Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex, and I'm really excited about today's show because I'm not just a podcaster and I'm a podcaster for a long time. But I got into podcasting because I was a listener and I still am a podcast listener today and I love to share the work of people who really inspire me. And there's a guy who has really been knocking it out of the park lately. You might have seen him on the show before. His name is Richard Cox, but he has a show, The Deep State Consciousness podcast. So Richard, thanks so much for joining me and welcome to Skeptico. Welcome back. Thank you, Alex. Thank you. Nice to be back. So, let's see. Of course, you are being roped into playing Skeptico Jeopardy. You knew that coming in, so there's kind of no secrets in any of that. Yeah, but the board is more high-tech than last time I was on. This is really, because I listened to the show. I hadn't seen this. This is really like when the game show now. Yeah, you're right. We're taking it to the next level. Sure, sure. Okay, I'm going to read the Skeptico Jeopardy board for those who are just listening along. It starts out with Deep States, 9-11, podcasting, cult-ish, trauma, medium, non-duality, suicide, and ET. Now, you have not been given a heads up on any of these topics, so we're going to get the raw, unedited version of Richard Cox. I'm going to pick the first one because I think it's only appropriate since I did just a little bit of an introduction. You tell us more about the podcast. Okay, well, I never intended to do a podcast. I fell into it because I was doing some work with Tim Freik, a philosopher, a previous guest on the show, republishing some of his books, and I felt like Tim goes through so many different things. There's a lot of subjects he covered in the past, like Zen and Guru's that written books on perhaps, but there was nothing on YouTube, and I thought, hey, someone did interview him about this, and no one was. So I thought I'd throw my hat in the ring and see if I could pull off an interview, and it wasn't too awful, people told me. So I sort of liked it, and then I realized that I knew all these interesting people who were just quietly living their lives, and I felt the world deserved to hear a bit more from them. So initially, I thought I'd just do one or two, and then I kept finding that I knew more and more interesting people. So that's how I kind of slipped into the whole podcast thing. Maybe we'll just leave it at that because I think we'll get into that as I let you pick the next topic that we might go to. I'm going to run roughshot over all these boundaries. You have to watch me there, Alex. I mean, I could follow up on what you're saying there with the 9-11 and spirituality thing, or the conspiracy and spirituality. Please do. I think that's in part a product of my age that I'm 36 now, which means I was 18 when 9-11 happened, and that coincided with me leaving school. And it was also a time in my life where I suppose, yeah, to pick a tarot card, the tower tarot card would be the appropriate one, where my belief in the society as it is, structures as they are, the system, the establishment, that was all coming tumbling down. And I didn't really have anything to replace it with. And it was leading to a rather despairful place of, does anyone have a clue what's going on here? Things like your President George W. Bush being elected. That shot pieces my faith in the concept of a leader of the free will for reasons I don't think I need to explain. And then in... No, no, no. Let me take that back. I think you do need to explain for a couple of reasons. One, my audience is largely American. You're British. You're, in particular, you're on the Isle of Man, which is even more kind of interested and kind of isolated in a way. But, you know, what was your... Why do you say that? Because I go a million different directions with that. I go Skull and Bones, CIA, family. Nothing that deep initially for me. So, you have to understand that up until about the age of 16, 17, I believed in the system, right? As everyone does, really. So, I remember being a little kid and we had to make a model house. And I made the White House because I heard, like, about George Bush Sr. being the President. And he'd done something to protect Golden Eagles. And I thought that sounded great. And presidents protect Golden Eagles. And they're the leaders of the free world. And I felt everything was figured out. And we have the scientific theories we have for very well thought out reasons. Okay. And even if random mutations and evolutionary biology might not make sense to me, it certainly makes sense to the Boffins at Oxford University. Okay. And if I could get, like, talk to people like that, my questions would be answered. And even if economic systems maybe don't appear quite right sometimes, of course, that we all have the economic policies we have because they are the best ones. And it couldn't be any other way. So, one of many things, another thing would be my just direct experience of going for the educational system, but with the Bush thing. Initially, I was struck by just what seemed to me like the most incredible coincidence of in a country 300 million people, the son of the guy who did the job one before getting into it. And it's like, gosh, is there some, is there some fundamental reversion to monarchy that human societies just go through? Are we sort of that primitive that we just revert back to what seems like a less evolved form of government? And then I thought, well, maybe it's, you know, maybe sometimes like the children of great athletes are themselves great athletes for genetic reasons. So maybe the Bush family are just the best of the bunch. And George Jr., you know, he really is the brightest America has to offer. Literally, I thought this prior to seeing him on TV. And then I did. And it became apparent to me that the United States did have better to offer, you know, in terms of intellectual capacity. And there's just something very wrong with this picture. The picture no longer makes sense, you know. So that was one of many cracks that were appearing at that time. So roll that, then I kind of sidetracked the story a little bit. We have to roll that into 9-11. And I guess in particular, if I was going to hone in, because you've done so much work on it that we could spend an hour just talking about that. What interested me from a skeptic perspective, and this is jumping right into the middle of this story, folks, because again, Richard has done so much work on this, is a point where it was almost an aside, almost a throwaway point, Richard, but you go, you know, hey, look, I can look at the building seven collapse and understand why people see that as a smoking gun. You don't cover building seven. You did this deep dive into the CIA, into all these shenanigans that are going back and forth between the CIA and the FBI, following all these guys.  Yeah, well, just to give some backstory of this, 9-11 is always kind of interesting to me because I, as I say, it happened at this time, where I was just getting into spiritual awakening, and these two things seemed utterly joined to me, like the inner world and the outer, right, that there are deep mysteries in our own consciousness, and also there are deep mysteries in the world. The surface appearance that we are presented with in the nightly news is not true. And I think back then there was also at some point a recognition of me that I didn't have enough worldly knowledge and context to take on those questions and things like the internet just weren't in the state they're in now, obviously. So I kind of, I left it for a few years and came back to it and left it again. And most recently, I kind of stumbled into meeting this chap, Adam Fitzgerald, and he's the real hardcore 9-11 researcher. So I've been working with him on the series and looking at the geopolitical history. Okay, because building 7 and the collapse of the towers has become 9-11 for the conspiracy angle. It can consume this immense amount of attention, perhaps for good reason, but we certainly feel that there are ways you can prove government complicity in the attacks without mentioning the demolition of buildings at all. And it's not that we will never touch the buildings. We actually just recorded with David Chandler last night, a physicist who did a lot of work on the collapse of the buildings and he's the guy that forced NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, to admit a period of freefall in there. So we've had to step into that because it's too big to ignore. But my feeling about it is people do not necessarily accept things for physics or statistical reasons alone. The classic example I've noticed is Dr. Semmelweis, the fellow who discovered that surgeons who work with corpses and then go straight into the maternity ward vastly increase the death rate of newborn babies and mothers. And even though he could demonstrate this beyond all doubt statistically, people wouldn't have it because there was no plausible mechanism for how a little bit of skin under the fingernail from a corpse could cause these kind of effects prior to germ theory. And you will of course see this with psychical research and things. So physics aside, I think if you're going to make those kind of claims, you need to demonstrate what kind of geopolitical context, what kind of structures in the deep state, the CIA, whoever else could give rise to rigging a building with explosive charges. And so that's why we've laid towards the geopolitical in a strong way. Yeah, I hear that and I guess I hope we can turn this into something other than just kind of rambling discussion, but it might just be a rambling discussion between two podcasters. To me, you're doing a lot more and you're doing a lot of deeper work in the kind of deep spiritual kind of thing that you said, because I would maybe challenge you a little bit on that idea that, oh, you know, the reason that people didn't accept that there's these unseen forces being germs and bacteria that cause women to get die when they're infected by the surgeon. No, people just did it because they just followed authority. I mean, they were just told this is the truth and they just accepted it. Then it read the current science and then were converted by the data and in the same way, 9-11, I mean, people, no one's going to change their mind on this. People not knowing, I shouldn't say knowing.  