 I have an interview coming up in a minute with the very excellent Dr. Hugh Urban, Professor of Comparative Religions at Ohio State University, and the guy nice enough to put up with my shenanigans. Here are some of the clips. The part that concerns me is we have reason to believe that, okay, often men who steer at goats, I mean, all this stuff is going on, and so I'm just not sure that we can bracket that back into, oh, you know, those Scientologists, they were kind of playing off of the Cold War jitters that people have. But I guess I would say that I can't know as a historian of religion whether there's a reality with what they're talking about, but I can say that they certainly believed there was and took it very seriously. You can also point to examples within Christianity where the leadership was incredibly corrupt. I mean, the Middle Ages are filled with bad popes, right, bad popes and bad cardinals. That doesn't mean that the entire Catholic Church from top to bottom is a corrupt organization. But wait, hold on, full stop. We don't know that. I mean, that's, I guess, the part that I want to say we're not doing our job if we don't ask that question beyond the Eckhart-Oprah Winfrey New Age thing that most people get. What he's saying about science, the science of consciousness is much, much closer to what leading researchers are saying. So I guess returning to kind of this earlier point, if you can't get consciousness right, if you're playing with consciousness as an illusion, as your atheist colleague no doubt believes, you're not even in the game. Yeah, that's an interesting point. And I guess I would say that, well, there's a couple answers to that question, that there is a movement in religious studies and other fields that is extremely interested in consciousness from different perspectives. But in my own work, I mean, I'm a historian. And so I look at what people do and the texts they leave behind and what we can sort of see. Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Caerys, and today we're joined by Dr. Hugh Urban from The Ohio State University. I'm going to have to ask you why so many people from Ohio State insist that you say The Ohio State, but I guess we'll get to that maybe in a minute. Anyways, he is a top notch scholar in religious studies. He's written some terrific books, including a couple we're going to talk about today one on Scientology, one on Osho, and maybe even talk a little bit about his work in Tantra. He has developed quite a reputation within his field. The net net is we have a really smart guy with us today, Dr. Urban, thanks for joining me on Skeptico. Well, thank you so much for having me, it's my pleasure. Well, as I was saying and singing your praises, I think you've done some great work and I'm surprised that there isn't more out there on what you do. But we're going to fix that a little bit right now. You're, as I said, a professor of religious studies, and you have some really pretty cool interest areas that I want to highlight for people. So you are interested in secrecy, religion, and a lot of these questions that kind of are Skeptico related secrecy, what some people would call conspiracies, but also you're about the relationship between religion and culture and power and stuff like that. But at the same time, you're scratching around in this spiritual big picture, who are we? Why are we here? Maybe you want to fine tune that a little bit and tell us who you really are there at Ohio State University. Well, you're assuming I know who I really am. But yeah, as you said, I'm a professor of religious studies at Ohio State. I got my PhD from University of Chicago and I teach in the areas of South Asian religions and also new religious movements in the United States. And sort of the big, large question I'm interested in is secrecy and religion. That is the question of why some groups choose to keep aspects of their beliefs and practices close to outsiders. And then what are the larger social, political, historical implications of that secrecy? And then within that sort of large question area, I'm interested in religions of India. One area I work on, particularly Hinduism in Northeast India. And then new religions in the United States, which is what led me to Scientology. And then the Osho book you mentioned sort of bridges those two areas by looking at a new movement that begins in India and then comes to the United States in the 1980s and then spreads globally from there. So there's a lot really to deconstruct here and we're going to try and do our best because when people jump into, I think people, normal people, jump into religious studies, a lot of times it winds up sounding a lot different than what they expected. We've had Jeff Kripel on the show a couple times, great guy. Good friend of mine. Malish Pasoka, not really in your field, but a number of folks and I always feel like there's a certain tension in terms of where you go in comparative studies at a university level and this kind of deeper spiritual understanding or attempt at a spiritual understanding, even when you were quipping about, you know, it presupposes that you know who you are, which is really kind of a very deep question. What about those two worlds? What else can you tell us about who you are beyond the professor thing? And maybe getting at this spiritual stuff, because you're obviously interested in some of that. You're interested in religion, but you're also interested in sure that religion proposes to answer. Yeah, I hope you have some time because that's a long set of questions. But I've always been interested in religion and spirituality. I grew up in a pretty religious Episcopalian family. My grandfather and uncle and great-grandfather were all priests in the Episcopal Church and my own father was a pretty religious guy. And I was an acolyte and did all that stuff growing up. And then when I was in college, I started taking courses on world religions and I got really interested in India and in Hinduism and Buddhism. So I did a semester in Bodh Gaya, which is where the Buddha became enlightened when I was a college student. And that sort of got me hooked on Eastern religions, although I always maintained an interest in Christianity as well. And so I kind of in my own life and thinking sort of separate the personal from the academic to a certain degree because I think in the academic study of religion, we're looking at the role of religion in history and in society and in culture and in things we can see and measure and text that we can read, whereas at least personally, I think I try to keep my own spiritual beliefs out of the academic work that I can do, although there are other people such as Jeff Kreipel who integrate those two more than I would. Jeff's a good friend of mine and we disagree on a lot of things, but I think there are different ways you can navigate between your own beliefs and the academic work that you do. But you did even there kind of talk about the integration problem, right? I love that you kind of spell it out that kind of Jeff is kind of out there saying, yeah, you know, and you're kind of kind of more holding back to the academic line. What is what is about that tension, if you will, within religious studies? Well, you're 100% right. That's the central tension at the heart of the field of religious studies from the very beginning, because religious studies in many ways grows out of theology programs Prior to the 1960s, you didn't really have religious studies or world religions programs. You had theology programs and then you had religion studies in sociology or in anthropology or psychology. And it's really in the 1960s that the field of religious studies in the United States begins to develop. You now have departments of religions that teach world religions in a non-denominational, non-theological way. But many people come to the field of religious studies because they are wrestling with religious questions of their own. And that's how I came to it, for example. I was coming from a Christian background, but I was really interested in Eastern religions when I was trying to figure all that out. So everyone who comes to the field has to kind of work through those questions in some way and sort of figure out how they navigate the academic and historical study and whatever spiritual questions of their own they may be wrestling with. And so in the field of the studies, you see some like Jeff, who are much more upfront about his beliefs. And then you have others like one of my professors, Bruce Lincoln, is