Everyone having fun? How is it day two of Slush? What an amazing event. It's like my favorite event of the year. It's really the most fun tech event I go to. Well, we have the pleasure of having two really, really interesting companies and guests here to talk about one of my favorite topics, voice technology and applications. Who here has used a voice technology of some sort? Wow, it really is 2018. You know, 20 years ago, I don't think we'd see these number of hands. And speaking of 20 years ago, you know, in a previous life, I was working in the space. We were doing natural language processing and voice recognition. I was working at Microsoft at the time, the other big tech company in Seattle. And they were doing really amazing work at the time. And I just remember it was really hard. You know, I remember when Dragon speak, I think that was one of the voice recognition programs that were coming out in the 80s and 90s. And this stuff was just really hard to do from a development perspective. A lot of it didn't really work that well. And it just took a while. And it just seems like in 2006 or something like that, computers like woke up, not to scare you, but it just started working all of a sudden. Now, you know, literally, I should have asked how many people have not used a voice technology. And that would have been more telling, maybe. But here we are in 2018. We have these products all over in our houses and our cars and our phone. And it seems ubiquitous. And so why don't we start by talking more about what, you know, a little bit more of your background and what you're doing and your role that you see in this voice technology space. Sure. So maybe Rodrigo will start with you. Yeah, yeah, happy to. Thank you. Thanks everyone for coming. And I see that this is a round stage. You don't have eight microphones around and no wake words here, but very Alexa-like. I like it. So I'm one of the partners of the Alexa fund. We're a three person team plus great support from the rest of the Alexa organization to invest $200 million that we have a commitment from the company to invest in startups across all stages of growth. We have run two accelerator classes to really work with really early stage companies. We've done much bigger investments in more mature companies. And we're really enjoying working with entrepreneurs from around the world that are building with voice technology. And so we've made 60 investments to date and excited to have this conversation today to tell you guys a little bit more and all of you what some of the fun things that we're doing, but also I think great opportunities and even still more challenges that remain in voice technology. Very good. So you really have this platform and now the fun is growing. What an amazing story. We're gonna talk a lot more about that. Omri, you've got a very interesting application and it looks like you're wearing the product right now. Tell us more about the product, the company, the product and what you're doing. Yeah. So I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Vee. Vee in very short is a voice and AI based personal trainer. We basically took the world's best human trainers in the world. If you want to lose weight, run your 5k pretty soon to do your mindfulness session and more and basically downloaded the human mimics and human practices to create an entity called Vee that is using voice as the main medium including music and some other cool audio stuff. And what you see over here is one of our utilities, if you will. It's one of the devices that we use together with Harman Cardone can get your heart rate, your voice recognition, your motion and more and you can meet Vee. There is an app on your phone with no device needed and also by one of our devices so you can get a full hardware and software experience. I see. So it's an AI fitness coach in your ear. Exactly. So you've got speakers at home and various places that you put an Alexa enabled Amazon product and then you've got now speakers in your ear. Interesting. We've got to have the sound come somewhere, right? So that's really interesting. We've got a platform and an example of an application of voice technology. Both sound incredibly useful. But I'm going to play the role of a bit of a skeptic because I'm going to just so we're at slush so we can be open here. I have to be honest with you. I have these smart speakers at home and I use it to play baby shark for my baby son and he loves it. He actually can say play baby shark and it starts playing and he loves it. He starts dancing around. It's great. But surely there's more to it than that, right? Are people really using this a lot or is it a gimmick? I don't know. Certainly not gimmick. It's on the front page of Amazon.com all the time. But what can you talk about in terms of the progress that you guys are making? Yeah. So I think we obviously started with some really simple and easy to use applications that got people really engaged with Alexa. In fact, when Alexa first came out and even before the Alexa fund was formed, Alexa was just a set of skills that the device could do that no outside developers could build on top of yet. We needed to first build the trust with the customer and find out the ways that customers were going to use Alexa in their homes and then build from there. But you're right, like using plain music and using timers is some of the most basic, most popular things. The number of questions, though, that people ask Alexa, you'd be astounded by the information knowledge that Alexa has to constantly ingest to be a ready to be helpful assistant in the home. And you can imagine that the trust grows when Alexa can say, hey, I know the answer to that question. Here it is. She doesn't respond exactly that way. But the more she responds that way as opposed to, hmm, I don't know the answer to that. Each incremental improvement that we make on that gets people engaged experimenting with new things they can do with Alexa. There's also tens of millions of households that have connected at least one extra device to Alexa. We feature on our website either Amazon devices or other outside company devices that link to Alexa and work with Alexa. And a lot of people have taken the step to build that next link to a device that then enables some new interaction. So a lot of connectivity you're creating here. And making that connectivity is another piece that extends that utility beyond just plain music or plain, you know, putting timers on. So how many, how often are they used? I don't know what you can share. But like how, you know, I feel like I don't really use my device that much. It's probably because I don't know about what I can get it to do. Yeah, I can't speak about the specific ways. And it's also very different skills and different interactions get used at different frequencies, you can imagine. But again, tens of millions of people are using this in their daily lives. And and that number continues to grow and continues to grow with also with the number of people using it around the world, what languages around the world. Okay. Yeah, so we're, we're now active, I think fully deployed for what we call general availability in 11 or so countries. But the language is beyond English include now Japanese, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and and then we have also Canadian French and and the UK. So no Chinese. Okay. Yeah. No finish. No finish. All right. But then the rest in the rest of the world, the countries that are are you're able to use you're able to use Alexa in English mode in what we call a rest of world mode around the world. Does it understand accents like if for non native speakers? It gets better at understanding accent. Yeah, she gets better at understanding accents. But I'm sure that there's places where a heavy non English English speaker right now non English accent might have sometimes trouble getting getting understood by Alexa. Got it. Well, we're going to come back to that. I got a zillion questions. But I want to hear about your made such a unique product because you you're selling headphones. Yeah. That sounds like a hard business, man. So for us, we are absolutely not a headphone or a hardware business. We are AI software subscription business. One of the options you can get is buying a device on our side, but it's just to ease the work on you to get out of the box, premium audio device. But the core for audience is application base. People are downloading on app store or play store the app and they get to their first journey with V. And to build on what was mentioned about Alexa for us as well, we needed to laser focused about use cases that will bring significant added value. So basically anything that he'd hands free eyes free, voice is a very powerful experience in fitness case, that you can literally have a fully conversational experience without the need to look at a screen or to tap any button. Number one. And number two, a very immersive intimate experience, if you will. You guys probably saw hair and some other beautiful movies that inspired teams like ours to take this broad vision and laser focus on a specific use case that is classic for a voice experience. That's I mean, I'll be completely honest with you, like it sounds like it could be kind of distracting actually if I have a voice coach telling me stuff while exercising sometimes when I go work out, go for a run or something. I just want some quiet Zen like experience like what? I mean, yeah, so tell me about that. So you're right and exactly put aside we're not here about technology and about making some cool features and the edgy gadgets. What we did is looked at the human case and ask us what would the best human trainer would do and what a thoughtful person would do is ask you questions and listen. So we try to listen more than talk. And we try to understand and cluster the type of user in terms of your user type, your level. We ask you questions about verbosity. Do you want me to talk more or less? We play music most of the time just if you'll have fun and you'll be within your groove and do your thing. And we're trying to mimic a thoughtful human interaction just using a voice. Now, does it work? Do I have to buy your headphones or can I use my own and their nice headphones? Harbin and Kardon can't argue with that. You know, it's probably really good sound, but it looks kind of expensive. So yeah, I welcome you guys to go to vtrainer.com. You can buy our headsets on Amazon or on our.com. These are the two only channels we are focused on for e-commerce or a download the app, go to a free trial. You don't need to pay anything and then upsell to either a subscription or a device part. Okay. Any special discounts for a slush people? Yeah, so I promised the guys I'm not talking about it, but we kept a promise for you guys to any person within a Finland IP will get a 30% discount if you're going into the site. All right. 