They rely on the fact that most people just do what they're told and most people are so involved in the day-to-day struggles of their life that they really don't have any time to look at any of this stuff. And then so that's kind of one point that I'd make. But the other point is we should never rely on intelligence organizations to do anything other than exactly what they did on 9-11. Absolutely, absolutely. Just to address your first point briefly, I appreciate the pessimism is true strong strong word, but the pragmatism, maybe that you bring to these kind of conversations in a world of spirituality where everyone thinks that the age of Aquarius is dawning or something, or we're going to have a revolution and overthrow the deep state and live in peace and happiness forever. You've always been a bit more pragmatic on that and said, no, this is always going to be the niche of the population and I appreciate that. So when I say trying to demonstrate plausibility to such a thing as bombs in buildings, I don't mean so that we can finally stick it in the face of the populace and they will have to come around, millions of people will take to the streets. I mean to allow for understanding of that firstly for myself because I have gaps there too. I don't know who could have given the order for such a thing within the deep state and then to allow for people who want to know to come to know that. But yeah, and the second point, yeah, I think it's beyond our both in September 11 itself that the CIA were protecting at least two of the hijackers that can be demonstrated beyond all doubt and additionally going back to the 1993 bombing, it's clear that they were protecting the Brooklyn cell that nearly brought down the trade center then as part of an historic relationship with Islamist militant types which ratcheted up seriously in the 1980s but you can go way back with it because they're a convenient proxy army to carry out geostrategic aims and that's what the CIA and Assorted Intelligence agencies do. They're not there to protect Americans from terror threats. Yeah, there's just so many threads to pull on. I might even if I have the time, dig up a clip that you have from one of the things where you play in an interview from Richard Clark who was in the White House. What was his official position in the White House? He was national security coordinator in the White House so he oversaw different agencies in their relationship to the executive branch then. The stunning thing about that for me that kind of encapsulates this whole thing is Richard Clark was just really hung out to dry on this.  You know, because we have to find somebody to blame and he fought back a little bit by kind of outing some people and in this interview he kind of outs the CIA and the FBI in terms of the information he's getting back and he goes right up to the verge of saying clearly, you know, these guys lied, you know, including Mueller from the FBI, including all these other guys.  And that's my bottom line on this. All we'll ever get is Richard Clark saying, well, it could be this which is totally ridiculous or it could be this which is totally ridiculous or I don't know what it is. Yeah, so Richard Clark's clip is both deeply revealing and probably not entirely true. Okay. Or we could certainly question the narrative he's pulling across because just to give the listener the narrative two of the hijackers who ultimately boarded flight 77 which went into the Pentagon. The CIA knew they came into the country and not only failed to inform the FBI who should have taken over the case then but deliberately absolutely blocked the FBI from ever finding out they were there whilst these guys were ferried around by Saudi intelligence with links to the royal family up until the point that they boarded the planes. So this is like a total crime, right? And Richard Clark's hypothesizes that the CIA were trying to flip these guys because they didn't have agents inside Al Qaeda, right? And that's the bit that it doesn't really make sense in a lot of ways, okay? When you're going down, we've just interviewed an FBI agent who was involved in Alex Ation at the time. That's the CIA's bin Laden unit who is also of that opinion who is also and is very angry about it about how the CIA would not let him pass this information on to his colleagues at the FBI. And you know, when you talk to someone who's on the inside and they can resolve your questions sometimes and they go, oh, okay, now I see. Thus far, that's not the sense we've come away with. We've still come away feeling like, yeah, it actually makes far more sense if you look at it, but certain people in the CIA wanted these attacks to go ahead. To me, that looks like a more sensible picture. Yeah, or the way I would phrase it is they had a higher instruction or mission to not intervene at some point, not that they even knew what that was about. And then after the attacks, they had another, you know, mission and that was to not get killed, suicided or, you know, completely sent to prison for not disclosing this. So to me, it just kind of is, it's very instructive, the series of interviews you did into exactly the psychology that must be going on in these people's minds, you know? I mean, they're given a job to do, they're doing the job the best they can, and at some point they go, wow, but shouldn't we be, you know, telling somebody? And then you put that aside. And then 9-11 happens, what can you do?  You've got to go along with the program now. Yeah, and it's not speculative to say about getting into trouble. All the people that blew whistles on things after 9-11 did get into serious trouble and did have FBI agents bursting into their houses and putting guns to their head. Some of them did do time in jail or lost their jobs or ended up in court at the very least. So, whereas all the people who participated in the pre-9-11 cover-up and continued that cover-up afterwards, they all got promoted. So it's entirely accurate. Yeah, you know, the thing I say is there's no such thing as whistleblowers anymore. If you see a whistleblower, you should be immediately suspect. And in a minute, we'll talk about ET and the TTSA to the Stars Academy and the control disclosure on all that. And to me, one of the first telltale signs of that whole thing is the guy claims to be a whistleblower and he's not a whistleblower. So it's a control fake whistleblowers wind up in jail or dead. That's the way it is now. Yeah, absolutely. I'm not saying there's no... There are people who go through hardship and that would indicate through whistleblowing and that would indicate maybe there's something more serious about their story. But yeah, that's the general path. We have to be very careful in discerning. To me, what's really, really significant about what you're doing is you are connecting it, as we said from the very beginning, to the deep state contemplation that is the personal spiritual journey kind of thing. And I've always felt that the conspiracy stuff, the conspiracy science, if you will, the conspiracy ethos has a role to play in that because the folks that I encountered over and over again who are not willing to go there are not willing to look at that shadow. Because 9-11 is a shadow. We don't know where the shadow goes and I don't particularly care to spend my whole life tracing down those shadows. But I do think as part of my spiritual path, it's important to understand that there is a shadow there. We had an interesting conversation, I don't know, a year or so ago, with Tim Freik, who I loved him and he's awesome. But he's just not willing to go there on any of this stuff. I have a similar kind of relationship with my buddy, Rick Archer, at the gas pump. Just close to this aspect, which to me seems to close them