Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life Podcast. I hope everybody's having a beautiful day. I hope that the birds are singing, that the sun is shining and the wind is at your back. Got a epic show for you today. I have with me... the one and only Stephen Snyder. And for those that don't know, he is known to many as Recluse. He's the mastermind behind the legendary Vice Up blog. And we're about to dive into the depths of culture, parapolitics, and high weirdness as we explore Stephen's unique approach to these fascinating realms. With a foundation in the synchro-mystical movement, Recluse merges rigorous research with a reluctant acceptance of Fortean and Saturnian currents. Stephen is the author of Strange Tales of Parapolitical Post-War Nazis, Mercenaries, and Other Secret History and a Special Relationship. Trump, Epstein, and the Secret History of the Anglo-American Establishment, Book 1. He's also working on the forthcoming book dealing with the history of Discordianism. state-sanctioned behavioral modification programs, and conspiracy theories. In addition to his writing, Stephen hosts The Farm Podcast, known for its high-quality, in-depth weekly shows that delve into these complex and intriguing topics. Drawing inspiration from iconic TV shows like The X-Files and Twin Peaks and films such as 2001, A Space Odyssey, and Blade Runner, Stephen brings a rich and multifaceted perspective to our discussion. So join us as we enjoy this journey with Stephen Snyder. Stephen, thanks for being here today. How are you? I'm doing well, sir, and it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for having me on. Yeah, man. I was reading through the Vice Up blog, which I highly recommend everybody go and check out. They should also check out your Patreon page, and they can see some of the discussions you're having on the farm podcast and with your patrons. Man, maybe give us a little bit of a background before we jump into this. Were you always fascinated? Were you always five steps ahead? how did you get to be where you are? Oh, well, I mean, it was a complex journey, I would say, um, in terms of like interesting or like kind of woo woo type subjects. I, uh, A really big pivotal event for me happened when I was at the University of Colorado Springs, living in the dorms. I think this would have been like around 2003 or something. And it was the first time I took magic mushrooms. And it was a pretty normal trip up until the very end of it. And the dorms at the times, like they would open the cafeteria up at about 1130. So the students get in there and have like a midnight snack. It was mostly like eggs or something. And it seemed like the mushrooms were starting to wear off. I was getting kind of hungry. So I figured I'd go in there and grab something to eat. And I walked into the cafeteria part where it's, you know, sort of the standard setup with all the white tiles and white walls and all this other stuff. And it looks like you know, like a Motley Crue video from the 80s with like a smoke machine or something in there. There's like smoke everywhere. And I see these seven foot tall, eight foot tall gray aliens walking amongst the students, just sort of like making observations and stuff. And I've subsequently done a lot of psychedelics since then. And I've never had like hallucinations that were that vivid where something looked as lifelike to me as you do to me right now while I'm recording this. So that was really mind blowing for me in that it kind of planted the seed in my head about the possibility that people occasionally encounter kind of non-human entities and altered states of consciousness. And I think several years later was when I first discovered Rick Strassman's writings. Like that was kind of another one where people commonly reported seeing gray aliens when they were under the influence of it. And then from there, I kind of started to see if there was anything else involving psychedelic or that didn't involve psychedelics, rather. And that was when I stumbled onto remote viewing and how some of the remote viewers had also had these kinds of experiences. And that is also when I first really started to learn about MKUltra and Artichoke. And that sort of led me down that rabbit hole to start investigating those programs. um many years later I started blogging on a lot of this materials I had gathered a pretty decent amount of information I think by about 2010 or something like that I wanted to start sharing it with the public and just seeing how people responded to some of the stuff man you're talking my language man we're talking strassman psychedelics mushrooms alternate states of awareness Isn't it interesting how alternate states of awareness, particularly psychedelics, seem to break down barriers and allow you to maybe open the aperture a little bit and see things in a different kind of way? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that I mean, everybody, I think to some extent who's tried psychedelics has certainly walked away from them, changed. And I think that even though we don't really talk about this a lot, I really think that the psychedelic revolution of the 60s upended spirituality in the West permanently because it brought the option back up. for having a direct religious experience without having to go through some kind of religious hierarchy to get to it. And that was something that really had been lost in the West, in my estimation, since probably at least the Renaissance, if you will. So it was a huge thing for people to discover that they could have these spiritual experiences without spending decades in a monastery or going to confession every week or something like that. And really, it was something that you could actually sort of develop your own path to enlightenment, if you will, through entheogens. So I think that that's something that we're still kind of figuring out how to incorporate into Western society going forward. Yeah, I love it. On some level, it seems like so much manipulation in the West is done because of an absence of spirituality. You know, when you start looking at like the different ways in which cult leaders or the ways in which we are sort of introduced to something bigger than ourselves, that fills this void. And then we're willing to follow that lead on some level. You think that that's? that's definitely an avenue for manipulation is the absence of spirituality and the reintroducing it in a sort of a manipulative way. Well, yeah, I mean, I think that when you sort of get back to, say, the Westophilia piece in the beginning of the Industrial Revolution around the 17th century, this is like the time frame when materialism really starts to become the dominant paradigm in the West. And certainly it would remain on so all through the Age of Enlightenment up until the present era. And this sort of created a dichotomy where even if you weren't religious, you were still trying to rationalize everything through the window of science. And when you started to encounter actual sex or whatever that were not sort of tied into the sort of Newtonian worldview, I think that, yeah, like you're saying, I mean, it was very intoxicating for a lot of people to discover this stuff. because I just think fundamentally humans are hardwired for spirituality. And that's been one of the reasons that's led to the West becoming so schizophrenic really since the Westphalian peace and the Industrial Revolution, because we've tried to deny the spiritual aspect of humanity in the name of reason. And don't get me wrong, reason and logic are wonderful things, but they're essentially learned behaviors for human beings. Whereas I think that spirituality is something that's hardwired into us. And it's such a part of who we are that I think that when you try to deny it, it leads to a lot of catastrophic manifestations in other ways. I mean, I think that you can really see the increasingly terrible wars of the West, for instance, as a symptom of that. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Yeah. you know, when we look back at whether it was the, like the Prussian school model that was brought in, it kind of seems like they were, they got this idea, if we get rid of the spirituality, then we can create these obedient workers that will become like, you know, serfs forever on some level. But, you know, I, if I take it back to the idea of psychedelics and the industrial revolution, the name that comes to mind is Kaczynski. You know, that guy had some pretty, yeah, like that guy had a, his, his treat, his, uh, you know, his book and his manifesto. They had some really fascinating points on there. And I know you know quite a bit about it. I was wondering if maybe you could give me your thoughts on what happened there and if some of that guy's stuff was accurate or, you know, maybe you could just bounce around over there. Well, I haven't really looked at the Unabomber Manifesto for a while, but I mean, I could see the perspective of where that came from because of his time at Harvard. He was, of course, a part of those. Oh, gosh, I can't remember now, but it was Timothy Leary's mentor at Harvard as a psychiatrist. Gosh. This is going to drive me crazy because this guy was a really interesting character. He was essentially the one who helped develop a lot of the personality profiles. Was it Myers? I don't remember. That doesn't sound quite right off the top of my head. But this was the guy who Leary had originally studied under at Harvard. And this was the guy who I believe introduced him to psilocybin. And this guy had also had quite an extensive relationship with the intelligence community going back to the OSS days. Right. And I mean, this kind of raises. In fact, I think this guy was one of the pioneers of like psychotherapy to or psychotherapy, stuff like that. Yeah, that's right. I remember hearing about that. so it's just it created uh I mean you can only imagine what it would be like going to school I mean under this environment so kaczynski I mean he was obviously a very intelligent person um another kind of interesting thing about him as well was his status in the gifted program uh which I really as I've studied this more and more I mean it very much seems like a um essentially, I mean, a kind of eugenics program that was introduced into modern America. And I mean, it essentially came explicitly out of a military program that the army had started to develop during the First World War, essentially to apply intelligence tests to the enlisted men to see, you know, who was better suited to be an officer, who was better suited to be cannon fodder, all this other kind of thing. So you had like the army alpha test that initially everybody was given. If you pass that, you got the, uh, the alpha or excuse me, the arm of B test, the beta test. And, um, that was essentially where you would end up if, uh, you did not have the capabilities to lead other individuals or could do something useful that required intelligence within the services. And a lot of this stuff was essentially used as the model for the gifted program when we started introducing it in California around the 1920s. And the guy who had really pushed this, Lewis Terman, was an individual who had been very closely tied to the eugenics movement throughout the early 20th century prior to the Second World War. And it's also kind of overlooked, but the gifted program is usually pushed in a lot of eugenics publications as well prior to the Second World War. So it was very open, and there was this general belief that intelligence was very much a genetic thing. That was one of the major things that Terman was hoping to prove. And from this pioneering program onward, there's just so much curious stuff about this. So for one thing, Terman's initial batch of gifted programs constituted like the longest psychological experiment that's ever been