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The Joe Rogan experience.

Train by day. Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. So thanks for coming in, Michelle.

Thanks, Joe, for having me.

My pleasure.

I love your man cave.

Oh, thank you.

I really do. It's awesome.

Yeah, it's, it's fun. Um, so when I heard your story, I was like, this sounds completely insane, and just to fill people in, just explain what happened.

Well, I was born into a cult, a high control group that I didn't know to call a cult because, you know, I was born there. That was my whole experience. My grandfather started in 1931, so my mother was also born into the cult in the 1940s. My dad was, let's just say he was twelve when he first met my grandfather, who would later become his father in law, and my grandfather became his father figure. So my mom was married off to this man who was a follower of her father, and I am the second child of their union.

Wow. And yeah, where did all this take place?

So this took place, he originally started it near La in Pasadena, which most people know because of the Rose parade and other things like that. When he first started it, it started, my understanding is he was a boy scout leader and he was an orphan. He had come from Oklahoma when he was a young man, and the boy scouts didn't allow him to have as much control as he wanted to have over the boys. Oh, boy. Yeah. Which is a lot of control. So he left the boy scouts and he took the boys with him, and some of the boys from his original troop in 1931 stayed with him past his death. One of the first boys took over after him in the late 1980s.

Wow.

Or the early 1980s, actually. Yeah. So he was really good at getting followers.

What was his background like? What did he do before he did all this?

Nothing.

Nothing.

He was complete. I don't think he graduated from high school. I don't know that for sure. He lied about everything. And he said he had a PhD from Stanford. Later when he. Yeah, it wasn't until I got to college I said, no, I'm not even 100% sure he knew how to read, to be quite honest.

Really?

He came from a family where he was the only child that lived out of his particular mother who was married to a man. It was a second marriage and his first wife had died and then he had a bunch of kids or whatever. So he had a bunch of half siblings, but no full siblings. And apparently now this could be lore too. They kind of excommunicated him. He compared himself to Joseph, you know, like, of the multicolored clothing and everything. So he was like, put down a. Well, he liked to say, and he escaped and he came to LA in the height of. No, no, the silent films, things like that. He said he was in silent films. There's no chance that is true. But he said he was. And he got some sort of probably church education when he got here. And he declared to everyone he was the prophet of God, he was going to live 500 years and he was going to lead the army of God in the second coming.

Wow. And that's your grandpa?

That's my grandpa. It certainly is.

Oh, my God.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

You can't pick your grandpa.

No, you can't.

No.

But it was a male organization for a very long time. It was all men. And it wasn't until all men. All men. It was all men. It was from 1931 to 1966 when my mom married my father. No one was allowed to get married there. And they were all, presumably celibate and it was just men.

Oh, my. Presumably.

Presumably.

It's like prison. Yeah, they're gay for this day.

Absolutely. So I was raised by a bunch of older men who had never been with a woman.

Oh, my God.

Seeing how well that ended. But he didn't want his daughter to be an old maid, and she was getting older. She was 24 by the time he married her off to my dad. And at that point, I think the women, like his wife said, it was their fourth child, they had three boys first, and. And so this was his first daughter. And he decided that since the world had not yet ended, that maybe he should marry her off before she either became an old maid or maybe a loose woman. Who knows?

When did he think the world was going to end?

Well, he used to prophesy. 1977.

Want some more fire?

Sure, I'd love some fire.

I'll keep this over here if you want.

It's easy to use where I come from. This is a grave sin, by the way.

Oh. A woman smoking a cigar, or anyone?

Anyone? Smoking a cigar?

Anyone? Are you allowed to drink coffee?

Yes.

What was the rules?

Well, coffee is interesting because I don't know that they said out loud you could drink coffee, but I don't remember it being forbidden that the body is the temple of God and that there's no marking your body with ink. No piercing your ear. I know I have a lot of ink myself. I wasn't sure if I should show it off.

No piercing in the ears.

Right? No piercing in the ears.

What about makeup?

No makeup. When I was younger, unusually cut off women's hair, at least during the era that I was there. Now there was an cut it off.

Like a boy's hair.

Yes. My mom had the exact same haircut since she got married, until she died. The exact same haircut. She died in 2022. Yeah. So just a lot of the femininity was considered a temptation to the boys. And since it was supposed to be, they thought it was better to, you know, burn in hell then to lust after a woman. And they quoted some stuff from Paul, you know, in the apostles and the epistles, and that basically you could get married as opposed to lust. And so eventually, in the 1960s, they allowed their first wedding, which is 35 years. Think about that. 35 years of celibacy of all. Yeah, just a bunch of dudes.

Wow. It is just absolutely fascinating to me how some people develop these groups and how they do it and, like, what the characteristics of the leaders are. It's so weird. There's a place out here called the one World Theater, and it used to be owned by a cult that there's a documentary on called Holy Hell. And this guy had started a cult in Los Angeles. He was a yoga teacher, but he was also a gay porn star and a hypnotist.

It's a nice combo.

It's a great combo for a documentary. The documentary is incredible. You watch the documentary, like, what the hell? And he was running from the cult awareness network, so he changed his name. His original name was Jaime Gomez. He changed his name. I forget what it was. He had, like, two different names. So I think one was Michelle and there was another one. So. And then he came out here to Austin because right after Waco, they were kind of cracking down on cults, and they were trying to find. Yeah. So they're like, we gotta go. So the cult awareness network was on to him because also family members were calling in, hey, we lost our children. They're with this guy and he's crazy. And, you know, they got the people in the woods in LA. And so he moved out to Austin and had his followers build him this theater where he could dance in front of them.

Wow.

Yeah. And so did he get a dancer. It was like, he was a very handsome guy, and he was very charismatic, and he was, like, ripped. He was a yoga instructor. He had a six pack. He was a beautiful man. And I think he. And he also was kind of exotic looking, so he had this, like, guru thing going on. And then he was also a hypnotist. So he's really good at manipulating people's. Consciousness.

That might be a criteria for being a cult leader, by the way. Charismatic, maybe a form of hypnotist. Like, you have to be able to manipulate consciousness, because if people, at least your top leaders, have to be indoctrinated if they are not. I mean, some people call it brainwashing. You can call it what you want, but you have to have people who worship you. Yeah, it doesn't work unless you do, of course.

I think we have a very narrow idea of what hypnotism is because of the term. I think the term. You lock on the term, like, oh, I want to quit smoking, I'll go to a hypnotist. And they sit here and the clock, tick tock, tick tock. But I think there's, like, states of mind melding that happen with people where you all get sort of locked into a state of consciousness. And I think it happens in riots, definitely. You know what I'm saying? Like the madness of the crowds. There's something real about that. If you've ever been in a chaotic public environment where, like, fights break out or something like that, there's a very strange feeling in the air. Air that leads people to do things that they would never do before. People that would never pick up a shopping cart and throw it through a Starbucks window will do that now. It's like everybody just loses their fucking mind. And I think it happens in concerts when people are jamming out together. You all get in the same mind frequency. And I think a really good cult leader does that, too. I think they get these people and they lock them into this way of thinking.

And we don't want to call it hypnotism, but I think there's a lot of states that are very similar to hypnotism in that something happens where you enter into an altered state of consciousness that's probably accessible somehow or another, but you don't know how to get there. But then this song brings you there, or this person brings you there with their talk about the impending apocalypse, and you're all locked in, and it gives people a sense of belonging and purpose that you're locked into this frequency that everybody else in the room was locked into.

It's very comforting. I mean, there are a lot of things about a cult that are very comforting.

Yeah, I think that's a. I'm sorry, but I think that's the positive benefit of religion.

Absolutely.

You know, it's like this. This thing comforts you. And even if. Even if, like, it's like some of them's gotta be wrong. Someone's gotta be wrong. Or if you have a hundred different ones and they're all different gods and different people, somebody's gotta be wrong. But the one common denominator that they share is that if you do believe in these things, it seems to aid you in life. People seem to be happier. They seem to have more of a sense of purpose. They don't feel lost, you know, like some of the least happy people I know are atheists. And it's. I have a joke about it where I say you're really dumb for not believing in stupid shit. Because if you believed in stupid shit, if you believed in dumb shit, you'd be happier. That would be a smarter move because it's kind of true. And I think that's what's so fascinating to me about these cults as how they do it, how they lock people in. I mean, I'm sure because of your experience, you've probably seen a few of these documentaries, right? You've probably seen.

I definitely have. And, you know, when I watched the reenactment of the Waco one, which is not the documentary, but the. Did you read or watch the one that came out maybe five years ago?

No, no.

But they showed, you know, the children and how they didn't want to leave, you know, they. And just how difficult. There was a child psychologist who worked with them afterwards, and I was very interested in that because it takes a long time to undo the level of. I mean, it's one thing to have a faith, right? Like believing in. You can call it stupid shit, but whatever you believe in, it's one thing to have a faith, but to not have the ability to think for yourself and that to be trained out of you. So I went to lunch a couple days ago with someone I hadn't seen since I was three. And he. So a lot of fellow former field members have come out of the woodwork since.

We should tell. Field is the name of the group.

Yes, we called ourselves the fields. And one of these former members, who I won't name, I hadn't seen. I didn't recognize him at all. I just hadn't seen him since I was a little kid. But several of them have come out who knew my parents and of course knew my grandfather before I was born and then maybe knew me when I was a little teeny girl. And they have lots of stories. Anyway, he was on one of these things we called the trip with the capital t. And what we did on the trip, I mean, there were different things in different years, but this one was in the early 1970s, and. And he was, you know, doing all the things you do on the trip. But one thing they required, which my father required of us at home, too, is to run every morning, first thing in the morning, which you can say, there's some good things about this, but you slept together in tents, and then you'd get up and you'd run, and you'd have to beat your time. And my father used to time us as a kid, so, like, I had to beat my time every day, which is really hard to do, of course, because at some point, you're not going to be able to beat your time, right?

Like, you can't always get better. But at this point, he was 19, and he was beating the time. He said, in that time, was it in relation to the fastest runner? And so if the fastest guy was going really fast, you had to keep the same ratio of distance. So, anyway, he didn't make his time. There were three guys who didn't make their time, and they had to go through the swat machine. So my grandpa often made boys go through the swat machine. And the simple version, which was done at the actual location of the field, was you'd crawl through men's. The other boys or men's legs, and every boy would spank you. I know. I know.

Oh, my God.

I know. They're little. Well, we won't even get into all the things you can think about that. But there was a different version that was only done when the boys were separated from their parents. And so when they would go on these trips, and my dad was the original driver, he started driving. By the time he was 18, he was driving all around the country, taking my grandfather's boys. So, again, my father was not his son. He was just some dude, like, you know, joined to this cult. And my father would drive these boys around, and he would time them when they ran and did all those things. And so in this particular case, they did swap machine where you have to hold onto a fence, point, pole, and you face the fence, and then all the guys come and they hit you. So they're not just spanking you, but they're hitting you. And so he was getting kidney punches and all this stuff. And he was saying he fell to his knees, and he was. He was. He almost died. He was so bruised up, and he was. He did not want anyone to know this story.

He hasn't spoken of it because he was so shamed that potentially someone might think, why didn't you fight back. And of course I said, but you were trained. Not you trained, that you deserved this, you know? And then apparently one of my uncles, you know, was really worried, wanted to take him to the hospital, but couldn't or didn't because they had no insurance. And this young man, who's no longer a young man, said that, you know, he could never tell his parents, and he never, to this day, ever told his parents or anyone. He and his brother have never spoken of their time in the fields. It is like this big taboo. He got out maybe a year later. But he was. I mean, that was only one of many, many, many stories he told me. But that one just really struck me to feel ashamed of that, you know? Like, I guess for many years, I, too, did not tell people where I came from, because you feel like you must have done something weak to be a follower. And that's just not true. I mean, if someone gets ahold of you as a child, they can program you to think almost anything, especially if they're good at it.

Yeah, unquestionably. I mean, that's why they have child suicide bombers.

Yes.

Yeah. I mean, you can trick children. It's understandable, though, that you would think, somehow or another, that other people would think that it's your fault, or ignorant people would think, why didn't, you know, why didn't you leave? You know? Or people that, you know, never really thought about it, never thought it through, because they haven't had to.

The friends I went out with, who, I mean, I'm calling them friends now, but I hadn't seen them since I was a little girl. They were saying, I would have. Of course you would drink the Kool Aid. And when people use that expression, I would have been first in line, would have signed up for that. We all would have. And I mean that. And I was born there and indoctrinated, and I would have completely taken anything that my grandfather or my parents told me was going to kill me. I would have, you know, I would have felt that that was going to take me to heaven quicker, and everyone I knew would have done that.

Wow.

And the reason you don't hear about a lot of cults, by the way, is because they didn't end up in flames or mass suicide. But that doesn't mean that they didn't prey on, you know, dozens, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of people, depending on the cult.

I was talking to Mark Andreessen, and he was explaining to me that there's still many, many active cults in California.

Absolutely.

And I was like, what? Like, right now, like, people know about them? Oh, yeah. They're successful. Like, there's some successful cults.

Mm hmm. Yeah. When I first started.

Is the field still around?

The field's still around. I've been told it is a completely different organization, and I'm not going to vouch one way or the other. They certainly don't have a charismatic look leader like my grandfather. Once he died and his replacement was there, and then once he died, I think it's become, has not become secular. It's a very strong religious organization. But they don't have the control they used to, because, like, when we were young, they wouldn't have Social Security number. There was no way to track things. And now, you know, it's hard to get away with.

You have to pay taxes.

Yes, they do pay taxes. And there was a sexual abuse, you know, case that was actually prosecuted, and I think after that, which I think was 2006, I think that they had to really clean up a lot of their practices.

When I'm hearing these stories about these boys and the abuse, that's what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking, if there's a bunch of boys and no one's allowed to get married, that's not a good recipe.

No, it's not. And the particular one that got prosecuted was a young leader who was abusing eleven and twelve year old boys sexually. I say out loud, I said this to my mom. I said, mom, isn't it curious that no one's ever prosecuted anyone for what they did to girls? And I was a sexual abuse victim there, and it was something I was so ashamed of for so long. And. Anyway, but there's other forms of abuse that go on. I mean, there's obviously physical abuse, but there's a lot of psychological abuse. There's a lot of ways that it gets inside of you that you're worthless and that you can't trust yourself, and you can't even trust yourself with your own stories. And I have a slightly younger brother who adores you, by the way.

Thomas. What's up? What's his name?

His name's Michael.

What's up, Michael?

Yeah. I love him to death. And he was raised, you know, we were all raised collectively, but we were also raised separate from each other. And my biological siblings, we all had different experiences because they don't let you bond. They don't want my sister, who's just a little bit younger, she and I, we loved each other deeply, but we weren't allowed to speak to each other, sometimes for weeks or months at a time. And they were just strongly against you forming what they would call allies. They didn't want friendships that could turn into anything that would be a little bit probably culty, but no, like, anything that would form a clique, they used to call it.

Right. Any other groups where another person could be in control.

Right.

Or they could discuss who's in control.

Yes. Or any loyalty to anyone else other than the primary leader. There's a lot of ways that you can indoctrinate people and make them police themselves.

Oh, shit. That's what North Korea does. Yeah, North Korea gets everybody to rat on everybody else.

Oh, yeah. That was huge. Where I come from, I have. I felt like it was a huge compliment. One of the former members came out of the woodworks after this, and he said, you know, I knew that you would never rat us out. And I was like, man, that's so great. But, I mean, it was something we were all taught so, so, so deeply that, yeah, you.

You have to, no matter if this is your brother or your sister or your mom, you have to tell on them.

You have to, because your words, trust.

Me, keeps everybody scared all the time.

You never trust anyone.

God, that's so. It's so insidious and yet also brilliant. Like, it's evil. It's evil, but it's. How did he figure out how to do it? That's crazy. And how is he able to pull it off? That's what's always so fascinating to me, that it's not like children. With children, it just makes 100% sense. You're raised there. You think this is reality, and you think that the world outside reality is all a bunch of evil demons or whatever it is, but if you're an adult, like, you're a grown adult, 34 year old man, and you meet this dude at the auto repair shop, and he hands you a pamphlet, and the next thing you know, you're on a farm somewhere. Like, how do those people.