30% off. It sounds pretty good. Still sounds like a hard business selling headphones, but it makes sense that if you're a fitness coach, but why would you build your own fitness, I mean, can't you use Alexa or Google now or whatnot? We shouldn't. We will. The reason we didn't and I'm actually it's a good question and an open topic because for us, we started with TTS. TTS goes for to a text to speech, what Alexa does amazingly well, but the problem for us that all TTS voices, the Googles and the Amazons and the series and the bydos of the world and so forth, didn't achieve a full emotional range and a full human range of experience and people thought that they are working out with a robot. So what we did, we took a step back. We created our own proprietary technology to stitch real human voices. We're bringing the world's best trainers, recording them in the studio and we stitched their thousands of keywords into full sentences. And the day that we will get a full emotional range, which is very soon and we're already prototyping in some other languages, we will utilize those. We have no intention to compete or to be an enabler for the voice part. We are laser focused on our vertical. I see. And the fitness part that makes sense, makes a lot of sense focus. That's what we got to do as startups. Let's go back to Alexa very quick. Now you represent the Alexa fun. Correct. Let's talk to me more about that. What kind of companies are you looking for? What what kind of companies are interesting? Yeah, anything you can talk about fun? I'm sure we've got some entrepreneurs here . Anyone working in a voice enabled technology in for their startup? All right. Well, this is for you. You've got. Well, and I bet maybe more hands will go up when I remind people that Alexa is now the things that Alexa or echo devices can do go beyond just voice. Obviously, the voice assistant is the thing that everybody really knows most about. But when you consider the different devices that we have in market, there's also screens on them. There's computer vision and some of the cameras that we have. There's touch ability. So Alexa works on fire TVs. So it is a increasingly a multimodal experience. And when we really engage companies around the many things Alexa can do now, just instead of it just being a voice assistant, we oftentimes end up having conversations with companies who said, you know, I've wanted to take my my product into a more multimodal type of experience. And we oftentimes engage with companies that way. But the three things that that we invest in in a in a in broad categories are companies that are building skills, which are like our apps, companies that are using our framework called Alexa voice service to put into third party hardware devices. So it might be someone else's smart speaker, but that still has an Alexa inside of it. And the third are enabling technologies that make Alexa work better or that advance voice in general. So we've made investments in microphone technologies, a couple semiconductor companies recently. We had a company that was making a better wake word engine that was actually bought by Baidu. So we we've invested in also these enabling technologies that advance in general what we think are the the capabilities of voice and AI. So really, if you're a startup that is building, you don't have to just be working with our voice specific interface, you could be doing things that are enabling products and services to be multimodal, where voice is one of the modes, and we'd be interested. So as a developer, you know, I've, you know, many of us have are working in startups. I have limited resources. Maybe one person or part of a person to do voice stuff for my startup, unless maybe that's your focus. Why should I work with Alexa versus Google Home? Well, or whoever face I don't know what Facebook has, but yeah, we we try to make, you know, we we're constantly expanding the number of things that Alexa can do and simplifying them from a skills perspective. We try to generate more API's to make the connection points between the different things that companies would want to do with their skills, and effectively just make it easier and easier to hook into Alexa's framework. If you become part of the Alexa fund as well, and it's a very selective process, it's just as selective as any VC would would go through. But our Alexa fund companies also get a bear hug from a team that makes sure that whatever they're specifically building on with Alexa is is getting attention from teams that are and we give them much more support than we can give sort of a typical company. So we do a lot of documentation to make Alexa as self serve as possible. But then we have the pleasure on in the Alexa fund to work a little bit more closely with our with our portfolio companies. What are a couple of cool companies you've done in the last year, not playing favorites? Yeah, things that people might find interesting where we might not expect. Yeah, great. I mean, we've done. So we recently invested in active, which is another company in the in the workout space. We invested in a German company called Tato, which has a deep, deep focus in European heating systems for the home. And we're very excited to be investing them out of our new global initiative. We invested, like I said, in a couple of semiconductor companies that reduce the power need that's required in an always on device. We invested in a company called Seven Rooms, which really is one a good example of a of a next enterprise play of how Alexa is going in to reshape the way that restaurants are managed. So it's really we're we've done a we started with a bunch of consumer focused applications. But one of the things that's happened over the last 12 months is Alexa's become a lot more enterprise focused as well. And Alexa is going into homes. It's going into sorry, into businesses. We've built a whole group of people that work on hospitality so that how does Alexa work in hotels and hosted properties. So those are all places that start to get us into the enterprise applications. So as a developer, OK, so I'm convinced, you know, working, building on that platform, maybe even getting funding from you guys, if possible, it sounds like an amazing opportunity. But how much money am I going to be able to make if I were to do an Alexa skill or work on the Alexa platform? I mean, that sounds like hard going to make. Yeah, can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, we we've we've now started. Yeah, so there were companies that could monetize like Uber, Uber, for instance, was one of the first companies that was that built a skill in a widely used application that abstracted effectively the Uber app into into voice. They could obviously monetize the ride that was being reserved off of Uber if you were using Alexa. But increasingly, we've introduced ways for developers to to monetize. First, we're rewarding the most popular skills on the site. But increasingly, we're allowing for skill developers to integrate paywalls and you even utilize Amazon Pay so that customers can buy things directly through through Alexa. So I think that we by opening that capability just this year, we're going to start to see and we're starting to showcase now more and more developers and companies that are monetizing and are able to build big audiences right and then also be rewarded for their the popularity of their work. Those sound like some great stories. And I'm sure there's going to be many more to come. Can't wait to see what you guys keep doing. You keep pumping out amazing things. So now I'm really what kind of stories do you have?  It's a very novel product.  I know that getting encouragement and getting real time coaching that has helped me to you know, I do pushups every day with a group of three other guys over a WhatsApp group. And that's been working really well. Been able to hold to keep my nearest resolution. So I think this stuff works, but it's still, you know, it seems pretty futuristic. It's kind of sci-fi. Do you any stories? Any testimonies? Like have people actually gotten seen results? We have we have thousands of stories, but I'll try and break it down into an easy to understand down to earth one. So I think the first is affordability. Yeah. Many, many people that do not live in affordability, affordability. Basically, people that cannot go into an equinox or to a top tier personal trainer gym and go into a real one on one personalized, which is a very important word. And I don't want to get into the regular pre-recorded, you know, content out there, but they don't want to pay trainers out there. So we have many, many stories of people that found V as the only entity that can keep them accountable to keep a fitness routine. We have amazing stories about people with either disabilities or recoveries from injuries. So it's not just about weight loss. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. It's it's basically it's a way it's way beyond some smart insights and steps and heart rate cadence. It's and she makes you laugh. She gets you the right music as she keeps you accountable between the workouts themselves. So it gives people framework. Why headphones? Why not do it on a speaker? Like when I'm a Bluetooth speaker and I just saying so we will be on speakers and basically the way I see it and it's also related to the monetization part. Think about it. You guys should think about it as you know 2008. Remember Nokia and iPhone as a very interesting junction that this world went through. And basically think about what people thought about tax screen applications in terms of smartphone. And I think that exactly this is what happens now with built in voice vertical applications. And for us headphones is a utility. I look for any type of connected audio device that we can live in including home devices. So stretching yoga mindful sensations nutrition sleep and falling asleep. So any place that V is a body and mind companion will be able to communicate with you. We will be there. We still need to be focused. So currently you see us within the more cardio world. But we are expanding our use cases and traction as well. Yeah I guess it'd be hard to do heart rate if it was a Bluetooth. Exactly. So you actually have heart rate monitors in the ear. Correct. Wow. Correct. The AI you don't have to wear that chest strap anymore. Or I guess if you had a wearable product. Yeah. We will be in Apple watch very soon. But basically most of the intelligence in the storage sits in the cloud. But you do need our device our premium our sense device if you want ECG level heart rate gyro matter to get your posture and steps and so forth. Let's see. What's hard about what you're doing. A lot of hard things. But you've seen 60 companies so it will take more time. But I'll give two simple examples of what's hard about it. I think the first thing that was hard but now we're in a very powerful place at last. It took us more than two years to get the voice experience right just to get to the steal the use case into an immersive playing or experience using music and voice super hard that we won't get into it. But ten iterations at least with lots of mistakes. Tens of millions of dollars that we needed to invest until we got it right. But we are there and you can look at the reviews out there and the product the product market feed is there but we took us we almost died literally five times in between the second is marketing the ability to market and communicate value prop of a voice product is almost impossible into this world unless you have you know you're not a startup and you want to invest tens of millions of dollars in it. But we find very clever social and audio related parts to explain what is the use case ask yourself how do you explain people what does one minute a voice experience sounds like that you can't compare the product into many other apps. So got a couple of minutes left so I'm going to ask you guys to close with one thing. It's 2018 when that slush 2028 comes around. Or maybe 2023 five years pick your pick your favorite slush. What's Alexa going to be like. I think if I mean one we would love for Alexa ultimately to be like this always available always useful assistant that just kind of blends into the background of everything. And so you know maybe one vision is when we're at the dinner table and people are having a conversation but they're looking at their phone to look up something that's coming up on a schedule or reminder about something else like that that those things start becoming like the devices go away. But an assistant that's just around you starts taking care of those things. So her is Alexa. All right 2023 what's V going to be doing. Are we going to have headphones still. She's going not necessarily for all use cases but yes help her phone is going to be a core part of it. V is going to be your A.I. entity for your body and mind basically your companion or your partner to keep you accountable between your text or voice based devices to help you reach your goals. So body and mind. So it's just it's a fitness coach but it's also absolutely a meditate. Is there a meditation thing. There is we also where we released a few betas to some of you guys maybe so and tested it that we're still not out there yet with a commercial product. But absolutely as we will cover body and mind. So to learn more V V.I. trainer dot com. Right. OK. Very cool. Sounds like an amazing product. Both of you guys congratulations on all the work that amazing work that your companies have been doing. Thank you so much for joining. I think that's all the time we have for it. Yeah. Thank you. Cheers.