conducted, I believe, to this day, because they continued to monitor these kids, literally their entire adult lives, like after Terman himself had died, and then they kept monitoring their kids. In fact, as far as I know, it's actually still ongoing. And there were some interesting people, as I'd said before, who ended up in this gifted program. One of them was Colonel Michael Aquino's mother. So Aquino was a guy who would have been studied essentially his entire life as part of Terman's gifted program as being the offspring. of one of his prized pupils and you know we can see how akino ended up later in his life so this would have been again the same sort of climate that kaczynski was brought into with these gifted programs uh because this was very much something that was designed to locate potential middle managers of the american empire so I think he would have been subjected to a certain degree of grooming and conditioning, in my estimation, from a very early age. And this is just sort of something from my own experiences. Going to school, you know, I can recall, I mean, at my high school, we had the IB program, which was sort of like the Uber gifted program. And I mean, the kids in these programs, A, they're put under a tremendous amount of pressure. I mean, I remember the typical IB kid had like four or five hours of homework a night. I mean, so this had two advantages. On the one hand, it basically ensured that the only people who could really do IB were the children of the upper classes they didn't have to work when they were in high school. And then on the other hand, it was just this constant crucible of pressure that they were under this sort of isolation that came with it where they could only really relate to other IBers because they had the same kind of background. And then on top of that, you just have the constant indoctrination from the teachers who would constantly tell these kids that they were better than the rest of the school because they endured all of this hardship to be in the IB program. And it's a great way, I guess, to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, because there were a lot of kids who burned out from this stuff. Some of them ended up developing really heavy substance abuse problems when they got to college. Some of them committed suicide. But some of them made their way through the gauntlet, and I'm guessing they're probably among the middle managers that we all have today. So this is essentially what these programs are designed to do. Kaczynski would have been brought into this from a young age. He would have then potentially participated in some of these programs in college that were connected to MKUltra and these types of things. And on top of that, I think another aspect that's sort of overlooked with the early psychedelic movement is how closely linked it was to the cybernetics movement in fact it's kind of overlooked but really you could make an argument that some of the uh the use of psychedelics among psychiatrists really grew out of the cybernetics movement because I had a lot of discussions about this in the early macy conferences And when I look at Kaczynski's ideology, it seems that it is very informed by an understanding of cybernetics, and it's also a very pointed criticism of it. And for those of you who are unfamiliar with cybernetics, it's basically the study of command and control systems. So the whole purpose of it is to figure out social order through the whole concept of feedback loops and things like that. And I think that an individual like Kaczynski, who had sort of been brought up in this technocratic structure, who did have a high natural intelligence, probably when he started to understand what the ends were for these different processes, it seems like you just really went off the deep end. um you can't really blame him entirely I suppose in a certain sense and who knows I mean possibly um the exposure that he had to psychedelics did contribute to that in the sense that it was able to allow him to step outside of the culture milk you that created cybernetics and see it from a different perspective that was maybe more ominous than what a lot of people who had grown up in a conventional American background in that era would have seen it as Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's speaking to the idea of conditioning and middle management and the managerial class. When you look at it from that perspective, it sure seems like that's what we have now as a class of managers. They're not a whole lot of leaders, at least that I see from my blue collar background. I see a lot of managers and not a whole lot of leaders. Is that something that is not a bug, but a feature? Yeah, I think very much so with the gifted program, because it seems like that was essentially what they were trying to target, not necessarily brilliant individuals per se, who had singular creative genius, but people who could be very effective middle managers. I just think that this was sort of playing into the notion that we could create a... a technocratic society that was so efficient that we didn't need great leadership necessarily because it becomes sort of self-perpetuating through, again, this sort of notion of like feedback loops and things like that. And if anything, it sort of seems like a lot of the really intellectually gifted kids in our public school system, at least when I was in school, end up going into special ed, special education, because typically there's this whole process of trying to convince you that you have all these learning disabilities and stuff like that. So it's almost like it's set up to discourage people of true brilliance to try to find a place in society, whereas simultaneously they're trying to low-key people that are intelligent, that are hardworking, that are efficient, but are not necessarily the most creative or visionary people on the face of the earth. Yeah, it's interesting to think about it from that point. When I think about culture, I think like the first four letters of culture, like cult, there's all these cookie cutter roles that you can do, you know, but I think it comes with a lack of a meaningful life when you find yourself in these cookie cutter rules. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that that's really the major flaw with Marxism, if you really want to get down to it, is it tries to reduce everything. to material comforts, right? I mean, don't get me wrong. You know, this isn't to say that money is not important. Money can definitely open up a lot of opportunities for you and what have you. But I think when it's all said and done, material possessions are not what give most people's lives meaning. What gives your life meaning are your family, uh your religious beliefs if you have them uh just things that I think that just go much deeper than simple material objects things that I think that we would consider as human beings to really be irreplaceable especially when it comes to relationships ultimately I mean I think that's what it really boils down for people is it is relationships relationships to your family to your community to your friends to whatever you choose to worship And that is fundamentally what's important to us. And again, I'm not trying to say that we should totally overlook the material aspects of this. I mean, that's sort of one of the great things that the right has done from a strategic standpoint is the left essentially vacated any kind of religious musings. The right was more than happy to fill the vacuum and trying to totally fixate on non-material causes for happiness. And again, it's a valid point to that. But to some extent, you need both. You need the opportunities that money can provide you. And I'm not saying you need lots of money, but you need some money to provide you with the opportunities to achieve things in life that will provide it with more true value than what you could get by just simply having a sports car or a big mansion or something like that. Yeah. It's the idea of consuming your way to happiness just makes you fat and like kind of boring in some ways. And it makes me sad to see the way we've moved. Do you think that this level of consumerism that we have found ourselves in is like a natural progression of an empire or of a society? Is this like a consumption phase or is it? What's your ideas of where we are right now in the West as far as an empire? Well, yeah, I think that it's really more of a sign of a declining phase of an empire because this is really, I think, the decadent phase of the empire. Right, right. You know, the Romans had bread and circuses. I think that we have essentially shop till you drop as, I guess, the ultimate form of decadence in our society. You know, we're just throwing money away. It's so much garbage. And I mean, none of it really makes us happy or anything to that effect, so... Yeah. When we talk about the left-right paradigm, it seems to me with a lot of people that articles that I read or things that I pay attention to, it seems that there's not... I heard a good quote that said, if you were born before 1980, you live in the 50s. And if you're born after 1980, you live in the 2000s. And it seems like so many people think that we live in this democracy where you get to choose the candidate and you have all this choice, but... That's one hand of it. And then the other view is like, that's all bullshit. There's not two parties. There's one giant party. And then there's owners that are controlling everything. What's your take on that? I don't even I mean, do people even really think that we're living in a democracy anymore? I mean, I don't think so. I mean, especially after what we're currently seeing with this election cycle. I mean, it's just beyond ridiculous. One candidate is a convicted felon and the other one is absolutely riddled with dementia, which somehow nobody in the press or the Democratic establishment seemed to notice until he did his debate about two weeks ago or something like that. Well, I mean, it's obviously a joke. I mean, they've got these two clowns up on this presidential debate talking about their freaking golf handicap. I mean, to me, that just says that they're laughing at the American public with all of this. I mean, just the whole psychodrama that seems to be playing out with Biden now, the sudden realization that, yes, he's not fit to hold office. So now they're going to try to work out a way to bring in this new candidate. And it just, it seems like this is part of the ongoing process to try and discredit democratic processes to the mass public. I would say probably this process began really vigorously during the early 21st century with the proliferation of color revolutions. Because now essentially all of these supposed totalitarian regimes are going to collapse and in order to replace them with new totalitarian regimes, we essentially weaponized democracy. So you have all of these color revolutions, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia and so on and so forth. And that, I just think, was catastrophic to a lot of the developing world who did not have a lot of experiences with democracy like we do in the West. And a lot of people now sort of look at this and are puzzled by why somebody like Putin, who is very much an authoritarian, I mean, let's not kid ourselves, would gain so much popularity in the developed wouldn't they desire democracy well you know they're looking at it from the perspective of what's happened to ukraine and from that perspective can you really blame them for being a little wary about it and now finally getting into the west itself you just have this whole crusade that's broken out against populism uh really now for the last decade or so and it's creating the narrative that the average voter in the west is not capable of making his own political choices because there's look what happens