clearly an atheist and a Marxist and really wants to critically interrogate religious claims. And so there's a whole spectrum and everyone has to sort of figure out where they fit on that spectrum. And at least in my case, it's a question I have continued to think about and my own position has shifted over the years quite a bit. Awesome. I think that's a great lead into the books that we're going to talk about today. Let's start with the Scientology book. It's been out for a few years now, but it's certainly an important book in the field. It was published in 2013. The title is The Church of Scientology, A History of a New Religion. And our friend Jeff has written a very outstanding blurb. So I'll go ahead and read that. Until now, there was no extensive scholarship on Scientology. With Urban's powerful and provocative new book, we are without question on radically new historical and theoretical ground. This is a major achievement. How nice and how true. A lot of people say the same thing. So maybe everybody knows or thinks they know until they read your book, the story of Scientology. But maybe it can start with just the kind of basics, who, what, where, when. Why is a long one, so we won't get into that. But the basics of the book and Scientology. OK. So the book actually grew out of my own teaching here at Ohio State because I teach a regular course on world religions. And I like to start out the course with the question of what is religion and what isn't religion and how that question gets answered and what's at stake in calling something a religion or a business or a cult. And so I start out with a controversial test case and then get the students to debate it. And I had been using Scientology as my controversial test case because it's a brilliant example for that question because it fought a 25-year war with the IRS over its tax exempt status as a religious and charitable organization. It's now recognized in the US, but it's not recognized in other countries such as France. It's widely attacked as a cult in the media. So it's a really good test case for thinking about that question. So that sort of led me to developing that whole set of issues into the book. And what I tried to do is just trace the history of Scientology and really interrogate the question of how it developed, what its relation to surrounding American society from the 50s to the present has been. And then this larger question of how it became recognized as a religion in the US and what's sort of at stake in calling something a religion rather than something else. So there's a lot of history there that you do a great job of just digging in. And again, that's why people are kind of praising the scholarship is you're not just shooting from the hip here. You're thousands of doc. I can't imagine how many thousands of pages you read to put this together. But the story you're telling at the end of the day does kind of challenge us with some of the ideas that we think we know about Scientology that you've just alluded to. So most people dismiss Scientology as a cult, that a profit-oriented cult. And I'm not sure that that isn't my position. That is my position. Let me go one step further. But what would you, what is important that you need to add to that conversation? Why is it important to, as you say, kind of test the boundaries of what this movement means in terms of our understanding of religion? Why is that important? Well, a number of things. A number of things, one, is it raises central and profound questions of religious freedom that have been with us from the very beginning. And you can think of any number of other examples of controversial movements that were at one time considered weird or dangerous cults and are now recognized as quite mainstream. The most obvious example is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or the Mormons when they appear on the scene in America in the mid-19th century. They're also seen as weird and dangerous and a cult are chased halfway across the country. But now they're one of the largest denominations in the world and maybe some people still consider them a weird cult. But for the most part, they're recognized as quite mainstream. Well, let's dive into that for a minute. I have a lot of thoughts on that, but I don't want to kind of cloud that right now. That movement, what is that? That's what you're really exploring on a couple of levels. That movement from fringy, cultish, ignore those weirdos to mainstream, run for president of the United States. As a cultural phenomenon, as a cultural movement is interesting, but does that really get to the other part, the other tension point that we were talking about in terms of the religious slash spiritual part? I mean, fake is still fake. Right. That's a legitimate question, but the United States from the very beginning has made freedom of religious expression one of its founding principles. And the courts historically have tended to have a very hands-off attitude about religious belief. So for example, in the case of Mormonism, the courts basically said, you can believe whatever you want because we have freedom of religious expression. You just can't do whatever you want. So in the case of polygamy and Mormonism, to basically believe whatever you want, that's fine, but you can't do things that are against existing laws, right? So I think respect for freedom of religious expression is so deeply ingrained into the fabric of US history and law and interpretations of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, that it comes up again and again and again when you have these fringe groups that sort of push the boundaries and test the limits of what we mean by freedom of religious expression. That's why I find groups like Scientology so interesting for thinking about that. So what does religious freedom mean? How far can we push it? Because there are some cases where actually courts that said, no, you can't push it that far. And Scientology is really right on the edge of that debate. So I find it's interesting. But it's really right on the edge of that debate because it's pushing not just the courts and the legal system, it's pushing our buttons. It's pushing all our sensibilities about what we think is right, what we think is wrong at a kind of moral level. And then when we see these groups carrying on in a way that we judge as amoral along with not being religious as we've come to understand it, that's where the friction is. And I love that you can step back and analyze that. And I think that brings a lot to the table. I mean, that's what the scholarship is really about and is fantastic. But at the same time, I mean, let's get down to it where most people sit and most people live, you know, talk about, like here's an example from the book. You cite the money angle. And Elron Hubbard, the founder of this religious movement, which when he founded it, it wasn't even a religious movement. But it's about the money, man. And he says over and over, get the money. It's about the money. If you forget it's about the money, refer to rule one. It's about the money. So here's how Dr. Hugh Urban spins that. And I think it's really important the way you did it. You say, okay, yeah, that looks like a cult to a lot of us because that's what we're conditioned to think that's the sure sign of a cult, they're just out of money. He says, but, you know, this is really consistent with this guy's theology throughout. So can we really separate the two? And so if I'm getting that right, maybe you get where I'm going to, maybe you want to expound on where this tent... No, you're right. And that's one of the main reasons that there's been so much criticism of Scientology. And one of the main reasons it's been called the cult of greed as Time Magazine put it, is that making money is explicitly stated by Elron Hubbard as one of the goals. And the auditing becomes quite expensive, especially when you get into the upper and more esoteric levels. So that's definitely there. But I would say a couple of things. There's nowhere, as far as I know, in the Constitution or any US law that says religions can't also bring in a lot of revenue. I mean, look at any televangelist, look at Joel Osteen or Pat Robertson, they actually make Scientology look like chicken feed by comparison. So you can think of lots of examples of prominent religious figures who also bring in tremendous amount of revenue. There's a guy here in Columbus, Rod Parsley, World Harvest Church, also brings in tons of money every Sunday. So I think we assume