Welcome to Paranormal Episode 7, DMT, Psychedelics, Religious Mysticism, and Paranormal Experiences. I'm assuming from that title it'll be a good time, had by all, but maybe not. The material that we read for this episode does in all fairness might tilt toward again what people would call sort of a positive experience, but there are negative elements as well. And we have with us again the usual crew now, I guess we can say that now because we've sort of hung together for the last few episodes, Trey Strickland, and Brian Goddawa, Natalina, DVD, Doug Van Dorn and Doug Overmire are with us. And so, just to jump into this, this episode is not just about DMT. That's the one everybody's sort of heard about, or maybe run across doing internet searching on mystical states or, you know, drugs and religion, or even searching for things about cannabis or, you know, some other drug, LSD. We're going to run into DMT and Rick Strassman, his research on the quote-unquote DMT molecule and the pineal gland and whatnot. So that's the one everybody's heard about, but this is actually a field of study that sort of goes under an umbrella term, N-theogens. N-theogens are psychedelic drugs just generally that are known to cause mystical states of consciousness. And there's actually a lot of work done on this and a lot of recent work that we were sort of able to tap into. We went a little bit overboard on the articles. When I sent them all out to you, by the way, I just thought that, you know, you'd end up saying, oh, yeah, let's do the topic and then Cherry picked the articles, but nobody did that. So it's like, okay, I guess we're going to read them all. One of them was sort of a popular piece that for those listening, I guess I could recommend, you know, just to sort of get your feet wet, here to know what in the world we're talking about. And that is Peter Bebergal's Mystics Under the Microscope. That one is publicly accessible. I'm going to have these listed on the episode page. Some of these will be accessible. Others will not because they're scholarly journal articles. One or two of those, you know, might be. So that's sort of an introductory piece to introduce the subject. And then we read Entheogen's Mysticism and Neuroscience by Ron Cole Turner. That comes from the journal Zygon. That's Z-Y-G-O-N. Volume 49, September 2014. And that particular volume actually had a number of articles on this topic. Zygon is a scholarly journal that deals with the interface of religion and science just generally. But again, for that particular issue, they put a special emphasis on this. Another article from that issue was By Its Fruits, question mark, Mystical and Visionary States of Consciousness, Occasioned by Entheogen's by Leonard Hummel. And then we also read something a little bit older. We have Values and Beliefs of Psychedelic Drug Users, a cross-cultural study by Michael Lerner and Michael Livers. That was from the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs. There is such a journal, believe it or not. Then we read a preliminary survey of paranormal experiences with psychoactive drugs. This is by David Luke and Marios Kittenes. That's from the Journal of Parapsychology. And then there were two reviews. There was, you know, of Rick Strossman's book. One was by Thomas Roberts from Northern Illinois University. And there was another one by Alan Hirschfield. And then the last article was the potential, or excuse me, here and now, discovering the sacred with Entheogen's by William Richards. And that was from the same issue of Zygon in 2014. So three of these are from 2014. So pretty recent.  They do a survey of the research that's been done up to this point. But really the discussion focuses on what are the implications here? None of these articles were studies where people were given drugs, as I recall. But there were some surveys about people who had taken various Entheogens and sort of surveying their responses, you know, answering a number of questions. Did this or that happen to you? Or, you know, did you have this or that experience? How did you feel? You know, so on and so forth. So there was a lot of that.  There have been others that Bevergall's article refers to. So it's something that I think we can say if we're reading material in 2014, this is sort of the state of the question. And just to get us into the question, I would, you know, in the summary, I put things like this. You know, do Entheogens simply affect part of the brain and its chemistry, triggering new states of consciousness from inside your head? Or do these drugs separate consciousness from the organ of the body we call the brain, verifying that consciousness is distinct from the brain? You can see right away that this subject not only gets you into, oh, people who take this drug had XYZ experience. Does that align with religious experience in the Bible or in early Christianity or other religions? That's one question. But you can see how it relates to the whole mind-body problem.  Is that distinct from the brain? So this takes us into that question as well. And when people encounter the divine or God or Jesus or some other supernal being, that whole mind-body problem becomes a real important issue. I could state it this way in a question. Are God and other supernal beings experienced by people under the effect of Entheogens? Just a product of the brain? Or are they entities to be experienced by unhindered consciousness? So again, the mind-body problem is a big deal here.  I put it that way because I haven't ever, I've not only never experienced anything like this, any drug-induced state, but I don't even know anyone that, you know, I could sort of talk to about this. I don't know if any of our panel, you know, where they would fall out on either of those things. But, you know, I look at it as, well, I haven't had any experience. So it just feels like I'm completely outside the discussion.  And I would think of myself as a spiritual person.  So there's a wide disconnect for me when it comes to my faith. And again, my study of scripture, my relationship with the Lord, and this subject. So I don't really know how to parse it. It's tough for me to assign importance to it. Because I don't, I can't share in the experience. And so having said that, you know, I'll rein myself in here. What did you all think of what you read? And can you, you know, can you offer any commentary as far as how you perceive the importance of this and maybe some personal anecdote or some insight that you might have with respect to the subject? Have you ever gotten a conversation with someone about this? What direction would it take? Well, I guess as our resident drug user, I'm just kidding. We always knew there was something special about it. Nobody is shocked. Well, I have a bit of history with some of this kind of stuff. But first of all, when I'm kind of taking in all of that, there was a lot of material to go over for this episode. And taking it all in, my kind of takeaway from everything was that it still remains like completely subjective depending on what the person thinks of the experience that's being had by the people being surveyed or interviewed.  But personally, I've never had an experience of that nature where you would call it like mystical. I have had a little bit of personal experience with hallucinogens. It was, you know, just the classic trippy situation, but nothing that I had an encounter with God or anything like that. I do know people who would say that they have had those types of experiences. Some I would take with a grain of salt, some coming from people who really trust and know very well. And so it has led me to this place where I look at it from the perspective of, yes, these are hallucinogens. They make you hallucinate, which would imply that these things are not real. You're seeing things that aren't there. But there's this other aspect where it's not just, you know, seeing things. Like in my experience, it was like snowflakes that, you know, got really, really big and really, you know, far out. And then they would hit the ground and they'd make this loud exploding sound. And it was weird and it was definitely a hallucination. You know, even as I was experiencing it, I knew it was a hallucination. But then there are those other instances where people seem to completely disassociate and disconnect from reality and go to, you know, I would say like, maybe from their perspective, a different dimensional reality. And they encounter beings and entities and they experience things. And I'll just share one really quick anecdote from someone who's close to me. I'll just have to take my word for it, very trustworthy person who many years ago had an experience where it was consuming psilocybin or, you know, magic mushrooms and had this experience where he encountered aliens. And they were, I think he said they were kind of like the almost like the praying mantis variety, not like graze or anything, but weird bug-like aliens. And they wanted to show him a movie. And this is not an uncommon theme where these entities want to show the person a film. And so he watched this movie that actually was sort of the story of humanity through the context of the Bible, you know, starting with Adam and Eve. But the point of the film being shown was that these people were created by the aliens, not by God. And how God was sort of this construct given to humanity to be able to, you know, cope with how we were created, but that it wasn't real, that in fact the aliens were responsible. And it turned out to be a very, very disturbing trip for him. He was really upset and ended up having to go and vomit up all of the mushrooms to try to end the trip because it was really scary. And these entities were very aggressively trying to push this agenda to him. And this was before he had really looked into any of these kinds of things. Do you remember, did he ever tell you like what year this was? Is there any way for you to know that? I don't know. I'm going to say like it was maybe within the past 10 years or 15 years, something like that. But a little bit of context is that, you know, he was a believer who was someone who kind of was backslidden at the time. So in the trip, he knew what was being told to him was incorrect. You know, there was that understanding that God created man and stuff. And the entities actually seemed really upset with him. In fact, he says when the trip first started, they were like, what are you doing here? They actually said to him, how did you get here? And anyway, so putting all of that into, you know, just understanding who this is coming from and everything, it's one of the most interesting cases to me just because it was like an attempt. Okay, let's just assume that this was all a spiritual thing. It was like it was attempt at deception that failed because of the person's inherent belief. But it has stuck with him all of these years as like just this very troubling experience. He described the physical appearance, appearance of the entities. I'm just curious. Yeah. He said, he said, I don't know if this is all of them, but the one thing I remember him telling me the most about was that there, there were like insect-like almost like, like at the praying mantis style, weird bug-looking aliens. And I don't know if he actually ever said it as aliens, but more just like entities. Yeah. The thing that strikes me in that is shown a movie. Yes. And when I hear that, my mind, I mean, I don't know if your friend ever saw it, obviously, and maybe if he did, he wouldn't even remember