they vote for Trump or they they vote for Brexit I mean this isn't what educated logical people would do obviously and that's kind of the really interesting thing to me about the Democrats this year because it seems like otherwise they're essentially falling on their sword uh to get Trump in office I mean My God, why would you raise the prospect of having women drafted, for instance, for military service right before a frickin election? But anyway, I think what's really interesting is it seems like Biden is definitely going to be replaced. But how are they going to manage this? I mean, obviously, the voters are not going to get to go to the primaries and vote for their candidates. So I almost feel like that this is going to be some sort of rollout for, I don't know, a panel of educated electors or something that the people can vote for and that they'll make the decision about which candidates to run and what policies to vote for. Maybe it doesn't work out this year, but look, it was a great effort. And if you just had a few more months to campaign against Trump, this new system would have been flawless and we would have been able to save democracy by voting. stripping the public of any ability to actually directly elect anybody or anything. Man, it's so interesting to see the illusion of leadership. What I'm thinking of is I think it was John Dewey who said that politicians and government are the shadow cast upon people by business. And for me, maybe it's because I'm getting a little bit older, but you see this playbook of like the Bundy Ranch trying to be taken over. And now all of a sudden you see the Idaho mining, the cobalt mining going in. And if you peel back that curtain a little bit, to me, it seems like the politicians and the government sell off private, like public land that was given to the people to foreign companies to develop. They take all the profits out of it and then socialize all the losses. Is that something that's been going on forever? Or is that sort of the new sort of infrastructure that they want to run in? Well, I think especially going into the Cold War eras when you really started to see a major takeoff in this whole notion of public-private partnerships. And yeah, I definitely think that because up to that point prior to the Second World War, I guess really the Great Depression, in fairness to a lot of the capitalist classes, they had generally avoided relying too much on the public trough to bail out their business decisions and so forth. But I mean... That definitely became much more of the policy, certainly after the Second World War and in starting a little before then to where we're going to create this situation where, like you're talking about, we're going to privatize the gains and we're going to socialize the losses so that society gets to pay for the screw ups of big business. I mean, this was you know, as blatant as you could imagine with the the 2008 housing crisis. I mean, essentially, you know, the entire banking industry was brought to the brink of ruin and the public had to pay to bail it out. Why many of them were foreclosed on and kicked out of their homes and so forth. Yeah, it's mind blowing to me. I wonder, do you think that the the people in positions of authority be it the multinational corporations or some of these NGOs, do you think that they're really worried about populism? no I don't think so to a large extent uh because when it's all said and done um there's never I mean I know it's sad to say this but there's never really been any kind of a popular revolt that's been done by the public at large um it's basically whenever you have any kind of revolution I mean it's almost always done by other elites You can look at that, for instance, with the communist revolution in Russia. I mean, most of the Bolsheviks really came from quite prestigious backgrounds in the early years. And you have the bizarre situation where many of the former Okhrana... uh members essentially were brought back into the uh what was the check of the predecessor to the kgb within months or something I think of the red revolution so you can kind of contemplate what that would imply in the first place but regardless it's always revolutions I think that are initiated by rival classes of elites and I sort of think that that is more the issue uh by populism is threatening to a lot of the globalist classes because I think that they see it as a sort of right-wing equivalent of a color revolution that could be used against them. And to some extent, you really, I think, saw that with January 6th. I mean, people wonder why potentially some of the globalist neoliberal sects would really be uh outraged to the extent that they are over january 6 but essentially because it's a color revolution I mean most people don't see it as that but the purpose of a color revolution is to create martyrs first and foremost because it understands that you cannot realistically overthrow a military with civilian protesters so you have to discredit the military so that it will be disbanded or you'll have people starting to desert a lot of other things like that And this is basically what you see. They were trying to do a variation on the January 6th. I think if anything, they were really hoping that more of the people who stormed the Capitol would have been killed. So you could have had an almost... Ruby Ridge slash Waco style outrage that could be generated by it. But the Biden administration in its infinite wisdom managed to do that by carrying on the ridiculous prosecutions against so many random people that were there. So, I mean, you basically achieve the same objective now. um but that's like really the tragedy with stuff like this I mean you know when I saw that they announced the january 6 thing I immediately was on my blog telling people that this was going to be a setup and I think that's effectively what happened with it you know they're just rounding up um a bunch of largely well-meaning people to be used as cannon fodder for a lot of these objectives so I mean it's just horrible Yeah. Yeah, I was listening to a really fascinating podcast with yourself and James True, and you guys were just talking about so many interesting subjects. One thing that he had mentioned is that this is the way it's done. This is the way government does it. There are these sort of – Gun school shootings or there's these sort of setups that are added on to and then they become part of this narrative, which becomes part of a movement, which becomes sort of this campaign. Is that is that just the world we live in where events are sort of created and dictated and created and spun into a narrative? Well, I think that in some cases, yeah, but I do think that there's maybe a temptation to try to credit everything that happens to some sort of pre-coordinated plan, which is part of the propaganda that we're subjected to, because it essentially serves the purpose of making us think that the elites are invincible. They've already plotted this out since the days of ancient Babylon, and there's nothing that anybody can do to stop this. I think that it's a real mistake to try to fall too much into that line of thinking. But again, there's always a question of grassroots movements and how many of them are astroturfed or created from the outset by the intelligence services. But I mean, I do think that in a lot of cases, more of them are co-opted than created out of thin air than people tend to believe. And I just sort of, I think I have some insight to this now from having been in the sync movement for about 10, 15 years now, because I've already seen some bloggers and some YouTubers and stuff sort of raising the question of whether the sync movement, for instance, was created by the intelligence community. And I mean, you know, there is definitely some interesting aspects of how it was platformed, especially when you look at a podcast like Red Ice Creation, which was really big in the early years of the same movement and setting up. And yes, there are some suspicious things about that. I mean, that's something that I've been investigating for a while now. But in looking over the movement for a lot of years and having been a part of it, I never got the sense that this was something that was totally created by an intelligence service or some sort of like private organization. But it was certainly a movement that a lot of these groups were interested in. And I think that this is why you see references to some of the sync movement popping up in something like QAnon, which, again, some people look at that as being nefarious. But I mean, to my mind, it's just simply confirmation that it works because a lot of the synchro mystics were big on the whole practice of memes and what we kind of think of now as meme magic for many years before it really caught on to the alt-right so if you're seeing a technique like this that's able to influence popular culture via a very small fringe, if you are somebody who's engaged in the intelligence services, why would you be interested in that? Why would you be trying to learn from it or possibly use parts of the movement to your own end? So I think that that's a kind of another mistake that we fall into by trying to reduce everything as being manufactured opposition or something like that. which essentially leaves us in a position where there's nothing to actually believe in. And that can be every bit, I think, as bad as, you know, trying to buy wholesale into a manufactured belief system, if you will. Yeah. When you, the loss of belief, the loss of trust in yourself just leaves you dead and alone. And so what, can you break down the Sikh movement? Like what is the Sikh movement? Well, I mean, I guess theoretically, it would have started to crystallize around between 2006 to about 2010 or something like that. You had Reality Sandwich on the blog that would have been a big part of it. You had Jake Cox, I think, who was one of the early bloggers with that. Also, Rigorous Institution, I think, would have been a big website, though it's not often cited as such. And then, of course, My mentor in sync, Chris Knowles, started The Secret Son around this time frame as well. Jason Horsley, I know, was really into a lot of synchromysticism around this time, probably 2010, something thereabouts. So this would be sort of when it started to emerge as a formal movement. But obviously, I think what we would think of now is synchromysticism. existed much earlier than that. But for those of you unaware of what it is, essentially this took Carl Jung's theory of synchronicity and tried to apply or try to use it through a mystical perspective. so essentially it would be a way of finding signs and symbols in your own life that you can follow to a certain kind of enlightenment or zen if you will I guess um something that I sort of inadvertently started doing when I uh actually in my case started reading the cosmic trigger uh probably around the time I was about 25 or so and uh obviously I would say robert anton wilson would also be a big uh figure in what eventually developed into synchronic mysticism, the cosmic trigger and the Illuminatus trilogy were definitely, I would say, big influences on this. And on the other kind of political spectrum, you would have somebody like James Shelby Downard, Jim Brendan, alias William Grimstead, Michael A. Hoffman. I do think that the whole concept that they developed with Twilight Language, again, was a very interesting concept. It's very similar to synchronicity. Per Hoffman, Twilight language would be an ancient cult doctrine that refers to the language that God spoke to Adam in the Garden of Eden with, which would have been a symbolic language because there was no spoken language at this point. In fact, in this time frame, theoretically, man would have been telepathic. We didn't even have words or We didn't speak or anything. We