that religions can't make money, but there's no actual reason that's necessarily the case. I mean, to be tax exempt, they have to be not for profit, but that doesn't mean they can't ask for donations or bring in revenue in all sorts of other ways. So it may be distasteful to most of us, including myself, but I'm not sure that inherently disqualifies something from being called a religion. Does that make sense? Oh, it totally makes sense. And again, it squares up the problem that you're kind of bringing into focus. And I don't want to make it sound like you're an apologist for Scientology because you're clearly not. And you try and present a very balanced picture you have in there, the account of Gerald Armstrong, maybe you want to talk about and somebody who can speak to the criminality of Rod. Go ahead, do you want to? Well, yeah, I mean, that's an important point that we should probably highlight is that my whole approach in that book and everything I've written is to try to maintain a balance between an attitude of respect and an attitude of critical interrogation. So by respect, I mean that we should try to understand these movements as well as we can, try to understand why anyone would want to become a Scientologist in the first place, try to understand the belief system and the practices and as sympathetically as possible, but at the same time we should also be ready to ask really serious critical questions like where does this money go, for example? Is it really a nonprofit organization or does it begin to look more like a for-profit business? So yeah, I think you're 100% right, I'm not an apologist, but I'm also not a Scientology basher either. I want to strike a balance that allows us to understand the movement and its history and its belief system and practices, but also look hard at its very problematic history too. Okay, then let's talk about the other book I wanted to highlight in this interview and it's the book on Osho, Great Stuff, another really interesting book. It's a couple of years old at this point, written in 2015, the title is Zorba, the Buddha, which is gonna be an interesting title right there to talk about and the subtitle is Sex, Spirituality and Capitalism in the Global Osho Movement. I'm not gonna read Jeff's excellent blurb, but trust me, this is another book that was extremely well received. You're good at this stuff, aren't you? You're quite the writer. Well, I've got Jeff Kreipel as my number one fan here apparently too. Yeah, I did pull two blurbs. There's a lot of other really good blurbs in this book, but maybe again, just a quick sketch of what this book is about. So really the book traces the development of one movement that centers around the controversial Indian guru who is known in his youth as Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh and his later years as Osho. He starts out in India, gathers the following in the 1960s and 70s, becomes really popular among Western young people in the 60s and 70s in India and then comes to the United States in the 1980s and establishes a large and briefly very successful utopian commune in central Oregon, which quickly also went off the rails and ended in the worst bioterror attack on US soil and led to many people being arrested and the guru being deported. This was the focus of the Netflix series, Wild Wild Country, if people have seen that. What did you think of that doc? How accurate any major bones to pick with those folks? I thought in many ways it was really well done. They had excellent vintage footage, a lot of stuff I hadn't seen before. So just in terms of like an archival document, it was really valuable to have all that stuff. And they had good interviews with people who were there. My criticism is really that it didn't do a very good job of explaining the prehistory of the movement before it came to Oregon. And then it also didn't really do a very good job of explaining the belief system behind it. It wasn't clear, I think, why anyone would have joined this group. But it seems like it's just this odd ball thing that popped up in the middle of Oregon and the Reagan era without explaining the philosophy behind it that led so many people to be attracted to this guy. Great point, so touch on that for a minute. From the beginning, from your book, I'm pulling this stuff, radical, iconoclast, dangerous, and eclectic, very eclectic, which is something that is a true innovation in his little religion, cult, whatever you wanna call it. Speak to that, because the... So Osho, I'll call him Osho Rajneesh, because he's known by both names, Osho and Rajneesh. So he was an explicitly iconoclastic sort of guru, unlike really any other guru that had come along before him. He loved to attack and make fun of iconic figures. So he made fun of Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa and was really pitching what he called the religion-less religion that would do away with all the dogma and institutional trappings of mainstream religions and really be a spirituality that was all about liberating the divinity of each individual. So from Rajneesh's perspective, we're all inherently already Buddhas, we're already enlightened, but we're covered over by so many layers of socialization from schools and politics and religious institutions that we don't realize our true divinity. We're sort of like sleepwalkers. And so his techniques were often deliberately radical kind of shock techniques. He used very active and dynamic forms of meditation that we can talk about that were really intended to sort of jolt us into awakening through sort of sudden realization of our own divinity. And at some point he's incorporating in some very Western kind of Esalen kind of Gestalt-ish and post-psychoanalytic kind. I mean, so he's again, he's eclectic. Where is that coming from? And is it just to further, I don't know, how do you sort that out? Is it to further develop people or to further control them or whatever? Well, he was trained in philosophy. So he was already widely read in Western philosophy and he knew the works of Freud and post-Freudians like Wilhelm Reich really well. And then in the 60s and 70s, as he's starting to attract more and more Westerners, he starts bringing in people who had been trained in places like the Esalen Institute in California. And so they start bringing in like encounter groups and Est and Raikian therapy. And so he begins really this very original blend of more traditional Indian-style techniques drawn from Buddhism, Hinduism, also draws on Taoism and Chinese traditions. But then he blends these with post-Freudian psychoanalysis with a lot of the new age ideas that were spreading in California in the 60s and 70s. And he begins to forge an explicitly kind of global spirituality that would transcend the limits of traditional Eastern or Western practices. And I think this was one of the reasons the movement took off so well is because it came along at just the right time and place when you had all these young people flocking to India, you know, in the wake of the Beatles going to India in the 1960s. And more and more stuff coming from India to the US. So it was just the cusp of a lot of this global circulation between India and the US. And he tapped right into that in a very original way. And Hugh, where are you going to explain to people the Zorba the Buddha thing? Go ahead and explain. So Zorba the Buddha was his phrase and it refers to the enlightened individual, the perfect, fully realized human being who would combine the spirituality of the Buddha with the materialism and sensuality of Zorba the Greek. And so his whole... Explain for people who don't remember Zorba the Greek. So it's a novel that was then made into a film and Zorba sort of embodiments the individual who's full of the lust for life and enjoys the pleasures of this world, right? And so that's the... Rajneesh's ideal is a spiritually realized person isn't just, you know, a skinny holy man meditating up in the mountains, but rather someone who combines spirituality with a full embrace of life and all its pleasures. So dancing is a big part of their practice. Sexuality is a big part of their practice. So you don't need to deny the body and the senses in order to have a spiritual life. In fact, the true realized person would combine the materialism of this Zorba with the spirituality of the Buddha. And what do you think about that? You're kind of interested in the Tantra and the Neo-Tantra stuff, which is kind of a fascinating thing we could get into because you're really suggesting