that. But the reason I asked about the timeframe is mission to Mars. I don't know if any of you ever saw that movie. It's the one with Gary Sinise in it, where they go and they find the face on Mars. They get inside this thing and that's what happens if they are shown a movie. Yeah. The aliens have left for whoever finds this place. And it recreates, you know, creation. You know, how creation happened, of course, and they're responsible for it. So that, again, that phrase just makes me think of that. And that story, that idea is actually, you know, pretty old. You know, going back in the comic books and other earlier films, but that's the one that sort of visually, you know, I think is, if I can use this term, is the best way to show it. Because they, I thought that part of the movie, they did a really good job, you know, even though I obviously don't agree with any of it. But the visuals were pretty spectacular in how they did it. So that just popped into my head when you related that element. Yeah, I'll ask him if he ever saw it. Because I could see, you know, when I, again, just hearing that, and then we've had these other episodes, like with sleep paralysis, I always have to wonder, you know, do we really understand how much information the brain captures and how it's stored and then how it's recalled? I think, you know, we know a lot about that, you know, in modern science. But I think if we had a brain, you know, scientist with us here, he'd say, no, we don't really know all, you know, all the ways that this, you know, this happens or this could be done or, you know, to me, the brain is such a fantastic thing that I don't know how we could take a personal accounting of it to know what is stored there or not, as opposed to some new experience. But anyway, somebody else, what do you think and, you know, just jump in here. A theme that really stuck out at me, and for most of the articles, was sort of an assumption among users of the drugs that all is one, and wherever they went, where the trip took them, they experienced this idea of like cosmic love and God is the universe, and they lost sort of their sense of identity or rather their sense of individuality and sort of became the whole idea. That was a big deal in one of the articles. Well, maybe one or two, but that, yeah, that was a big focus, this losing the sense of self. And then we're going to say this a lot. The one article, because there were seven, right? But I think one of them in the Zygon Journal described how these drugs impacted part of the brain that differentiates ourselves from other people. So, of course, I mean, naturally, if you're going to not stimulate the brain, but if you're going to mute the ability of that part of the brain to function, then you will lose, you will experience a sense of oneness, but there was this overarching perspective, and maybe, Mike, you can speak to this or Brian, because I'm a little fuzzy on sort of the monism. I think that's what it's called. Sort of the worldview where you assume that there are many ways, many ways to the divine oneness of the cosmos. Whereas as Christians, we accept that God is separate from the cosmos. And it seems to me like these people who are using these drugs are just, several of the articles were sort of buying into the idea that, well, really, there's many ways to God, and God is one of the cosmos. Yeah, well, what they're angling for there, and I will use that word because I do think they are angling, is that since people across the religious spectrum take XYZ drug and they have similar experiences, therefore, ergo that their religious differences either don't mean anything or shouldn't mean anything, which is really a convoluted logical path when you actually sit down and think about it. But Brian, did you want to jump in on the monism thing?  No, as a matter of fact, that's probably coming at these articles, reading them.  But I've certainly never had anything that is so extreme or transcendent like these drug experiences are described, right? And so, but interestingly, I also, you know, come from, and I think a lot of us probably do, I mean, I come from a tradition or at least a sense of the Christian Church that has an automatic negative, you know, sense about these kinds of situations taking drugs or whatever. And I actually tried to read the articles with an open mind.  Is it legitimate in me or not, you know? And I mean, in some ways I was reading these articles and I honestly was curious just like, well, with taking this drug, even an experimental sense to see how it affects human body, is there really a morality to it or not? And so, in other words, I'm not as, I'm more open to that element, whereas in the past I would just know it's immoral, you know? So I'm coming at it from a more open-minded perspective. But yes, because I do have a commitment to, you know, rational truth in the universe that whenever someone starts speaking about things like, you know, yeah, the unity of all things, the rejection of the distinction between objects and subjects, I immediately become suspect. And, you know, I think the tenor of a lot of these articles would be, ah, yes, of course that is because you haven't experienced it. And, you know, there's a sense in which one of the articles, I think it's Richard's, you know, he says, you know, whether, hey, look, people can read books on Paris and learn all, you can learn a lot about Paris and know a lot about it, but it's still not the same as actually going there and being there in the midst of Paris. But I would agree there's a certain truth to that. But on the other hand, if you're following a false map of Paris or if you're going to Paris and you're there and you're misunderstanding what you're actually experiencing, you know, that tells me that there is a rational component to everything that must be legitimized. And so therefore, you know, when you start saying, when people start saying, well, there's, you know, when you have this experience, you learn that there's no distinction between the subject and object, between objects, you know, what's that called? Yeah, distinction, the rejection of all distinction. Well, that's the foundation of one of the foundations of logic. And the problem with that is you're immediately using the distinction in your description of no distinction. You know, you're saying these people who believe there's distinction, they're wrong because there's no distinction. Well, that's a distinction. And so it's not a logical game that I'm saying. What I'm saying is if there's something, if we cannot communicate or use language or even, if we cannot even experience or use science without the notion of distinction, well, that's an inescapable thing that you can't deny without reducing yourself to absurdity. And that's when my mind starts going, bang, red flag, because it's like, I'm not against the fact that there's, you know, reality has a unity to it, because we are all kind of made of the same molecules to some degree, of course. So there is a unity, but there's also diversity. And so any science, any philosophy, whatever, any person who's trying to promote a rejection of one, you know, that cannot answer diversity and unity, cannot find unity within diversity. It's going to be problematic for me because it doesn't matter what you say, you're denying what you're actually saying, you know, and that was the thing that sort of the red flag that came up to me. But I also found though that they all kind of have a consensus and I'll end with this, you know, and I think this would be a worthwhile, fascinating discussion, but they tend to sort of point out that both mystical, non-drug users, you know, religious mystical experiences and the drug mediated experiences do tend to have this common reports of experiences and viewpoints. And Richards puts it in six categories that I think most of them tend to agree. One, I think Doug mentioned this already, the unity. You tend to, when you go through the mystical consciousness, whether drug induced or not, you tend to have this sense of unity with all things, to transcendence of time and space, you are actually transcending where you are. Thirdly, intuitive knowledge, meaning like you have a knowledge or a connection to reality in a deeper way experientially than just mental. Fourth, a sense of sacredness, you know, that there's a sacredness to reality. And then fifthly, a deeply felt positive mood. So it's very positive usually. And lastly, ineffability and paradoxicality, meaning in other words, it's this sort of like, you know, you're outside of the empirical experience that you have, I guess, you know, and some of them would even connect that to quantum physics, you know, and so I find it interesting, and then other of these articles were pointing out this, a commonality with Buddhists or Taoist thought. So I find it interesting that why is science that is trying to be empirical, you know, they've done this with quantum physics as well. The Copenhagen School in quantum physics, it tends to, they tend to seek to confirm a Buddhist or Eastern worldview with science. And that to me is a red flag as well. Yeah, I think they're doing that because when you're, when you're doing quantum physics, I mean, when that's your bread and butter, you are sort of looking for the theory of everything. And so your tendency is to unite everything and sort of like answer every question and one fell swoop. So I think that's the proclivity. For me, anyway, that explains the earnestness to move in that direction. Because if you are looking for a theory of everything, you know, that explains all reality, you're not going to want any outliers. So, you know, that's just, that's just sort of the nature of the inquiry, I guess. You know, the one thing, you know, that just listening to me made me think of is, you know, even if you're, even if you're not a creationist of any stripe, I think you'd have to agree with this statement that the human brain, when it's running on all cylinders, is supposed to be rational. In other words, we're not excluding experience, okay, because that's just part of life, you know, and the brain is part of how we process an experience either from, you know, externally or within, okay. But I'm really struck by the almost virtue that some of these articles place on not paying attention to rational, rationality or transcending it, as though it was a lesser thing than experience. And what was really interesting to me is in the Cole Turner article, they talk about how it used to be in the early days of researching, you know, entheogens, that the suspicion was that the drug heightened, you know, the brain function in some way. You know, it stimulated it in an upward sort of way, but he says on page 645, we now know that this is almost completely wrong, you know, and he goes into, you know, he's making a distinction there between mysticism and visions and how they're not the same, both in terms of academically and also the experiencers, you know, the people who are reporting what they experienced under the influence of these drugs. But he says, Psylosibyn, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly or not, does not excite the brain, least of all, to create visions, so much as it decreases its activity. And so when I read things like that, I'm thinking, okay, here we have a situation where we're taking a drug, it is influencing, attacking, whatever word you want to use, a certain part of the brain or a certain function of the brain to make it less than what it optimally is.  