just communicated with our minds and did so via symbols. And it's interesting because the way the human brain operates, really, it is triggered by different symbols that we've been kind of hardwired into us. So I do sort of think if there is ultimately a kind of Ur language, it would probably be a symbolic one. And I mean, who knows? Perhaps something like Egyptian hieroglyphics or an echo of that. um but anyway uh downer hoffman and grimsted developed this whole concept where there would be this almost mystical language that was embedded within pop culture the press and then a lot of significant uh political events that you could discern the symbols from to sort of understand a greater reality of what was happening And I would say probably the most blatant example of this would be the Kennedy assassination. Because if you've ever really looked into the JFK assassination, it's just so weird with all of the different. I mean, just when you try to get a scorecard of all the people in Dallas, for instance, alone, it's like insane. It's just like who wasn't in Dallas with Kennedy? shot. And some people will try to argue that this constituted a vast Byzantine conspiracy, which I think is absurd. Don't get me wrong. I do think there was a conspiracy to assassinate JFK. But if you're going to kill the president, you're not going to have like, I mean, everybody in there, you know, with any sort of name recognition in the same town at the time. i just think that it's one of these things when there are these major geopolitical events it's it affects the timeline so to speak and I think you see reverberations of that by the strangeness that surrounds it uh you could say the same thing about similar events like 9 11 for example um all the sort of crowley symbolism for instance the people remarked upon uh the turns up in that event again I don't know that this is the case of the elite necessarily having to go out and I guess like try to mark their territory or something like that by putting 93 in all of these things. I actually think that it's more a case when you do have a lot of these things playing out. And I do think that there are some magical purposes that are behind these events in certain quarters. But when you have this kind of stuff playing out, when you have an event that unfolds, it's going to have a significant impact on a society at large. I just think that it causes reverberations and there are signs that will turn up to mark this as something that will continue to be processing, if you will, for years afterwards. Yeah, that's awesome. I was really unaware of the sync movement, but I resonate with so much of the ideas of symbols as language and, you know, different states of awareness, allowing you to interpret the world in different ways, which was meaningful. It's, do you think that maybe the, the sync move, did the sync movement, this is a two part question. Did the sync movement give way to the, um, discordia movement? And are there some similarities to the very pranksters in that movement? Well, yeah, I mean, the Discordian movement was obviously much earlier than what would have constituted the SYNC movement. Discordianism would have been going back to about the late 50s or so. I mean, again, we can sort of debate when the SYNC movement started. You could argue maybe it started with Carl Jung. who certainly had a much more mystical take, I think, on a lot of the stuff that people realized during his lifetime. It could go back to, again, Downard or Robert Anton Wilson, so you're kind of getting into the 70s and 80s. But generally speaking, I would say that Discordianism predated it. But yeah, I would certainly say that there was an influence of the very distinct influence that Discordianism had on the Sync Movement. And there were certain aspects of Discordianism that have been adopted heavily by the Sync Movement, like the 23 Enigma, for example. I was just talking to Christopher Knowles about this, and he was trying to come up with movies that sort of encompassed synchronicity, synchromysticism. And one of the ones that immediately kind of came to his head was The 23 Enigma with Jim Carrey. But again, this is also something that would have clearly been heavily influenced by Robert Anton Wilson's branch of Discordianism as well. So yeah, I would say that there's definitely a close overlap. You could also say chaos magic as well, which is interesting because chaos magic is essentially, I would say the British version of discordianism and vice versa. And subsequently there has been a lot of overlap between discordianism and chaos magic kind of beginning in the nineties going forward. So yeah, I would definitely say that those would be currents that had heavily influenced what we would now think of as synchro mysticism as well. Yeah, well... When I think back to large events that are marked by synchronicities and whatnot, I started thinking about history and alternate timelines. And that kind of brings me up to the idea of the Saturnian influence. I don't know a whole lot about the Saturnian influence, but I've heard some interesting ideas about Saturn theory and Saturn being the second sun and stuff like that. But I was wondering, maybe we could shift gears and you could tell me a little bit about the Saturnian influence and what's going on there. Well, I mean, I suppose it depends on, like, who you're really talking about, because there's a lot of different interpretations, like a Saturnine cult or something like that. I don't know that there's necessarily a uniform one. But one of the best works on this would be the Game of Saturn by Peter Mark Adams, which goes into the Syllabuska tarot deck, which was one of the earliest tarot decks. It originated around Venice towards the end of the 15th century. and it's interesting because this is one of the most compelling instances of a possible cult existing amongst the elites that dated back to antiquity and the whole climate that produced the deck is very interesting because this is right around the time that the eastern roman empire was in collapse venice had always had a very close relationship with the eastern roman empire in fact venice a lot of people don't realize this but it was established as a trading port by the eastern roman empire and the early doges reported to caesar so there was always that long-standing relationship and a big reason why venice became a major um trading haven too is because they were supported by the eastern roman navy for years so um they had the protection of greek fire which was quite useful for a number of centuries but anyway when uh constance and opal collapsed you had a lot of uh the knowledge that came over from the eastern roman empire ending up in venice because there was always that connection And in the Eastern Roman Church, the Orthodox churches, and really throughout much of its territory, Gnosticism and Neoplatonism and even to some extent Greek paganism had never been as thoroughly suppressed as they had been in the Catholic countries. You know, there were periodic persecutions here and there, but there's a reason when you sort of see like the Blagomies that kind of stuff ultimately originating from the Eastern Roman Empire, because a lot of this knowledge really seems to have continued mostly unabated over there. And it seems that one of the customs that came over there was a very high version of theurgy, which was a practice that was very popular in Neoplatonianism for a long time. It was later picked up at the Gnostics and so forth. And this was based on the notion that the human soul originates in the Milky Way. So when we go, when we are incarnated, the soul travels through the different planetary spheres and it picks up attributes of the different planets. This is sort of how this ties into astrology. And then we end up on Earth and we have our lifetime. And then when we die, our soul turns back up to the planetary spheres and ends up back in the Milky Way. and a lot of people don't talk about this but this underpins a lot of diverse belief systems I mean even in like philema for instance um it's in the book of law multiple times every man and every woman is a star that that's what this is referring to it kind of goes back to this very ancient belief that we literally our souls are stars that travel through the heavenly spheres to end up on this planet So as this relates to Saturnite influences and so forth, so the practice of theurgy, you can open you can travel through two gateways that were typically believed to be open on the solstices so the gates of capricorn open on the winter solstice and the gates of cancer open on the summer solstice I believe it was cancer when souls were said to incarnate and it was no no excuse me I think it was capricorn when they incarnated and it was cancer when they departed from the earth so you have the practice of theology and there are two ways you can go about this one way you can go through the gates of cancer and raise your conscience back through the heavenly spheres and return to the milky way while you're still alive essentially and realize the path that it takes to return to the godhead effectively It was sort of this mystical journey that a lot of people went through. And it would be sort of similar now to what we would think of as like scrying. You would almost put yourself. I mean, we don't really know exactly what they did because there's not a lot of manual descriptions left in the practice. But essentially, you would try to enter into a trance-like state. For instance, I think 2001, A Space Odyssey is actually very influenced by this notion of theurgy. And I think when you look at the Stargate sequence, this is actually based on what that journey would have been like where you see this sort of conjunction and then he goes through the stargate I think that that was kubrick essentially trying to recreate what this process would have been like but this was a very high tradition like um I think the egyptian book of the dead for instance was also sort of a manual for this process and then gradually it passed down to a lot of these mystic groups like the neoplatonists and so forth So anyway, you can send your consciousness to the heavens. That's one thing you can do. The other way you can go about this is what we would think of now as drawing down the moon. And that's where you summon one of these planetary consciousnesses, one of these gods or whatever you want to think of it. And you bring it down into either yourself or some other receptacle that can contain this consciousness so that it can communicate with you. And it's a belief, for instance, that this is what was behind the phenomenon of talking statues, for instance. We see a lot of reports of from antiquity, supposedly the Egyptians and some of these other older civilizations had these vast statues and the gods would enter into these statues and they would literally talk to the priests and so forth. And it's kind of believed that this is what they were essentially doing. It was this process of theurgy where you were summing down these planetary intelligences or these gods, whatever you want to call it, and communicate it through you in these statues. But you could also call them down into yourself and essentially allow them to take possession of you. This would be kind of similar to the tradition of Voodon with like horse and rider, for instance. You're allowing one of these creatures to ride you, essentially. So getting back to the Syllabuska Tarot. Peter Mark Adams' brilliant theory is that the deck essentially was a manual for how you could summon Saturn down to enter into you and take possession of you. And this is sort of the cusp of what might have constituted a very ancient cult of Saturn. And then there have been various attempts, especially beginning in the 20th century, to recreate a kind of new Saturn cult. One of the most notorious