off from a greater part of this spiritual path that needs to be explored. Where does 9-11 fit with you and your deeply spiritual show? I'm not entirely sure. It very much arises from a felt place in me that these things are connected. And maybe one day I'll conclude that they're not and there really is no link between spirituality and events like 9-11. But my felt sense is that there is. I think if my podcast is about anything, it's about being with what is and how we perceive the world and how things aren't what they appear to be. And 9-11 is certainly something that isn't what it appears to be. So it draws me in that way. And then the question becomes, how deep does that rabbit hole go? Are we going all the way into Illuminati-type groups and connections with all the world of the entities that are utterly behind this thing? How are we not? That's the inevitable thing I think arises when we acknowledge, Dr. Julie Baichel has shown us that there's a validity to this or the worldly contact in some way. If we felt we needed that, maybe our personal anecdotal experience has shown us that. And then furthermore, we see that that's not all sweetness and light. There are a percentage of people who have very negative experiences with us. There seems to be whatever is going on over there. It seems to be a spectrum of good and bad. So I've interviewed the psychotherapist, Jeremy Zinski, on my show, who worked with people in both in the mental institution and in prisons, suffering with what we call schizophrenia, this hearing of tormenting voices continuously encouraging them to do negative, violent things, running them down the whole time. And he became firmly convinced this was all the worldly spirit contact coming through. Irrespective of that, he derived a method which helped people from viewing it that way. But if we go with that, then it's the question of what effect has that world had on this historically become one we just can't not ask anymore? Because we tend to look at it at individual levels, both good and bad. People might have mediumistic contact with family members, or people might be tormented by something they consider to be a hungry ghost or a demonic entity. But it's surely not just then on an individual level. If we acknowledge the existence of this realm, it becomes inevitable that it's having a global effect, isn't it? That's the way I'd look at it. Absolutely. And when I heard you say that on the show, it was like an aha moment of like, of course, of course. And why aren't more people going there? And I understand it. I understand we get into near-death experience, for example. And we're going to kind of plow through all the... First, we're going to look at the science. Is it real? Is it the last gasp of a dying brain? And we're going to beat down all the skeptics and all that. And then we're going to take such pride and wrap ourselves around the data that we have. It is real, my God.  It's all about consciousness is real. And then you're going to dive into the accounts and you're going to look at all the accounts and say, wow, isn't this awesome and life transforming and spiritually transformative experience and how you're changed and all that stuff. It is awesome. But then when you're going to take a step back and you're going to say, what does this now mean in terms of the larger implications for extended consciousness and you arrive at the kind of questions that you just asked. Well, if there are these other forces and they are both benevolent and benevolent, how are they impacting the rest of the world that I live in? Beyond me, beyond my family, beyond my mother who I connected with in a medium reading, how are they connecting with these people who perpetrated 9-11? That's a question that I think is a way that you connect these things that we need so much more of because I don't know who else is stepping into that void. Well, I see it historically like you've had, I think his name is Jason Horsley on the show and he talked about his research and he's thinking about John D. is considered the intellectual architect of the British Empire. He had the idea of this maritime empire and he got it out of scrying sessions where some spirit being claiming to be the Archangel Michael came through and gave him the whole idea for this. So the British Empire, I suppose you could say morphed into the Anglo-American Empire, so you have the dominant power structure of the past 300 years came through spirit being claiming to be the Archangel Michael. Now how do you write that into your history books? Well, and then take that one step further because this is the kind of deep dive stuff that we got to do because you're talking about hungry ghosts and you're talking about deception in that realm which is really where we have to go and we have to start pulling that apart because that experience of John D. has all the earmarks of deception. So, like you had a great interview with Claire Broad who I just interviewed recently as well and my interview is up but you guys did a great job in that interview and one of the things that you asked Claire is hey, I have a number of people who are worried about you know, encountering evil entities and Evelyn entities in this other realm and she was very she's awesome person I really really appreciate her and I think she's being totally up front when she says look I don't encounter that I've been doing this for 22 years it does not come up and a couple of times it does come up I don't go there and it goes away I get that from my own spiritual understanding I get the secret of the ascent is to always look up for dark and I get that on a as above so below level in terms of you want to go looking for darkness you don't need to enter the spiritual realm you can just drive around your neighborhood and you'll find plenty of darkness and you'll find plenty of people who are doing horribly evil things so I get that on both of those levels what I I don't fully understand is how we connect that with the deep impact that these beings seem to be having on our governments on our there's no other way to put it I mean it's hard to see back to 9-11 it's hard to see that other than evil on so many levels and not evil in terms of I mean evil in the United States are evil if we pulled in other people's masads evil is Israel's evil Saudi Arabia's evil so be it but there's enough to go around there where's the light in that I'll just return to the point you made earlier that if you're crossing the line into acknowledging the reality of this realm whatever it is it becomes an inevitability that it's having this massive effect on the world that we're not acknowledging as to what I think of it I want to proceed cautiously because I feel around the kind of thing we've done with the CIA and Alex Asian and Islamic hijackers we've stepped very cautiously step by step proving everything along the way to have something that's very solid and whilst I might take leaps in speculative conversations I want to take my time and proceed very cautiously in this kind of area too I wonder about that Richard and that's one thing I plan on doing differently as I move forward is a lot more leaps because you're there but I've interviewed so many people that need to be pushed into that leap yeah so I certainly with you know placing our attention on that area and taking leaps and such however what I also see and this is not a factor in skeptic right but I do see out there there can be people take a lot of leaps in the conspiracy world into very unsubstantiated information and I think certain traps are set for people right there's two ways you can shut down a solid investigation into state violence one is to be dismissive offer and say you're a bunch of fools, you're exaggerating your fantasies you're conspiracy theorists and the other is to say yeah and not only that but the planes or holograms and they have been directed by energy weapons from outer space now whilst I can't prove the planes or holograms and so on grossly exaggerated claims are a way of covering things up so conspiracy theory can become a part of the official cover-up and that's all I mean by not taking leaps I would go one step further is always is always a tactic as part of the cover-up so I look at what's going on today I'll tell you one that I have a hunch kind of from another angle the whole flat earth thing the traction that it got what are your things my hunch is that that was fed, watered and nurtured along as a way of kind of pointing at something and going look at how stupid people are to believe that I was a bit ahead of the curve if you're part of my expression of flat earth because years ago I had a philosophy of science course and my teacher always wanted to debate the whole year's course around the flat earth and this is when there were like 10 legitimate flat earthers in the world so I'm assuming he's delighted by the recent turn of events I on the other hand did not want to do that because I felt there are so many real controversies in the world things that science takes absolutely for granted which I don't think should be that flat earth is not