So I can't vouch to that. I will say that the unusual thing about the field is you have to join as a child. There are no adults who join, really. It's kind of like a pyramid scheme. Most people join when they're five or six and they are indoctrinated, and then they play sports. Like, so, for example, they play tackle football at age five, and so they teach everyone how to, you know, play game, but it's only the people who are really good at the game that they continue to court. I would say you could call them groom, whatever. But there's a lot more kids there than will ever get into the inner circles. And it's a little like the mob or something. Like, I was born in the inner circle, but there are plenty of people who came out of that cult who honestly weren't harmed by it because they got out young. So as long as you get out by the age of twelve, you're probably okay. But they don't keep you unless you're really fully indoctrinated. And most of the people who stay really don't have a family to go back to. And they separate you from your family.

And so they do more and more separation as you become a teenager. By the time you're 18, you're signing a commitment for life form Jesus. And I'm not saying that's happening now, but that was 100% happened not just during my era, but all the decades prior to me.

So it's not just a cult, but it's like it's got a sort of a meritocracy built into it.

Yeah, but I think a lot of cults have that.

Really?

I think so, yeah. Yeah. I mean, you have to kick people.

Out that don't line up enough.

Yeah. So cults in general kick people out. In fact, they want you to believe that staying is hard and that you have to work hard to stay. I think the misconception is that they're trying to get you in. Sure. They're seducing you in some way. There's some sort of calling card, whether it's a pamphlet or something else. But once you're there, do I have what I know?

I said yoga class.

Yeah, exactly. That's what that guy did. Exactly. Yeah. Dancing, you know, but whatever brings you in. But then after that, it's like you're the strong one, you're the special one for choosing to stay in this particular cult. They always would say, there's 20 of you in this room. 19 of you will fall away. There's only one of you who will make it into the army of God.

Geez. It's like the navy seals of cults.

It kind of is. And there is a lot of physical. Yeah.

They only want the best of the best. So if you're a child and you're in, I mean, first of all, how could anybody ever expect a child who gets indoctrinated into that to know the difference? If that's your reality and that's what you grow up with, how could you possibly know what. I mean, what year are we talking about when you were like eight years.

Old, that would have been the late seventies.

Yeah. So nobody knows what the hell's going on?

Oh, absolutely.

Not even in the world. Exactly. The whole thing's a big foggy haze. There's no Internet. The world's. We have like one 10th of access to information that we do today. And you're also a child and you think that this is reality and parents.

Were used to their kids being gone all the time. And I think that that was not something unusual because one thing I hear for kids who went there, people say, well how did your parents allow that? And I mean parents, like they sent them off to the sports place and then their kid got really into it and then at some point their kid became a teenager and didn't want to come home anymore. And I mean they're like, well I don't think my kids doing drugs or I don't think that they're like in prison. So it seems like they're doing pretty well.

But it also seems like societally there was a shift at some point in time where what was the year? Where more women entered the workforce and more women started getting jobs.

So that happened in the seventies. I think 1973 might have been like one of those. I mean it obviously was starting to happen in the sixties, but there was a lot of women at home in the sixties. Around 1973 to 1979, you had a huge exodus of women out of the home. The women I come from, I mean like my grandmother who had my father who joined this cult, she was always a working woman, minimum wage working woman. She didn't have more than 8th grade education. She worked because her father, I mean, excuse me, me, my dads father, her husband had been in world War two and got, you know, pretty severe PTSD or whatever, was an alcoholic and beat her. And so she ran away from him. She just had one child, which was my father. She was living in a chicken coop near LA, just with this one son, and she was the first woman to get hired in a factory. But this was in the 1940s, so there were always women, of course, and lots of women of color who were working, but it wasnt the middle class women who were working, but the poor women were always working.

Right. I'm just thinking like Latchkey kids at that point back then, seventies and even eighties. Yeah, it was totally common. All my friends, we just got let out of the house when we were kids. You just got on the bus, went to school, walked home from school, rode the bus, hung out with your friends, nobody knew where you were right.

So you could have been in a cult, and your parents would have not necessarily known.

I think I would have told them. Well, but I could have got sucked into one. That's the point. It's like everybody looks at themselves as who they are today. So if you're a 35 year old man and you're listening to this today, you're like, I wouldn't get sucked into that. That. You can't say that because you're not a five year old boy. If you're a five year old boy, you don't know what the fuck is going on. You're a child. By the time you're 18, you sort of get a. Especially if you're a little street wise, like, all right, some people are shady. I know what the fuck's going on. Listen to this guy. He's trying to rope me in. I remember there was this christian group when I was in college that was trying to indoctrinate people, and they were. They were like young, good looking people. And there was this beautiful puerto rican girl, and she was always trying to get me to go to parties with her. And I was like, wow, did I hit that jackpot. Like, eventually I'm going to get a date with this girl. Like, this is amazing.

You know, it was probably 1920, I guess 2021, maybe. And one day she invites me to go to this retreat on the weekend. Like they have some crazy christian retreat. And I'm like, oh, my God, a retreat? Like, she's not telling me it's a christian retreat. She's telling me it's like this fun party and this whole thing. And I said, I can't. I have plans this weekend. I go, but if you guys ever do another one of those things, that sounds like fun. So Monday morning or whatever the day was, I'm in school, and we're all in the cafeteria, and it was the day that Trump's airplane, the landing gear, failed to open. And so we all sit down at the lunch table, and I'd just seen it on the news. I said, did you see this thing on the news about the plane? It's crazy. Like, the landing gear didn't. Didn't go out. And so the plane, just on the belly of the plane, skid across the Runway, and there's all these crazy sparks. And I go, but nobody died. And they go, oh, praise God, praise God. And I was like, what? Like, what's going on here?

This super hot puerto rican girl's like, oh, praise God. They're all, praise God, praise God. And I'm like, oh. And then it just immediately clicked. You dummy.

They were trying to get you to.

Go to their church thing. You thought she liked you. And then they started talking to me more about God. And then I was like, oh, I gotta go. I got a class.

I gotta get out of here.

Fuck.

So you didn't get that date?

No, no, I avoided them. They were in my italian class and they were learning how to speak Italian, and I avoided them. I was like, I can't, I can't be, I can't be involved in this because they were all glossy. They were all like, they were all believers. Not, this is not saying that God's not real. This is not saying that Christianity is not true. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is you could have got those people with Scientology, you could have got those people with Mormonism. You could have got those people with the Moonies, whatever. They were just looking for a thing that they could attach themselves to and then formulate their identity based around this thing. And for them it was Christianity. And it was this, like, youthful form of Christianity where they're trying to get young people. They're making it like retreats. We're gonna have. We're gonna party. And they were all socially odd. They were all real awkward people. It was really, it was very interesting, though, to me, the person who's always curious about human beings. I was like, this is wild. I'm hanging around.

Well, I think in high control groups, they do tend to obviously cater to the young. I mean, they're soliciting the young. And I want to be clear, too, I'm not anti religion. I think high control groups, cults are a whole different experience. And yes, they use religion, but they don't teach you to have faith and to trust yourself in your faith. They teach you to follow someone else's faith.

I used to have a joke about what's the difference between a cult and a religion, where a cult is created by one guy and he knows it's bullshit. In a religion, that guy's dead. Yeah, and all the other people, all the other people that this fucking dude 2000 years ago convinced. But some religions are really beneficial and they might in fact, be based on some kind of true story. I think it's a game of telephone. That's what I think. I think if you tell me a story and I tell Jamie the story, and then Jamie tells someone out in the lobby a story, by the time it gets to me all the way again, it's going to be screwed up, right? Sure. Now imagine this over thousands of years of just oral tradition and then writing in lost languages, like ancient Hebrew. They wrote them in Aramaic on animal skins. Some of these stories, like the Dead Sea Scrolls. And then they eventually translate them to Latin and to Greek into Roman, and to English into German. Like what?

Lost in translation.

Also, like, what did they know? How much did they know? They had some ideas of, like, the formation of the universe. The beginning. There was light. Sounds a lot like the big bang. Sounds a lot like if you would tell the big bang to your kids, and your kids would tell it to their kids, and you're gonna do this for a thousand years, at the end of it, you're gonna get some real. People are gross. They always, like to, like, twist things around and make things, you know, they add their own little spice to a story. Like, if you ever a friend that tells a story, hey, bro, that didn't happen that way. Like, you didn't say that you fucking ran for cover. Like, everybody's got their own version of a story. If you got oral traditions, 100% for sure, you're gonna have a lot of that. Especially when you have high control groups like your grandfather. Your grandfather.

Think about the translations, too. Like, even when the monks were translating all that and, like, they were scribes and they were inscribing it. Yeah, like, all of that, too. There was an agenda on a lot of that. Yeah. And then when we read the King James version of the Bible, I mean, you know, the king pronounced it to be so and so. Anything that was left out. I mean, there was a lot left out. Right. And what was canonized, because it was perhaps dangerous to the particular regime that he was running. And so not to get to decide. Yes, I know.

You get to decide what God meant. Yeah, I think God didn't mean any of that. Take that stuff out. My problem is never with religion. My problem is purely with human nature and what we know about humans. If there was a way that you got religion through some sort of non human source, like, if you achieved your experience through a non human source, I would go, okay, well, maybe there's a place that you can go and you could actually go meet God. There's like a portal you walk through and you meet God, but as soon as you're doing, you're letting people tell you a story. People are full of shit. They just generally. Generally, at least a certain percentage are full of shit. And the people that want to control people have a much higher likelihood of being full of shit. Cause to really do that correctly, like, if you want to be a president, like, you gotta lie, you gotta lie. It's like really important. So the people that are like good at that job are generally full of shit. And so then you have a problem with the interpretation of the past, right?

I mean, you're seeing that right now in universities. Like, people are trying to reinterpret certain events because of the way people feel about socio political issues today. So they're trying to reinterpret history, take down statues. There's a lot of like, craziness that's going on today. Well, that's like a microcosm of the ancient history of human beings. It's not that God's not real, it's that people are full of shit. And so there's some. A lot of wisdom in a lot of these ancient religious texts in particular, which is really fascinating, like how much did they know about the human experience? How much did they know about how you need to live your life in order to be harmonious with the universe? How do you accentuate positive experiences? How do you leave the world a little bit better than it was before you got here?

Have you read the Bible, by the way?

I did when I was a kid. I actually had Bible class in Florida. When I moved from San Francisco to Florida, I was eleven years old. And it was a complete polar opposite experience of the country. I lived in San Francisco with two parents that were hippies in Haight Ashbury. So we were in the middle of like, we lived near Lombard street. We were in the middle of like the hippie anti war revolution of the 1960s. And then I moved to Gainesville, Florida. My stepdad was going to. He was becoming an architect. He was a computer programmer, and then he switched careers, became an architect. And so he's going to a University of Florida at Gainesville. And so we were there. So now all of a sudden I'm around alligators. There's fucking alligators everywhere. It was like, what are you people, retarded? Why do you have giant monsters everywhere? This is so ridiculous. So we had alligators. Super weird swampy weather. And religion. Religion was in the schools. Like in public school, you had Bible class and they also paddled you. It was the first time I'd ever been hit by a teacher. I got in this fistfight with this kid and they whacked us with a paddle.

Can I ask you, algret, a question? So when you were in Florida in the 1970s, were you there in the late 1970s?

It was, let me see, so I was in 67. I was born. So I. In 73, I was in San Francisco. So 75, 76.

Okay. Did you know of someone whose name is Ross Allen in Florida?

I have no idea. I was eleven.

Well, he was older, like he would have. He. He was an alligator. Yeah, he's an alligator wrestler. He had an alligator farm.

Alligator wrestlers. What's the lifespan on those fellas?

Well, I don't know when. I don't know when he died, but.

Yeah, that doesn't seem like that would work out so well.

They probably banged him.

I don't know even that. They're just gonna break your arms off.

Beginning in which. I need more fire.

Oh, sorry. Grab that sucker right there and pull the top back. Flip it around the other side. Like this? This way, this way. The other way, this way. No, the other way. It's upside down. See this? There you go. Now see the top? Pull it sucker back like that. Like there? Yeah, pull it down.

Pull it down. I cannot believe how that.

No, it's not open. You got to open the top. Flip that top. No, no, look.

See this? My hand.

Oh, my God.

I know. There you go.

You got it.

Thank you. I feel like I came here to learn this.

Perfect.

Thank you.

Yeah, it's a little weird because it's all black and so it kind of blends in. Especially if you're like us and your eyes are probably going as time goes on.

Like, I can do it myself.

There's not a chance in hell I could ever do one of those clasps on a. Like a bracelet. Those little tiny bracelets, like them little clasps. Like, if my wife tries to get me to do one of those, I'm like, I don't even know what I'm seeing. I have no idea what that is. I see blur. I see golden blur. What the fuck? That is what we just talked about.

Well, you were talking about learning the Bible in school, but. So one of the things that a lot of people who have read the Bible or they have read a portion of the Bible, I definitely don't think.

I read the whole thing.

Well, yeah, that's the thing is not very many people do. And that's why I asked, because a lot of it is. Is kind of tedious history. And there's a lot of hebegats and there's a whole line, you know, of Christ, all the ancestors, and the whole delineation of all that. And where I come from, we were encouraged to read like, a verse of the Bible, but they would always tell you what it meant. And so I kind of went against. I used this little pin light and, like, did it, like, late at night. But I read the whole thing cover to cover when I was eight. And if you read, like, every single book in order, you start to find that there's a lot of really beautiful, beautiful, beautiful places in the Bible, but there's a lot of stuff that's really violent. And then there's a lot of stuff that contradicts itself. And it's because it was written in different time periods by different authors and different languages, and it also has historical context. And so generally, there's a lot of stuff that people leave out when they teach the Bible because it's really hard to explain.

Like what stuff?

Well, there's, for example. I mean, this one's taught a little bit, but David, King David, I'm sure you've heard of him, like, as of David and Goliath. But then he became a powerful king. And he saw this woman, who this woman is often talked about, Bathsheba. He sees her bathing on a roof. And where we came from, we were taught, like, she shouldn't have been bathing on the roof. No, I don't. Right. Anyway, he demands that she come to him. And she is the wife of a soldier of his name, Uriah, a top soldier. And he commands her to lie with him, and she becomes pregnant. And then King David, who is the same guy who had the slingshot of David and Goliath, decides that he's got to figure out how to get her husband back so that her husband can go sleep with her. And her husband won't do it because he's loyal to the army. And he comes back, but he sleeps, like, at the floor of the castle, you know, trying to.

Wait a minute. He's trying to get the husband to go back with the wife so that she.

The pregnancy will seem like it's his.

Oh, boy.

Yeah.

So in the Bible.

In the Bible.

Dirty David.

Yeah, exactly. And it doesn't even end there. So Uriah won't do it. Cause Uriah is loyal to David.

Oh, boy.

And so then David sends him to the front lines to have him be killed.

Oh, boy.

So that he can marry his wife and get away with that child's not being illegitimate.

Oh, boy.

And then God kills the child because, you know, needs to make the point that David was. And think about poor Bathsheba. I mean, she's just been, like, rung around. Her husband gets killed, all these things. Her kid dies because God is punishing.

David and her husband got killed, was loyal to the guy who got her pregnant.

Absolutely. That's not a story a lot of people hear.

Oh, my God.

But you can fact check that one if you'd like.

Oh, no, I believe you. I'm good at that. I'm good at just. Ok, now go argue it.

I mean, there's something I talk a little bit about in the book forger, which I encourage everyone to read. But in that book I talk about as a kid that I looked up this whole long, you know, he begat, he begat. And there's only four times that it mentions a woman who a child came out of, like, it's all the male line, but occasionally they'll say so and so, you know, Boaz through Ruth, or David's the father through Bathsheba. So Bathsheba ended up having a child who became Solomon, who we know a lot of people know, at least of being the wisest man who ever lived. And he wrote ecclesiastes and. Yeah, and so there's four women who are named. And as a child, that was really interesting to me. And I would ask, you know, why are these four women in the line of Christ? And no one would tell me. And so I started doing the research about that. And one was a prostitute. Oh, here's a story you don't hear a lot. Want to hear another Bible story?

Sure.