would have been the Brotherhood of Saturn from the Weimar Republic in Germany. This was actually an offshoot of the OTO. So they had sort of their own means of sex magic and this kind of thing as well. Though they do seem to have been rather different from what's been theorized might have been the Saturnine cult behind the Sulabuska. But again, that's also interesting. And then you've had some other attempts as well to develop a modern cult of Saturn. I think it was... Gosh, I cannot remember the guy's name now. David Beth has also done some great work on some modern manifestations of the Saturnine deity. But yes, there seems to be various traditions of this at play. I've argued before that I think that what Stanley Kubrick was depicting in Eyes Wide Shut was actually a Saturnine cult. Peter Mark Adams was actually the first person who had brought this to my attention, and he had made a very compelling argument for this. And as I had researched this more, it seemed very evident to me, especially after I got a copy of this book called In the Occult that Stanley Kubrick had had as one of his references for Eyes Wide Shut. And it had an entire section in it on the Brotherhood of Saturn which I think would have inevitably appealed to Kubrick, because he was also a big fan of James George Fraser. And again, if you've read The Golden Bough, you know that Saturnalia is a big, big thing, and his whole premise of that stuff. Kubrick was obsessed with The Golden Bough. It was one of his favorite works, and I think it's very evident in a lot of his films. You can see the influence from it. So I think that it was something that he had gravitated to, and who knows, perhaps... maybe even had some firsthand experience with what a modern Saturnine cult would constitute. But yes, it does seem to be this current that has continued to manifest time and again. I know there's some really elaborate thoughts about a cult of Saturn that have turned up online in recent years, supposedly in pop culture, whenever you see some sort of variation on a cube in reference to the Saturnine cult. I mean, obviously, two famous examples of that would be the Borg cube from Star Trek on the one hand, and then the cube, the puzzle cube from the Hellraiser franchise on the other hand. Again, I've seen arguments that this traces back to the original deity in Mecca, you know, the black cube that they've got there, supposedly it was a Saturnite deity that was worshipped there originally before the advent of Islam. But again, I don't know if you can really say legitimately that the cube was always a manifestation of Saturn or something, but there's been these sort of elaborate cosmologies that have emerged online in recent years. I think the craziest one was that I'm trying to remember now. It was some premise along the lines that the Earth had had a closer gravitational pull to Saturn or something earlier. And when Saturn was knocked out of alignment or something like that, it had caused catastrophic effects on the Earth. And this is why all of the ancient traditions were all based around these Saturnine cults. And this is why we're obsessed with it and this kind of thing. Again, who really knows, frankly? But it definitely seems like something that there has been a very consorted effort to revive that in the 20th century going forward. And certainly, Saturnine worship has a very ancient and very curious tradition to it. yeah that's that's fascinating man I there's so many through lines that go through there to pop culture and you know the ways in which we've been influenced by deities and even julian james and his book talks about the different statues of people talking to him and language and also uh jonathan strange and uh mr muriel or something oh gosh by susan clark that was a really great fantasy novel um that was written I think around 2010 but uh It's got so much interesting stuff on that. It's got the talking statues in it. Venice is like a big part of the storyline as are Venetian mirrors. And it's kind of interesting to kind of getting into the whole notion of scrying and, you know, the whole thing with like the solo bus on Venice. I actually found out that modern mirrors originated in Venice. So, yeah. You kind of wonder like, well, why did they decide to develop the mirrors exactly? Yeah, yeah. Of course, Kubrick's also got Venetian mirrors all over Eyes Wide Shut along with the famous Venetian masks. yeah like the idea of it's almost like the socratic nature of creating an elite population is we're going to have all these people in masks and they're just going to have babies they don't know who they are and in some ways you can kind of see that being a set set of satyrian cult in a way like the idea of raising leaders without knowing who they are I don't know it's fascinating to think about like all the ways in which that can happen or have you heard the um There's a great, Wal Thornhill has a really cool theory called the electric universe. I don't know if it's particularly- Yes, yes, yes. Right? Yeah, I'm familiar with the electric universe theory, but yeah, it's like the whole notion that, I mean, essentially frequencies and so forth affect, I mean, our entire physical being essentially, which I think has some interesting merit to it. I mean, it really seems like this is sort of the science that's underpinning a lot of the research and non-lethal weapons and things of that nature. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's it kind of goes into some of the darker theories that I've heard about something like Skinwalker Ranch, for instance. What are some of those? Well, essentially, it's been speculated because of the background of some of the scientists involved with the National Institute for Discovery Science or whatever it is. that they were actually using psychotronic devices in Skinwalker to induce paranormal experiences, because it's actually been theorized that, you know, there are certain frequencies that could induce a religious experience in a human being. I mean, that's kind of underpines like the research into something like What is it the god helmet for instance by Michael Pershing for instance? Which is another device that's said to be able to stimulate kind of quasi religious experiences by applying different frequencies to the human brain so Yeah, there's um I mean, a lot of this is, you know, again, it's sort of related to the notion of the electric universe. So it does sort of beg the question, is this maybe closer to how the world actually works? And it's one of the reasons why that particular theory is really downplayed by a lot of mainstream science. Yeah, it makes me wonder, it seems like, just curious to get your thoughts on this, the way we move is like this helical model, like we're gradually getting better, but old ideas have to break down and die and are we seeing some of our old notions die the same way we saw like the uh planets and glass spheres die you know maybe it is an electrical model but that means you have to throw away a lot of the science that we had in there is that do you see us moving because because the one thing that we always get right is that we get it wrong if you look back So if you were to put on your speculative glasses, do you see sort of the electric model taking the place of gravity? Or what do you think could be happening here in the future? Well, yeah, I mean, I think that it's undeniable that this sort of Newtonian paradigm is breaking down. And it sort of plays into something I was talking about earlier as well with the proliferation of psychedelics in the West and the ability of people to experience, have a direct religious experience without sort of an intersection from the church or something like that. So I think that... The the advent of psychedelics, of quantum mechanics, quantum theory, the rise of things like the Electric Universe theory and a lot of this other stuff is really making it undeniable to us on a lot of levels that the world is a lot weirder than Newtonian science can account for. And I think that the elites are also aware of this as well. It just seems like you're sort of gradually seeing a shift away from the Newtonian process. And it's this is where I find the recent push for disclosure to be sort of interesting because One thing that's really interesting about ufology, especially I would say like in the last 10 years or so, is the increasing popularity of the John Keel kind of ultra-terrestrial hypothesis or Jacques Vallée's interdimensional beings hypothesis. Because previously, these were really sort of like fringe views, like everybody believed in the whole nuts and bolts ideal that they were from, you know, another planet, and they traveled here in the spaceship, and they had affected our development. And, you know, the gods of the past were all just these aliens who had technology that we didn't understand. And now you're seeing the shift away from that to this more mystical version of extraterrestrials, whether it's these interdimensional beings or there's these ultra terrestrials. And I feel like that that's possibly being you laying the groundwork for a major spiritual reversal in the West. Whereas, you know, it's like we've been talking about before. You had this really secular materialistic paradigm. that's dominated everything since roughly the West Ophelion piece. And we're heading to this point where if you start to bring in the question of not only there are other intelligences that exist in the universe besides ours, but that they essentially also are outside time and space or something to that effect. it really puts an end to the material paradigm. You're going to have to start introducing quantum physics and the implications of that on a wide scale. And it seems like this is, you know, it's also, I think, something where you're seeing quantum mechanics and all this other stuff becoming so popular now in the New Age movement. Increasingly, we're heading to a period of re-enchantment in the West. And I think that they see things like quantum mechanics or the Electric Universe as a bridgeway From the materialistic paradigm. If you will. Yeah. Is it possible that. It's so interesting. We spoke about. you know, Trump and Biden. And like, it seems like so much of a generation, like the baby boomer is such a huge generation. Like we really can't have a cultural shift until their ideas die off in a way, like the same way a fruit would ripen on a vine and then drop and then spoil and a new flower would show up. It kind of seems like we, we have to get past a large portion of all the boomers being in any position of authority before we can really begin to see the fruits of this new transition. What is that too, too dark? Or what do you think? Well, I think that inevitably there's definitely a different perspective, I think, from boomers versus Generation X, Y and Z and so forth. But I I think the bigger issue with the boomers is the belief that they have in institutions because and I mean, I get that because, OK, they grow up in an era where education is has become widespread for the first time. And it did have a lot of positive benefits for society at large. But I think that that also created a certain blind belief in academia and technocrats and this kind of thing. Which again, I'm not trying to say that valuing intelligence isn't admirable. I mean, it certainly is. And I mean, you do want rulers and people in position of authority who are intelligent. And in the past, Typically, to achieve higher learning, you had to go through academia because those were the only bodies that had the repositories of collective knowledge in terms of their libraries and the staff and the faculty. I mean, there were always polymaths, people like St. Charles Fort. But even Fort, I would kind of argue, benefited tremendously from spending a good chunk of his life in New York City, where he had