And it seems like if our brain is functioning optimally, it should be evaluating that idea instead of just sort of going with it. I think that's really a great point. And that's what struck me, not only in the Colterner article, but in a few of the other ones, how it sort of tears down this ability to evaluate, you know, and even a desire to evaluate. You know, in other words, you're having this experience. I just want the experience. I don't want to think about it, you know, that sort of thing. But anyway, that was just an impression I got. Well, you know, because of the bias in that article you mentioned, the Colterner, because of their bias, they then therefore conclude that the disintegration of the self or ego is a central hypothesis of this article that psychedelics induce a primitive state of consciousness. In other words, we're going back to how we were in the past, but because of our culture and because of technocracy, we've suppressed this aspect of our being, whereas I'm thinking like, well, no, wait a minute, if you lose your eyesight, yeah, you can hear a lot better probably because you become more focused, but you are not any closer to integrating yourself into the real world. It's actually, you still are at a disadvantage, right? And yet ironically, in that same article, I actually found one of the most, of all these articles, it was one of the few points where they actually became, their rationality was a little bit more intact and that's where they point out that magical thinking is what they call it, is a style of cognition in which supernatural interpretations of phenomenon are made. Now, that's a materialist bias. However, there's a side in which magical thinking is wishful thinking where you see things that are not there, you know? And they admit that this can be a problem, a risk factor or unintended unwanted side effect. And I think that at the end of the day, let's not forget, yeah, you're seeing things that aren't there. So how can that be more insight? Isn't it odd that because I have this experience of seeing something that isn't there after I take an entheogen, that that's a good thing, that's a cool thing or that can be really positive. But if I did that without taking a drug, they would just say, you're insane.  Right. What makes it a virtue, just taking this drug, you know what I mean? There's just an incoherence there that troubles me. You take the drug to numb part of the brain and that is achieving enlightenment. That's the mentality. Which can include symptoms of insanity if you didn't have the drug. In other words, we are holistic beings. We are empirical beings. We are rational beings. And the proper functioning of us as entities in the universe is the use and integration of all these functions, whether it's all of our senses, as well as our reason, as well as our imagination and our emotions or whatever. But to cripple one aspect of our being is actually become less holistic, which makes us less integrated in the system, is what I would argue. Yeah, actually that's a boom on that one. That's good. To me. This is a DVD. Yeah. I want to do this in a different direction. Okay. But I want to do it by like picking back what you guys are just saying. And starting with the monism thing is, as I was reading all these articles, I thought that was kind of the tie that bound them all together. I mean, you got guys talking about Zen Catholics, you know, and Paul Tillich, you know, the panentheist and it's just, these things are underlying and really important, I think for our listeners to, if they're going to read through these articles, just be aware of where these guys are coming from. And Mike, you brought up the mysticism thing, and I had that highlighted right as you were talking about it. And right under that part where he says, we now know that this is almost completely wrong. He talks about the distinction between mysticism and visionary experiences. He says, mysticism is understood as a state of consciousness that transcends awareness of specific objects, ordinary or visionary. The whole idea there seems to be that they want to become one, you know, with all things, sort of thing. And then the magic thing that Brian brought up, I was reading that a little bit differently. It's almost like in the magic, you are kind of not being one with all things and you're making some sort of an evaluation about what's going on. It might be right about it, it might be wrong about it, but it's the evaluation itself that's what's so bad. You need to get over that and just be one with all things. So as I was reading this, for some reason it popped into my head a book that I read several years ago, listening to Coast to Coast, and I heard that Malachi Martin episode where he starts talking about the demon possession. So I went and I read his book, Cossage of the Devil. And in that book he tells this story of this dude named Carl who, it's almost exactly the sort of thing that's going on in these articles. And the reason I'm bringing this up is this is the different direction I want to take it. He talks about kind of losing self and all your thingness suddenly of itself became a transparency through which non-thing, the other clearly appeared. It's just this weird oneness. And that ends up leading this guy to, you know, in the book, and I think it's probably true, sort of opening himself up to demon possession, which he eventually is possessed in the night. You know, that's what the book is about. You would want to become one with some other entity. Exactly. And so then I was watching the band Ted Talk that Graham Hancock had a couple years ago. He goes into this whole thing. He goes, he gets out of his Atlanta stuff and he starts going down to South America taking Hiawasca. And he gives this Ted Talk about it. And in the talk, he's just like militant that, man, we have got to get this stuff legalized so that everybody can, you know, do this. And of course it'll be, it'll be good. We'll have it under control and we'll have, we'll have it be the doctors that are giving it. But people need to experience this. And let me tell you about this, this time that I met Mother Hiawasca. And let me tell you about what she said to me. And let me tell you that people from all over the world have met Mother Hiawasca. What kinds of things are, as a Christian, my perspective is that these things may very well be quite real, but they're like forbidden. And we're not supposed to do it because of the, you know, the extreme danger that we're opening ourselves up to. Yeah. Well, one of the, one of the reasons why I think, you know, historically Christianity has, you know, poo pooed this is, you know, there are a couple of references in the New Testament to Pharma Kaia, you know, which if you look in a Greek lexicon, this refers to, it usually gets translated sorcery in English Bibles, but it refers to the use of and, you know, we're not given a great number of details, but it refers to the use of or the incorporation of drugs, you know, in certain religious practices, again, to induce, you know, certain states, you know, certain experiences.   And so within the Christian tradition, you know, you're naturally, you know, going to have this passed on in some form. And so it's no surprise to me that, you know, aside from the cultural factors that Christianity would historically, you know, divert people away, you know, from doing this, it's really interesting. Hummel in his article brings this up about, well, if this is like, if this introduces us to, you know, real spirituality or, you know, real divinity and we can meet God and, you know, well, then how would we use this in church? How would we do this as a community? And he uses the word community a lot. And he says on, on page 693, to be sure it is conceivable that in the not too distant future, independent retreat centers defined loosely as Christian, but without official church connections might emerge in which entheogen sessions would be offered as part of a wider program.  And he says, speaking for myself, I cannot endorse the incorporation of such drug use as a regular or recommended Christian practice in this time and in this place, precisely because of the risks noted above, you know, he had been talking about this, you know, involved in both its unregulated and its regulated use.  And he kind of, kind of knows where somebody's going to take this.  So he's just being, you know, honest that, you know, this doesn't seem like it's a really good thing, but I got to tell you, again, with this effort to numb the brain or to, you know, the effect of it to sort of take you away from the will to evaluate something and the ability to evaluate something. I think in our culture, which, you know, it's hard to look at the internet on any given day or even listen to the news now on any given day and not have the thought at least fly through my head, we are just fleeing from rationality. I mean, we are in a gathering rush away from rational thought in so many areas of our culture that I could see this as like two thumbs up, man. You know, let's do that because not only, you know, don't I have to think about X, Y, Z, but I won't even care anymore.  So I wouldn't be surprised at all to see, you know, Hummel's writing in 2014, you know, to see that, yeah, eventually we're going to see stuff like that. You go to this church or this Christian retreat center and this is part of what you do.  So I wouldn't be surprised at all. There was one of the articles that mentioned how people who engaged in one of the studies where they took the drugs later, years later, still recounted that experience as one of the most profound experiences of their lives, but had not made any significant changes to their lives either. So it was like this amazing experience, but it didn't, it wasn't like a salvation experience where someone meets the Lord and then their life has changed, their new person. And so I think to me, trying to use a drug to stimulate a spiritual experience is short-cutting. It's like inauthentic. You know, if the Holy Spirit wants to touch someone and give them a mystical experience, fine. But taking a drug to try to force that is just invitation to disaster. Even if it's an amazing experience, you do it one time and then 20 years later you're like, yeah, that was a great time. It was amazing, but nothing has changed and what's the point, what's the point? Well, Scripture always gives you both sides of the coin.  Like, oh, well, let's just throw this in here. It doesn't mean anything, but then we'll move on to something else, you know? I mean, that's clear, you know, from Scripture that people can have these dramatic experiences with other entities or something that may not directly involve an entity but maybe an entity is the cause, you know, but or something like that. But then there's always the flip side that part of knowing God is divine revelation, not just in the form of an experience, again, even though you get that, but in, you know, in teaching, in the truth propositions that are put forth and that complement the experience or are there to, you know, help you evaluate an experience. It's never just one or the other. You know, knowing God in a biblical sense is not just one or the other. It's both. And they are supposed to be, you know, mutually reinforcing. And when there are disconnects, we're asked to evaluate that. You know, we're asked to judge, you know, this or that teaching or this or that experience.   