and you have some, from what I understand some ethnographic work going on to kind of tease out how we understand Tantra to be basically what Osho's talking about, but maybe the roots don't go back there. Or but again, I don't wanna bury the first question. What do you think about his spin on that? That's really good questions. Let's see, I have two answers to that. One, sort of in a historical sense, I think it was brilliant insofar as it came along at just the right time and place again in the wake of the sexual revolution and the counterculture and it catered brilliantly to a generation of young people who wanted to pursue liberated ideas of sexuality, but also wanted a spiritual life and this movement was perfect for that. So historically, I think it worked really well with that kind of moment in time. From a scholarly perspective, what he did was also quite a change in our understanding of Tantra because historically, Tantra does use the body and it does use the senses in spiritual practice and in some cases there are sexual practices too, although they're much more limited than what we see on the shelves of like Barnes and Noble and like the complete idiot's guide to Tantra sex. And Rajneesh was really the key figure in redefining Tantra to be mostly about sex, right? So previously, sex was a limited small part of Tantra practice, but from the 60s onward, it's mostly redefined entirely in terms of sex. So like Cosmopolitan did an issue on Tantra and they called it Nuki Nirvana, right? So that's right. And I think Osho Rajneesh is probably the most important figure in that transformation. Yeah, but also aren't they? They're kind of completely spinning it. I mean, isn't the original core understanding of Tantra is a means to transcend your barrier. So if that's your barrier, is this attachment to these material things including your sexuality, then let's find a way to transcend that. And that seems out the door here. That's like not really anything to worry about the transcendence, let's get it on. Yeah, I mean, I don't wanna caricature Rajneesh's understanding of Tantra, but I do think he really shifted the emphasis from what was originally a fairly esoteric path aimed at awakening and harnessing the divine energy that flows through the cosmos and the body. That's kind of how I would define Tantra to understanding Tantra largely in terms of sex and also largely in terms of sexuality understood through the lens of post Freudian therapists like Wilhelm Reich in particular of whom he was a great admirer. So you do an awesome job in this book again of trying to sort this stuff out and people will come to appreciate that when they read the book, but maybe you wanna just, because I think this is kind of an interesting point. You know how you dealt with followers versus ex-followers, the stories and accounts. It is interesting because again, from the way this stuff sits in our culture and doesn't sit well, you know as a scholar, how do you deal with some of that stuff? Yeah, that's a good question. That's a question I wrestled with in both the Scientology book and this one. How do you balance accounts between current members of a movement versus ex-members? And for a long time, people who worked on new religions didn't want to listen to the accounts of ex-members because they were seen to be too biased and had too much of an agenda or axe to grind to be credible informants. Now that's gonna be really surprising to people. Again, because when people come into the religious studies, they kind of, I don't know, they think a whole bunch of things that turn out not to be true, but that right there is kind of startling because from a kind of public media standpoint, it's almost reversed, right? What we want to hear about are the people who feel that they're most damaged and injured by these cults and bring them forward, let them have their time and you're saying that it's almost the reverse. Yeah, and the reason, or one reason for that is many scholars for a long time, I'd say up until the 90s, maybe, we're really working very hard to undo the media stereotypes of groups like Scientology, right? So the media stereotype is that these are brainwashing dangerous cults and therefore we want to listen to all the ex-members who are bashing them and scholars kind of went the other direction by saying, no, no, no, we need to take them seriously as religious movements and therefore we should pay most attention to what spokespersons who are existing members of the church say. And my perspective is really, need to gather as much information as possible and so you need to listen to everybody in order to get a full picture of any group. So in both books, I talk to current members and I talk to ex-members and I try to balance both perspectives as well as possible. And you do an awesome job of that. And the books are highly recommended by everyone who's read them and they're on these bestseller lists inside of Amazon and I really need to check them out. But one extra point on that is that it also means that you piss off people on both sides. So in both cases, I mean, both books have largely been well received but in both cases I've also been criticized by some for being too nice to Scientology and the Osho movement and I've been criticized by others for being too critical. So if you try to strike a balance, you can't win is kind of what I'm saying. You can't win anyway and you can't win on Skeptica either because I'm gonna pull you into some other questions because you are at this kind of friction point, this junction point and you're kind of pushing some buttons in terms of how these religions slash cults interface with culture, interface with spirituality, interface with religion. So this is the kind of stuff I'm really interested in and I've interviewed so many people about these issues including people in academia who do anthropology work and para anthropology work with shamanic people and how does that fit in? But here's, let me start with this and this will be kind of fun, take you outside of your comfort zone in terms of stuff that you've probably talked about before in these books, but let me talk about this excellent clip that I got from an interview you did with, you haven't done a lot of podcast interviews, there need to be more of them out there but this is from an interview you did a few years back on a show called The Edge and this is just fascinating stuff. Let me play this for people and then we'll talk about it. This is about your book, The Church of Scientology and about Elron Hubbard and Jack Parsons and Aleister Crowley. I think a lot of people know this history but not as well as you do. Because there's no doubt really that Hubbard was involved in some kind of occult practices in the late 1940s. The Church of Scientology even admits that. Then after World War II, after he gets out of the Navy, he goes to Pasadena, California and encounters an individual named John Whiteside or Jack Parsons. Parsons was a rocket scientist, quite a prominent one, who was also extremely involved in magic and occultism and was part of a group called the Ordo Templi Orientus whose most famous member was Aleister Crowley who was probably the most important occultist of the 20th century. Hubbard and Parsons became friends and began to engage in a series of rituals. The most important was called the Babylon Working which was a right based on Crowley's work that was intended to help identify a female partner who would serve as the whore of Babylon and then through a series of sex magical operations, they would conceive a being who would become effectively the Antichrist. They would then control that being and unleash tremendous power. You know, the first thing that strikes me is you're pretty damn calm about all that. Most people would be shocked and then they'd immediately wanna jump to the, well, is this true kind of standpoint? And how did you kind of process that? Well, I've been teaching for 20 years and researching for longer than that and I've seen a lot of weird stuff. And so very little phases me at this point. And so, and in my attitude in all the work I do is a kind of what I call radical agnosticism. So I try to just be as open-minded about anything that I look at and try to understand it without immediately passing judgment on it no matter how bizarre it might seem at first glance. The part that concerns me is we have reason to believe that this stuff really did happen. And like the Jack Parsons and Alistair Crowley thing has direct connections to the MKUltra program