access to a phenomenal public library and all this other stuff. But the point being that I'm trying to get with this in the past, you really had to go through the system, through academia to achieve higher learning. So this is the world the boomers grew up in. And I get that. I could see why they would have the attachment to that. But I think that things changed dramatically in the late 90s with the rise of the Internet. Because now essentially you have all of human knowledge practically available to you. And all you have to be able to do is pay a monthly bill for Wi-Fi at this point. I mean, you can access most of the stuff in your phone if you really want to. And this was a game changer because now you've really cut out the middleman, so to speak. You don't have to go through the universities anymore to become an expert in the subject. If you're really that determined, you can teach yourself a lot of skills. And I think that that's been a huge revolutionary change that we haven't really processed now, because just in my experience, it just seems like a lot of people my own age range, this would be millennials, the ones who have been fairly successful, really did not go to college, dropped out of college, or they don't use their degrees. You know, they learned how to make money basically through other means that they usually taught themselves. And I think that that's even more prevalent in Generation Z. And I think on top of that, with the rising cost of college. Now, I mean, really, you're probably better just taking that money and invested in investing it in a good Wi-Fi connections, books, you know, just. But, yeah, I just I think that this is really more the mentality of a lot of us who grew up after the boomers, certainly with millennials, with Generation Z and even a lot of gene extras as well. But I think it's this mindset that you can't really rely on universities for higher learning anymore. And a lot of times if you're going to learn skills that are going to be useful to you in business, you either have to develop them, develop them yourselves, or you have to learn them working with other people who have the skills that you want. So I think that that's going to be a dramatic change in how we view expertise, if you will, going forward. But yeah, at this point, the baby boomers are still sort of the dominant generation. and you know to suggest to them that you could have somebody who's never been to college you know in a certain position or something like this what do you mean Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's so, I'm stoked to hear you say that because I do see that pattern. Like I know so many young people that have imagined a way for themselves and like created it and they, they did it through lived experience. They did it through like, well, I'm just going to, I'm going to, I'm a big gamer. I'm going to, I'm going to teach myself how to code or build. And then they, they build this own world for themselves that seems so unique and prosperous. But I feel on some level, while we go through this process, there's a lack of meaningful connections on some level. Like, how do you see that playing out? Like I, I'm super stoked that I can talk to you over the internet and we can have this, but on some level, it seems like a crisis of meaning. Well, see, and that's like where, you know, this is something that I talk about like with Chris Knowles a lot and the people that we do that I do astronosis with. And, and, this is like where I think the next step is going to be because okay so we had uh the digital revolution and we had so many other things that unfolded I think really kind of going back to the late 80s going forward uh but the end result of this and I'm thinking of like the commodification of houses the rise of globalization all this it destroyed community as we knew it and of all the things we've lost that has definitely been the most devastating it's the loss of community and like you're saying it's led to a lot of this isolation and people tried to replace that by going online but again that's not a true replacement for having actual flesh and blood experiences in real life so that's the bad news the good news is that the internet has enabled us to in some ways have the possibility of the strongest communities human beings have ever had because now we can find people who have the same interests as us all over the world So the step that we have to take now that we know that we can do this is bringing this into the real world. And this is why, like, I'm so stoked that I'm able to do these conferences that I do. I do the Astronosis one. I do the Strange Realities one. with Conspirate Normal. I've actually started doing events in LA too with Subliminal Jihad. I actually just threw a parapolitical rave in LA. So this stuff has just been great to do because it's bringing people from these online communities to physical locations. And a lot of times too, I mean, I do a lot of extracurricular stuff. I mean, I'm going to be visiting a bunch of people when I head out for Astronosis in Chicago that I've met online, where a lot of us are going to be going around having adventures or going to archives. On Sunday after Astronosis, I'm going to take a bunch of people up to Wisconsin to go to House on the Rocks and Taliesin East. So this is like the kind of stuff that I've been really trying to push forward. And I'm happy to see that a lot of my colleagues have started to do this kind of stuff as well on their own initiative. Because I think everybody realizes that this is so important because we have the platforms to bring these people together. And the next thing is we have to start bringing everybody together in real life so that we can start to rebuild true organic communities going forward. Because I think that that's really the key because. technology has upended things so, so much. I mean, this is the biggest cultural revolution since the Industrial Revolution. I think that that is really one of the major crises that we're dealing with right now because there's no vision going forward. We can't imagine what a new society is going to look like with this technology. Well, I take that back. We do have some visions out there, but they're, you know, I mean, like the World Economic Forum, they're just this insane authoritarian. Nobody wants this. So We have to figure out how to rebuild societies going forward with these technologies. And I think the logical way to do this is starting from the ground up. I think it starts with things like these conferences and getting together in real life and starting to develop ways where we can get together easily, trying to set up networks of places, people's houses where you can stay at, where we can get together and do things. So that even if we're a certain transient community, we're still a kind of community. And I think that that is going to be probably the ground floor, eventually establishing these communities in real world on a permanent basis and linking them up with other communities across the country, across the world, and starting to figure out ways that we can gradually build things back up from hopefully a more democratic and personal level at the ground floor. Man, it's inspiring to me. And I think if past relevant behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, I see this sort of cultural explosion, especially in the psychedelic world where we're in the medical container right now, but it does seem that we're beginning to break out. And I can't help but think... When you talk about translating this online community into a real community, it's psychedelic in that most people who have had a really deep psychological trip are trying to bring something back. You're trying to describe the ineffable. But it seems like that's the same thing that you guys are doing with the Gnosis movement and going out and throwing these things. You're bringing something back for the community to thrive on. Well, we're putting out a... We're all playing out a psychodrama, essentially. A Jungian perspective, or maybe more accurately from Joseph Campbell, this is very much the hero's journey, right? And what is the purpose of the hero's journey? Well, there's really two purposes to the hero's journey. The first one is to know yourself better. by gaining knowledge. And then the second purpose is to pass your boon on to other people. So I think that that's what everybody who's sort of subconsciously going on these journeys is trying to do now because we've learned things about how we can start to create these alternative communities. And we're trying to pass them on to other people and have this, or I should say maybe more alternative lifestyles and pass them on to other people so that we can build this into a community. I mean, like my buddy Michael wanted to be another guy who's been doing this. And I mean, Michael's been almost kind of homeless, I would say, for like the last year or so. But it's really cool. He basically has a gig sitting people's houses across the country. He goes around. He does a lot of these rituals and stuff to bring people together. So, yeah. Again, there's just a lot of this stuff that's happening right now, and I think everybody is being driven in part by a desire to try and impart knowledge that we've learned onto other people so that we can start to build things up again. Let's not kid ourselves. We all saw, or at least we saw the clips of the presidential debate. It's time to put aside the illusion once and for all that our politicians are going to solve this shit for us. That's not going to happen. You know, we got to start doing this for ourselves and figure out ways that we can do it and stop just feeling like, you know, we're powerless. I mean, it's not going to be easy, but, you know, we can do things going forward to start to get back a sense of community. And that is really going to be where things start. I think if we're going to get anything positive for ourselves in the future. Yeah, it's really well said. I mean, It makes me, when I do look at the death of the ideas that we used to have, it makes me, you said that there's two parts to the hero's journey and these myths that underlie the human condition. Do you think maybe we're outgrowing the hero's journey? Like it's pretty simplistic in a lot of ways. Do you think maybe we're moving in to a new myth? And like, that's what this thing is. Like giving back to the people is the first part of the new myth. What's your take on that? I don't know that you ever can really leave the hero's journey or some of these concepts because they're so like ingrained in us. I mean, I think that they just sort of like modify over the years. But I think that fundamentally, you know, you always want to, I mean, I think that's sort of a cornerstone to most of the great myths is the desire to try to bring something back and create a more just society, whether it's, you know, Ulysses returning at the end of the day to his manor and so forth, or in the case of Star Wars after Luke has, you know, destroyed the Death Star and killed the millions of people. But, you know, trying to put the universe back to order, I mean. Yeah, yeah. We did it, we killed them all. Yeah, just I always gotta bring that up because, yeah, you never think about all the people that died on the Death Star. But yeah, yeah, I mean, but again, it's a myth. You're not supposed to think about something like that. But I mean... It is the Death Star. They should have known. You knew it was a Death Star. It blows my mind to think about that aspect of it. What about the what about conspiracy as a way to inspire people? You know, have you ever like taken some time to think about how to, and maybe QAnon in some way was a good example of this, like creating a cultural myth that catches fire. You know, like we, I guess we do have some of those, but is there a way