worth my time and I continue with that so I think two things one, I hope to live long enough to see the CIA documents declassified they did see the flat earth story onto YouTube and of course of course I suspect that it's been helped along of course and the second thought again I'm just parroting what you said Alex it's an interesting sociological phenomenon that breakdown of trust because I remember myself if I make the admission I was not a flat earther I certainly question things when I was 10 because I was very interested in science and I remember like holding a ball up and imagining ants walking around it in my school class and thinking but why don't people in the southern hemisphere fall off because there's this natural impulse to move downwards isn't there and then I found out about gravity and Newton and oh okay that's it so I think if I was to take something positive from this it seems like maybe on a societal level society is going through that kind of hang on I trust so little of what you say now I don't even believe you've got the shape of the earth right okay and I can take a positive from it in that way in that I imagine a lot of people who were flat earthers two or three years ago or are now will not be now or will not be in five years time I wouldn't be surprised at all if someone go on to do very interesting things in other areas and this is like the foundational thing for them and indeed one thing I learned from spending time on your forum I'm not going to get the term right but there were two gentlemen there talking about how there's a way of inquiry that we start off by going to the most extreme proposition and then working your way into the center I can't recall that I keep meaning to go back home through the skeptical forums and find the term because that was a new one to me but I think that's that it's something that I've unconsciously adopted and maybe what I see people adopting now with the flat earth interesting interesting um let's return to the non-dual thing and explaining what that is what spend your experience with it and if it is I don't want to say an alternative to but it does seem to be for my own experience with it and it being part of my spiritual path being somewhat of an answer to the questions that we were raising in terms of the hungry ghost the malevolent forces that are so dominant in our political lives and in our society yeah and while I think it's a it's an answer to everything but the detail okay so it's a way we can navigate our way through all these subjects without necessarily knowing all the hungry ghost aliens or aliens and so in the detail like that it doesn't give us but in terms of like if you're being attacked by a hungry ghost how well what do you do about that then we can look there for support in that so what would you like would you like a biography for me of my involvement or yeah that'd be that'd be fine yeah the biographies probably um one of the more interesting things about me I suppose so I'll give you that then so it started for me as like reasonably jaded 16 year old who had rejected his religious upbringing in favour of a materialist atheism and finding the utter lack of meaning contained within that was starting to weigh ever more heavily as I dragged into that position and um I've never heard anyone else quite have this story but for me it started with going to the pub and drinking some whiskey okay and whatever that did to me okay the next day I would wake up in this kind of absolute other world of just bliss and I would like walk around in the garden feeling the life force in the trees and the grass under my feet struggling to find any description of what had just happened to me but it the best I could come up with fitting into a kind of the Christian upbringing I'd had was like it felt like I knew that heaven existed and there was this world was a small part of something timeless beyond it that we come from and return to and that sense of knowledge eradicated my sense of panic about um life my worrying about the future my threatening about what I hadn't done and everything was just bliss and then wore off by the next day and I was back like well go outside and start to rub my hand against the tree and think where did that amazing sense of how alive this tree was it's completely gone I'm locked in what just happened and um I'd never heard anyone talk about this stuff I was think I would I remembered some fragments or some poem by Blake about eternity in the palm of one's hand and heaven in a wild flower and that sounded kind of similar so maybe I didn't know as far as I was concerned I could be the only person that ever experienced this no one was talking about it and and that was a reoccurring thing then but I knew it was something to do with shifting consciousness right so like that's drugs and meditation you're going to go down one of those routes and I got into Eastern martial arts and sort of practicing meditation and my initial experience of that was very not like what I'd experienced it like I got into Zen because I heard this thing about be in the moment in Zen I thought oh yeah I know I never thought about it that way but I was very in the moment for those times but it seemed very caught before horse to me as well it seemed like if you continued to push yourself into the moment you know quote-unquote gently pull your attention back there continuously then you'll start to feel really good and to me that was mistaking the result for the cause because it's like no something happened deep within me I'm not quite sure about and that allowed me to be very relaxed and present in the moment it's not that I this is very arduous and my experience is anything but but I did get drawn into that and it was an experience of being because I didn't have a better solution I threw my lot and if that would have really got sold to me and that was my experience of being involved in somewhat cultish mentality then and thinking I was going to retain enlightenment and I was going to make my mind go snap and it probably good overall that I had that in my life that experience of like being an idiot and you know because I can reflect upon it now but then I really after two or three years started to question the underpinnings of what I was doing and moved away from that into I was very influenced by a radical Tony Parsons who had the acceptance of what is and then I suppose really through meeting Tim and exploring his work more this sense of finding a return to that place and opening up non-dual states but doing it the way that was more obvious to me of delving into this deeper inner sense of consciousness that's very connected or perhaps the same as the sleep state but going there consciously and that then changing the world outwards and and refinding that place very like TS Eliot we shall the end of all our travelling we shall arrive back at place from where we started and know it for the first time that was what struck me over about a 10 year period of refinding that 16 year old experience and I take it from understanding your biography deeper not an easy path not a path without bumps and doubts and all the other things well the big one was there was a period of depression when I things were generally on the up for me until I got to about 23 life was better my social contacts better so I thought you know so we'll go in the right direction and then this this overwhelming sense of depression engulfed me which was a big surprise right because it was not what I expected not the way things have been going and and not the way things are drawn up on the path that you were supposedly on and yeah I mean I can't remember if I was I think I was shocked I think I thought if I encountered something like that maybe last a day or two and then I'd you know get myself out of it I mean I was aware of John of the cross and dark and I did the soul and that kind of thing but I don't know how much I really related to it and it went on for so long I felt like oh maybe this is it for me maybe it's you know time to start taking a lithium and making the best of it I didn't really think about that I felt about how to you know maybe stop thinking of how to live with this rather than live for it but to to give a sort of esoteric analysis of that what was going on for me was a transition between from belief to the real okay so what I found I'd done was I bought into a lot of concepts like the love of God and so on and and believed in that and done my meditations with great aspiration that I would come into contact with such a feeling and after a certain time period having to recognize well yeah but it's not really real for me to believe in but I've never felt the love of God or all the love I felt comes from other people and that's transient it's here one minute gone the next and this sense of what I find inside myself and I look into my depths is a sense of emptiness I used to call it the not nothing because it wasn't even nothingness it was just an absence an absolute absence meaning anything and when I would meditate that's what I'd find and that horrified me and not just in an intellectual