in the 50s, right? It has direct connections to the Secret Spying program that now there's tens of thousands of documents released and there's this guy up on the screen, Sidney Gottlieb, a lot of people refer to as the US's Joseph Mengele. So it's not so much that I would judge these practices but I would wanna drive a stake in the ground and say the best we can know there is a reality to this extended consciousness realm that they're trying to get to. And the reason I say there's a reality to it because it looks like our government was trying to do the same thing, you know, MKUltra and men who steer at goats. I mean, all this stuff is going on. So I'm just not sure that we can bracket that back into, oh, you know, those Scientologists, they were kind of playing off of the Cold War jitters that people have. I mean, there seems to be a reality to this. Yeah, I'm definitely not saying that it's merely an odd byproduct of the odd stuff that was happening and during the Cold War. And the only reason that movements like these gain any traction is because people do take them very seriously and do believe there's a there, there, right? But I guess I would say that I can't know as a historian of religion whether there's a reality with what they're talking about but I can say that they certainly believed there was and took it very seriously. And so that alone I think is worthy of study whether the psychic research they were doing was real or not, I can't say, but I can say that they certainly took it very seriously and you're 100% right. The US government did too. In the chapter on the Cold War in the Scientology book, I talk about the research that was going on by the Stanford Research Institute in the early 1970s. There were at least three Scientologists who were involved in that. They were doing this remote viewing research where they're trying to spy on Russia remotely. So, and I've interviewed several of those folks and they genuinely believed that they were doing remote viewing and that this was a real thing. Whether it was real, I don't know, but... Hold on, I mean, that I guess is the point. First off, you're right. Pat Price is a Scientologist. Russell Tarker helped put off one or both of them are Scientologists. Harold put off and Ingo Swan, there were the three and then Tark was not, but he was close with them. And then they say they left the religion which is fine. I mean, we can't, you know, you're not guilty because you go to a couple of meetings or you read a couple of books or in the rest that you're not kind of scarred for life. But I do want to challenge that idea of, well, we can't know that. I mean, I guess that's kind of one of my problems with the religious studies kind of angle. It's like, well, we can know this over here. We can understand how it impacts culture and how we look, but we can't know this. Well, we can come a lot closer to knowing it. Like I say, they've released tens of thousands of pages of documents. We have proof, you know, Jessica Utz goes and does statistical, Jimmy Carter announces that remote viewing works and that they found a plane that way. So did we really have to then come back and say, wait a minute, we're not really sure we know if any of that's true. It just sounds like the same old, you know, biological robot meaningless universe. We're not sure that consciousness is real or maybe it's just an illusion kind of thing. I think that's so limiting. I don't think we can really get to the heart of any of this stuff from that standpoint. No, I'm not saying that. It goes back to the distinction I made earlier when you asked me about my background and my beliefs and how that was my scholarship. So I think as an individual, you might believe that or know that when that's fine. But in terms of what I would write about in an academic book, I'm gonna, I think, bracket that belief and talk about what can be kind of verified empirically, right? And so, and that's my- Hold on, hold on, let me just push that. Let me just push that a little bit further. That's my view. If you asked Jeff Kreipel, he would give you a different answer, right? I don't think so, because I've asked him a couple of times and he basically gives the same answer. And my pushback on that is, but wait, we're both playing, what if we both agree to play by the same rules? So science, you know, let's just agree to play by the science rules. And we look at scientific studies, peer-reviewed scientific studies on remote viewing and it establishes that it's true, right? You look at the physics behind it and the quantum physics behind it that suggests that it's at least a possibility. And then we look at when they do controlled experiments with remote viewing and labs and again, blinded and controlled and stuff like that. So it's a reality. So then why do we have to kind of treat it as a, well, it's outside of kind of the standard dogma of the social sciences college at Ohio State. So it's not really, you know what I'm saying? Well, there's a couple of answers to that. One is that maybe remote viewing is real. I've never experienced it myself. So I don't have first-hand knowledge of that. Second, your point about scientific studies, I mean, you could also cite a lot of literature that would debunk it as pseudoscience, right? And then third. Everything is like that, right? I mean, everything, we have to sort out all that stuff. I mean, you didn't, you haven't had direct experience with Osho's meditation techniques and you're writing on them and you're talking to folks. I mean, it's not all about direct experience, right? Well, actually I have, I do have direct experience of it's a meditation techniques. They're really tiring, by the way. But the third point I was gonna make and maybe the most practical one is that in the system of academic publishing, which is governed by peer review and kind of academic consensus, if you wrote something that stated you 100% believed in remote viewing, you would most likely not be published by an academic press. You could be published by other kinds of presses, but it's just the way the rules of academia work. Some people push up against that a little bit, but for the most part, you would probably be dismissed, I think, in academic publishing circles, though not other circles. Oh, I totally get that. But then that's a religious issue, isn't it? I mean, that just becomes a certain dogma that has to be followed. And I get that over and over again, talk to many scholars, no matter how they do it, cross, just to talk to a brilliant guy that did cross-cultural analysis of near-death experience, but still, you talk to him and he has to talk this double talk like, well, I can't really say one way or another. All my data points in one direction, but I don't know that I can really come to any conclusion. I think for a lot of us sitting on the outside, we just lose trust in academia in general, in the scholarship in general. So it's teasing out what we wanna keep and what we wanna leave out. But if I have a feeling that you're having to operate with one arm tied behind your back, I mean, that really does slant how I kind of view this stuff. I don't say it as operating with one hand tied behind my back. I just think that there are different spheres of discourse in which the rules, like the rules of a language are different. And so there are many publishing venues where writing openly about your belief in remote viewing would be fine. And there are others where it would meet with a lot of intense skepticism. And so you just have to learn how to speak of the language of a particular sphere of discourse is all I'm saying. I gotta push that just a tiny bit further because I deal with this stuff all the time. But to me, it'd be like saying, well, the flat earth. So there's a certain group of people that believe in flat earth and we cannot offend those people. So we have to be spherically neutral. Or if the Ohio State University Department of Arts and Sciences decided that flat earth was the prevailing kind of wisdom of the day, then everyone would have to conform to that? No, I mean, I think the way it's supposed to work is we're supposed to lean on science and the larger body of knowledge to define what reality is and then move our set of beliefs to that. So when we don't see that movement and when we see ourselves stuck in kind of this dogma that doesn't allow us to kind of fully understand. I mean, these people are talking about summoning, creating a spirit and summoning that spirit and marshaling it to do their work, the Antichrist. And