to ignite a new cultural myth? Maybe, I mean, conspiracy mythology, they can kind of be interchanged a little bit, but what's your take on that? Well, yeah, I definitely think the conspiracy has definitely branched into mythology on a lot of levels. It's interesting to see the direction that this is going in because I do think a lot of people see it now as more of an art form and Agreed. And when you look at a lot of the podcasts that have come out in recent years, I mean, a lot of this stuff is being run by comedians or actors or people connected to Hollywood. I mean, really, in a lot of ways, I think that now that Hollywood is, you know, is I mean, on the decline, I feel like conspiracy theory is actually in some ways starting to replace that. because it just sort of plays into where I mean the public's at now people are more into a lot of cases podcasts and youtube series and things like that uh than they are with uh you know I mean typically just going out and trying to stream some of the recent shows on netflix or something so right I mean I think that very much that's kind of the direction we're heading in with um conspiracy becoming a kind of mythology and I think it was a process that was almost inevitable with um Operation Mindfuck, because in this case, you know, you're very much using conspiracy theories to create a mythology. And this continued with a lot of the later iterations like, you know, the rise of alternate reality games. I mean, it's always fascinating to me when I hear the stuff about Montauk, because nobody really realizes that a lot of the Montauk mythos was developed with Joseph Matheny when he was doing Ong's Hat. He and Peter Moon, I think, actually did a book or two together about But the Montauk stuff bleeds into Ong's hat and vice versa. And again, it's like everybody knows now that Ong's hat was an arg. But a lot of people were still clinging to the Montauk stuff. So and again, it's it's even more strange because, I mean, there actually is a lot of weird stuff that went on in Long Island throughout the 20th century and around the region of Montauk. But I mean, now you have this sort of. quasi fictitious mythos that's been grafted onto it with the Montauk experiment stuff and then this outright you know alternate reality game with Ong's hat and I sort of feel like uh you know we didn't really see it at the time but I mean that almost seems like the direction that we're going in now with how conspiracy theories are increasingly being used as a form of mythology in the 21st century There has been just an explosion of ufology in the last probably year or something like that. And isn't it interesting how this particular narrative pops up in history from time to time? What do you think is going on there with all this explosion of disclosure potentially? Well, like I said earlier, I mean, I think that it's possibly laying the grounds for some of these more woo-woo takes on extraterrestrials, like interdimensional beings or something like that. Because again, I mean, so much of this stuff has become closely intertwined with the sort of quantum mechanics-obsessed branch and the new wave movement or new age movements and some of these other groups. So it seems like that this is sort of creating... a perfect storm for like we were talking about again, to revise the kind of secular paradigm that we've had for the last couple of centuries. Do you, do you see, you know, there's a lot of talk about like project blue beam. Like how would you, if someone's like, this is project blue beam coming up, like how would you be able to tell the difference between a conspiracy like project blue beam and an actual, you know, disclosure movement? Well, see, that's like where it's kind of interesting because like with the advent of like deep fake technology and stuff now, I kind of like wonder how effective would something like a theoretical Project Bluebeam even be? Because you could easily have the same argument because I mean, now in the past, seeing really was believing for most people who had video evidence of something. or uh pictorial evidence or something but I mean now uh with the ability to create these elaborate deep fakes and this kind of thing uh would anybody really believe that this stuff was real I mean I suppose certain people would but uh I think there would be tremendous amount of people who would be trying to prove that this was some sort of deep thing So it's almost a situation where I don't even know if those kinds of techniques, if they had ever been seriously planned, would even work. I mean, it'd be like the same thing with like trying to manifest like Jesus's return or something like that. I mean, how many leftist groups would I mean immediately be blasting that as some kind of deepfake technology? So I think in some ways we're in a brave new world with this kind of stuff. I don't know that you could really even conceive of doing something like Project Bluebeam now in a post-truth era with the advent of AI and deepfake technology. I mean, if anything, it seems like we've gone into a state where we're perpetually pondering what is and was not real. Yeah. You know, you brought up some of the work you're doing at different, going out at different speaking events and finding ways to build community and stuff. Are you noticing like a parallel economy sort of show its own face? Like, hey, here's a new way where we can kind of trade. Like, I want to stay at your house for a little bit. We'll do this gig together. Yeah, I definitely think that, yeah, you're starting to see like more of a parallel economy like that. Like you're saying, I mean, people in exchange for staying in somebody's place, like they're doing work around the property, that kind of stuff. um it's interesting too because it really seems like there's been a big revival at least in my area of a lot of uh farmers markets um a lot of like thrift stores and stuff like that or just um like for instance I live next to like berkeley springs which is sort of like a um maybe how Asheville, North Carolina would have been about 20 years ago or something like that. I mean, it's kind of like a new age town, but it's got a lot of shops where they're selling stuff by local artists. They've got like a really great antique store and things like that there. like yeah I do kind of get the sense that you're starting to see a return at some level to a localized economy for a lot of people as well um you know this is like kind of great for me because I mean I i hardly ever even go to like a grocery store or something like that anymore uh and I'm blessed to be in an area where that's possible because we do have uh so many uh farmers markets and stuff here but I think that that's something that's going to become an even bigger issue for a lot of people going forward is a return to trying to get locally sourced food and things like that. It's just, especially since I think that we're going to have increasing difficulty with supply lines and so forth due to the escalating amount of conflicts across the globe right now, that it's going to be necessary to start getting back to producing more produce and other things like that in a local basis. So that's kind of another thing that I think going forward, a lot of people are looking And the woman that I just had on my show, Sherilyn Jones, that's a big thing that she's been working on in terms of bringing a lot of U.S. military veterans together with people in the sustainable community to start developing organic farms and stuff like that so that people will have more local choices for food. So, you know, I definitely think that going hand in hand with creating these new communities, there is going to be more and more of this people also creating almost this alternative of these alternative markets where you're able to sell your artwork, you're able to trade your you know your skills your services I mean helping maintain a farm or something like that for uh room and board or a way to uh have an opportunity to sell your artwork or something or to help uh you know put up more local produce or something like that I mean yeah I think that this is sort of a part of the ongoing process that we have to start looking at and getting creative for. What can we do to give us alternatives to the current system that's collapsing before our eyes? Do you ever think to yourself that there could be like a dollar collapse? Like a lot of the times you'll see in popular media talking about getting off the petrodollar or sometimes you can read in different blogs like the end of the dollar. Like do you foresee a time when there's an economic collapse in the United States and the dollar is worthless? It's hard to say. I kind of go back and forth like on how much of that is hysteria. I mean it is interesting though. that the petrodollar is essentially coming to an end now with the recent agreements that Saudi Arabia has made. But on the flip side of the coin, when you look at some of the alternatives that have been put up, I mean, the EU, their currency, I mean, has been going... Died a long time ago, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know if the Chinese currency is really ready to replace the dollar or not. But the other thing that I think that people tend to forget is that, I mean, even without the petrodollar at this point, the U.S. dollar still has the backing of the U.S. military. So it still has the ability to force nations to use the dollar for transactions. Uh, that's kind of the thing I think that when you have to look at is when it no longer has, uh, the force of the weapon, you know, I mean, be it the nuclear weapon or whatever, the rifle, uh, is when the dollar might become into a real issue. But at this point, I mean, I, I'm really weary of whether or not the CBD stuff or CBDC stuff is really, uh, as big of a threat as it's being hyped up because this seems to be a big part of the, uh, the Cryptocurrencies, that's kind of another interesting one as to whether or not that could be something that could replace the dollar system. But that would actually kind of be something I think especially where you would almost have to have, it would probably have to happen after most of the boomers have died off. That's definitely something where I would agree with you wholeheartedly. I don't think that you're going to have like a major monetary shift in this country where the boomers are still with us. If it's something like crypto, I just, I don't think the boomers get crypto. There's no way. There's no way my aunt Loretta is going to have a Ethereum wallet and be trading. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I mean, that might be a possibility in like, you know, 10, 15 years or something like in the foreseeable future. I just yeah, I don't think the boomers are going to go for something like that. Right. Yeah. It's interesting to think about the idea. It's interesting to think about how cryptocurrency changes the idea of value, too, and the idea of a peer-to-peer economy, which is kind of like the economies you're talking about, the parallel economies. Isn't this peer-to-peer? Like, okay, I'll give you this, I'll give you that. That seems to be an idea on the surface. Yeah. and you know another thing I'll point out to that uh with the dollar I've noticed a lot more places uh are giving you discounts if you play pay in cash um you know for instance like I mean a lot of businesses have to charge it or they're charged a credit card transaction every time they have to run the card So I've seen a lot of businesses to avoid that now. They're just kind of like, well, if you pay us in cash, you know, we'll give you a three percent discount or something like that. So I actually think, if anything, you might see a greater amount of demand for dollars going forward in some of these alternative economies, partly for financial reasons, like I'm just saying. I mean, also, it gives people the ability to work under the table a little bit, so to speak. But it's kind of an interesting thing at a point where it seems like a cash is being abandoned on a large scale. There's also a reemerging demand for it among a lot of small businesses and individuals who are trying to live in kind of an alternative economy. Yeah, people are so tricky with their language. Like, I'm going to give you a cash discount. But really, aren't they just giving you like a higher price credit card? You know what I mean? It's not really like, we're just going to bump up the price, but we'll give you the cash discount. I don't know. Language is a tricky thing for me. I'm always fascinated by it. Well, essentially, they're not going to eat the processing fee. That's kind of like, I guess that's kind of like the discount. Like, okay, we're not going to pay the processing fee anymore. So either you can pay it or you can pay the cash and avoid it. Right. That would be interesting if they said that. I think it would bring a lot more people to the idea of like, yeah, this processing tax is kind of out of control. Well, that's what I'm saying. A lot of people don't. I mean, you know, because I worked at a kitchen and I used to for years and I used to hear my bosses rant about that like all the time. Because when you think about the amount of credit card transactions a restaurant does, I mean, they're like, you know, showing out like thousands of dollars a month for this crap. So, you know, it's not something a lot of people think of when you run your debit card or something. And I mean, you know, for a big company, it's not that big of a deal. But for a small business, you know, that can really add up. Of course. Yeah, it's huge. All the mom and pop spots. And that's the beauty of cryptocurrency is that you just cut out that middle person. You guys are irrelevant. We don't need you anymore. I'm just going to pay Steven right here. But I'm hopeful to see more of that. And I understand why there's pushback against it. Yeah. Well, like I said, that's why I think we might still need the cash for another 10 years for the boomers, because you kind of tell the boomers like, okay, you'll be less money if you pay in cash. They get that. That's simple. You know, like, yeah, you start getting into the stuff with the crypto that yeah, that that's where you kind of start to lose them a little bit. It's fascinating. Stephen, I love talking to you, man. This is awesome. The recluse, you got such a cool stuff on your blog and you got all these ideas that I think are scratching the surface of a world that's emerging. I'm stoked to talk about them. And I know that on your podcast, you have lots of cool people that come on there and you're continuing to do this. But can you talk a little bit more about some of these events, these live events that you're doing? You've mentioned a few of the people, but I was hoping you could mention the organizations and what they got going on in case people are interested in that. Well, I'm doing the Astronosis Con on August 9th and 10th in Wheaton, Illinois, which is right next to Chicago. We're actually doing it out of the Theosophical Society's headquarters on top of everything else. Nice. It's not the Theosophical Society that's sponsoring it, though. It's basically the brainchild of Miguel Connors, who does Aeognostic Bites. If you guys have ever heard that podcast and some of his mates who help him with it. But they're cool dudes. And then Chris Knowles, who's kind of my sync mentor, is a big part of that, along with Mitch Horowitz, Richard Smalley, a couple of other people. But again, I mean, it's, I think, really very much a labor of love for Miguel. And I think Miguel is hoping eventually to start doing at least two of them a year. And this time around, like I said, I'm going to be kind of leading a side trip to take people out to my house in the Rock. which if you've ever read American Gods or seen, I think, the second season of it, House of the Rock is a big part of that. It's a really, really great experience. And Taliesin East is also really interesting as well. So I kind of like to find these like weird spots like that to take people to. It's like one of my hobbies. But anyway, that's something that we're going to be doing going forward. And that's very much a agnostic fight that does that, along with a couple of other people like Mitch Horowitz, who support it by showing up and doing presentations. Then with Strange Realities, it's the Conspiranormal guys, Adam Sane and Sergio Stevens. They're great. They're based or at least Adam is still based out of Nashville. I know Sergio relocated to Washington State. But again, you know, usually I'm there. I think Joshua Cutchins has done all of them. He does a lot of really cool stuff with Bigfoot, entheogens, all kinds. He's more of in the cryptids, but he has some really great theories on this kind of stuff. Tim Banal's done quite a few of them. I know Adam Gowrightly did one one year. Adam Greenfield, a couple of other people. But that's just another really interesting one. It's a great community. The turnout has been better and better every year. So it's just another fun thing like that. And then I just did this sort of hybrid event in LA with the Subliminal Jihad guys, or specifically with Dimitri from Subliminal Jihad. It was like a conspiracy rave, essentially. I gave a presentation to kick things off with for about an hour. And then Dimitri and a couple of other people did DJs, turntables, stuff like that. So it could have run a little smoother, but it was our first rodeo, and I think we definitely learned a lot from it. hopefully we can get another one of those going here um I also did like a presentation of prs and just kind of the whole time in la I was going around doing stuff with people so um you know this is more of the ton of stuff that we're trying to do more of I mean I you know hope I'm hoping to try to get some kind of hybrid event going at some point because I love the ideal of having like lectures along with music because I'm very passionate about music and be I know a lot of really talented musicians so I'd love to give them a platform to display some of their work. And also I would like to get a lot of artists involved as well, because again, I know a lot of great artists and I just, you know, I feel like that this is something going forward as we need to find a way to help everybody, you know, figure out how to market their stuff. Because I think, you know, I know so many creative people that are doing great work and I want to try to help them get more of an audience as well. So it's kind of my long-term goal is to do more of these sort of hybrid engagements. I have them in different parts of the country and then also maybe kind of combine them with, I guess what you would call like dark tourism now, kind of going around and exploring weird spots and things like that. Because I think that that's sort of, an important part of re-enchanting the West. I mean, from my perspective, this really kind of helps people get into sort of a synchromystic mindset. And a lot of times, I mean, they do have great synchronicities when they're out doing this sort of stuff because it's almost sort of like a different way of living. You know, you sort of start to see the magical potential of your surroundings because I think every part of the country to some extent has some really extraordinary things hidden around there. And, you know, unfortunately, a lot of us take them for granted in our day to day lives. And that's one of the things I try to do is find a lot of these sort of hidden gems and start bringing people there so they can go around and experience it. Because it really does, I think, change things for you and in a lot of ways, a very positive way. Yeah, it's like rediscovering a part of yourself that you forgot was so awesome. Like, And then other people, once you recognize that thing in yourself that's good, other people can begin recognizing it. We need that with communities and branching that all the way outward. I like the idea of re-enchanting. That's an awesome concept. Well, I also think, too, it's like the authenticity of it, you know, because I mean, it's just like also I mean, everybody I just think is so tired of like corporate entertainment. It's, you know, I mean, that's why I love something like House on the Rocks in comparison to like Universal Studios, because it's such a result of Alex Jordan's singular. uh vision and dedication to build this weird place in the middle of nowhere and create like I mean it really is almost like a real life field of dreams thing though uh instead of a baseball diamond it's just like tripped out like amusement park type of setup but um But yeah, I mean, I just, you know, I think that that's kind of the other thing is people now are more and more looking to experience things, you know, that are outside of like Amazon and all of these other things become so prevalent, Walmart or whatever in the modern world. Yeah, it steals away our imagination, the idea of. The great mediocrity. Everyone get this. Everyone have this one thing. But we're all so unique. And it's beautiful to be authentic and have your own nature there. But I'm going to have all the links in the show notes for people to go and check out the podcast, the Patreon page, and maybe some of the speaking events that you're going on to now. But before I let you go, I just want to say thank you very much for today. And I was hopeful before you leave you could do a couple things. One is to tell people where they can find you. And the second is to maybe give like a reading list of some cool books that people could maybe turn to that you found interesting. Well, you can always find me at the farm podcast. You do any kind of Google search for the farm podcast mock to it should come right up. It's on Apple, Spotify, you know, most of the big platforms. I do one free show a week. And then also there's the Patreon. You get two additional free shows per month on the lowest tier. You get all kinds of other stuff in the upper tier, including State of the Union addresses, all my dispatches from like these weird places that I go to with pictures and just all kinds of crazy stuff. Plus the the monthly Zoom party as well. And then also my books are available at Amazon. So check that out. uh let's see in terms of books that I've read well uh I actually just did a show on one of my all-time favorite novels uh mark daniel loosky's house of leaves uh which I would say reading that was definitely a pivotal experience for me it was one of my first exposures to immersive art too so I would highly recommend that it's a really interesting book um robert anton wilson's the cosmic trigger was also one that I would say I had a very strong influence on me uh even though I I'm not the biggest fan of peter lavenda I would definitely say that his sinister forces trilogy uh was very influential on my thinking as well um I'm trying to think of some of the other ones uh yeah I'm always like kind of put on the spot when I'm trying to think I know folks um See, I'm kind of drawing a blank right now. But those are some good ones there to kind of start off with, I suppose. Yeah, that sounds awesome. I'm looking forward to it. I saw your write-up on the House of Leaves. It looks intriguing and sinister forces. I'm going to check that one out as well. And we'll hang on briefly afterwards, Stephen. I want to talk to you just briefly afterwards. But to everybody who hung out with us, thank you so much for spending some time with us. And go check out the links down there, the VICEB blog and the Patreon page, and definitely tune into the Forum podcast. There's a lot of incredible entertainment. That's all we've got for today, ladies and gentlemen. Hope you have a beautiful day. Aloha.