way it was a deep embodied sense of horror that that's what was on the painting all things absolute absence of meaning and I had I eventually encountered the writing someone who had gone through a similar experience and I feel what I'd lacked until that point was the tenacity to just stay on the edge of that inner blackness for long enough and in reading this account I resolved to do just that and I sat up into the night on the edge of despair until it got really late well I better go to bed but I will be resuming this tomorrow morning and this is what I will be doing forever more now and I would often wake up for a fit of despair at about 4am I seemed to sweat a lot when you were depressed I had very sweaty sheets at that time so I woke up for my usual fit of despair and I saw everyone I knew and who had some meaning in my life like stood around me in this very vivid dreaming wake like state and they all started shooting off into the distance and everyone represented a little supply of love that was coming into me that was now gone until it got down to one person who had been like a very kind to me as we could friend it was like a big sister kind of thing and then she went and I was at this moment a complete aloneness and then this oceanic infinite sense of love opened up okay it was just like bigger than the universe and it was this classical non-dual experience of we are swimming in an ocean of love and I saw all these people in that I saw people I had problems with and I felt apologetic that I never needed them to be a certain way because I was this and we were all this and much like people say with the near death experience thing that PM Atwater would say that the proof of the pudding is in the lasting effects saying I woke up the next morning and my depression was gone right and I didn't know that it was gone for a while like a couple of weeks went by I was like is it not going back and I really knew when I went out and got drunk and it would always really hit me if I was drunk and I got drunk with a friend and wasn't there at all and Nether did Nether resurfaced so that was and then my subsequent investigations of non-duality were like what was that and how do I I've sort of fallen into this state for a lot of intensity and a lot of suffering but let's try and understand that a bit more properly awesome just totally awesome stuff two questions I guess what have you discovered since then what are some of the most meaningful discussions I know you still are interested in trauma and in grief and in people who are overcoming and I think you feel a need to support people in that wonderful way but I can't help but tying this back to the earlier part of our conversation why is still there that need to understand it in terms of our world like 9-11 because the world is a reflection of consciousness I think it's like a dream okay so now on a collective level we trim 9-11 in some way but let me offer a counter hypothesis that you'll hear on the non-dual path and I've shared it on this show it's the Amma the Hugging Saint you know so Amma is this woman who at 13 had this amazing spiritually transformative experience in India she was incredibly impoverished but she knew she just had to devote her life to God and she has and she goes around and she supposedly does all these wonderful things with people and works tirelessly 18 hours a day just helping people helping people helping people and one of her devotees goes to her and says Amma you're so busy you're doing all this stuff with the world and yet you're telling us we're not of this world and that's what we hear from spiritual masters all the time which would this is not this is not skeptical because I'm in the world right I'm interested in this stuff I'm interested in 9-11 and why science is wrong about almost everything and all these other things but there is a part of me that says I'm doing that as a way of just kind of occupying myself because I really know that on a deeper deeper sense it really doesn't matter like in the same way that you know some of the near death experiencers you've had come on and said that and said it on my show too is that this is all just middle stuff it doesn't cause me a problem why I don't feel there's a contradiction now if you have some sort of psychological issue where in watching a film at the cinema you started to believe it was real okay you would really want to stop that right so if you're having that kind of issue of not knowing it's an illusion you need to solve that first you need to get your mind and say yeah it's okay I'm in the cinema it's fine it's all good let's enjoy the show and that's what I feel about the world we're in I don't necessarily think it's immensely important on a grander scheme of things but this is the dream I'm having this is the art I'm observing so I want to fully engage with it and indeed I think the non-dual allows ultimately for deeper engagement because again if you think the film is real you're just going to want to run or you're going to scream or something it doesn't allow you to really involve yourself it's only when you know it's not real if you have a sense the world isn't real and that's why we're ultimately safe that the deepest part of us isn't in the world then there's the freedom to engage fully love that answer I agree I didn't see that coming but you're right next I've kind of monopolized the board I'm going to say away from E.T. well I wonder why Suicide is there I thought you did an excellent show Suicide in near-death experience with Angie Fenimore thumbnail sketch of her story it's fascinating you know sexually abused traumatic yeah type berries it all gets to a point contemplate suicide attempt suicide has an NDE some people would call it a hellish NDE or traumatic NDE but she says no this is a turning point in that life and you know all these things and she comes out of it with a mission to tell others that suicide just can't possibly be an answer because it's just an intermediary step it doesn't get you anywhere so Angie Fenimore wrote a book back in the 90s called Beyond the Darkness and it was the story of her life which had a lot of trauma in it from childhood on up and then dealing of the effects of that trauma in throughout her adult life then her relationships and such so all of this ultimately led to a serious suicide attempt and she says she she didn't attempt it she actually succeeded she did cross over that line into being dead taking a medication inspired somewhat by near-death experience she's had just trying to pull this out of my memory it was her stepmother who had made suicide attempt and talked about this beautiful sense of love and light on the other side and I think she'd come into contact with some other literature around it and felt like that's the ultimate escape from the trauma of the world this place of love and light then and that's not what she encountered she encountered a sense of stepping out of her body but the problems all still being there but she was still the same and then a sense of other people being around her who had just done a similar thing and going to this place where people were very very lost felt like they'd been there a long time just drawn into their own suffering consumed by it and realising that this hadn't solved anything then calling upon the light and having a sense of God and Jesus coming and an interaction with them then and this sense people talk about it being more real than the waking world and ultimately waking up with a sense of them a new sense of purpose and a new sense of spirituality and I don't think everything has been sweetness and light since then for her but for me the book was I found very powerful in the sense of like I might have had a certain ideation around suicide I don't think I was ever like close to acting it out but in this sense of wanting to escape the trials of the world and it sort of reshaped that in my mind so I saw the potential for it to reshape that for other people then it's not without its problems and let me just interject a couple parts that I found particularly meaningful because first this idea of contemplating suicide at one point or another is probably I don't know what the stats are I'm sure it's in the majority of the population we just don't talk about it we just don't talk about that darkness that it comes in the middle of the night for everyone no matter who you are unless you're totally stuffing it down and then it comes up in other places when you're down there eating ice cream at two o'clock and not think about it but what I found interesting about her story is and again it's like back to I love your thing about the movie because here's some reality that we have to pack back in so part of the reality is she's faced with contemplating suicide and she's shown instructed told by this higher being that you should not do this because look what it will do to your children it will do this it will do this it will you will lose out this now it says so much about one it says this about there are lessons that we have to learn and whether we learn them on this level or whether we learn them