then we have the United States government who is doing the exact same thing and we understand why they're doing it too because they're saying, hey, if that can be done and we're a charge of defending you then we better do it first. We better do it before those Russians do it. That's the rationale and that's the path we're going down. Don't we have to kind of get a little bit more inside the game there and at least try and understand what the implications are if there is a reality to that extended consciousness realm? Sure, but an academic text might not be the best place to do that. And so you can do both at the same time. You can pursue your own interests and beliefs on one hand and play the academic game on the other. You know, you don't have to do one or the other. Fair enough. And you know, I'm just playing around here. There's a lot of great stuff in what you've done. And the scholarship is important, folks, because who else is doing this the way that Dr. Urban and his colleagues are doing it? At least they're raising these issues up in a way that we can kind of take a step back from the usual knee-jerk reaction and look at those. But I am going to persist with my poking. Okay. Next I guess would be looking at religious studies from a religious context. You know, I just had the opportunity to interview this guy, really an impressive guy to me. His name is Kevin Anett. And talk about someone who's lived the reality of the sometimes sordid relationship between church and state and really cults in places that we don't normally associate with being cultish. So Kevin's history just really quickly is former minister in the church in Canada who became a whistleblower after he revealed these really horrific crimes against children carried out by the state and really by the church in kind of a conspiratorial relationship with the state. And let me just interject. This stuff is proven now. This is admitted by Canada. They've apologized. They've released documents. It's true. It's again proven. But that is kind of the beginning of Kevin's work. He's since doing that in almost 20 years ago. He's continued to look at kind of nefarious activities inside what we would call old religions. But I think if we're gonna look at new religions, we have to look at old religions too. He actually went to Brussels and he organized the International Common Law Court of Justice, which some people don't think much of, but they did get a ruling against Pope Francis, found him guilty of rape, torture, murder. This was widely reported in the media. They brought eyewitnesses forward who not only talked about their personal experience with that, which again is all over the news. That's not like super controversial now because so many of the people at the highest level, even right below the Pope, but all the way around the world are in jail for these same kind of crimes. But in this hearing, they had 48 eyewitness accounts of activities, including satanic ritual abuse. So my question for you though, is not whether Kevin Annette is telling the truth or whether any of this stuff is true because we can't possibly expect you to sort through that. The question really is, is that even something that needs to be considered, considered religious studies? I mean, this is a criminal organization, cult organization. Do we need to have that square on the table? Yeah, in fact, I argue that point in the Scientology book and also the Osho book. There are cases where new religious movements and mainstream religious movements do horrible things, covering up priest sex abuse or in the case of Scientology breaking into IRS offices and stealing documents or their rehabilitation project force program, which has been accused of human rights violations. So I think there's a lot of evidence in the case of Scientology that stuff has happened and probably continues to happen. So the attitude of respect that I was talking about doesn't mean that we shouldn't also look really critically at the really problematic things that religious groups often do as well. So I think it can be generally respectful of the movement but then also look very carefully at things that they've done that might be unethical or illegal. I don't think those are mutually exclusive. Well, I think maybe they are. I mean, at some point, the respect thing has to fall away. And I think this is where most people sit. They say, wait, at some point, we're talking about an organization whose primary function is criminality. And I guess my question and concern is, can we get there from here in terms of answering that question? Because if that's the case, we do have a different situation. I like how at the beginning you said, hey, well, we have a tradition and the constitution and we have a legal kind of thing. But most people are kind of, that's part of their reality, but the reality where they sit is to say, Jesus, get these guys, throw them in jail, throw away the key and we need to look at changing the laws, not, you know, don't recite to me the code and the law and all that stuff. Something is fundamentally messed up here and we need to fix it. How do you respond to that? Well, I would say if you have a priest who's molesting children, put them in jail and throw away the key as far as I'm concerned. If you have- But you have the pope? Yeah, yeah, but I'm talking about the, what if the whole thing is basically a criminal organization? Well, that's a different question and that's where Scientology is a complicated case. Because in Scientology, for example, the Operation Snow White that was launched to infiltrate the IRS offices, it does seem that that came from the top, right? It seems that that was instigated by Mary Sue Hubbard, Hubbard's wife, and he was probably directly involved in a bunch of top-level Scientologists to jail. But does that mean that Scientology from top to bottom is a criminal organization? I think that's where it becomes more complicated because you still have many, many run-of-the-mill Scientologists who had nothing to do with criminal activities and still take it very seriously. So there, I mean, that's a hard question. Do you have to throw the whole movement out if leadership is involved in criminal activities or can you still say, well, it's still meaningful to the majority of people involved despite the fact that those at the top are engaged in really problematic activities. And so I kind of leave that up to the reader to make up their own minds on that. I have my views, but in my book... What are your views? My views, it's a hard question, but I tend to value freedom of religious expression and the First Amendment and all of that. So I think on the whole, it's probably better to err on the side of giving movements the benefit of the doubt, even if that means that sometimes we let slip through some really problematic groups. And there are a lot of people who have argued that what Scientology needs is some kind of reformation. That there's enough there that is valuable that you could salvage that while acknowledging that Hubbard and others did really problematic things. So there actually is a wing that wants to reform Scientology while still salvaging the valuable parts of it. Okay, well, let's probe that with one kind of final point. And I appreciate you. Can I just make one other quick point? Absolutely. You can also point to examples within Christianity where the leadership was incredibly corruptive. I mean, the Middle Ages are filled with bad popes, right? Bad popes and bad cardinals. That doesn't mean that the entire Catholic Church from top to bottom is a corrupt organization. Well, but wait, hold on, full stop. We don't know that. I mean, that's I guess the part that I want to say we're not doing our job if we don't ask that question because that would be one very straightforward read of this situation. You know, I always point to when I first got out of college I went to work for a consulting firm, a big CPA firm. And the largest at that time was a company called Arthur Anderson, a company doesn't exist anymore. It was the largest accounting firm in the world, Enron, which a lot of people, I'm older so I remember, but when Enron collapsed, they went to the people who were auditing Enron, which was Arthur Anderson, and they said, you know what? You have so violated your fiduciary responsibility to the public that you don't need to exist anymore. Now I know for a fact, there are a lot of really good people working at Arthur Anderson, honest people, hardworking people, people who've worked their whole life and saved