There was a woman named Tamar, and she had been married to one of three sons, I think there was three. And her husband died before giving her a child. So as was the custom in the time, and perhaps the law, she married the brother of her dead husband, and that man would not give her a child because he didn't want to have a child in his brother's name. And so they're allowed to have more than one wife, but this woman was not allowed to have a child. So he does something they call onanism. So he, like, spilled his seed on the ground instead of inside of hers that she couldn't have a baby. And so God gets really mad because Onan will not impregnate her. And so Onan gets killed, too. And so then her father in law decides not to marry her off to the youngest brother because two of the brothers are already dead. Right? And he doesn't want to lose his only son, so he just banishes her and she has nothing. Because what does a woman have at the time if she doesn't have a husband or a child? She has no ability to make a living in the world.

And so this man is. The father in law is really unkind to her in a way that she decides she needs to take something into her own hands. And so she dresses up like a prostitute and goes to the side of the road, and as he's traveling on the road, she puts herself in front of him and offers her services, and he sleeps with her, and he does not have payment on him for some reason. And so he gives her his staff, which is a token of his word or something. So at least he's paying his prostitute. And she gets pregnant from this. And he orders her, when he finds out she's pregnant, to be stoned to death, to be killed and executed because she's not allowed to have a baby outside of wedlock. And she said, okay, but let me just return this staff to you that I got from the father of the baby. And so then he ends up protecting her, and she gets to have the child. And that child is in the line of Christmas.

Whoa.

Yeah. So really interesting things. I don't know what you're supposed to learn from that story. When I was a kid reading this, I would ask, and of course, no one really wanted to tell me because she was rewarded for that. That's the interesting thing.

Those stories are crazy. It's just if you're being honest and if you believe in God, but you also know that people are full of shit, you have to put all this stuff through a filter. You just have to. And it doesn't mean that there's no God. Of course it doesn't mean that. It just. It means there's probably something in these stories, but we have to be real careful with what that something is.

And I don't profess to know. I don't. I don't know why they condone slavery.

The Bible condone slavery. Like, flat out it's in there all the time.

Yes.

Women are essentially second class citizens. And you know what I found out recently? That there was a woman before Eve.

Depending on who you ask.

Yeah. So what was that one?

Well, that's not in the 66 books of the Bible that most people are taught in the protestant tradition or the 69 or whatever. In the catholic tradition, that's part of the apocrypha. So these are books of the Bible that didn't make it into, you know, Christianity as such that we.

The editor's cut today.

Yeah, it was an editor's cut. Exactly. So that's not considered the word of God. What you're reading that is considered or what you heard, it's like word on the street.

Word on the street. Yeah, I heard on the Internet. But, yeah, okay.

That's the street these days.

Yeah, it is. It's the best street.

Yeah. Which is not to say it's not true. I don't know the truth. So I'm a yoga teacher, among other things. And one thing that I say all the time when I'm teaching, which is really common thing as a yoga teacher, to say is, whatever I am giving you right now is a suggestion, so listen to your body, do what's right for you. If this doesn't feel right to you, please don't do it. And then you offer modifications, etcetera. And what high control religion does, and I'm not saying all religion, I'm saying the cultural religion doesn't give you the option of listening to your body or opting out of anything. This is the interpretation of the word of God. And the one thing I will say is, I don't know why Tamar did what she did or why Onan did what he did. You know, I don't know whether or not the stories were transcribed accurately or not. Even if they were like, that is a different culture. Right. And I wasn't there.

We don't even know if OJ did it.

Right. So how are you going to know what happened to David and Bathsheba?

I mean, we're pretty sure. Sure he did it well, but I was just reading some story that OJ hired thugs to. There was another thing. There was some thing that he said that he hired thugs to kill his wife and Ron Goldman. So this is really recent, is my point. And there's a bunch of versions of it and. Depends on who gets into power, whatever version gets propagated. Like, if you. If there was no Internet and no independent journalism, and they never had to account for the fact that Iraq never really had weapons of mass destruction. If the people in charge, if we're living in 1963, how long does it take before people figure out that Iraq didn't have those weapons? How long did we ever find out?

I don't know. I was gonna say you might not ever find out.

You might not ever find out. It took forever just to figure out that the Gulf of Tonkin was a false flag that got us into Vietnam.

Right?

I mean, it took decades for that to come out. And now that's widely accepted. So our own history is sketchy as fuck. Our own history, our real, absolute history, is sketchy as fuck.

Yeah.

And that's why conspiracy theories are so fun.

Yeah, of course. And in a sense. A cult is just a whole conspiracy theory. I mean, like. But they control the narrative. They completely control the narrative, and no one's allowed to question it. And if they do, they're excommunicated. And one of the ways you know something as a cult is they will always tell you that anyone who left, it's different than outsiders. I mean, outsiders are people who maybe had never had access to the truth, but people who are quitters, they literally called them quitters where I come from. Quitters. I know. It really is.

Nobody likes quitters.

Right, right. And so quitters were just. Anything they said was of the devil. And so you were not allowed to talk to anyone who left. And that's really common in cults. Just.

You couldn't even talk to them. Yeah, that's. That's a Scientology thing, too, I believe. Right.

Yeah, I think it's really common in any high control group, I'm sure. Yeah. Because you can't. You really do need to control the narrative, and you can't let other stories get in there.

Yeah. Wow. God damn. It's so interesting how these patterns reoccur all over the world. You know, there's a guy in Australia that says he's Jesus, and he runs this whole cult in Australia, and he has this woman who. He says it's Mary. But the problem is, there was another woman who was Mary before, and it didn't work out with the original Mary. So he tells this new lady, I was wrong about that other lady. You're Mary.

And so do you know that they say that the translation for Mary actually was woman?

Oh, wow.

And so that the word possibly just means. I mean, you think about it, there's so many Marys in the Bible. Like, when people talk about Mary Magdalene or Mary, mother of Jesus, or, you know, that it. Perhaps it's just the translation for woman.

Jesus as a historical figure is controversial. There's people that say that there's absolute evidence for Jesus, but then there's people that say, do you know, like, how much historical record we have on people that live thousands of years before Jesus? You know, there's people that lived, that they know what they said. They know where they ate, they know where they went. They know so much about them. But the Jesus one is kind of. There's people that say, yes, there's historical documents that show he existed. And then there's a bunch of documentaries that you can watch. They're like, boy, the evidence is kind of sketchy. It seems to be a thought, like a reoccurring thing in many religions. It seems to be like Hercules, right? It seems to be. There's a bunch of these that are, like, real similar to that. Like the child of a God that comes down to fix everything.

There's a lot of traditions where you have a virgin birth.

That is true.

And I am certainly not here to tell anybody what is true or not true. But the gospels that are written about Jesus were written after, right? Not during. And that was, you know, common. I mean, Socrates never wrote anything down. He told stories to Plato.

And how long after his death?

Well, I think the first one, now I feel like I am not, but I think the first one was like 100 years. And so you have apostle Paul who wrote, but he only saw Jesus after, like, he was on the road to Damascus. And so he saw Jesus after Jesus had been crucified and risen. So what he saw was a ghost of Jesus. But the other, you know, gospels were not written by anyone who had seen Jesus in that way, even though they were the versions, like of when you have Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, these are the versions that they were told. So, I don't know, maybe 100 years.

Yeah. So this is where belief hits for people that are listening to this right now, because there's going to be a certain percentage of people right now that have their hackles up because someone might be insinuating that maybe all this Jesus stuff is not legit. And that's not what anybody saying. What we're saying is these stories were written down a hundred years after he was alive and people are full of shit, that's it. It doesn't mean that he didn't exist. Because if someone did exist, like, if. If the early emergence of humans in the. In the world, let's imagine what they mean by this story. If the early emergence of humans in this world were put down here to figure it out on their own, like a bunch of lock key kids, like latchkey kids from the 1970s, figure it out on your own. I'm gonna give you ways to live your life. Tell everybody, but I'm hands off. I'm hands off. I'm an afterlife type of guy. I want you. I'm not gonna come down and explain it again, pop out of the clouds and freak everybody out. I did that once. I did it once, I'm done.

You guys killed me. So I'm just saying, live your life this way. If that was a real thing, what would be any different than the Bible? What would be any different about the. If a real event like that actually happened? Where the son of God came down and explained to mankind what they're doing wrong and lived this amazing life and taught so many people, and they spread his wisdom and they spread his. His information. It wouldn't be any different than the Bible because you're still. Even if it was, like, very clear what he was saying and very clear what he had done and the impact and how they all knew he was the son of God, by the time 100 years go by, people talking about it, who the fuck knows? Who knows?

Yeah. But you know what? Jesus did really well. So Jesus didn't write anything down, right? Like, he was a storyteller. Jesus told a lot of parables, and those are easier to remember. So if you listen to, like, his sermon on the mount or, you know, these various things, it's possible that some of these stories, which they can be interpreted more than one way, but, like, you know, to say that. Have you heard the expression casting pearls to swine?

Yes. What does that mean?

Well, in the story of the prodigal son, there was this. And Jesus tells this story, right? So there's these two brothers, and one brother stays and does everything that his father wants him to do. And the other brother says, give me, you know, the son. He says, the younger son says, give me. Give me my inheritance now. I don't want to wait till you're dead. Just give me my inheritance now. I want to go experience life. And the father gives his younger son his inheritance, and this young man, who is raised well, goes out and hires prostitutes, does all the things right and just, and lives this loose life, and he finds that he runs out of money, and he is in a pen of pigs, and he is willing to eat what even the pigs won't eat, like the leftovers. And he is face down in the mud, according to the story in the pigpen, and says, even if I was a servant from my father, I'd be treated better than this. And so he goes back, etcetera. And his older brother is really upset because the father brings the son back and treats him.

You know, he's just so grateful his son's returning to him. And his brother says, you know, or an expression like, you're casting pearls to swine. I mean, like, my brother is a pig. My brother is like, you know, from the pigpen, and you're giving him something that he doesn't deserve. And that whole story, I mean, you can interpret it any way you want, but this idea that you tell stories like this, and someone could say, God is willing to take you back, and perhaps even better if you have experienced life and that just being obedient isn't the only way to live a life. Maybe that's the. I don't know what the real interpretation is. Right. But, like, when you read a story like that, or you hear the story, Jesus didn't write it down, but if he told that story, then now people come to that and they think, what does that mean? Does that mean when I find myself in a pigpen that I can repent and go back? What does it mean?

Isn't it funny that Jesus is a storyteller? Yeah, because a storyteller is a person who stands in front of people and commands attention, and we know how that goes. Right?

Yeah. Well, you're a storyteller.

Well, sort of.

I don't think you're a storyteller.

I talk shit on stage, so it's just jokes.

And those are stories.

Some of them are stories. Yeah. Some of them are just making fun of things. Yeah. It's different than someone who, like, tells you stories and imparts wisdom. Like, if someone's standing in front of a group of people imparting wisdom, that's a very bizarre relationship. It's a very slippery position for the person that has the podium. Very slippery. Because you could start believing all this nonsense. You could start believing that you're different than everybody else. You could start believing that you are the son of God. Even if you. I'm not even talking about Jesus. I'm talking about someone today. Someone today. Even today in this day and age with the Internet, if you started doing something like that and you're schizophrenic, you could believe it.

Lots of people. Lots of people believe they're the son of God right now.

Yeah, 100% legit. And then lots of people believe that other people are demons. There's a lot of, like, real funky beliefs that people hold on to. And if someone, like I said, if someone was a charismatic leader and they pretended to be the son of God versus someone who is actually the son of God 100 years later, it's gonna be very difficult to parse out what's what, which is a problem. Which is a real problem. If you wanna, like, put all your eggs in one basket, you gotta pick a religion. They're like, boy, if you're agnostic, you're like, which one of you guys is right? Cause there's some are the Hindus right? Maybe are the Buddhas right? I don't know.

You know, some people would say that the Buddha and Jesus have an authority a lot in common. And if there is a right, that a lot of those beliefs are going to overlap, and it is right to live a good life is to treat other people the way that you would want to be treated, you know, and to love your neighbor.

Love your neighbor. Yeah, yeah. I think there's universal truth in all that stuff. I think that the source of it is fascinating, like, what are the universal truths? But we always, we have to look at things through a filter of reality. In the filter of reality, we know human beings are full of shit. So you have to put that in there. You have to put that with everything. You can't just say, they wouldn't lie about religion. Stop, that's nonsense. It doesn't mean that God's not real. It doesn't mean that Jesus didn't exist. Because look, maybe Jesus is the ultimate. It's like this is the last word, and then we're going to let you guys figure it out on your own. And maybe if God exists, okay, let's just as a thought experiment, if God exists, why would God engineer an animal to be at the top of the food chain that is so filled with greed and wants so much power that it's willing to take over enormous swaths of land with giant machines and murder anybody who gets in their way? And it's all justified in the name of nationalism. Why would God universally impart that kind of sensibility on a species?

Why would God tolerate it? Why would God tolerate crime and murder and all the horrible things that we see today? Why would God want any of this stuff to go on if God is so all powerful that he created the universe? Is this just a first draft? Did you, like, try, like, say the.

Idea is free will, right? I mean, that's the answer to it, is that in the garden, when Adam and Eve didn't know the difference, and then they partake of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that, like, by the choice to do that, brought sin into the world. And once there's sin into the world, then humans always have the choice to follow the light or follow the darkness. I mean, that's the party line, right? Like that. It is human choice, right?

My point was that maybe God's ultimate plan is to make things as fucked up as possible so that it forces people to figure it out. It forces an evolution of consciousness. It forces us to go to the light. It forces us because it's the only way we survive. It could be like a test, like the entire human species, the entire civilization, the whole thing. It's just some gigantic test to see if you get it right.

Did you ever read a wrinkle in time when you were a kid?

Whose book is that?

Madeline lingle.

I've heard of it. I don't think I read it.

Okay. Well, it was. I don't know if it was taught in schools, but kids were at it for years. I don't know when it came out. In the seventies, probably. But she says in an interview later that she thinks that in the end, that God is waiting for every single person to choose to believe and to choose to follow, and that the light. So in a wrinkle in time is a story. There's science in it and a lot of things, but that when you see the light and you're drawn to the light, that you might be tempted by the darkness, but when you really know what light is, that you'll always choose that. And so at the end of the day, that we're all going to see the light.

But even if you don't believe in religion, if you know, like, good experiences and bad experiences in your life, and when you're happy with yourself and when you're upset with yourself in your life, you generally know, like, there's a direction that you really want to be moving in. And the more life experience you have, the more stupid things you do, the more you learn. And so the more you get a better database to draw from to understand what each individual choice means in the greater space, the greater picture of your existence. And as you go further and further you go, if you're living a harmonious life, you go almost naturally towards that direction, trying to be nicer to people, love your neighbor, have more peace in the world. Don't be murdering people. And that's generally how most religions want you to believe. It's like the origin of it. There's some sort of a guidebook for being a human. That's the origin of it. It seems like they were just trying to, like, you can't just let people be feral. You got to give them some guidelines. You gotta. And one of the best ways is to.

Someone's watching all the time. There's a dude in the sky, but maybe he really is. Maybe there really is something that watches everything. It might not be watching, but it might be, like, integrated into the entire existence of the whole thing.

Maybe that's what the prodigal son is about.

Yeah, maybe.

No, he goes and has all these experiences, find himself, like, making every mistake possible, and then sees the light and goes back to his father.

Mm hmm. Yeah.

Goes back to the kingdom of righteousness.

Yeah. There's wisdom in all these things. And these people that lived and were writing things down on animal skins while they were engaging in wars with spears, you're like fucking wild ass times. And they were trying to sort it all out. Have you read meditations? Marcus Aurelius?

Yes.

Isn't that wild stuff? Yeah, that's. It's wild how brilliant this guy was 2000 years ago. Like, his understanding of how to live a life, it's so valuable. And his concept of forgiveness. Like, forgiveness, he's a fucking Roman. I mean, this is like this badass soldier and he's like, it's very important to forgive everybody for, even forgive your enemies. Like, he had this incredible wisdom about logistically maintaining your objective perspective of the world. It was really interesting. So we know people were smart as shit back then.

Yeah, yeah.

And if you go back 2000 years before him, when people start writing all this stuff down, well, people had a.