through help from the spirits whatever that means that that's somehow part of it it also raises this question of can we change this timeline that we're on it's long but a question of mine that I think is fully answered in the near death experience where you hear people say this is your time this is not your time or you hear people say hey this is your time and they go no no no this is not my time and then they're allowed to go back there's a million questions that aren't completely that aren't completely answered by your interview with Angie but are at least teed up yeah sure and I think with the suicide thing you know if there is this absolute stigma around acknowledging any ideation of it whatsoever and it's not something anyone want to do when I've talked to people about this more and more people will acknowledge that they have the thought right and they can be a million miles away from doing it but I think it's to our detriment that we pathologize thinking about it with any kind of relationship you have the if it's healthy there's the possibility to end it with a job a partner anything and in a sense have a relationship with life okay and I think the the impulse to say I've just had enough of this right I want out well I'm not saying that's the way to go but it's going to tell you a lot about yourself if rather than being afraid of that sense of I want out you think okay why is that what is it that I can't cope with in this moment so we demonize the impulse to our detriment I think and I wanted to engage with Angie on that level I was also interested to ask a she wrote this book back in the 90s okay and there's been so much done since then on the death experience so how her interpretation has maybe changed since then okay so for example Angie's Christian and Jennifer a Christian experience okay but since then she's read a lot about this experience she's read even Alexander and all sorts and she so I asked her do you feel that you met Jesus because he's the correct one he's the one true God or because he's a symbol of some deeper infinite consciousness and and she doesn't have an answer to that as you know we don't put she says it's come through more to her since then that you know maybe it's this deep infinite mind love thing that's expressing itself in the right way we can't be definite about that so on the details of it but that's and yeah and there's something again I don't for me also it doesn't answer all the things like Angie's experience is it has this very dualistic quality to her like she was in the darkness and God was light and he came to the edge of the darkness because he couldn't go into the light and he told her she made a mistake in doing this he brought it back to life so that there's a dualism that's maintained between that right like suicide is a bad thing and you keep it away and I think there's different ways of seeing it there too in terms as I've been mentioning this idea of integration of like what is the what is the impulse the desire to end it and have to tell me so that those are the things that came out ultimately and I wanted to create something that will be valuable to people as a resource in you may be struggling with those kind of feelings and and this is the counterintuitive part and helpful to people who might have had a loved one go through suicide okay because that's I say counterintuitive because this this this dark place that they Angie talks about going to is not necessarily what people want here but I don't think people want fluffy stories about light and love in that sense and what Angie came back with was the sense of she certainly didn't feel that it was only her that got saved and everyone else is screwed right there was a sense of being able to connect through love through four forms through prayer as previous guests on skeptical talked about and with people on the other side who maybe there is a continuation of suffering and struggle maybe not for everyone some people maybe that's the case but what we what Angie doesn't leave us with is this sense that's an infinite divide then this kind of religious we get it from Christianity a lot that when you're lost you'll ask forever great so there's two more that I want to make sure we get to I'll let you pick the order but the cultish and the E.T. and I know you're begging off the E.T. but we have to go there a little bit which one would you like to go to? We'll do E.T. at the end then we'll do cultish now what about cultish so really interesting interview that you did holy hell tell folks a little bit about this and then I want to talk more broadly about what's going on with cults and how it taps into a lot of the stuff that we're talking about in a really interesting way so please jump in at any part you want so holy hell is a documentary if you have Netflix you can see it and it's a cult documentary I sat down and watched it one evening and for the first 20 or 30 minutes you might think this doesn't look too bad I don't know what's going to be the dark side here it all looks like having a lovely time and then it just goes off a cliff and descends into insanity in people's lives being ruined people being sexually abused by their guru awful traumatic experience for the people involved and I interviewed Chris Johnson one of the participants in the interview I was just thinking about this the other day actually he's probably one of the most interesting hours of my life was speaking to Chris and getting his insights about how he as a a young man who was not lacking in street wise and had been approached by religious groups on the streets I think it might have been LA the moonies or whatever had laughed and said oh this is ridiculous of course we knew what a cult was but then still got involved in a cult and ended up doing for like 20 years yeah about that yeah yeah and the guru figure I've he went by various names and I've forgotten all of them to be honest but yeah getting his insights on that how he questions I was left with were was he genuinely interested in spirituality and it kind of got a bit egotistical or was it just a scam for him and these kind of things and did Chris feel like there were psychological factors in him that drew him to that or was it just you know anyone could have fallen for this the con job and so I see yeah Alex just where do you want to go with that kind of that whole thing there you know because you have this interest in spirituality and in exploring these deep states one of the questions I wanted to ask you in particular is when you're watching this movie this excellent brave brave documentary for not only Chris to kind of come out and say this guy you know course me into having sex but then and I think Chris is gay right I'm not really sure to be honest how we would define that because the reason I bring that up is you know even more sadly in in a very confusing way there's other young men who are heterosexual who are coerced or you know whatever you want to say into having sexual relations with this guru who's just has this power over them is doing therapy with them is doing hypnosis with them and they wind up having these you know sexual encounters with them and again I hate to even have to say there's nothing wrong with being gay of course there's nothing wrong with being gay but the trauma in these people's lives say that's not my sexual orientation and I look back at that with this incredible shame because you know how did I wind up in that situation so there's these people who come on the film that are incredibly brave and they reveal the story which as you say is not typical but then is typical of what we see in cults but I digress Richard and that's why this show goes on without a lot of questions the part I found particularly interesting is the samadhi experiences that these people have so when you talked about your experience with the whiskey and the all feeling of love there are certain people on this planet that seem to be able to transmit that experience to other people through a touch, through a gaze through any various number of waves and these people have been reported through history and they a lot of times sit up on a cushion up on the stage and people throw flowers and money at them because we have such unbelievable respect but more to the point participants have this if you have that incredible feeling the most profound feeling of your life like you talked about that next morning after drinking the whiskey man it's hard not to be attached to that and it's hard not to attach yourself to the person who you think transmitted that experience so there's so much to pull apart there what do we think is going on when someone like this who is not a good person by any measure seems to be able to affect this inside of people yeah so I don't have a final answer on this one but it's something I've explored and journeyed on myself so I think for one there's definitely a sense in watching the film of but for the grace of God there go I there was a period in my life where I can see definitely I could have taken that course if I'd have met the wrong people at the right time I could have fallen into