in their 401K and built a career, gone, out on the streets. That's the way we're supposed to function. Why do we have this kind of craziness about religion where we can't say, hey, maybe it really is a criminally corrupt organization. Maybe it's always been about control more than it's been about this spirituality and however we are to understand that spirituality. What would seem to be from your work and the larger body of work in religious studies is that spiritual impulse seems to be able to sprout anywhere. It doesn't need one particular form or another. Why not question that? That's a legitimate question and it's something that I do deal with in the Scientology book is that I think particularly in the United States, the designation religion tends to give groups a special kind of protection and immunity. And I think that's one reason that Scientology has not been investigated more critically by law enforcement is that because of its religious status, I think there's been more of a hands-off sort of approach with them and other religious groups because of the long history of protections for religious groups and the State Department issues in annual report on religious freedom and defend groups like Scientology and the way they're being treated in other countries like Germany. So I think because of the history of religion and the first amendment in the US, we have tended to give religious groups a special protection. And I think you could argue that that is problematic. You had more to your question that I am forgetting now. Can you kind of respond? Oh no, you're generous to answer all these kind of oddball questions and I appreciate you a lot. No, it's not oddball. I mean, that last question is a central one to thinking about not just Scientology but the whole history of religion in the US. Well, great. I'm glad you feel that way because I feel like this is even more of a central question. I know what I was gonna say next is that and one might well conclude as you're suggesting that a group like the Catholic Church is corrupt from top to bottom and that might be the conclusion that you reach but I don't see the Catholic Church or Scientology for that matter going away anytime soon. So therefore there's still in need of study and scholarship and analysis. Totally agree. No, and that's why I think that no matter how one feels about the kind of academic approach which is this kind of tension that we talked about from the very beginning, there's value there and there's value in the scholarship that you bring and that's why folks within this community are praising this work and saying, hey, here's a guy who's, you know, as you alluded to, a lot of people aren't gonna like you. It's like the old pioneer story. You know, the pioneer is the guy who gets arrows in the front and the back. Well, it does aggravate people sometimes because they want the scholar to take a stand and say, no, Scientology is bad, Scientology is a dangerous cult. And at least I resist that sort of judgment and this came up actually, I was giving a talk at Princeton on Osho and there was a pro Osho guy who had flown all the way from California to come and see the talk despite fact it was only a 40 minute little presentation and then there was a Osho hater who had been raped by an Osho member in Hawaii and thought Osho was condoning rape. And so it led to a lively discussion, shall we say. And they're both kind of unhappy that I was being either too critical or too generous and I was explaining that the whole point is to try to be balanced and to get a full picture of the movement that would acknowledge problematic aspects but also try to understand why anyone would find this persuasive or valuable in the first place. So again, you're gonna piss off someone on either side but I think it allows you to get a full picture of the movement. Bear it off, I'll tell you on the final point that kind of I would draw out in terms of this contextualizing religious studies you know the different contexts that we kind of put it in. I'm still scratching at this thing that I talked about from the beginning Hugh and that is the spiritual part of it. Because I love just a little quick quote from Eckert Tolle and he says, and when I say normal, I mean insane. So the larger quote is he's talking about you know the from an Eastern perspective you totally understand where he's coming from in terms of a non-dual in terms of the mind, the voice inside our head that we all recognize as our consciousness. And then when he really breaks that down he says, but of course it's rather insane to kind of believe that that really is who we are. So let me play this clip and then let's talk about maybe what my understanding of what spirituality is and why I'm kind of upset here that I don't see religious studies really trying to get to the meat of the issue. Let me play Eckert for you. So you give up all knowing the accumulated knowledge, the mind made self that consists of accumulated thought forms. So as we sit here, we are dying a little death and realize that nothing real actually died or in the illusion of a false self. What remains is consciousness, a very bare fact that you are. So at this moment, there's the opportunity of sensing something much more fundamental than the history of who you think you are in the mind. You know, let me just say that beyond the kind of Eckert Tolle Oprah Winfrey kind of new age thing that most people get, what he's saying about science, the science of consciousness is much, much closer to what leading researchers are saying. You know, I just had an interview with Dr. Don Hoffman who's really one of the top physicists in the world. And he will tell you that every experiment we do on quantum mechanics and on the quantum field brings us to the conclusion that consciousness is fundamental, which is the same thing that physicists were saying a hundred years ago. And even Einstein says at the end of his life after battling it for so long. So I guess returning to kind of this earlier point, if you can't get consciousness right, if you're playing with the consciousness as an illusion we're biological robots in a meaningless universe as your atheist friend, their colleague, no doubt believes, you're not even in the game. You're not in the game science-wise. I mean, you're just, you're flat earthing it, you know? So Eckert Tolle isn't just saying Oprah Winfrey new age stuff. He's talking about cutting edge science. So that's my pitch. What say you? Yeah, that's an interesting point. And I guess I would say that, well, there's a couple of answers to that question, that there is a movement in religious studies and other fields that is extremely interested in consciousness from different perspectives. One, there's a lot of work being done in neuroscience and cognitive science looking at, for example, what happens during meditation or prayer. So that's a whole emerging field. And then there's also a whole body of scholarship on understandings of consciousness. For example, when I was in grad school, I did a lot of work on yoga chara buddhism, which is all about mind and consciousness and understanding reality itself as a product of mind. So there's work being done and sort of from a neurological perspective, there's philosophical research on consciousness. So it's not as though people in those studies aren't interested in the question of consciousness. But in my own work, I mean, I'm a historian. And so I look at what people do and the texts they leave behind and what we can sort of see. And so I'm not uninterested in questions of consciousness, but that's not really what I write about in my academic work, even though I recognize its importance for the people that I'm writing about. Fair enough. And I've already bashed the ivory towers, still piping academia thing. So I won't push that any further, but I will maybe end with a question that I kind of began with is, so how does all that sit though with your personal spirituality, whatever that is, whether it's a more of an atheistic materialistic worldview or whether it's kind of more of an expansive, I know you've done a lot of work in the East and you just said a lot of meditation work. How do you square beyond your role as an academic who has to kind of publish? Where do you sit with some of that? Yeah, well, we don't have that much time, so I'll give you the short answer. First, to go back to the point I made earlier about being kind of a radical agnostic, so I haven't seen God myself. And so I assume that if there is something beyond this