Lot stronger ability to concentrate. Obviously, they weren't distracted. Right. But even before things were written and people really had command over language and oral traditions and their memory, they had to remember, like, you think about, you know, where. Where to find whatever it is when you're a forager, where to find the hunt. You know, all of these traditions have to be passed down for humans to stay alive. I mean, we're really fragile creatures, right? And to think that when before there was anything except for spheres, you know, like, how did. How did humans stay alive? They stayed alive because they could remember. They could remember what could kill them.

Yeah. Just like we used to be able to remember phone numbers.

Yeah. Even back then, I know I had.

So many phone numbers in my head.

I still remember the phone number of the field.

Wow.

I do. I do. Because, you know, it was the one place, right. That was my home.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's wild.

My mom was a survival trainer. She trained people to survive and she trained us to survive. And one of the big things was surviving the apocalypse. But some of the survival techniques are actually really valuable. And that's the thing about forgiveness or anything else. Like, even if somebody is telling you something that is in their own best interest doesn't mean it's not true. Right, right. And that there's so many truths in anything. And so learning to survive literally off the land or in the desert or things like that was a really harsh training that I had as a kid, but it taught me to look around everywhere that I've been ever since and to pay attention. And, I mean, that's a gift. And I think about that when I think about forgiveness, too. Like, part of forgiving people is because on some level, they taught you a lesson.

Well, even in cults, they can give you valuable skills.

Sure.

I mean, if someone could teach you survival techniques, how to survive the. If you're really worried about the apocalypse, you need to learn how to survive the apocalypse.

Sure. So, you know, they do it for good intentions.

Yeah.

And some of it pays off a little bit.

Well, do you remember the one in Los Angeles that had billboards up and with a very specific date?

Oh, what was the date?

I don't remember, but I remember there was this thai restaurant I used to go to on Ventura, this great thai spot, and right above it was this fucking billboard that was. It was giving you a very specific date, like, repent. The end is here, and it's gonna be this time. I'm like, is this, like, the most brilliant album release? Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, some rock band has figured out a way to, like, make something go viral before the Internet, I guess the Internet was around then. It was not that long ago. I want to say, like, maybe eight years ago, ten years ago, was it?

Wow, that's pretty recent.

Here it is. 2011. Judgment day. May 21, 2011. Cry mighty unto God. Monday through Friday, live open forum on familyradio.com dot.

And what happened on Monday?

So, yeah, that was only 15 years ago.

Jamie, what happened on May 11?

Nothing. Fucking zero. These people were out of their mind.

Like, y two k was a little like that, too.

Well, also December 21, 2012. That was the end of the mayan calendar. My license plate used to be December 2012, December 12, whatever it was. But that was the end of the long count of the mayan calendar, and all the kooks thought that was the end of the world. So we actually did an end of the world show in Los Angeles with my friends from Honey Honey band, my friend Suzanne, Joey Diaz, Doug Stanhope. It was wild.

And what did you.

Nothing happened. Nobody died. We had a good time. We had a good time. And the world keeps going. But there's just a long calendar. It's a very bizarre, ancient calendar that they don't really fully understand. So to say that was the end of the world seems a little silly.

Well, you know, when they give these dates, like, when my grandfather gave the date of 1977, they can also say anytime it doesn't happen that the calendars are wrong.

Ah, how convenient.

Yeah.

Do they have a good calendar? Can I see that calendar?

Well, you know, but the point is like, oh, well, you know, with the star of Bethlehem and all this, like maybe that was redated because Herod didn't want us to know, like, when the Jesus was really born because he was killing all the babies and he didn't really know the date of Jesus's birth. That's why he was killing, you know, all the young boys as opposed to just that one. And etcetera, etcetera.

Back to the lady who was around with Eve. Who's that lady?

I assume you're talking about Lilith, but that's not in the tradition that I read, so.

But Lilith was supposedly. I didn't even know Lilith existed till like two years ago, I think.

Oh, wow. I was like, what changed your life in some way?

Who the fuck's Lilith? Yes.

Okay.

It was an eye opener. I questioned everything after that.

Okay.

Um, the. What is the Lilith story? Exactly.

So again, I was not raised on the Lilith story at all. I don't know, Jamie, do you know the Lillith story?

So the Lilith story?

I've heard some, but I feel like I'd misquote it.

So the little story they decided was B's, so they left it out of the big book. She's been interpreted as. Articulate as Satan. Oh, Satan.

Well, sure, because of course she's a lady.

She made me do terrible things.

Yeah, well, you've done that too.

The original Hebrew word from which the name Lilith is taken is in the biblical Hebrew, the book of Isaiah. Though Lilith herself is not mentioned in any biblical text in late antiquity. And how do you say that word? Mandean. How do you say that word? Do you know? Mandean? Mandean and jewish sources. From 500 AD onward, Lilith appears in historal incantations incorporating a short mythic story in various concepts and localities that give partial descriptions of her. She is mentioned in the babylonian Talmud, Nada Shabbat Bhava Batra, and the conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan as Adam's first wife. And in the Zohar, Leviticus 19 a as a hot, fiery female who first cohabitated with man. Wow. Many rabbinic authorities, including, boy, there's another word. Maimonides and men, hashem Mary, reject the existence of Lilith. Interesting. So Lilith is controversial.

Very controversial.

Like all hot ladies.

Exactly.

But the fact that she was the first.

Yeah, I mean, again, that's not the tradition that most christians are taught. I mean, it's considered part of the apocrypha. So, I mean, I don't have any idea what the truth is, but she has been vilified even more than Eve. Although if you think about, Eve's pretty vilified too. I mean, she caused the downfall of humankind.

Yeah, it's, I mean, what were the, what's the root of that story? That's the real question. Like, what was that? What was the original thing they were trying to convey? I will not original hubris.

Take a stab on that.

But at least Christianity has, like, an origin story. You know, an origin story for everything, for the universe, for people. And when you didn't have science and you didn't have any understanding of cosmology, you need something. We need something. Thousands of years just staring at the stars. Anybody know what the fuck's going on up there? I know there's Thor. He lives up there. And then there's Zeus. He's running shit.

Yeah, well, looking at the stars of storytelling, too.

Mm hmm.

Yeah. In the beginning, there was the word.

Well, I think that's one of the things that's really screwed up human beings. And I don't think in any small way is light pollution. I think our inability to see that we are in this celestial, majestic cosmos. This thing, it's not just black with a few bright lights. The whole thing is lit up, and it's the most magnificent thing you could ever see. But we sacrifice it almost for everyone that lives in cities. If you live in cities, you don't go anywhere and see it. You sacrifice a humbling spiritual experience of just staring at the stars. And I think it's spiritual poisoning. It's like, just like if you have vitamin deficiencies, I think you have a spiritual deficiency, just a natural, universal spiritual deficiency from not seeing the stars. I think it puts our place in the universe in perspective like nothing else can, because it's there. It's real. It's not a concept. It's not something that you have to use a microscope or a telescope to see. It's right in front of you, and it's absolutely spectacular. On a clear night in the mountains where there's no light pollution, you see the stars. You're just like, wow, is that up there every night?

Did you go, used to go to Joshua tree when you lived around LA?

No, I didn't.

Still so magical for that reason, because there's no lights.

I've heard. I've heard it's incredible out there.

Yeah. It's not too far from where I am. And when I feel that I need to commune with something greater than myself, you just go there and you just lay down and look at the stars.

Light pollution is spiritual poisoning.

Agreed.

It really is. And it's a big factor, I think, in how lost we are and how we're not consistently humbled every night by the majesty of the stars. If we were consistently humbled every night, I think we'd be generally, like, you could tone people down a little bit.

There's something really healing about looking at the stars, and there's also the ability to literally not be lost if you know how to read the stars. So that is something I was trained by my uncle, who was somewhat of an astronomer, but to look at the stars and to always know where you are and if you know how to read the stars, you can never be lost.

Mmm. So you could, like, navigate with the stars. Like, if you're in a boat, could you do it?

I don't know if I could do it very well from a boat, but I could do it by. Because I know how to put, like, a stick in the ground and to see the difference in the way that the sun goes so that you can see where you are, because you got to know where the north star is, obviously. But then you also have to know what time of year it is to some degree. So if you're lost for or you think you're lost for a matter of months or years, you would need to have some sort of idea where you are. And if you're in the desert, it's hard to tell seasons, but if I was on land, I could do it. Yeah.

So you'd have to, like, add up the days.

Well, you don't even have to add up the days. You just have to know what season you're in. And you can tell that by the angle of the sun.

Right. But if you get lost.

Well, sure. Although you don't get lost for years, you might just never know.

You guys are getting prepared to be lost for years.

Yeah. Yeah. My mom used to have this phrase. I think she made it up, but it survived. Fear. Survive with faith. And so she taught everyone that those five letters stand for what you should do first, you know? So the first thing. What do you think the first thing you should do if you're lost or you think you're lost, get to a.

High space to look around.

Well, the first thing you should do is shelter, because first thing. The first thing you should do is shelter. If you don't have shelter, you're going to lose your body heat. Depends on where you are, of course. But if you're anywhere that gets cold. And sometimes you don't know it's going to get cold. Desert doesn't seem like it gets cold. Have you been in a desert night?

Yeah, they get cold.

Very freezing. So shelter is the first thing, and then fire, because the warmth is really important. So survive fear. So it's shelter and then fire. And then the thing is signaling. So if you want to be found, you put up a signal. If you don't want to be found, you need to know what creates a signal for people who are looking. So, for example, like, if you are in the desert, you try to find dark rocks to put so's. But if you don't want to be found, you try to never put a contrast. So you try not to have anything that would contrast with the color of the land from a plane that a plane would see as contrast. Jesus, there's a lot of fun stuff like that.

So they were preparing you for hiding and for surviving.

Yeah.

And who are you going to be hiding from?

Well, so after the second coming, when everybody goes up to heaven, who's good? All that's left is the demons in the world, and there's a thousand years of terror that will rain upon the earth till the blood rises to the horses bridles.

Wow. And you guys were preparing for this when you were little kids?

Yeah. Whoo.

Demons.

Yeah.

But if you're a good person, you're going to heaven, so you don't have to.

Yeah. So that's. You probably heard some of those stories, right? That there's a whole books on these, like, left behind series.

Yes.

So, like, who gets left behind?

But didn't they do a bunch of movies?

I think so.

I think Kirk Cameron did it, maybe. I heard they're amazing.

Okay. I don't know. So I can't speak to that. But, yes, there's a lot of that because it's part of a lot of traditions. And. And the idea, though, is that some people are left behind in order to try to win the last people. Like, all the evil people. Sort of like Noah's ark, right? Like, Noah's left, and he gets on this ark, and it's his job to. I mean, why didn't God just take Noah to heaven? Right. But, like, he gets this boat, and he has his family and all the animals, and he gets to, like, stare or clear from the flood, or you have Sodom and Gomorrah. You have lot. The only good person left, and he wants to, like, help the people in the town, or Jonah and Nineveh, where he's, like, told to go tell the people they're bad, and then God saves the people anyway, so there's a lot of stories of God changing his mind, and yes, I know a lot of Bible stories.

Yeah, there's definitely a lot of stories of God changed his mind.

Yeah. So if you leave some people behind who know how to lead the army of God, you can then proselytize and bring people into true faith or righteousness. It's also kind of, like, I don't know, a way to keep people a little bit isolated if you're trying to teach them to do something that other people don't know how to do. And I was very ashamed of knowing, like, that kind of thing. So it's the kind of thing I talk about in forager is, like, I spent a lot of time really feeling like I couldn't acclimate to the regular world, like, later, because I. You know, it's like, if you're always looking at. I'm sure Navy SeALs feel this way, but, you know, like, you're always waiting for disaster, right? Yeah. And you're always thinking preemptively and what can I do to avert this disaster?

How did you get that out of your head?

That's still in my head, Joe.

For real?

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

So right now you're preparing for the.

End of the world? Well, you know, I walked in your lair, and I'm like, okay, there's all dudes here. Where's the exits? Like, no, no, but I mean, to some degree. I mean, I'm not actively preparing, but I feel like I. Yeah. I mean, it makes it really hard to trust people when you've been trained that the people that you think you can trust are gonna betray you.

Right, right.

Yeah. Really hard to get that out of your head.

I had a friend who was a Mormon, and when they left, she was, like, in her forties, and she said she became really susceptible to any kind of, like, spiritual people, spirituality, like, con people. She just had this trusting nature from being, like, a strict Mormon her whole life, and then all of a sudden cut loose and didn't. Didn't know to distrust people. It wasn't programmed in, because if you're.

Only around people who are homogenous and they're, like, you're taught that everybody in your group is trustworthy, you don't see the signs. You don't know. I mean, you don't know the red flags, as people would say.

She also said, like, she found herself to be susceptible to people telling her things. Like, she just had, like, this automatic inclination to not question and believe things that came from being strict religion.

Right. Why did she leave in her forties?

I don't know.

That's a tough time to leave.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what the story behind it was exactly. I never got into it.

Well, that's the thing about cults, is it does make it really difficult to survive on the outside. And I certainly know a lot of people have taken their lives after being excommunicated from the fields. And I had. I had a dear friend, the first person who ever told me that, use that word, that it's a culture. And I had been out for years, and I didn't. I mean, it's not like I'd never heard the word, but I didn't apply it to the way we were raised. And he had written, you know, newspaper articles. He's a professor, et cetera. And he took his life because it was really, really, really hard to live on the outside. Yeah. And there's been many others who have done that as well.

There's also people who are ashamed once they reintegrate into society. They were part of that. They got duped into this nonsense.

And so you hide it. Most people, it's like. It's not like you're telling people and they're laughing at you. You're not telling anyone because you're scared they're gonna laugh at you or judge you. And so you spend your life in shame, hiding this truth. That honestly doesn't make you a bad person at all. And probably many people would understand. But you don't talk about it. I didn't talk about it forever.

Not just that, but everybody's susceptible to it, whether you believe it or not, especially if you were a child. Everybody's susceptible. This ridiculous idea people have that, oh, I would have known better. Like, I don't think you would. I really don't. I think you would now. But you're you now. You're 35 year old. You. You're not that. You. That was five years old.

And if that had been consistently perpetuated onto you, you wouldn't know.

Right?

So there's a story we were raised with, which is a really common biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. And Abraham is told to kill his son, his only son, and he's told to, like, take him up on an altar and slaughter him. And the way that you would slaughter an animal, and Abraham, like, makes Isaac do this hike up to this mountain where he's going to kill him. And God has told him he must do this. And so he, like, ties his own son on this altar and brings up the knife to kill him. And, like, very dramatically, you know, the story, you know, comes, and as he's plunging down the knife, an angel comes and grabs his wrist and stops. And God said, I just wanted to make sure you'd really do it. And this is the story I was raised on. And both my parents and my grandfather were very big on, like, you will kill your child if God asks you to. That's what you're supposed to do. And I said this in the book, and my brother, who, you know, we really haven't talked about these, or we have now, but at the time, we hadn't really talked about this.

This was like all of a year ago. And he said when he read it, he thought, no, it's not that our parents would have sacrificed us. They did sacrifice us because they believed that somebody else would take care of us. And we were raised very, you know, I don't know if communally is exactly the truth because there wasn't necessarily anyone who was checking, but there was random people who a lot of, in my case, a lot of men who just raised us because our parents had more important things that God told them to do. And so there's a lot of ways to sacrifice kids. There's a lot of ways to think that, you know, God is talking to you.

Yeah. You could apply that to other aspects of culture.

Absolutely.

It is, is there, like, groups of people that get together that have survived cults that have an ability to help each other through this?

So apparently there are, and I didn't know about this until the last year.

Oh, no.

There's a whole huge group of people who have come out of, like, hasidic Jews, like orthodox Hasidic Jews. But there's also Steve Hassan. He's a doctor who spoke on Megyn Kelly when I was on that show, too. And he has something called the bite method, which just basically says that there's these really four major ways of controlling that. Cults do they control your behavior, your information, your thoughts and your emotions? And so he has these deprogramming systems and counselors and people who can help you if you've been in that kind of high control group, even if it wasn't religious in nature.

Yeah, I've talked to that dude before.