Yeah, of course, that's the problem. Your dogma is what defines truth for you and it blinds you to what you're experiencing, right? And that's sort of their mentality that even kind of comes in some of these articles. But to which I say, well, wait a minute, we live our lives every day with dogmatic truth or values being much higher priority than experience. Last night, I ate half a pint of Hagenas Ice Cream Man and it was an awesome experience. But in my mind, I know I've got to stop eating this. This is not good for me because I know that it will be bad for my health. So just because you have a wonderful experience doesn't mean you can't be deceived. Right, here's my secular materialistic answer to that. Pardon me, but I'd like my whole brain to function as it evolved to function. I don't really need to take something that deadens part of my wonderfully evolved brain into functioning less than optimally as mother evolution has produced it to function. Maybe you do, but I don't. Our faith is pretty rational. It's not an experience. I don't have that faith to make a rational statement about that. I think what I just said is completely rational. God wasn't in any of those sentences. So you can think that I'm drawing a conclusion because of dogma, but that just means you didn't hear a word I just said. Again, that's how I'd respond to somebody who comes up with that. I don't think that that sort of retort back to me puts me in a bind in any way. In the New Testament, particularly for non-believers, when they experienced something supernatural like Jesus healing someone or disciple healing someone, usually it was in the context of either A, demonstrating the kingdom, or B, to wake someone up to say, now follow Jesus or the Lord saying, yeah, I just healed you, now follow me. And I think what happens when these people are just doing drugs just to get a quasi supernatural experience or religious experiences, there's no one afterward to say, okay, now it's time for you to follow the Lord. Often these people are experiencing messages that take them away from the Lord or nowhere. They interpret it through a materialist mindset. They have something that sort of shatters their materialist view, but there's no one afterwards to reorient and reframe their worldview to one focused on Jesus. And so to me, that's also why just short-cutting a religious experience by taking a drug is potentially extremely harmful, but I don't see a lot of good coming out of it, which is what Hummel's point was also. Besides the fact that many people might kill them. Agreed, agreed. So I might be in the minority here, but it's been interesting as we've been doing these paranormal episodes, I've found myself to be a far more skeptical person than I even thought that I was. You know, because I think of myself, you know, I always say I have this supremely supernatural worldview and we live in a supernatural world and all of this stuff, but I found throughout the course of these episodes, I am leaning much more skeptical. When it comes to what I read and a lot of what we have talked about in these articles for this subject, everything that's been cited, the propensity for people to feel the sense of oneness and having these sort of Zen-like experiences that bring them in touch with the universe and all of this stuff. To me, what I kept taking away from all of that is the supernatural nature that there's something going on, the deceptive nature of what's happening here that is pulling people away from the truth. And I couldn't get away from that. Every single article cites at least once this, you know, more of the Eastern mysticism idea of oneness.  Even like, oh gosh, I can't even remember which article it was now, but it was talking about the experiment that was done, I think, in the 60s with the theologians, the Good Friday experiment. I think that was in part sort of led by Timothy Leary, which was interesting to see his name come up. But, you know, these people were sort of presented as leaning at least Christian. And they too had these mystical experiences of Zen and oneness. And then when they followed up with them many years later, you know, this guy was like, yeah, I still identify as Christian, but it was sort of altered a bit to where he had this allowed, he allowed for this idea, this concept of oneness. And, you know, I can't pull myself away from thinking that there's something deceptive going on here beyond just brain chemistry.  That puts a person in a position of vulnerability. Yeah, that's exactly what I thought. Right, to spiritual forces. And so, okay, I take this drug and it's not that these entities that, that, you know, like, let's just use your friend or whatever, that entities are this thing they saw.   This is what's coming up here. This is what's surfacing. That when you do this, you can be capitalized upon. Yes.  Okay, if that is known, if that weakness is known, is it being exploited? Yes.  Yes. And so this is a great chance to do, you know, lead them to monism or whatever, you know, and it's just right. It's just, or if they're experiencing sleep paralysis, that's a great time to jump on them, you know. Not that they will, but not that every experience does that, but it's just, I think you, which is why probably Paul said, hey, don't, don't do drugs. Yes. Well, you know, I mean this is, and this is Godawa. I think that's, in this case, I really do agree with you, Natalina, because, but I got to admit, it's only because we have the biblical basis of what Mike mentioned. If we, you know, if there wasn't the condemnation of sorcery, pharmacia, which is the use of drugs and that that's connected to the opening of the portals to the demonic, if we didn't have that, it would be harder for me to agree with you, but I actually do agree with you precisely because of that. And, and that's why in this case, that's what solves me. As a rational Christian, I don't want to just believe, I want to make sense about my beliefs and I want to have a biblical basis, not just drugs are bad, therefore, they're demonic, but rather, oh no, there's an actual biblical description that there is a demonic connection to the drugs and for that reason is why in the end I'm, I'm totally, totally with you on that. I think that, I think that it is a connective portal and it's not just Christians reacting against something they don't like and calling it demonic, but there's actual biblical basis for it. I would say like, for example, there's, in our country now there's this big thing about medicinal marijuana and you see a lot of things coming from the Christian community saying, Farmaquia, you know, get away from that. I put it in a completely different class, actually, I'm a proponent of the medicinal uses of cannabis. And because I think it comes from a big lack of understanding of what marijuana actually does, it's not the same as psilocybin, magic mushrooms, LSD, it doesn't do any of that. But I think you're right, Brian, in that Christians just sort of have this knee-jerk reaction, drugs are bad, evil, Paul said so, stay away. But, you know, when you read about what Farmaquia actually is, like Mike mentioned, it is more linked to sorcery. It's like potions that are meant to elicit specifically this mystical experience. And I just think it's very, very, it's like a different class of things. Farmaquia, there's so many Christians I've noticed that think all drugs are Farmaquia, including prescription medication you get from a doctor and all of that. But I would say that Farmaquia, as mentioned by Paul and in scripture is so much more linked to the mystical sorcery type experience where it is intended to create this altered response. And for that reason, I do link so much of what we've read with a spiritual component, even though it's physically doing something to your brain chemistry.  It still seems to me almost inescapable because of the prevailing nature of what people experience while they're in that state, that there is something that is like the antithesis of the biblical worldview that seems to consistently be what people experience. And I'll bring a dimethyl tryptamine, DMT specifically. They talk about, I don't know if this proved true or not, but when you're in a dream state, you release small quantities of it.  The themes of near-death experiences are very similar to what these people are experiencing during the trips and astral traveling to the spiritual realms is kind of similar to people experienced DMT. So we all agree that the spiritual realm exists. It's a real thing. So I find it interesting if DMT, there's a connection there that does open a gateway or maybe when you die, it's interesting that there's similar themes being experienced by people, whether they're dreaming near-death or they're tripping on DMT. So I find that interesting into the unseen realm, you know, what's going on there. Yeah, I think, you know, Strossman's work is, you know, is commented on a few times in these articles and there seems to be a consensus that, you know, he's correct about what you just described, that we have, you know, the DMT in our bodies, you know, naturally, and you have these release points and whatnot. So I want to come back to that, but for the sake of our listeners who might not be familiar with the whole Pharmachea thing, it shows up in several verses and I'll grant, you know, some of these are more abstract. They may not, on the surface at least, you know, refer to specific, you know, drug taking, but they're more abstractly associated with sorcery. But Galatians 5.20 is a big deal. Revelation 9.21, Revelation 18.23, Revelation 21.8.  So you're being distanced from the place where it was sacrificed or the ritual that would have been involved. So you're eating the meat is okay, as long as it's clear, you know, that you're making every effort to not be mixed in with the worship of another God, a foreign God, you know, demon is the word he uses there.  I think it's just a useful analogy. You know, if you can, if you can disconnect from the, either the self-destructive elements of drug taking generally or the legal aspects or some of the more harsher things, which of course would fit under, you know, self-destruction and whatnot.   But I know that I'm sure there's a couple that want to chime in, but I'm going to read four things to you. And one of these is the NDE thing, because I want to get these out here before we, you know, go too long, but I'm just going to read four, I guess, questions or statements. And I want to know how you feel about any one of them, because these are just four things that popped into my head reading the article. So here's number one. What about the absence of any sort of religious or mystical experience? If you have the absence of that, does that mean you can't be authentically religious? Okay, that's not item number one. Number two, there are biblical instances of trance like states. I think in Paul Paul's case is probably the most, you know, obvious one here, but there are many divine encounters that bear little resemblance to what's being described in these articles. You know, what do we make of that? Number three, what about NDE situations where to the best of our modern clinical ability, there is no brain activity. In other words, you have a clinical diagnosis of brain death. How can that be synonymous with these drug induced experiences? If the drug is stimulating or decreasing some sort of brain center, that doesn't seem equatable with no brain function at all. So in other words, how similar are these really to NDE's? I mean, I'm sure there's an overlap, but again, it doesn't seem to be like a one-to-one thing for me. And lastly, number four, does this emphasis on sort of overt dramatic and even bizarre experiences of the divine or, you know, the spiritual world? Does the dramatic invalidate experiences of divine activity that are just very normal or indiscernible?  