life, I'll find that out when I die. But in my own sort of personal life, I think of myself more as a nature mystic. The most profound experiences I've had have been in the out of doors. I'm an amateur mycologist. I'm really fascinated by the interconnections between, for example, the world of fungi and the world of plants and trees. And so that's where I find the most meaningful kinds of spiritual experiences and the greatest sense of something beyond my ego or the most profound experience of a sort of loss of ego in the natural environment. So that's kind of my personal spirituality, I guess you could say. Philosophically, the world view that makes most sense to me is Buddhism and Buddhist ideas, such as emptiness and no self, but that sort of makes the most sense to me when I look at the world around me and it fits with the way I understand nature too. Okay, I love that. Although, you know, I've done a bunch of interviews on Buddhism and particularly the, you know, it's another interesting phenomenon, the kind of American atheistic Buddhism, which is really kind of a role of your own. I mean, there's really no traditional understanding of that and, you know, Buddhism is enmeshed in a culture that completely believes in the survival of consciousness after death, completely believes in reincarnation, completely believes in the extended consciousness realm that we're talking about with Alistair Crowley and all that stuff. So where are you with that stuff in terms of your Buddhist kind of leanings? Yeah, I don't consider myself a practicing Buddhist. I simply meant that particularly strands of Buddhist philosophy make sense to me in terms of how I look at the world and they sort of fit with the world that I see around me. And Buddhism is a vast complicated set of traditions and the one that makes most sense to me is sort of early Indian Buddhism that develops for a few hundred years after the death of the Buddha. So what we would now call Theravada Buddhism. I think you're describing, at least what you're alluding to, I think fits more with later Mahayana and Vajrayana forms of Buddhism, which are interesting too, but I have more affinity with earlier Buddhism, I guess. Okay, so you're a mystic. I get it. You just want to kind of keep it under your hat. That's cool. I don't know if I'm a mystic, but I certainly don't rule out spiritual experiences. So our guest again has been Dr. Hugh Urban. We've talked about a couple of books on this show that you're going to want to check out The Church of Scientology and Zorba, the Buddha. You're working, I know, on a bunch of other interesting stuff. You are such a great and accomplished writer. Tell folks more about what's coming up and in general, how they can follow your work. Well, I just finished a book that has been accepted by University of Chicago Press called Secrecy. That's the main title. We haven't settled on the subtitle, but it'll be something like Silence, Power, and Religion, something like that. And it's a look at six different forms of religious secrecy that developed from the mid 19th century to the present. So I have a chapter on Scientology, a chapter on Freemasonry. I have a chapter on Theosophy. I have a chapter on the Five Percenters, which are an offshoot nation of Islam. And I have a chapter on sex magic. So that's been a lot of fun to work on. So it looks at sort of six different modalities of religious secrecy that range from social resistance and protection of religious groups to, and the other inspector in my look at religious terrorism too. So that's one project. And then the other is an ethnographic project on Tantra in Northeast India that would look at living forms of Tantra as it's practiced on the ground today in Northeast India. You know, I'm really interested in that. Can you kind of offer up any little tidbits on what you've understood, maybe are some of the misunderstandings we have or anything about Tantra as it's really practiced? Yeah, so Tantra and the American popular imagination as we've talked about is usually identified with sex or nooky nirvana. And in Indian popular imagination today, Tantra as you see like in Bollywood film is almost always all about black magic, right? Not so much about sex, but about sorcery and corpses and stuff like that. But there is still a living tradition of Tantra practice in the region of Assam, which is Northeast India. It's a little bit of India that sticks up on the other side from Bangladesh and then the Northeast. There's still a very old and living tradition of Tantra practice that is not as authentic as you can get these days. So I'm looking at that. And there are elements of sexuality and there are elements of black magic, but there's lots of other stuff going on there too that's really fascinating. So there's spirit possession, for example. That's one aspect of it, but there are also Tantra rituals that are really in really, really old traditions. And so I've been working on that off and on since about 2000, and I hope to finally finish a project on that. So you're right in the soup, man. I mean, I'm pushing you on all this stuff, but you're right in the soup, you're right in the middle of it. So how do you, I guess, there's a final kind of question because I'm curious, how do you approach that without kind of jumping all the way in? Because one of the guys I really enjoyed on this show was an anthropologist or he has a journal called the Para Anthropology Journal because he was Dr. Jack Hunter. I don't know if you're familiar with him. He's in the UK, but his kind of thing is like, hey, from an anthropological standpoint, at some point, you can't be totally outside of this thing because of all the things, by observing it, we're affecting it anyway. Maybe we need to understand more deeply and accept their reality of this extended consciousness realm, even though it doesn't fit within kind of this narrow confines that we have. And I guess you're bumping up against that in your own way. What do you think? Well, I wrestled with that question for a long time, really since I was a graduate student. It was my first book, which was my dissertation, was really grappling with the question of how you study an esoteric tradition like Tantra. Do you become an initiate? Do you remain kind of a distant outsider? And what I've sort of come to over the years is that it's always much messier than just insider versus outsider and that the deeper you go, the more you become, the term I would use is entangled with it because you make friends, they have you over to their house for dinner, you get to know their children more and more. Even if you're not a full initiate, you become enmeshed and entangled with the tradition in complicated ways. And that means becoming a participant in ritual practices. And so then it becomes question how far you feel comfortable going or how far you can go because you're still culturally an outsider, right? So, and that's where every researcher has to navigate where they fit in that sort of relationship. So I'm still working through that myself now. Awesome, man. I love how you keep a very cold meaner about all that stuff, but I think there's a depth there that is really gonna fascinate a lot of people. Again, it's been absolutely fantastic having you on the show. Thanks for allowing me to kind of pull you into some other areas and it's great. I hope people really check out your work. We need more of your stuff. Okay, thank you. It was a fun conversation. Thanks again to Dr. Heurben for joining me today on Skeptco, the one question I'd guess I T up. Can religious studies remain agnostic about consciousness? Oh, I went on and on about this so I won't add anything more, but I would be very interested to see what you think here, what you have to say. Of course, the easiest place to do that is to reach me through the Skeptco forum. You can connect with other people who enjoy the show, kick around some ideas to all that good stuff. You can also jump over to the Skeptco website, S-K-E-P-T-I-K-O.com. You'll find all the shows there. Many, many, over 400 of them available for free, download MP3, no firewall, no ads, no anything. And while you're there and while you're thinking about this, think about if there's anyone who you think needs to hear this particular show. Share it with them and tell me why you're sharing it with them and who you think needs to hear this stuff. Would love to hear more from you. I have plenty of more stuff coming up down the pike. Stay with me for all of that until next time. Take care and bye for now.