Have you talked to him?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, I think he's a mooney, right? Yes. Yeah. His, the whole thing of, like, his excommunication and how he got free of it. When you were breaking free, what age were you?

17.

You're 17. And what was it like trying to integrate with regular people out there in the world when you were 17?

I don't think I did that very effectively at all.

So how could you?

Yeah, I just couldn't. So I got married.

What was the experience like of, like, all of a sudden, you go from being this incredibly controlling religious cult that thinks the end of the world is coming to regular world.

So it wasn't entirely. All of a sudden, I had a childhood illness, an autoimmune disease, which was probably. I mean, there's no genetic nature to these diseases, but where your body attacks itself. So it's quite probable that my body was just like, I can't take this anymore because, I mean, stress. Yes. And also there's a lot of deprivation, sleep deprivation, you know, when you're in survival training, a lot of extreme deprivation.

How long does survival training go for?

Well, because I was born there, and it also because I was sick and because of other things. Like, I was trained for a very long time. Like, pretty much we moved up there full time, up to the mountain, which I talk about in the book forger. We moved up there when I was almost eight, and so I was up there until I left.

And you were foraging?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there was other things going on, too, but so I got sick, and then I was hungry, and there was a lot of other things happening. And so I found a way to start house cleaning for people, and that's how I got an application to college and stuff like that. But I was a house cleaner, and so that was kind of a foray into learning about how other people lived, even though, like, it wasn't like I was invited into their family, I was invited into their things. But you can learn a lot. Like, when you see a refrigerator that has food in it, what was it.

Like just cleaning people's houses, just seeing how these weird people lived in the outside world? Did you ever see the unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt?

I did. Yeah.

Hilarious.

So many people were like, a show about you.

It's kind of you.

It is. And you know what? That is very much the way that she's just, like, confused by the smallest things. I mean, it's. It's funny the way that they depict it, but it's also kind of dark. I mean, I actually liked the dark humor in that. It's a very show and handmaid's tale, too. I got a lot of calls about that one. And they made another show about you. But I think that there's. There's real truth to these. The things that confuse you. And I didn't have any friends. I went to college. I didn't know how to have relationships. There's a lot of rules, apparently, unspoken rules about the dance of friendship. And I hadn't ever made a friend because I was born with the people I was born with, and I didn't know how to do that.

Wow.

I didn't know how to date. I didn't know how to be. I didn't know any of the rules. And it took me a very long time to learn them.

What a crazy crash course. Were you open about your past to these people?

No, absolutely not. I wasn't open.

They just thought you were weird.

One, two called me an ice queen.

Oh, boy.

Because I was just really separate, you know? I didn't know how to. And I didn't drink or smoke or do any of those things because I was so afraid of losing control. I was so afraid that if I. I also felt like I was in a huge hole that I had to dig my way out of in order to find a way to live in the outside world. And so I couldn't afford to. Like, I didn't know who to trust and who not to trust. And, I mean, some of my friends now even, and my friends have become my family. And my brother's like that, too. He has just the most amazing friends who are his family. And they will still call me feral. They're like, you don't. You still don't know how to. I mean, like, I still don't understand the point of utensils. Like, I can do it, and I know which fork to eat from, but, like, I don't want to, you know.

You want to eat with your fingers?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I can eat with utensils, but it's not, if I'm not in polite company, I'm eating with my hands. Yeah.

Isn't it interesting that, like, eating with your hands is thought to be gross, but something you have to eat with your hands? Like, if you're eating ribs, how you gonna eat ribs if you eat ribs with a fork and knife, you're a fucking asshole. If you got a big old Texas beef rib, you have to eat that thing with your face. You have to get in there.

Yeah.

You have to use your hands. Isn't it weird?

Yeah, it's interesting, and it's just cultural. Yeah, but there's something we do in western culture, because we're so in our minds, instead of our bodies, we're always separating ourselves. So we need this, like, piece of metal that keeps us, like, from the reality that we're, like, fucking eating an animal or, you know, whatever it is we're devouring. And somehow it's more polite if you have this piece of metal between you and it.

Bizarre. It is, but it definitely keeps your hands cleaner, you know, and it's easier to pick the food up and you feel like, you know, look at me. I'm at a restaurant. I got a napkin tucked in here.

Yeah. A lot of rules. You have to have that on your lap and, you know.

Right. And which side is a salad fork? Which sides with which one's the regular fork?

Started the outside in. Yeah, yeah.

Bizarre.

Yeah. So when you are learning these things, you have to, like, actually memorize them, you know, like, when you don't come from it because you're like, there's a lot of rules and all of them have systems. Right. So I'm very actually fascinated by microcosms. You know, like, the microcosm cultures of, like, any sort of culture has a lot of rules attached to it.

Sure.

You have to.

Well, you must be hyper aware of that.

I feel like I am. Yeah.

Yeah, you have to be. And, yeah. Patterns that people just take for granted. You're like, oh, interesting.

Yeah, I'm always watching.

The thing about, like, not knowing where the forks and knives go to me is one of the dumbest ones of all time because it's like a sign that you're a cultured person if you know where the fork, it has to be proper. Like, what are we doing? What, do you got to have a boring ass conversation with a bunch of people? Or do you want to sit down and have a meal and talk? Like, that's the fun kind of like, what the fuck are we doing? Like, who's prop? Who are we impressing? Is the queen coming by? Like, what is this? Why would you want this?

Well, haven't you experienced, though, that sometimes when you get rid of all that, you just have a much more intimate conversation? Oh, yeah, I like to eat on the floor. I like to sit on the floor. And I have this beautiful rug in my house. And I'm like, if people will do it, I invite them to sit on the floor because it just feels more organic to me and it just feels earthier and it feels just like, I don't know, it just removes all the hierarchies and I don't know.

Have you ever seen those Middle Eastern guys all sitting around an enormous plate of food, and they're all just sitting cross legged, just digging in with their hands and eating with their hands?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, if your hands are clean.

Yeah. Well, the whole idea is you never shake someone's hand with your left hand, right? That's the hand you used to wipe your ass.

Right?

So they think we're gross because we use paper. We just smudge it all over the place. Well, and they got a point.

They host it.

They got a really good point. Like, it is one of the grossest things. If you get one of those bidet toilets, you will never go back. You'll never go back. Like, how gross is it to just smear it all over the place? So they have. You're allowed to eat with your hands. You're supposed to eat with your hands. It's just a normal thing. Like, most of the time it's normal. How do you eat popcorn? Do you use a spoon?

I feel so validated right now.

Yeah. How do you eat popcorn? Do you eat popcorn? Okay, well, do you eat with your fucking hands?

Yeah, I'm bread.

Yeah, bread.

Bread.

Exactly. Exactly. Bread. Who's cutting bread with a fork and knife? That's ridiculous. Eat with your hands. I guess it's just the messiness of it. But I think if you can get people to act proper, like, the conversations, to get, like, stay within the lines.

Yeah.

You know, maybe that's it. Maybe, you know, if you go to an inn and everybody's eating chicken legs and drinking beer, they're gonna have crazy stories. It's gonna get uncomfortable. Just keep people. Make them wear their nicest clothes so they don't want to get messy. And give them a fork and a knife and keep everybody proper. And everyone's trying to impress everybody else with how proper they are and how much they know about fine dining. May I see this sommelier to make a wine selection? You know, all of it.

It's like, I remember the first time, you know, someone came to pour this glass of wine or whatever, and then the guy is supposed to, like, take a sip of it to tell the guy if it's okay. And I'm like, what kind of culture is this? Like, I mean, also. And what are you gonna say if it's not? Like, what kind of.

By the way, that is the. The most bullshitty, bullshitty moment you ever have in a restaurant. You swirl that thing around, take a sniff and sip. Unless you really know what you're doing. 99.9% of the people doing that have no fucking idea what they're doing.

Absolutely. And I don't know. I don't know if this is a fact, but I have never had anyone offer it to me. They always offer it to the man, and the man decides whether or not it's a wine good enough for the lady.

Oh, that's interesting. No, I've definitely seen women get it.

Really?

Yeah. If a woman orders a bottle of wine, it's generally like, whoever orders it.

Hmm.

I've seen that.

Okay, I'm gonna watch.

Yeah. But I think maybe that's just modern today. Maybe that's, like, a new thing, you know, with women's liberation stuff. Like, people don't want to be presumptuous, so they'll offer the women.

No one has ever offered me a taste.

Interesting. Even if you've ordered the bottle?

Maybe. I've never ordered a bottle.

Maybe that's what it is. I think it's generally the person who orders it.

That may be, yeah. But I also wouldn't have any idea.

If that was because if I'm around a group of my friends and we order a bottle of wine, if I ask, they always bring it to me. But if one of my friends asks, they always bring it to them. Yeah. I think it's generally the person who orders it, I think. But I don't know. I think it's probably just rules. But I would imagine that, like, women get offered less. I would imagine if I was, like, an old school sommelier, I would assume the lady would not be making the choice.

Do you know anything about Sikhs?

Sikhs? The religion?

Uh huh. Not too much, which is really more culture than a religion. But this is about wine. I didn't change the subject. So they have this. They do not drink unless the person they are with is drinking. And they don't want to be rude or whatever. So they're not allowed to order wine. But if you order wine and you pour it for them, they can drink. And that's the same thing about smoking. They also never cut their hair. There's a lot of things. But I have a sikh friend, and he taught me. I couldn't figure it out at the beginning because I'd be like, why does he keep asking me to order? Like, he'd be like, you order. I said, no, no, you order. I don't know what I want. You know, like, whatever. And he'd be like, no, no, you need to order the bottle of wine. And he. If I ordered, even though he told me to order it, and he was paying for it, then he could drink it. And what a goofy rule. No, what a workaround. That's the thing. I mean, there's just all these cultures have different traditions and.

Yeah, yeah.

Do you know what Sikhs do have? They have this crazy yogurt cannabis mixture. I did not know that's supposed to be bomb diggity. What is that stuff called, Jamie? Yeah. Duncan taught me about it. Like, they have.

You had it?

No, they have some, like, edible Thc yogurt thing. That's supposed to be insane.

Oh, he's giving it to you.

Okay. Many different ways of making bang lassi. The traditional method is to blend fresh cannabis leaves, plain yogurt, a pinch of sugar and nuts like almonds and pistachios, along with spices and ginger powder, fennel seeds, cardamom and peppercorn and water.

Wow, that's a concoction.

Click on that. What does it say at the top? The world's oldest cannabis treat. Yeah. I probably should try it.

I think you should.

Yeah. But I guess these guys take that stuff and get blasted.

Yeah. So it's a really old and rich tradition, and they are very humble and kind people, the culture, very powerful, pacifist and etc. Etcetera. But probably that's what they've been doing.

Yeah. They're chilling. They're in a good headspace. Yeah. It's. It, like, so that's an example of a group of humans following a pattern that seems to be beneficial. Like, it seems to like they got a harmonious relationship with each other.

They do. But their workaround, you know, we can joke about the workaround, but the thing that workaround does means that when they associate with outsiders, they don't stick to their own custom. They accept the customs of the outsider.

Right.

And so.

And they work around it by the.

Other person having the right, but they participate in it. And because they participate it, they don't keep themselves as narrow minded. I mean, cult people, they're definitely, no matter who pours you that glass of wine, you're not allowed to drink it. My dad was in the military, and he was just like. I mean, he was drafted, but he was like, you're not. No one could get me to drink a sip of alcohol, et cetera, et cetera, like, there. He was very proud of his ability to be separate. And so it's really difficult to have friendships in a cult, by the way, think that it's so great because you're all in unison. But one of the things that people who have gotten out and maybe they still have family members there is that the people who are left there, they don't have any real friends because anybody would report on anybody. There's no loyalty. You can't tell a joke. You can't laugh at a joke. You can't, like, there's really a lot of things that are forbidden, that are, I think, required for friendship. And so I had to learn that when I got on the outside and I looked back, and I think I was really impoverished by knowing people and moving in unison and having comfort, but not really having the experience of trust.

Mmm. And so how did you. How long did it take? And how. What steps did you go about to sort of, like, create your own version of the world?

I feel like there's really good ways to do this, and I did not do any of them. I. I mean, I was in college, so I, you know, whatever. I learned things academically, but what I didn't learn is, like, in my body, I feel like I had four children really quickly, really young, and then I think I raised myself with them. I used to do this thing when my babies were little, where I was reading about other cultures, because I didn't even know what an american culture really was. And so I read about Japan, for example, which, at the time, they were saying, basically, you don't say no to a child till they're five, because you want to give them a sense of autonomy, and then you start putting the structure there. So, anyway, I had these index cards, and I put them all over my house, and they said they had the values that I wanted for my kids, like resiliency, humor, agency, whatever. And so. And then on the back, I would put the techniques. So, for example, I didn't put restraints, like, I didn't use play pins or whatever. I just tried to create a safe environment.

And then I did these things, like, they should be able to find me, but I shouldn't always be present. So I would say, hi, I'm gonna be working right here in this room, like, to a one year old. Right? And they're like, anytime you want me, I'm right here. But then, like, remove myself from sight. So they felt that they were in control of the relationship and just all this stuff. But I did it so cerebrally, you know? And so I think by raising them, I raised myself.

Wow.

But it did take me a long time to have friends, though. I don't think I had friends till my thirties, because, like, any genuine friends, because I didn't know how to be vulnerable, and I didn't trust anyone. Like, I would be friends with somebody for, like, six, seven years before I'd mention anything about where I came from.

So how did you figure out how to open up?

I'm still working on it.

I think you're doing great.

I'm trying it with you, Joe.

Well, just the fact that you get the way you communicate about it, you're so open about it, and, I mean, I can't imagine what that's like. I can't imagine what that life is like, what your childhood was like with being 17 and just being out in the world on your own, trying to decipher what the fuck the outside world does.

Yeah. And I didn't understand parents either. Like, people's relationships with their parents. Like, I didn't ever have. Like, my dad never bought me a meal in my life. Like, he never. Even later in life, when I reconnected or whatever, it's like I would always have to pay. There was never this sense that my parents were giving us. You know, like, it was always us giving to them. And I felt like I didn't understand. I feel like I still have a little struggle with, like, it's like, why are they taking such good care of you? You know, it's like this. I don't know, it disconnect as far as what it looks like to be a family. And my definition of family is wider than biology, of course.

Right. Because, like, your grandfather wasn't really your grandfather, right?

He was.

He was your grandfather.

He actually was my biological grandfather, but the other kids that we were raised with all called him grandpa.

Right.

And so I didn't know the difference, but he was my actual.

So there was a lot of people that were family, but they weren't related.

Right.

Yeah.

And then, of course, once I left, I had to make a new family as well, and my friendships for my family.

What makes sense that it would take you into your thirties because you have to relearn life, so you're going through one through 17 again.

Yeah. Yeah. It takes you that much more time. Did you see the movie poor things?

No.

Okay, well, just this idea that if you put, like, a child's brain in an adult body, that, like, that's what that story's about. It's kind of like a Frankenstein sort of thing.

Who's in that movie?

Emma Stone. Emma Stone.

Is it a recent movie? Yes, there's a bunch of those. Like she did when she did.

Yeah. Like, I pay attention, but it's not about religion. Well, she does call. She calls the guy God, who created her because his last name's Godwin. I think it's Godwin. Right, Jamie? But it's. She calls him God. So there's, like, a religious parable, but it's not specifically about religion. But I think that's what I was like. I was like a. Which I feel like I'm still recovering from.

But what year is this supposed to be taking place in?

It's surrealistic. So it's kind of victorian, but it's sensationalized. It's almost like Diego Rivera crossed with, like, oh, yeah. Because part of it's in black and white, and then she starts seeing in color.

How do I know about this?

Yeah, I don't know how you don't know.

I'm so out of the loop. There's just too many things.

I feel like I just taught you something.

You definitely did. But there's just too many things to pay attention to today.

Yeah, there are. There are too many. But it's an adult brain put in. I mean. Sorry. A child's brain. It's actually her unborn fetus that gets put into this body. She.

Whoa.

She dies, and so the. The baby dies, and then. Or the baby doesn't quite die, so that that brain gets put into this adult woman. But any case, that's what I felt like.

Wow.