And there are thousands and thousands and thousands of these where, oh, I was in this tight situation, I'm out on the road at night, and it's snowing, it's raining, and my car is busted down or whatever, and then this guy helps me out, and I turn around to thank him and poof, he's out of there. Okay, it's not dramatic while it's happening. It's only sort of after the fact that you go, holy cow, you know, like, how'd that happen? So does the drug-induced thing, again, the bizarre nature of it, does that somehow invalidate, you know, the quote-unquote normal or even providential divine experience? Again, I don't see why it has to be dramatic to be genuine. So those are four things that popped into my head and feel free to launch in or attack anyone. Well, your first one there, as I recall, it was about does it invalidate religion? I think use the word religion. Yeah, without an experience, does that mean you can't authentically, you'll be authentically spiritual, authentically religious if you've never had an experience? So the thing that popped into my mind was actually the differentiation between spirituality and religion, as I understand it. So there's the, this kind of goes back to Nat's discussion of marijuana. There's a table on the Learner-Livers article that contrasts psychedelics with other drugs and then non-users. And those other drugs include like cannabis and alcohol and stuff like that. And their very first thing there is spirituality. And spirituality is super high with psychedelics and other drugs, it's like the lowest number that there is in the entire table. And so that seemed to justify for them, well, this is, this gives you a great spiritual experience. And then the other things in the table are like, they're not outward duties. Like James says, you know, you want to have religion that's undefiled. Why don't you go and take care of widows and orphans and distress and keep yourself from being unstained from the world? The questions that they have are, do you have concern for the environment and do you have empathy for others and does it make you more creative? Like they're all states of your mind or something like that you have towards others, but there's no outward concern at all. So like I don't think... There's nothing practical. Yeah, there's no like second table of the law is what I was thinking. So yeah, it doesn't invalidate true religion in any sense of the word. In fact, it doesn't really speak... If this table is correct, it doesn't really speak at all towards religion. It's just a spiritual state of consciousness. Yeah, I mean, there's nothing in that... I'm looking at the table now. There's nothing there that... I mean, a concern for the environment, that might prompt an action. Yeah, concern for others might prompt. But this is not the asset. Right, it's more abstract. Yeah, it's more abstract as opposed to life changing in respect to, well, I need to actively change the way I behave, both in terms of not doing things and doing other things. Yeah, there's nothing on the table that's really transparently in that direction. So I have a question for you, Mike, that I've been thinking about, and you're kind of the expert on this, of anybody that I've ever read. And it's a question that has to do with who it is that comes to the prophets and what it is that he says to the prophets. And I'm thinking about it in response to these psychedelics and you might meet your spirit guide or your animal guide or Mother Hayahuasca or whatever. So there's... A lot of them, they seem to describe some kind of an interaction with the being. I'm not sure that... I mean, maybe what they tell you is important or not. But what's interesting to me is that over and over and over again, you'll have this connection of the word came in a vision, as you point out, you know, like with Abraham. So you've got visions, but you've also got this idea that he's called the word or the memra or the lagos. And so I kind of want to know what you think is the significance of that title for the Lord in respect to what we're talking about with regard to drugs. Because when he talks to them and when he gives them visions, he's always going back to the covenant that he made with the people and how they've broken the covenant and how any kind of future prophecy that he has is usually in relation to that covenant. And it's very religious. Like I was talking about with James, it's the spirituality. So what's the significance of that title word? Well, I can't think... I mean, maybe there is one and I don't have the Bible memorized here, but I can't think of a divine encounter where God or the angel ever says to the person that they're encountering that the purpose of this encounter is so that you feel something or that you feel differently.  I mean, in other words, the purpose of the encounter is behaviorally oriented. I don't want to leave you here and you just have this sort of sense of wonder or spiritual fuzzy feeling or something like that. No, it's about prompting behavior. And again, that's when you typically get into the content of messaging being about, hey, you need to stop doing this or you need to change your life here and start doing that. I just can't think of one that was just about giving somebody a feeling. And again, maybe there is, I don't have the whole thing memorized, but the word of the Lord, of course, there are several contexts where it is visual. It's not just a voice inside the head. It is the, in some cases, like in Jeremiah 1, the embodied Yahweh, the embodied God, because he reaches out his hand and touches the prophet in that passage. So it's a direct divine encounter with a commissioning. The pattern is, as I talk about in Unseen Realm, the pattern of these encounters is, again, behavioral. It's commissioning you to not, hey, feel this way. No, it's go do this thing. Or you are going to become, because of this encounter, you are going to become my spokesperson. I tend to think that a lot of this religious discussion, defining or conflating religion with a mystical experience, is really results from a reading of the Bible where people don't see the embodied God in some of these passages. And they sort of want to process the whole thing as feeling oriented. In other words, it's good enough to get a feeling without anybody, including a spiritual being, making any demand on your life at all. And I think that notion, you know, influences the way people think about passages with the prophets. I think also there's sort of a reflexive assumption that when the prophet does get a message, even if it is just oral, even if it's the voice in the head, that you know what, that can't be a real deity speaking to someone inside their head. That must be, again, materialist worldview here. That must be something going on with the brain. That must be a chemical thing. That might be a touch of insanity. That might be taking a drug, and now you're having some sort of ecstatic spasm. Okay, in other words, there has to be some natural explanation for it. And that colors not only the perception of what people are reading in the text, but also the way they sort of process, you know, just religion, you know, quote unquote in general, you know, and any belief in God, theism, maybe is a better word. And that's just not the case.  Well, if you actually read the passages, that's really unusual. And when you got a guy like Ezekiel that's taken off his clothes and laying on one side for hundreds of days, it's not because he had an ecstatic experience, okay, per se.  And so then that's when people will step in and say, well, that was just inside his head. He was just having some ecstatic experience.  You see how this goes.  It's a feeling. Or if we can reproduce some sort of ecstatic experience or some sort of encounter experience in your head, well, there you go. That's all we need. Never really bothering to look at the text and say, you know, there are just some passages where that just does not fit. And when it comes to the behavior, basically none of them fit. But you don't have a very much willingness, I think, you know, to evaluate things very deeply. And so we, this is kind of what we get, you know, in the discussion. Can I bring up one thing that's kind of off of this topic of, well, I guess not. So obviously I, it all really changed your mind. I came admittedly into this discussion. No stranger to this particular topic of, you know, psychedelic drugs. And when years ago I read this book called Entangled by Graham Hancock, it was his foray into fiction and it was poorly written and not a very good book. But the point of it was entanglement, you know, these shared experiences that people would have, two separate people would take the DMT and their experience would converge and they'd be together in this altered state. It was very weird and interesting. But apparently all you have to do is go to Google and Google like DMT shared experiences and there's tons of anecdotes. So I'm not a stranger to this idea of potentially a spiritual connection to what's happening with the drugs. But so what about, for example, MDMA? It was originally used for or attempted to be used for therapeutic reasons. MDMA is ecstasy, depression, anxiety, things like that. There was this show on National Geographic Channel not too long ago where it talked about how people will go to places where they can take ayahuasca. And these are people with like terrible PTSD or traumatic life experiences that they couldn't get over and they would take the ayahuasca and they would have this trip and they would suddenly be completely free of this lifelong torment. One really surprising example to me was this man who I want to say he was like in his 50s and he'd suffered from cluster headaches, debilitating cluster headaches his entire life to the point where suicide was not out of the question for him. And he had read about how psilocybin or mushrooms could potentially help with that. And so he started cultivating his own mushrooms at home because he was willing to try anything and this was like mainstream middle America non-drug using man. And for the first time in his entire life he was free of these cluster headaches. He has to do these mushrooms once a month. And as long as he stays on that schedule he has not even a shadow of these debilitating cluster headaches. So my question that I'll just throw out and I don't think there's an easy answer but what role does intent play in consuming these things? If we talk about the Bible's warnings against doing these things and we see that often it is linked to the pursuit of a mystical experience is there an allowance for doing something that might alter your consciousness if that's not why you're taking it but you're taking it more for therapeutic purposes? I don't know how to answer that because I'm looking at it thinking, you know, this man is not taking mushrooms to have a trip. He's taking the mushrooms because it's literally the only thing that's ever given him relief. People take ecstasy or MDMA who've dealt with crippling anxiety their whole lives and they find relief from it. Is there any wiggle room so to speak for doing things for therapeutic purposes that might have this side thing of taking you on this wild psychedelic trip? I don't know what the answer to that is. What do you guys think? Well, I think it depends on how your body reacts to a specific medicine. I've had people write into my website several people who just are convinced that using marijuana has opened up themselves up to spirit entities and they see spirits and spirits attack them and so that's their crusade. Don't do marijuana and to which I reply, yeah, you shouldn't do marijuana but not everyone has that reaction when they smoke pot. I think we're really complicated people and not everyone has cluster headaches.  