that you know at the same time I do feel that getting involved in spirituality in the early noughties the first time I ever heard about Sai Baba was when I heard about the accusations of pedia filia right so the the vanilla was falling off the gurus the gloss was falling away so then okay we start out with this idea that there are some people who go into consciousness in such a profound way that they can wave their hand above your head and that will induce this immense experience of you because they are so enlightened and pure of themselves okay that's the sign in place of this and then the accusation surface that these people are not holy of them now they're doing stuff that in some cases not only dark but so dark it will make them amongst the most evil 1% of people in the population so then we have to move that and say okay well people can be enlightened on a very deep level of consciousness and touch the infinite and transmit that but in the middle it doesn't necessarily purify their psyche and they can have all these demons of in so this power comes through but you shouldn't necessarily trust them and that's a model Tim Freak move towards and that's sort of picking this up from I mentioned his name because he came with this great analogy of like look it's like a rock star okay like no one expects rock stars to be good people in fact you know if they were good people that would probably went backstage and they were just drinking purple tea and they weren't like snorting cocaine or something you'd be a bit disappointed so but they have a genius there's a genius in them for music and artists are tormented people and actually we should move gurus out of the spirit of the pure category and put them in the tormented genius category awesome I'll tell you what I love that and I think it also speaks to your earlier point about understanding the movie is the movie I mean I have a friend who is a devotee of so you appreciate the recently deceased Buddhist and you know he really struggles because he knows full well he's a nasty abusive guy who you know had sex with all his young female devotees but he struggles with the you can't ignore that the most profoundly shifting moments of his life came in the presence of this man or in his group and he's had to you know wrestle with that and it's different I think it gets right into our attachment patterns and disorders and probably how we were parented and what we're unconsciously searching for in that level so I understand like people get a real lock in to that and whilst I agree it's part of the movie and the process then is to recognize why we're being drawn to this or the person what they give us in the way we are and to come into our own sense of oneness I sympathize with that being a difficult journey and one that can take time totally agree why have you been a whole E.T E.T is right on your shoulder man you are E.T. isn't that what we found out at the end of the day isn't that the real reality here that we are E.T. is it I blame Skeptico for this I was just trying to do some basic meat and potato near death experience research and then I stumbled across Mary Wadwell's interview conducted and that was the rabbit hole I never wanted to fall down but then I was down it and I was like oh Simon's well yeah that was another again entirely by accident Simon is a priest in the church of England he's retired now a deeply mystical contemplative man in that aspect of the church and I really wanted to interview him on that and he wrote a sci-fi book big fan of sci-fi so he wrote a book about a priest who meets aliens bringing those two worlds together I didn't really know his interest in this whole area was prompted by some personal experience of contact okay so that came up in sci-fi interview and then of course you've got to go there so we did an alien encounters an alien encounters interview so to me what I thought would be kind of interesting to talk about and just drag you into the deep water here is that it's like stepping stones across the river and I guess my earlier rant about I do want to jump I would do want to launch into kind of conclusions and that's not maybe exactly what I meant but what I do feel like I want to do is I don't want to not recognize when the burden of proof kind of thing shifts in a dramatic way and that we have to change our belief system in a way that says well I now have to accept that until I'm proven otherwise here are the stepping stones to me I always like bringing up the New York Times Fox News, CBS News December 2017 is it yeah I think so yeah you know I mean it's outed COD has now come out and said our government in the United States has said yeah they're here they're UFOs so the stepping stone for me is number one you lied your ass off about that for at least 60 70 years you threaten people you threaten to kill people kill their families kill everyone if they reveal this UFO secret and now you just kind of casually slip it out there in a little you know oh it would never was really classified information anyway here's the video you can see for it yourself what surprises me in that is that people seem unexplainably reluctant to take the next step if we see the UFO video that the DOD now has thrown the holy water around and say yep that's real that's real then certainly ET is real there's someone piloting those crafts and it's ET and then how would we not connect that to the ancient alien hypothesis which I think is overwhelmingly just self evident when you go and you interview like I interviewed already six killer Clark who is a Native American anthropologist at Montana State who goes and interviews all these indigenous people in North America and Canada United States South America and they say oh yes this is our tradition the star people came and they gave us all this and we are in fact the star people and then you go over to Africa and you talk to the dog and they say yes the star people they came to this and then you go and you look at Egypt and you look at the lining of the pyramids and of course they're with the stars and it's the star people and again if the pivot point is the DoD release of the videos and saying yeah this is real well then there does have to be this kind of avalanche here of accepting all these other things so the Mary Rodwell interview that you mentioned that I did and we can juxtapose that to the interview you just referenced that you did brings us face to face with the hybridization of us the hybridization of ETs this genetic transformation from all these different species that might be out there in the universe to something that is us right now but is in the process of constantly being tweaked and changed that to me I'm not going to say that certain I'm just saying that until that can be thoroughly disproven that has to become the most likely scenario in my opinion and then the larger question back to your whole interview is does that change anything about all these conversations we were having about deep spirituality does it change it at all or is it just fit right into it seamlessly so there's a ton on the table there but go ahead yeah I could see it not changing anything about deep spirituality if you take this non-dual idealist paradigm that found that big ocean of love and presumably the UFOs are arising in that too whatever they are so unless I fundamentally misinterpreted my experience there which is of course always a possibility not changing that and this being another aspect of the world we inhabit can we explore that for a minute how does that work it sounds self-evident to me so what can you elaborate on the question a bit in one way I get that it's self-evident in another way how come Angie isn't all over that how come she isn't coming back and that's the first thing she says the variety of the manifestation of that one love consciousness is infinite there's millions and millions of different manifestations of it she doesn't say that think of the context here that Angie is not going into that she's not taking tablets to shut her heart down because she wants to have this deep conscious experience because she's a psychonautical explorer she's doing it in an act of utter desperation so it feels like what reaches out to her is an appropriate image for this lady born into Christian spirituality and that's been the thing she's clung to for her life, her soulful subsidence so it makes sense to me in that way whereas by contrast someone in a Rick Straussman group taking DMT so they can explore the depth and breadth of the universe might have a different experience that speaks more to that so let's pause on that because this is really the conversation that I wanted to have was that really washed though because one of Angie's concerns is she's hearing the voice of God and she wants to make sure she gets it down just right which always strikes me as a little bit strange although I love what Angie has to say and what she brings forward is phenomenal she's gifted in terms of her knowledge and her understanding of it but I wanted to make sure I got the voice of God just right do you really think you got if it's God