I felt like I was this adult body who just had an infant brain, and I. And there was just. And I think it just took me so long. So I don't come from. I feel like I don't come from an era, too, like, kind of like the way that the movie's depicted. It felt like there was no music of. I don't relate to the music of my generation because I never heard it. And so people, you know, like, people our age, it's sort of like everyone should sort of like the same kind of thing, and I don't have it. Never. I didn't go to concerts when I was a teenager, ever. I never. So I didn't have any idea what that felt like, and so I don't associate with that. With youth.

For example, did you guys listen to any music?

I sang a lot of hymns.

Hymns.

A lot of hymns.

Mostly just christian hymns. Right.

All christian hymns. But John Wesley. There was a lot of. I don't know if you know who John Wesley is, but he wrote a lot of hymns, and, you know, like, in the, I think, 16 hundreds. Could you fact check that, Jamie? But it was. He wrote so many songs, and I knew all the lyrics to those. I knew how to sing in harmony.

And so when you were kids, like, you guys would rock out. You just rock out and sing hymns?

Yeah, pretty much. I wasn't really rocking out.

When was the first time you heard another song?

You know, the thing that I got ultimately kicked out for was going to a movie with a boy who was raised with me. He was a young man. He had left, and he was a college kid, and I was 17, and I went to the color purple, and there was music in that, and I.

Were you allowed to see movies?

No.

Had you seen one before?

No.

Color purple is the first movie you ever saw?

To my knowledge, yes.

Wow.

So that really changed my life. And then I started watching movies when I got to college.

What was it like going to a movie at 17 for the first time?

Magic. Like a. Like a. Like the most beautiful church. It was so beautiful. It was like. It was. I mean, just the darkness and then the way that the screen lit up, and I just. It was so beautiful. I just felt.

I think we take it for granted, right?

Yeah, it just made me cry.

Yeah. Wild, but. And that was the first time you heard other music, too?

Yeah. And so I didn't start listening to popular music, though. It took me a while to, like, acclimate, even once I got out. Like, I knew that other people were doing it. But the first time, like, I maybe bought a CD, for example. I think I was 30.

Wow.

Like, I just didn't, because I had babies young. I just didn't. I did all that in my early twenties. I had all these little kids, and I was doing, you know, the mom thing and trying to get myself educated so I could, you know, make good money and take care of everybody. And it just felt like there wasn't time for that. So I didn't have a youth, and so I met a music critic when I was in my thirties. I'm actually putting this in my next book, which is actually called prodigal Daughter. And he introduced me to the songs of. It was in the early two thousands. And he introduced me to the songs of the nineties and taught me, like, you know, the derivations of, you know, these beats and the lyrics. And he had come from a pastor father, so he understood, you know, religion in relation to music. And it was just this wonderful music education. So I did all that. I mean, I really think I came into understanding music in my thirties.

You're, like, almost like an alien.

Yes, very much like an alien version.

Of a human being that they dropped off at 17 years old. Like, what what am I doing here?

It just. It's shocking to me how long it takes to figure it out. Even when you think, like, you can learn to, you know what it is. I could learn to code switch, and I could learn to be presentable on the outside. Like, I could learn which fork to use, like, really quickly. That you can learn, but you can't learn to feel the other things that other people feel.

Right?

And so you're always just a little bit disconnected as, like, being kind of in a bell jar or something. Like, there's always a distance between, or there was for just a long time between me and someone else. And so, for example, my brother, who loves you, as I told you, he. I went to his birthday party recently, and they're like, you have a sister. Like, he never even talked about his family. They didn't even know. And he's like, yeah, she just wrote a book. You should, like, read it so you could figure out who, where I come from, you know? Because he never told his very best friends who he had been, like, friends with for over 20 years. Like, he never told them. And I think that, you know, and he, he looks really normal, you know, like he has, but he didn't have the ability, I think, to really. To really maybe gage the way that it affected him. Yeah. And we as a family, you know, the siblings all kind of went different directions because, like, it's painful to go back and relive it, and you don't. It just feels like you're always going backwards if you try to be around where you come from and you just want to.

You just want to, like, live in the world and, you know, find. Find a new identity.

Wow.

So there's long term consequences for coming out of something like this?

Oh, for sure. How could there not be?

Yeah.

I mean, just, there's so many things that can happen to a child when they're young that will screw them up forever. But the fact that you had no understanding of the outside world and you fully believed all this stuff that you were being told, you learned how to forage and survive in the woods, and then you get released, and then you're out in the world because you went to see the color purple. Crazy. It's such a crazy story.

But the outside world is really complicated because there's so many different belief systems out here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Did you, were you at a rush to try to find a new one?

I was in a rush for everything because I didn't think I was going to live very long because there was still inside my head that I was a breaking. I mean, even now, like, to be honest, writing about this, this is what the former field people have say to me all the time, is, like, nobody's ever talked about this publicly. We were trained, you know, like, once you're in the field, you're always in the field. Like, it's like being a marine or something. Like, these are our brothers and sisters in arms, and you never allowed to talk about this. So to come out with the book, it was the first time that anyone has spoken publicly about this particular cult. And I was raised, of course, to believe I'd be struck dead by lightning if I ever talked about it. And so there were so many years that I think it was just so painful to even think about. I think, you know, where I come from. So, I mean, I'm kind of going around a circle to answer this question, but it felt like it's been very recent that I can own that as being an essential part of my identity.

Wow. How did you. Do you attribute any specific, like, is it meditation? Is it yoga? Like, what is it that sort of has allowed you to kind of regain your life?

Have you heard the expression or the word biophilia?

No.

So, biophilia is the love of living things, and it's not specifically environmental. It was coined in 1973, I think, by Eric Fromm, and it is the love of living things. So it's not just humans, but it's animals, plants, whatever. And so I think that because I was raised understanding the natural environment, I really feel like when I've been lost in the world, you know, and you think you're lost. I don't know if we can ever truly be lost. I think that we're just learning what's around us that isn't working. Like, that's always information that can. If you know what to look for, there's always information that can get you where you want to go. You just need to know where you want to go. Right? So I feel like putting my feet in the dirt. So, you know, kind of like. Anyway, but, like, being in my body and being on the earth. And I think yoga helps with that, even if you're not doing it on the grass. Although I do teach outside sometimes. But, like, if you can find yourself, like, what you're connected to, that feels solid, that feels like something you can believe in, right?

Because it's not about an idea. It's like, I am held by gravity right now. Like, this gravity is holding me into the earth, and this earth, like, it is capable of nurturing seeds. Like, things grow out of this earth. Like, we forget that. I think sometimes in our contemporary culture that everything comes out of the earth. And so I think that one of the practices I do meditate, but I meditated before I came here today. But I think that, like, if I can be under a tree, you know, and, like, on the earth in some way, then I feel like that. I guess it's that neuroplasticity thing. Like, I can always grow. Like, there's that. There's no point at which I'm separate. And I think there's that part of practice of being, like, no, I'm truly connected. And all the things they taught me was a way of keeping me separate. But I can always go back to the source itself.

Yeah. I think when we were talking about the sky, the light pollution, being a spiritual deficiency, I think we have that also from the forests. I think there's something that connects us. When we're in the wilderness, there's a feeling that you get. There's a humbleness that comes about you, a humility that you have to accept that the wilderness is so vast and powerful and amazing that it puts you in check. It gives you this feeling of connectedness to everything. We think when we're living in cities and we're getting ubers and we're going to restaurants, we think we're disconnected from nature because we've kind of set it up that way. We set our own little hamster wheel up over nature. But we're missing something by doing that.

We're missing nature because we are nature.

Yeah, we are.

We really are. Like, we are nature. We just create our forks. Right? Let's go back to that metaphor and that literal thing, but we separate ourselves from the reality that we eat straight from the earth. And, you know, most people, they eat animals that, like, are alive on the earth. And that thing was a living creature, and you were devouring it. And that is so primal.

Yeah. Life eats life.

Yeah. And we all come from the wilderness. We really do. Like, for, like, hundreds of thousands of years, we were way, way. I mean, just. It's astronomically, like, longer that we spent foraging than we did with civilization. Yeah. With an agriculture. I mean, agriculture is relatively new.

Yep.

And so we all come from that. So when we get there, I think it is something that is inside of us. And I think we would all benefit. At least I benefit. I shouldn't preach this to anyone else, but I think we benefit when we connect to it.

I think all human beings share that. The only people that you have to be like, really, really neurotic and like a crazy city dweller, like, get me out of the woods. I hate it out here. It's so quiet.

There are a lot of people who are like.

They're smoking cigarettes when we fucking going home. This is terrible. There's got to be people like that. There are people that are just like, well, there's people that get acclimated to those particular cultures, too, right? These people that maybe there's a thing that they do in their city that they can't be without. And they need. They need that thing.

They think they need it.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. For sure. But they. Like gambling addicts. I have a friend who's a gambling addict, lives in Vegas. I'm never leaving Vegas because once a gamble all the time. If that's the place, you know, that's the place for you. You can't get that guy to live in the woods, you know? There's no card games out there. No.

But there's a lot of adrenaline if you're looking for it.

Oh, yeah. It's a different kind of adrenaline. But it's also. There's a lot, like I said, the humility that the woods give you. It's, first of all, it's so hard to just get around. It's fucking hard to get around. Well, there's no roads and shit and everything.

GPS doesn't work.

But you actually can get gps out there?

Not everywhere.

Handheld?

Not everywhere.

What do you mean?

Well, I suppose if you have a specific device, but your phone is not going to work in plenty of places.

And I wonder.

I know there's places phones don't work.

But the new phones don't. New phones use actual global positioning satellites so that it works even without a cell phone signal. I think iPhones do that. I think Samsung phones do that, too. Everywhere.

Do they?

I think they do. It's very limited. Is it limited? You can send one. Not like one, but like, if you're stuck. No. No. You misunderstand what I'm saying. No, you miss. You misunderstand what I'm saying. Yeah. There is satellite messaging, but what I'm saying is gps coordinates that your maps work. I think your maps still work even if you don't have cell phone signal.

You can't put in. I can tell you this, if you're in a forest, it's not going to tell you which way to go because it hasn't been mapped in that way. Like, it's not going to tell you turn left in 50 yards, right?

Right. Yeah, you. Right. You get GPS, but you don't get directions.

You're gonna have to trust something else, Siri.

Tell me how to get home.

Right. You're gonna have to find some other ways to identify.

Yeah, you'll have to actually look at the terrain on your GPS unit and figure out which way to go. Yes, you can do that, but you can pick like, a waypoint and they'll actually steer you towards a waypoint.

And what if you don't have your device on?

You're fucked.

No, no, you can actually. You can actually.

Oh, no, no, no, I'm not. I mean, you're fucked. I'm fucked. You're not fucked. An iPhone's GPs will work fine with. Without cell phone coverage, your phone will know where it is, but you will not be able to see your location displayed on Apple maps without a data connection to download the map. What does that mean?

That makes it a little bit tough.

To get so it knows where you are. The GPS will work fine, but so could you just download the map of the entire country and leave it on your phone? So I know you can do that with certain apps, like there's Onyx, Onyx Hunt. It's a map app application for wilderness hunters. And you can use that and you download areas and you have them regardless of cell phone service. So you can tell where you're at.

That may work, but most people on this planet have not done that.

Yeah, they would fuck. If you don't know where the North Star is, you don't know how to figure out what. North, south, east and west. Yeah, you're in trouble. You don't know where the sun rises. And some people don't even know.

No, you're right. They don't.

They don't even know. They have no idea. A lot of people live in the city. Which way does the sun set? North. I don't fucking know. Probably north. And they just start going. They think they're going north and they're going deeper into the woods.

And you know, another thing about, like, going deeper in the woods, like, humans are prone to circular movement. So if you don't know that, you will just keep walking in circles. And so you could see the north and you could see. Keep walking like, kind of towards it, but you're gonna veer slightly and you're gonna find yourself right back where you came from. Not good. It's not good. And you have to figure out a strategy to keep yourself from doing that because you will naturally they've done all sorts of studies on this. And humans walk in circles.

Why do they do.

That's what we do? I don't know. Why do we do that? It's something in our brain. We don't really understand what it is to walk in a straight line when she could get real. Like prodigal son about that too, I think.

But getting lost in the woods has to be one of the most terrifying experiences.

So you know what you should do if you get lost in the woods?

What?

The first thing you should do is stop moving.

Stop moving.

Stay put. Yeah, stay put. You really need to create a shelter and come up with a plan. You really just walking around, you're not gonna get out. Yeah, people have died. I mean, you probably heard this, but, like, on the appalachian trail and stuff, they'll like, go off the trail for like 10ft or something to pee, but it's like in a bush or whatever. And then they lose track of the. Where the trail is and they will die 20ft away from the trail because they moved around, they exerted all their energy and whatever. If they had just stayed put and waited for the sunrise and did, you know, whatever. And then they figured out a system, like by watching the sky or if they had your. We should all download all the maps, make sure we have gps on our phones. But, you know, people just. I mean, there's all these stories my daughter was telling me that one of the nurses, and she's so capable, she and her sister took her daughter. So it was like the two sisters, so the aunt and the mother and the teenage daughter, and they were saying, like, they were camping and they went just on a little, like a little hike out, you know, right next to the campground.

And her husband knew which campground she was at. They died just a hundred yards away because they didn't have any idea how to do basic survival.

Wow.

Actually, the teenager lived because the mother and the aunt gave her all their clothes and they covered her and everything and she survived. Yeah. Horrible stories.

Oh, my God.

The things that people don't know about the wilderness. So stay put if you're not good at this. Yeah, there's a lot of tragic stories.

Jesus, it's so. It's so unforgiving out there.

Yeah.

And so many people have no idea how to even navigate. And you can't. Most people are out of shape. You can't even walk up hills.

There's that too.

But stuck out there, you're fucked.

But we survived as a species out there. So the thing is, it's it really is about knowledge. And, I mean, living a city would be impossible for prehistoric people, too. Like, just. I mean, cars are so fast. Like, how do we get mugs so quick?

If they had a car, they would never figure out how to drive a car. No one's going to teach them.

Oh, yeah. It would be so. I mean, imagine moving at those speeds. But the point is, you can understand the wilderness, but people don't. And then, in a sense, they're not humble enough. Right. They don't understand that there's something terrifying if you don't know what you're facing.

And it's interesting that this is the disconnect from nature that we get with cities enables people to create things where you don't need nature anymore. Where supermarkets, trucks, all those inventions, everything's coming out of cities and it's all getting constructed, built, put together by a group of people living in cities.

And it all comes from nature. But nobody sees that because it's so many steps removed.

Right. But whatever it does, it removes you further and further from nature.

Yeah.

Like, all the things that we make remove us further and further from nature, shield us from nature.

Like, a lot of the high control group culty things is as far removed from nature as possible, too. I mean, like, my mom was really an exception in this way. My dad didn't learn the survival stuff. It was just my mom. But there's this idea, I think that if we could understand our true nature, we'd be a lot less susceptible to all sorts of control. Right. Because we would understand that we're. That we don't have control and that no human, you know, who professes to have the ultimate wisdom could possibly have it, because we would be so attached to. I mean, the cycles of nature. Like, everything is prey and predator, and like, everything's part of a much larger system. And if you saw yourself as part of that, it would be really hard to fully believe any one person could be the son of God in today's age. You know, like, if they professed to be the prophet or whatever, you would have a lot more cynicism, I think, if you understood nature. Yeah, we're just from it.

We're very removed from it. And, you know, that's also a problem of protecting your kids, right? Then your kids aren't gonna meet a bunch of creepy people where they could recognize creepy people in the future. You know, I met a lot of fucking psychos, so I know. I see him coming. I know what you look. I've seen one of you before you're out of your fucking mind. And if you don't know that and you're a 17 year old kid who just gets released from a culture because you went to color purple, all of a sudden you're out there in the world. Like, how'd you figure out who to trust?

Oh, it took me a long time. In fact, I've been physically assaulted. I was. I mean, I've been physically assaulted by people I had no idea were dangerous. Like, you were some guy and, you know, he's like, oh, I'm having this backyard barbecue or whatever. And then there's nobody else there, and you don't know to leave. You know, you're just, like, in the backyard, and he grabs you. I mean, my bones have been broken.