I hate to fall back on the personal conviction line but in that case it's like if it's not impacting him negatively, if it's keeping him alive, I guess I don't have a problem with it. Anybody else want to jump in? I think there's an analogy to that too with things like yoga because this has been an issue for years as well as do you engage in the yoga world and of course when you're really fully doing it you're reciting Hindu deity names and stuff like that but there's also a circle of Christians who have said don't ignore all that stuff just do the physical exercises because they do help you physically. I think in some ways, Natalina, this is the most important question for us because we do have to deal with these things in our real lives but I do think, Mike, that you've kind of already addressed I think the most relevant for us as Christians is what you've already addressed which is biblically there is differences between meat sacrifice to idols in one context and another context so we can see that the context really does affect the meaning and the purpose and what is actually resulting from engaging with drugs so I think that that at least points in the right direction here because I mean if I had glaucoma man, I'm using marijuana. Anybody else? I mean, Brian, I'll just jump in here because you referred back to the whole meat sacrifice to idols I think the role of intent is important. I think it's real important but it's not the only consideration. We wouldn't want to do anything that brings us under the power of the thing we're doing So that would be an issue. Again, your body's reaction. I mean, okay, it gets rid of this thing but does it cause another problem? Again, that's an issue. Does it open you to spiritual attack? In other words, when you take this thing, do you have these experiences where you suspect or in fact know that you're under spiritual attack? All those things are factors. The yoga thing I find interesting because again, this is just me speaking. I won't shock anyone by saying I don't do yoga. But I could see a Christian saying, you know what, I'm going to do yoga and I'm going to basically strip all this spiritual stuff out of it. To me, that is an act of defiance to other gods, which I think is a good thing. Stick it to them. No, really, because if that's the spirit in which it is done and again, there's intent there, there's conscious intent going on there. I think that's quite different. It's like polemical almost. Yeah, it is like a polemic. The closest I've come to this is a few months ago, we did some filming, I did some filming for another Christian organization and we rented out a yoga studio. So people wanted to, oh, should we rent that out? You know, we've got these idols sitting around here. It's like, look, we're going to go in there and we're going to do the gospel on video and we're going to stick it to their gods. Okay, that's my attitude. And we're going to be as defined as we possibly can be with our content and if they want to mess with it, well, then we'll just see what happens. So, you know, there's an intent to me really does matter, but again, it's not the only consideration. So I tend to be, if someone came up to me and said, hey, I'm thinking about taking this out of the other thing, you know, marijuana or whatever, you know, there's a series of questions I would ask them. I don't think it's an all or nothing proposition. One of the things that they say in these articles is that this stuff is not addictive. Like some of these other, you know, not hallucinogenic drugs are like cocaine or something like that. And then they come to this conclusion that, you know, under the right circumstances, controlled all that kind of stuff that, you know, we really want to see this stuff researched more. And, you know, they really just seem to be advocating it. And I think that what you're saying there, Mike, about there's other considerations. Like you think about a guy like Graham Hancock again, and he's taking this stuff. And okay, it's not addictive.  So I did. You know, it's kind of like, and other people say the same thing, like they'll use LSD to help people get off alcoholism or something like that. But I mean, tell me that Graham Hancock doesn't want to keep going back and taking Hayawasca. I mean, it may not be physically addictive, but there's something to it that makes him want to keep going after it. And that's, that's something that you can't just write down in a journal article about the physical effects of it. Yeah, that's a psychological Hancock would probably use the term spiritual motivation. But again, you know, we're defining spirituality as something that frankly just doesn't make any demands of your life. You know, it doesn't make you it doesn't ask you to evaluate certain truth propositions. And it doesn't necessarily ask you to, you know, exercise, you know, true religion as James would define it. So, and I'm not trying to paint, you know, Graham poorly, you know, by saying that to me that that's just the sort of matter of fact way I kind of look at it.  But I again, it's just, I want to make it clear. I'm not I'm not shooting at him, you know, for that. I would certainly, you know, obviously disagree, but I think he would try to try to paint it, you know, in a pursuit of spirituality kind of thing, which to me, again, you're using a substitute it shows it shows an emptiness there it shows a yearning for something transcendent.  Okay, this might be something that's not just inside your head, it might be, you know, releasing your consciousness and he might not be a materialist and all that sort of thing. But then, you know, for me, that takes us into the area of, okay, you're encountering something.  Why is that a virtue? Why is that a good thing? Why, you know, why is that a non threatening thing, you know, they're just things to ask there and of course people are going to be like, are going to pretend they have control. They're going to pretend they're not threatened. The fact that you haven't been threatened to this point doesn't mean you will, you know, or you won't be, you know, threatened in the future. I mean, there are all sorts of things that we like to think we're in control of even without, you know, doing the drugs here.  And, you know, I think people can discuss that rationally, but let's put it this way, you know, I think this is a good thing to say in light of this episode. If you go after the rightness or the virtue of taking an entheogen, for many people you are attacking their religion. Okay, that's where they're at. This is, this has become their equivalent. So, you know, we need to keep that in mind. Anybody else want to jump in? Nobody commented on the NDE thing, but I just thought there just doesn't seem to be a one to one equation here. Some of those experiences reminded me of the classical alien abduction scenarios also. I mean, the people are experiencing basically the same thing. I think the drugs are mimicking whatever the NDE is, and I'm not well versed on that phenomenon. But, you know, I think there's an overlap, maybe, but it's just there's a mimicry going on. You're right. I mean, there is an overlap. And what you're saying essentially is which direction does the mimicking work? Right. You know, what's mimicking what? You know, so there's, there's, if we can put it this way, there's a directional question as well. Well, one of the articles, I'm sorry. Go ahead, Nat. I was just gonna say one of the articles did talk about how in our, just our physical bodies at the point of death, there is a DMT release, which is interesting when you consider an NDE. NDE has popped into my mind as I read these in the context of, I think it was the last episode that we did where we talked about how just because you experienced something in a, quote, altered state doesn't mean that it's real, no matter how real it feels. We talked about it in the context of some NDE's people see Jesus, some people see Buddha, some people see Krishna. And that's kind of the case with when people are on these hallucinogenic, hallucinogenic trips. Some people do say that they encounter Christ and some people, you know, have this experience of oneness. And so it's kind of just, we tend to kind of just take people at their words. Sometimes they say, oh, well, I went to heaven and I saw Jesus and all this stuff. Well, just because that conforms to our worldview, does that necessarily mean that that actually happened? Or is it still potentially a hallucination? So that's kind of the context that it came to me as I was reading this stuff. Yeah, in Robert's review of Straussman's DMT, the spirit monocule, he says, Straussman's most interesting religious speculation is concerned that pineal gland is possible role in the spiritual experience, combining modern brain research and Tibetan Buddhist teachings. Straussman speculates that the soul man or the body in the 49th day of gestation and talks more about the development of the pineal gland and DMT being released. I just am curious. I would want to ask Dr. Straussman what his feelings are about abortion if the soul enters the body in the 49th day of gestation based on brain research and Tibetan Buddhist teachings. Yeah. Yeah, that would be a really good question. Are you suggesting he may want to reconsider that speculation? Well, it's just, I don't know.  It would be a good question to ask. Another takeaway just for my, my sort of my fellow Charismatics would be in Hummel's article about by its fruits, looking at the fruit of religion versus the fruit of taking these drugs. One of the arguments for using drugs in a Christian context is that, well, it creates a creates an environment where you can experience God and maybe some good come out of that. And while I, and I'm with Hummel, I think that's deeply not a good idea. But it's just the whole idea of creating an environment to experience God in some of our worship settings where we didn't allow, you know, even in classical sort of gothic churches where they have, it's dark and it's, you, you sense another, you sense otherness when you walk into a cathedral with the stained glass or whatever and then modern churches where they darken the lights and they have the smoke and they have the lights and in music to create a sort of an environment for worship. I think that's, that's fine, but we need to be cautious of not doing what the drug does, shutting down the higher reasoning and shutting down the, the separate, you know, what our brain functioning like Christianity is not a pure spiritual thing. It's, it's us on earth, doing the pure religion, serving the poor, serving others, being in community as individuals, you know, and serving God and pursuing Jesus and bringing the kingdom and all that. So I think my creating an environment is, is, is fine as long as we're not going, not creating a cult, you know, that makes sense. Sort of like the pendulum swing to the other side, you know, we, in a modern world, we have this idolatrous exaltation of reason, right? And, and, but the other side is just as bad if you suppress reason, you're also suppressing a part of truth and reality. So, again, that somewhere in between, you know, if you go to either extreme, you're going to be suppressing one element of how we actually know and experience truth. Well, I think, I think we can wrap up. So let's, let's do that. I'm going to propose a topic at the end of this one. So we'll, I'll just go into a little bit of a wrap up here. And you don't have to agree to do the next topic, but I'm just going to throw it out as, as a maybe so that people get an idea. Well, I want to thank everybody for participating again. Again, our little panel has sort of held, held fast here. This is a, it's an interesting topic. Again, I admitted my distance from it at the beginning. But the questions, you know, the readings were good, the questions were certainly good. I think the discussion was, was well worth it. Again, even though I can't in some ways, you know, really completely relate to the topic, but, you know, I appreciated some of the insights, you know, that, but the rest of you were able to put into it, at least for me anyway. For the next time, I want to propose, you know, kind of an odd topic here. And, and again, we'll decide in the interim if we're really going to do this, but you, I presume all of you have heard stories to the effect. Where somebody gets a, an organ transplant or a heart transplant, and they begin to take on, like, aspects of the personality of the donor, or some such thing. I have two articles that deal with that. I'll be honest with you. This is not an easy thing to track down. But I have two articles. So right away, you might want to say yes, because it's not seven. I didn't mean that you had to read all the articles. I should be a little more circumspect, you know, when it, when I send these things out. But I thought that might be an interesting take because I, you know, looking at this topic, this is a real tough one, you know, to kind of understand what in the world is going on here. And since there isn't a whole lot of research, I think it might be a little more open-ended, but I will, I'll send those to you.  Please feel free to recommend something. But maybe our next topic will be, you know, metaphysics of organ transplantation or something like that. We'll give it a title. So thanks for, thanks for showing up and discussing drugs. Discussing drugs today. All right, guys. See you guys. Bye guys. See you later. Bye bye.