talking to you then why are you just getting that little sliver and then when we jump over and I just interviewed Deborah Diamond who I think is a really great medium and she's talked to thousands and thousands of spirits and serious spirits all the time and I ask her and she's like well no I'm not sure I'm down with reincarnation what do you mean you're not down with reincarnation I already proved it over at the University of Virginia and then if you want to talk about aliens it's like a whole different kind it's like whoa I don't know anything about that it doesn't it doesn't fit together in a way that I would expect it to if the whole ET genetic we are ET kind of story is real I would expect to see that pop up more I can only address the Angie thing by being a bit sort of theological and making statements like God reaches out to us in the form we can accept right and then that fundamentally makes sense to me okay because if I'm having a conversation like this and I were exploring the nature of reality I'm not sat here thinking what's the most compassionate and kind way to speak to Alex that won't upset his apple cart you know but if I'm interacting with someone who's maybe the big thing for them is they're suffering and struggling and they have a particular religious view that does come into play then and I'm happy to fit into whatever language bracket people feel comfortable if I can you know be of some service in that way so it makes sense to me to extrapolate that's the way I would act then you know it makes sense that that carries on up so that when whatever deeper being interacts with Angie in her moment of suffering it makes sense it would reach her in that form because compassion trumps exploration in that moment God is working on a need to no basis yeah I can't say it makes sense it's also not lost on my Alex that okay when I was 23-24 I was really into Neo-Advaita I looked at the world that way or Advaita Vedanta and what do you know my experience was a very non-dual classical Advaita Vedanta experience what a coincidence I guess that's the right one then okay well maybe there's something very pure very non-mythological about the way I experienced it okay I didn't meet Jesus or something but also maybe that's just I'm seeing the part or feeling the part of the elephant that I can feel in that and I might have my own cognitive restrictions because of the lens I've picked up I don't doubt that if I'd been very much done this soul searching for a more Christian lens I would be speaking a different language in reporting it maybe not maybe the same experience or maybe the experience would be a little different I don't know but I have a related question as we start to wrap this up are we looking at two ladders that are leaning up against different walls one ladder being the spiritual ladder that you're talking about and we're trying to ascend hopefully that ladder and then we have these different experiences and oh we could call them non-dual we could call them Christian we could call them mystical or Gnostic or all these different things and we understand all the complexity of that and all the rest of that and then there's this other ladder that we're exploring which is you know what's going on and how does science relate to that and we are a genetic experiment and we are being manipulated but our consciousness is manifesting and they're still talking about that ladder they're still talking about consciousness and they're talking about Rick Strasman and they're talking about the purple Jaguar and all the rest of that but when you really get up to the top of these ladders you find they're on two completely different walls and the one wall is looking deeply at this time-space reality and it's just trying to figure that out and not putting judgment on that but just saying here are all the things that we can experience in this time-space reality and hey there's these other beings that are seem to be popping into it and experiencing it with us and then this hypothesis then if I would to round it out would say this other wall as you're ascending it at the top of it it becomes more and more separated from the other wall because the other wall doesn't really it's just like a game it's just kind of an experience but at the end of the day this other true spiritual ascension is what it's all about does that analogy make any sense or does it- I think so and I think you could say okay it depends on your perspective on things like the UFO phenomenon for example if like David Jacobs has got the correct answer then the ladders are quite separated the UFOs the aliens on here for any spiritual reason they've just seen resources and they want to take them on the other hand obviously like a Mary Rodwell perspective would have the two ladders very conjoined I can't make sense of the questions you ask exactly the right questions to be asking regarding like why does this person say reincarnation and this person says you know only three times and why does some people say spirits won't close contact with their families when they're gone and you can do therapy around that and others say no leave them alone they're busy with their own thing I suspect that it might be that our way of understanding the world our rules of logic and such are limited and we're dealing with something that's just on another level and we can know more if the ancient Greeks tried to understand or found the facts we know about the world about having the reasons they wouldn't be able to understand quantum mechanics or something they're not in a position where they can even approach that and I suspect we're not in a position where we can approach and move shouldn't try and I appreciate that's the ultimate cop out answer but that's also just because of the variety of the way the phenomena come through and how though all these apparent contradictions it makes me think that we would need to look at this on a deeper level in some way that we might have limited access to hey it's either a cop out or it's the most deep profound answer it is the world what world answer it is the answer right it's like hey I'm playing the game as hard as I can but I still see it as a movie I don't forget that so I think that's just awesome I hope I can turn this into something that is edutainment for at least some folks out there it's been awesome to me because as you can tell I've had a lot of of my own deep state consciousness experiences while listening to your excellent excellent show and I really hope people check it out you're really in this glut of podcasting content there's so much fantastic stuff out of it I do hope people find their way over to your excellent show Richard as we wrap it up tell folks what you have coming up what you're working on okay well I just my mind is fried at the moment because I've spent the past month or so working on an interview with a fellow from the FBI about the kind of intelligence failures we're talking about we have gone into the ring over the collapse of the towers thing with the physicist David Chandler I also have lined up a lady who she was a client of Dr Janet Colley who worked with UFO encounters people having that and a lady who's had a kind of spiritual awakening through prolonged encounters okay who's writing a book on the subject to explore the spirituality of contact so that's something I'm very much looking forward to doing and the continuation of the themes basically there's all these themes which I get completely absorbed whenever I'm doing and forget everything else exists and then oh yeah I did that so there's a continuing thing I'm doing looking at around the spirituality of hell and I've got a Tibetan lucid dream of coming on next to continue that series looking at the spiritual value in hellish experiences awesome much for me to to look forward to great listening for a good walk on the beach Richard it's been absolutely awesome having you on I know I just kind of sprung this on you the last minute in terms of turning this into a skeptical episode but I'm glad we did so great to absolutely yeah for when they enjoyed it thank you very much Alex thanks again to Richard Cox for joining me today on Skeptico one question I'd have to tee up at the end of this interview what the heck does 9-11 have to do with deep spirituality I tried to make the link because to me it's really so much of what this show is all about but as always I'm interested to hear what you have to say your thoughts your ideas the best place to connect with other people are listening to the show and to connect with me is through the Skeptico forum Skeptico-forum.com you can find that through the Skeptico website SKEPTIKO.com where you will find all our previous shows available for free download mp3 take them run with them do what you will with them I have a number of I think super interesting shows coming up a couple of half-baked projects that I'm super excited to do I hope you stay with me for that I hope you join this community in any way that seems to make sense for you and share it with anyone you think needs to hear about it until next time take care and bye for now