Oh, my God.

I've had. Because I didn't understand. I mean, I could fight back to whatever degree, but I also. You can't fight again back about somebody who's two or three times your size. You know, it's just really difficult. But I didn't know the people were dangerous. Right, right. We're dangerous in that way. Right.

Wow.

So it takes.

God, what a wild experience. That would make a hell of a movie, you know, cuz, like, the unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is, like, really funny.

Yeah.

But like, a real more fun when it's funny. Yeah, well, he. She's hilarious. That shows hilarious.

It is. I really like it.

The gay guy, the roommate. Oh, my God, what's his name again?

I don't remember. It's been a while since I saw it.

Show is excellent. Funny show.

Well, I did. So after forger came out, I was approached to do, like, creative shopping agreement, whatever. So I did write a screenplay for forger that is different than the book, but it is about all of this, so we'll see what comes of it.

Well, I hope they make a movie out of it because it's. It's such an insane story. It's just kudos to you for getting through it and becoming the person who's sitting in front of me today. It's a wild ride.

Yeah. It's been a long journey, but it's nice to be on this side of it. I'll tell you.

How many cults are active right now in the country. Do we know?

No, we certainly don't know. But there is such a thing as a cult directory, which you had mentioned, too. So when I was on, I did a local television right at the beginning when the book came out, Frank Buckley and the woman who was his producer. He was asking at the end, it's like, oh, you know, I didn't know this colt existed. How did I not know? Etcetera. She said, well, I did my fact checking before we booked her, and it's in the cult directory. And he's like, what? There's a cult directory? And the field is actually in the cult directory. And I didn't even know that. I was like, whoa. So it's been reported. So I think a more interesting question, actually, is why are these cults not shut down? I mean, there's a bunch of them. Like, you. You said someone told you there's just tons of them that are active in California. And I don't know if it's, like, freedom of speech that we have going on.

Isn't the real question, like, how do you define a cult? Yeah, because Scientology has tax exempt status in the United States, which indicates that it's a legitimate religion. Because they sued the IR's and they want. They smart. They got thousands of dudes threatened to sue the IR's, and they filed lawsuits. And I guess the IR's caved and said, all right, we don't want to deal with all this.

Well. And.

Which is really powerful of them.

It really is. But also, if you declare yourself a religion, then you do get tax exempt status. But I think what makes a cult is. Yeah, I mean, there's, like, the Steve Hassan thing that we talked about. But, you know, this is really, really high control. But the question is, unless the abuse is reported in real time, it's really hard to find. And the people who are in the cult a, don't recognize it's a cult because nobody's in a cult, calls it a cult, and then, b, are loyal to the cult, so they're not talking. You can't just go in and ask people. They're not gonna tell you.

Right.

I would not have told you. I wouldn't. There's no way. When I was there, when I was 16, I would never have this conversation.

Right.

Not just. Not publicly. I wouldn't had it privately either.

Yeah. I mean, you don't think it's a cult if it's the truth. The truth. You think this isn't a cult. We're just the people living the right way.

Right?

Yeah, but there's a lot of people.

Who believe that, I think.

Yeah.

About themselves.

They believe that about religions, too. I mean, and the fact that people want to say that there's, like, there's certain people that talk historically about the christian religion, and they refer to it as a cult. Like, just historically, like, this is the christian cult, and this is what they did. Like, as you would say. This is the hindu cult, this is this cult of that cult. They don't think of it as. We have this problem, like, religion, cult, different things. But it's groups of people that have very specific rules that you need to live by that's mandated by a higher power.

Yes.

Like, if you just break it down to what the ingredients are. Like, you could tell me it's a steak, but it has all the ingredients of a carrot cake. I think this might be a carrot cake. No, no, no. We call it a steak. Like. But it seems like it's got carrots. It seems like a carrot cake. You know, and that's religion and cult. Like. There's this very blurry line. So Scientology should win that lawsuit. So who's to say, like, what, their Mormons aren't legit or they are legit. Okay, so they get tax exempt status, but Scientology doesn't. Why?

Yeah, I don't think you can come up with a legitimate reason why. And in all these groups, Scientology and Mormonism, too, there's these inner circles that are much, much more devout. So there's plenty of people who define themselves as Mormon or Scientologists who aren't living this really narrow life, but the people at the center are.

But that's the question is, like, how hard is it to form a religion? Is it really easy? Like, how easy. Easy is it to get that tax exempt status? How many people do you feel like.

I can do it?

I bet you could do it.

Like, I could do it.

I bet you could do it. For sure. But it's one of those things. It's like, how many. You would imagine that everybody would be doing it. It's a great way to just trick the government.

Sure.

You don't have to give them any money.

Yeah, I think. I think someone did that. Right, Jamie? Like a spaghetti monster or something. And actually created the church of that.

And you got. They got tax exempt status for that. The flying spaghetti monster. Well, you would be really hard to argue, especially when you're dealing with something like Scientology, when you have a science fiction writer who is, you know, he's. He's the most prolific fiction writer of all time. L. Ron Hubbard is. He wrote more words down and had them published than any human being that's ever lived.

I think he was a boy scout, too, actually.

Was he?

Yeah, we should check that one.

But I think he was my favorite is when he's in the sea. And he's got, like, this military jacket on. He just gave himself a bunch of medals. He's got, like, this taxi medals.

Have you gone to the museum?

Which one?

I think there's more than one, but there's the one in Hollywood.

No, no, I didn't. I did. I've met with them before. I got audited. Well, you hold on to the cans. And they did.

Yeah, yeah, I did that. And I could feel the energy.

I was filming a television show in San Diego, and they had. We were near a park, and this. I wasn't as famous back then. I could get away with it. They didn't know who I was. And I sat down with this dude. He went through the whole thing with me with the e meter, and he's telling me. And I realized somewhere online that he's just a dude who joined Scientology. And now part of his job is to go out and convert, but he's not very good at it.

He didn't convert you?

No. No. Well, not only that, he's not good at selling it. He was very, like, very non enthusiastic about it, because I would have thought that, like, all the cult members, like, super pumped to get you to join, but this guy was just, like, lost. Like, I guess this is my people now. And. Yeah, hold on to the e meter. So it was interesting. It's like he wasn't even so, like, it reshaped in my mind. I was like, every person trying to indoctrinate you into this cult is gonna be, like, really charismatic and really locked in. No, those are the leaders, right? They get the regular folks to go out to the park and annoy people and get yelled at. You fucking wackadoo. Like, yeah, so that's the guy that I met.

The people at the top don't want to do that.

It was very weird.

I feel like you could be a cult leader, Joe, if you wanted to be.

I don't think it's that hard.

I feel like you could.

I don't think it's that hard.

If you decided it was one of your life goals, hit me up, and I'll give you some, like, tips, and you'll be.

I'm not.

You'll be there in another week or two.

I'm not interested. If it's a cult, you could leave anytime. There's no requirements. And just to say you're in when you're in. Okay. You're not. I don't care. Pasta fire ins have tax exempt status. Mmm. They're called. But the Scientologists do. If you. If you read the fucking story, anybody that reads that story, the story of the Thetans and the volcano and the.

Aliens and the spirits, it's really interesting.

It's crazy. It's crazy. If you read Lawrence Wright's going clear, it's a very fascinating book that sort of details the whole history of L. Ron Hubbard creating it. And he was basically a crazy person who was self diagnosing, you know? And so he was like, self counseling. He was using all these self help books and psychology books, trying to figure out how to live a life. And that was dianetics.

Yeah. You've read some of that, right?

Yeah. Well, I bought it in the 1990s. They had those infomercials where the volcano and the books were flying out of the volcano. It's funny. And I didn't know that it meant, like, I didn't know the whole story behind the volcano where, like, the aliens throw the fucking frozen souls at the vault, all that crazy shit. So I just thought it was a self help book. And back then, I was really into self help books. I bought, like, Anthony Robbins audio cassettes and all that shit. I was into things like that. And so I was like, oh, that seemed like how to maximize your life in this commercial. I'm like, oh, interesting. So I bought it online or on the phone. I think back then you called, it wasn't online. And they never stopped sending me shit. They sent me shit for years. For years, it was invitations to this and invitations to that and half off of this and free that and come here and meet with us. And they just wouldn't stop. They just bombarded me with stuff.

Well, you would be a good get if they could get you. So you had all these iterations of, like, these self help, you know, stages of all these things through all of it. Right. All the ways that you have self helped, in a sense. So what has been the most useful to you in being the kind of person you want to be?

Time. Time's a big one. Learning over time experiences, introspective thought, making decisions based on truth rather than based on what you want to believe. And just the accumulation of life experiences, like a life well lived. And then psychedelic drugs. Those have been very effective. Those are the big ones. The psychedelic drug breakthroughs are the ones where you. I always say that it's like control alt delete for your brain, and then your brain reboots with a fresh desktop. But now there's only one folder in that desktop, and that folder says my old bullshit, and you have a decision. Either you open up that folder and start behaving exactly how you used to because you have a pattern that you're accustomed to, or you try to reengage with the world, re interface with the world with this newfound experience as a guide. Yeah, I think that's what the heart of all religious experiences are. I think there was people back then that experimented with psychedelic drugs and they had profound experiences, and they might have even experienced entities. They might have even had interactions with God. It might be a real thing that you could do with the right stuff.

And I think people have been talking about it and writing it on cave walls and depicting it in many religious texts and drawing images of it on the fucking ruins of Egypt. I mean, it's everywhere. It was in the eleusinian mysteries in Greece. It's everywhere. Psychedelic drugs have been everywhere throughout human history. I think they probably shaped a lot of the way people formulated their ideas about religion.

Absolutely. And I think that a lot of people believe that it was the foraging of those mushrooms that led to psychological drugs that, like, led the cultivation of communities that were religiously based, but that they really came from just looking for food initially. And then they would have these experiences and they could see something bigger than the life they were living.

I always wondered why the Hindus don't eat cows. Like, how did that become religious?

Specifically cows.

Right. And does it have anything to do with the fact that they make mushrooms? Like, because mushrooms grow on cow shit, and if you had cows that were connecting you to God, you wouldn't want to eat them.

They would be a form of a God.

Yeah, don't eat Betsy. Betsy's cool. She brings us the mushrooms because that's where the mushrooms grow. I mean, is it a coincidence that mushrooms grow on cow shit? I don't know. What is the original origin of why Hindus don't eat cows? Because I really don't know. But I know that there have been cultures that were cattle worshiping, cultures that also had mushroom iconography. There's some, I forget the name of the culture. There's a weird, like Choctaw Hyuk or something like that. But it's a culture that had all their iconography was like, cattle. Cattle and mushrooms. Yeah, or some of their iconography. I shouldn't say that. Like, some of their writings, what's left? It's like so many cultures that show evidence that they've been doing stuff with psychedelic drugs forever. It probably formulated so many of their, you know, like their shamanistic practices and how they organize their culture and their communities, they'll probably all do rituals together to connect to each other, you know.

Stare at the stars about psychedelics, though, that is so beautiful compared to cults. And cults don't do these because they tap you into yourself and you have your own unique or somewhere unique, but, you know, you have your own individual experience of what it means to you.

Yeah.

And cults can't allow you to have that.

That's true. But, you know, there are a lot of instances of guys who are shaman, even in the rainforest, that do creepy shit.

Well, they're human.

Yeah, they're not just human. It's like they do start running things like a cult even though they're. They're shamans and they're giving people ayahuasca.

There's depressing.

Yeah, well, certain of them. Certain. Some of them might have gravitated towards that with that intention in mind. Right. Like they might not have been born true of the shamanistic spirit. They might have entered into it at a point in life, like as a con artist, you know, which does happen. It does happen. Like, people infiltrate certain kind of groups of people if they feel like it's a bunch of vulnerable people in those groups and a bunch of like, easily influenced and, you know, open to interpretation and, you know, you could just tell them that you're connected to God in a very unique way. And also you're a guru, you know? Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of those guys too. I mean, that was the wild, wild country guy.

Hmm.

You know, he was like a legit guru. Said some o show, said some brilliant things, but also was fucking crazy out of his mind.

I feel like we need to be skeptical of anyone who tells us that they know the word of God, that, like, they are connected to God and you are not.

Right?

So if you tell me this is my experience and I ask you questions, I can choose to follow you or not follow you, right. Based on whether or not I like the results of your experience, etcetera. But somebody who says, no, God told me this and this is the only way.

But imagine if God really did tell you. Nobody wanted to believe you.

Well, I'm sure a lot of people.

Really am a prophet.

Yeah, well, that was my grandpa.

Guys, I know this is crazy. I know this sounds crazy, but I just got back from the mountain and God gave me a series of rules. I gotta give it to you. Yeah, yeah. Nobody would believe you. Which is really ironic about today. Like, christians really want Jesus to return, but, like, what amount of convincing would you have to do to get people to believe you were really Jesus, you'd have to do so much work. And how many people would be convinced that it's Satan pretending to be Jesus? So then there'd be that battle, those same people that think Michelle Obama has a dick. There's gonna be people that think they're gonna think the nuttiest of things, and then Jesus is going to be like, guys, guys, guys, I am not Satan. I'm actually Jesus. Nobody believe him. We would fucking crucify him again. And then people realize, God damn it, we did it again. We did it again. We could have kept him around and learned from him. And now they're going to have to rewrite Christianity. Every few thousand years, he comes back and they fucking kill him again.

Cycle of life.

Well, that would be. That's the really scary thing to think that. But if the son of God really did return, if that is a real true thing, how the fuck would we ever believe that? We don't believe anything anymore.

Yeah, I mean, the tradition, right, is this trumpet is going to sound and you think, the trumpet in the sky.

But we would be convinced. That's the government. That's air horns. They're tricking us. This is the ultimate false flag that Jesus returns. False flag. I mean, that's what a lot of people think is going on with the UFO reports. Yeah, yeah, they think it's bullshit. They think it's the government, and the government's lying to us about that. They're from another planet, you know, which is, you know, they lie about everything. Like, if they're telling you something this year, these are off world crafts. I'm like, oh, when did we make these? Like, shut the fuck up. When did we make these? You're saying they're out from another planet for real? I don't believe you. I mean, it could be a case of crying wolf. Like, maybe they're telling the truth, but. But, boy, seems a little suspicious. And that would be the same thing with the Jesus thing. Like, if Jesus really did come back and there were some fundamental fundamentalist christians that were in government that wanted the world to know, so they had a press conference, and we have definitive proof that Jesus has returned and we need to listen to him. Everybody would be like, get the fuck out of here.

No one would believe it. That's what's crazy about today. If Jesus came back today and the world was in the middle of chaos, if we're in the middle of world war three and Jesus returns, there's a real likelihood that they would crucify him again or something similar. Real likelihood he falls in the wrong group of people. The modern day version of the Romans. Right. You could fall into the wrong group of people. And, like, if Jesus, like, accidentally landed in ISIS country, could you imagine?

I don't know if it would be an accident, but. Okay.

Right. Probably not an accident, but maybe, you know, Jesus is just like, let me just go down there. And it wasn't specific enough. And God didn't say, like, where do you want to go? Like, send me to Manhattan. No, he said, just bring me to earth. And he just dropped him off right into ISIS camp.

Oh, yeah, that'd be very dangerous.

Yeah, yeah. And then the whole thing starts all over again. And then we have to tell the story about the guy who came from God. He was God's son, and Isis killed him.

I don't think we've changed that much since the Pharisees and Sadducees and all that. Yeah.

I mean, we've changed a little, but I think so much of our change is.

But not a human nature change.

Right. That's what's going to. So much of our change is technological. So much of our change in society. And wooden buildings, concrete structures and roads and metal forks. Bones and metal forks. Yeah. That's what's changed. But the actual tissue is real similar. It's real similar to people that lived 10,000 years ago.

Yeah.

So if we've got the. The human nature, like, more suppressed now than it's ever been before. But like we were talking about earlier, if you're in a crowd situation, when things go chaos, then you go, oh, we're still this thing. We're still programmed for war. We're still programmed for chaos. It's all in us.

Yeah, yeah. And mob mentality, all of that. It's all. People change. They absolutely change when they're in a group. There's group dynamics are always different.

I think you see it online, too. I think mob mentality exists not even just in a physical space, but I think it exists in the digital space, too. I think when, when people gang up on people online, on Twitter and those kind of things, I think that's the same thing. I think it's the same kind of mob mentality. It's the same sort of energy that is in us. It's very creepy. Yeah, it's very creepy. And it's one of those things where it's. You're like, how do we ever get that out? How do we ever get these ancient primate inclinations out of the modern human organism.

I think if we had an answer for that, that we would be very.

Very, very wealthy, maybe, or the government would kill you.

It would be hard to control people if you had the answer to that.

Yeah. I think for individuals, the most important thing is exercise. It's one of the most important things, I should say, because you can induce enough stress voluntarily that the regular stress of the outside world is mitigated because you've already experienced a higher level of difficulty in your day by choice than the world can impose upon you. So if you have rigorous workout schedules, if you like to run, if you want to lift weights, if you want to do yoga, like you want to do something with jiu jitsu, do something that's physically taxing, that's what you should do. Do something like that. And the physical act of forcing yourself to do something extremely difficult that makes you uncomfortable for a short period of time, but makes the rest of the day much easier. Yeah, that's what it is. You gotta just feed the monkey inside of you. You gotta, like, don't deny its existence. Just do something to that thing to calm it down, give it food, you know?

Yeah. I wonder, statistically, those of us who exercise, if we are less inclined to get online and terrorize other people in mob mentality. I would guess that may be true.

I would bet that's true. A lot of the people that I know that terrorize people in mom mentality, they're extremely unhealthy, they look terrible. They're just, they get addicted to it, and they get addicted to interacting online on Twitter all the time. And, like, gaging, you know, the temperature, socially of how people think about them based on this, like, verbose bullshit they just typed on Facebook. But it's like, it becomes this integral part of the way they engage with other human beings. And it's very non human. It's very recent, it's very non human. It's too limited in the way you interact with it. It's just you can get good information online, and you can get interesting discussions on Twitter, but you could also get, like, you're dealing with legitimately mentally ill people. And I don't use that term lightly. Okay? I'm not saying schizophrenic, I'm not saying manic depressive, but if you are a person that has a gambling addict addiction, if you're a person that has an addiction to betting on the horses, you're mentally ill, you have this thing you're sick with, all right? If you can't stop smoking cigarettes. You're mentally ill.

You have this thing that you can't stop. You're physically attracted to it, you're physically addicted to it, but you're also mentally ill because you don't recognize that you should stop before you get fucking lung cancer. Right? That's the same thing with everything. I think. I think these are just like, normal patterns, and I think people that are addicted to arguing with people on Twitter, they're mentally ill. This is serving the same thing as online poker. This is serving the same thing as fill in the blanks, whatever you like to do that you probably shouldn't be doing, scratch tickets, lottery, whatever it is that you just can't get out of your head because you got locked into it, you're mentally ill. You're mentally ill. Just like when you have a cough, you're physically ill. Yeah. When you're online 12 hours a day arguing with people, you're mentally ill. And maybe you're mentally ill. End having good discussions. Maybe you're mentally ill and engaging in sometimes productive conversations, but you're also. You're heightening your levels of anxiety and this bizarre, non natural way of interfacing with other human beings. And you're living in that most of the time, you're gonna suffer in the way you interact with people on a regular basis.

And you see that bleed out, too, right? You see people, like, act like they're on Twitter into people in real life, and you're like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Why are you acting like this? Because they're so used to communicating like that on Twitter and on Facebook and Instagram that they think it's normal to just be completely rude to people.

Yeah. You can't do that in the wilderness, right? There's not enough cell reception to do that in the wilderness, right?

And you can't do that face to face because it feels weird.

Yeah.

If you do that, if you. If you talk to people face to face, the way people talk to people just constantly on Twitter, you would have fist fights everywhere. People would be just fighting. They'd be pushing each other and hitting each other. You'd have murders. Like, it's just. It's just a shitty way to talk. So if you're doing that, you're mentally ill. So if you have gangs of mentally ill people that are just constantly engaging with other gangs of mentally ill people online all day long, arguing over everything cultural, everything environmental, every. Fill in the blanks. Climate change, fill in the blank. Ukraine, whatever it is, Palestine, free Palestine. Fuck you. It's. It's all day long. Mentally ill people. Yeah. And I think China's laughing at us.

Oh, they said that they. Yes. I mean, I don't know if they set it all up, but they have infiltrated it.

They have done a wonderful job. I take China. I say, yeah, way to go. That TikTok.

Very effective.

Fucking genius.

Yeah.

What you've done is genius. Yeah. I mean, they've definitely infiltrated universities. They definitely. They did grants and funds. They put money into things. They donate to things. It's. What they've done is wild. It's wild.

And I would say that the same, I guess, impulses that make people do what everything you're describing are really the same things that keep people in cults. Like, there was a lot of the similar traits of people who become mentally ill because they are constantly only focusing on one person's definition of anything.

Yes, yes.

And so if cults were online doing that to each other, that's what they. They would sound like.

Oh, well, most certainly when Marc Andreessen again talked about that as well, he said they have, if you look like, woke people online, they have all the characteristics of a cult. They have excommunications. They'll savagely attack former members. They have rules. And there's things that you. There's a suspension of disbelief that you have to use in order to adopt certain things. You have to be willing to say things you know aren't really true. And they all get you to do it, you know?

Well, because it's part of the in group. Right.

Yeah.

Like, that's how you get status.

Yeah. But it's just fascinating to see how far that stuff goes up. You know? Like, even with, like, people that run universities, like, they believe it. People that are in Congress, they believe it. It's like, Jesus, like, this is. We're all in a cult. Cult thinking is not like, I think people have this thing in their head that cults are like, small groups of people that are gullible. No, and I don't think that's true. I think you could have a cult of 150 million people. Easy. Easy.

If you have someone controlling your behavior, your information, your thoughts and your emotions, then.

Yeah. And if you have a good system set up where everybody polices everybody else, like, woke people on Twitter, and then you have a good system of the person who's in charge and the underlings and all the other people, and there's like. Like. And people are. Benefited from it in a good way. Yeah. You can get a bunch of businesses going. You can infiltrate corporations with this nonsense. You can get in the supreme Court. You could do wild things with it. You just need to have a strong structure of support from the other members online.

Yeah. You just need to get people to police each other and police themselves.

Yeah, that's the big one. Right? That's the north korean model. Get people to police themselves. Yeah. Get people to rat on each other. Who.

Yeah, I think I just came full circle on that.

Yeah. I think your story is very important for people to hear, and I'm really. I'm really happy that you had the courage to say it, because I would imagine it would be very, very hard to tell that story. Very hard to explain the vulnerabilities that you experienced and what it was like to be this 17 year old kid who's still a kid, who's like, you know, just becoming a woman out there in the world, and you just escape from a cult where you couldn't even see movies, and all you sung was hymns, and you thought the end was near, and then you're out there in the world just interacting with all these people that went to, like, normal schools and had normal childhood american experiences, and you have to kind of relearn everything.

Yeah. And there's a lot of excommunication that still goes on in terms of, it's my family of origin. It's all. Every single cousin I had was raised there. I did not have any cousins on the other side. 100% of my relatives were raised in there. And so, yeah, you have to be willing to, in a sense, step away from the acceptance that you get, which I think could relate to many, many, many people who have nothing to do with religion. But, yeah, all the different types of cults in the world. It's like being willing to stand back and say, wait, I don't believe this.

I think this story, your story is really important, too, for people that maybe vulnerable. You know, they. Maybe they don't have the tools to discern. Like, maybe they're being courted by a group. You know, they don't have the tools to discern, like what? Just fundamentally, if someone's telling you that they have secret information that only they have and it comes from a mystical source, either comes from aliens or it comes from God or. Probably not. Probably not. It's probably not. I mean, it might be Jesus, because, again, if Jesus came back, who's gonna believe him? But most likely you're dealing with someone who's full of shit. So at least today we know that. You know, in 1930 when your grandpa first started, I mean, he was just running wild. Like, there's no Wikipedia.

You can say anything.

You could just go, oh, or Joseph Smith, who created the book of Mormon, you know, like, that fucking guy. He was like 14 years old.

Wow.

Yeah. Said he found golden tablets that contained the lost work of Jesus, but only he could read it because he had a magic rock and everybody's like, okay.

Yeah, that's the kind of thing my grandfather said, too. And people believed it.

There was a lot of those guys back then.

Yeah, you get away with a lot back then.

What do you think is the motivation? Like, what is it about human beings and almost always mentally? There's only a few women that have been successful cult leaders.

Yes, but it's pretty rare.

Yeah, that one that was on the HBO documentary. I haven't seen it yet, but everybody raves about it. You know what I'm talking about?

I do, but I haven't seen it.

The lady who became anorexic. What is it, love? What was that one, Jamie? What's it called? It's supposed to be amazing, but I haven't seen it. But what is it? That seems to be a recurring pattern.

So I've always found it really fascinating to say that anyone could be a cult member. Anyone could fall for that, especially if you're young. But it's. Who would become a cult leader? Like, that's the bigger question.

Who's Jim Jones?

Right. I feel like there's no simple answer for that. But in my grandfather's case and in many other of these young men cases, they were outsiders in some way, and they had some bone to pick, and they wanted. I think they maybe started out of wanting, belonging, but then they got really drunk on the power so quickly.

Like Manson?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I've been teaching in prisons, by the way. It's part of, like, my. Well, it's been part of my career. And I worked with Lessa Van Houten, who was a. I mean, she's been released now, but she was the tutor in the program I was working in. And, you know, she was like, what, 19 when she committed these, participated in. But she followed Manson as if he was a cult leader. It's very similar. And I'm not, like, talking about the politics of all that or, like, I'm just saying that. I mean, I'm very grateful that nobody asked me to kill anybody. You know, I'm not. I would like to think I wouldn't, but I don't think any of us know?

Right? If you were twelve years old and your whole life you'd lived in that cult and you were told to kill some man. Cause he's a demon, right? And if you killed them and they were, like, hugging you, you did it. You saved us. You saved us from the demon. You'd be pumped.

Yeah, I think he would be.

Of course, children like that are. If you. Especially if you get.

They trained in armies at that age.

Exactly. Exactly. And then that's also why people, like people joining the army when they're young, not just because they're strong, but also because they're mentally unaware of the conflicts of the world. It's really difficult to get a 60 year old man to go to war based on, you know, we found weapons of mass destruction. Okay. They'll put on his reading glass. It's like, let me see this shit. What do you got? Show me what the fuck you got. I'm gonna fly to Afghanistan. Show me what you have.

Yeah.

Yes. You need them, eight. Yes, sir. We're gonna kill the bad guy, sir. That's what you need.

But the cult leaders have something that they really feel like they need. Like, they need people's respect, because, like, I don't think they could get it in other ways. And so they create this whole world. And honestly, once people start believing you, it's probably a pretty big high.

Yeah. I had David Holthouse on the podcast the other day, and he did that documentary series that's on Peacock about the Hare Krishnas, about this one guy that created this sect of the Hare Krishnas and was, this is all child molestation and murder. They're killing people. And it's just. It's a crazy. It's a really good doc. He's a really good director. And the documentary series is really interesting, but it's just like, God damn, that pattern just repeats itself over and over. Waco. Holy hell up there. Wild, wild country. It's like, everywhere, the same sort of pattern repeats itself, and it always, almost always, at least falls apart.

Mm hmm. It's hard to keep that stuff going because.

But you're a crazy person.

Yeah. And you have to keep upping the ante.

Right. It's not like Warren Buffett. He's not out there starting cults. It's not like. It's not like people are good at organizing businesses. It's like crazy people. Like wild, crazy people. But there's this inclination to get people to follow you and to tell them what to do and to tell them how to live life and to. To make them worship you. It's fucking strange that that's just some sort of weird evolutionary response, like, because in tribal cultures, there was always a leader, and that leader was generally the wisest person who had the most life experience, who could tell you, hey, this is a plant. You can't eat. Don't go over there. They'll kill you. This thing runs faster than you. Get away from it. That snake's poisonous. You had to know how to make an arrow. This guy knew. So that was your leader. And if you listen to him, you're gonna stay alive. And if you don't listen to him, you're gonna watch people die right next to you. And you go, oh, they didn't listen. And you're gonna experience that at a young age where people die because they used to die all the fucking time.

Of course.

Yeah. Just infant mortality was like 50% back then. And then you're like, what are the odds you're gonna live to 30? Not so good, bro. There's jaguars in the fucking trees, like, you're fucked. You're in trouble. And that's why we had tribal leaders. And then as we expanded into these societies and cities and large groups of human beings, we still had the desire to have one individual leader because we have this primate genetic imprint in us of the alpha who runs the people, to the point where we'll pretend that someone's alpha, like, we'll pretend Joe Biden is really running the country. We'll pretend. And so many democrats are all in on it. The most culty of cult members, the wokest of woke, are the ones who are the most likely to try to fucking gaslight you that he's fine and he's doing great and he's the best president ever. And just look at the economics and look at the economy's doing better, and look at the, you know, he's on top. He's never been sharper. Like, what do you. Shut up. You're in a cult. You're in a cult, just like if you were in the moonies, just like if you're in the holy hell cult, it's the same thing.

It's just patterns of belief. And we all have them and we're susceptible to them because life is a massive mystery. It's a massive, scary, weird mystery with a lifespan. It's got a finite lifespan. You have a certain amount of time here, and you never think, like, you have enough time, and you never think you did enough. And it always feels weird, and you never even know what the fuck is going on. While you're driving your car or sitting on the bus the whole time, you're like, what is this? What is this all about? So anytime you can get some relief from that, someone comes along, they go, I've got the answers.

Right?

Come with me, Michelle.

Okay, so that's not happening anymore.

No, of course not.

But, you know, when you said that, too, I was thinking like, it is. It's that the belief that there's answers instead of what I think, I think you and I believe, is that it's always more questions. Like, we don't have the answers. And we will. There will be continuing. There'll be questions that we never answer in our lifetime.

Well, also, we exist in a certain frequency in reality, but there's subatomic reality that's so damn confusing that somehow or another, a part of us that we can study, like, what's all that magic? What's all that magic going on where you got particles that are both moving and still they exist and reappear. They disappear. We don't know where the fuck they're going. What's happening there? What is that stuff? What's all that stuff? There's so much that we don't know. There's so much weirdness just in the observable universe that it's. The whole thing is a crazy mystery. And to not approach it that way and to approach it with some bizarre confidence that you have the answers, you're not doing anybody any good because you're full of shit. You're full of shit with yourself. You're full of shit if you believe it. You're full of shit with yourself. You. You're definitely full of shit with other people if you're telling them you believe it. You can't know. We have guidelines, and there's ways that we can live that are going to be better for everybody, and we should definitely go that way. Definitely don't try to harm people.

Definitely try to be nice as much as possible. Try to be cool to your friends. Try to enjoy your time here. Try to leave people with a smile. Try to do your best. Do all that stuff. Like, if we do all that stuff, we're good. But as soon as someone comes along and tells you no, you have to do this, because this is the word of God. Like, be suspicious because it's been around before. It's not like this is a unique thing.

I feel like be suspicious is some good advice.

Be suspicious.

Yeah.

Be suspicious of anybody that's trying to get you to do things like they're trying to tell you to do a thing, and then if you don't do a thing, you're a bad person. And the people that are engaging in other things other than what they're telling you are all going to hell. Okay, let me put my reading glass on.

Let me see this. Hell.

You got a fucking YouTube video I can watch? Like, how much do you know? Are you sure?

Do you have the gps coordinates of that?

You get the onyx maps of hell? I don't think you know what you're talking about. And if you don't say that, if you don't have the humility to say that this is at the very least a massive mystery day. We know so much. I end mean, we the of know so much more than we've ever known before. And thank God there's people out there that are trying to figure the world out. Thank God there's people out there that are doing the work and doing the fucking. The theoretical physicists and all the quantum mechanics people and all the people that are like trying to make rocket ships. Thank God you're out there. But at the end of the day, this is a crazy mystery that you go to bed every night, you close your eyes and you disappear, hopefully for 8 hours. If you get in your 8 hours, Michelle, and then that alarm clock goes off and then you reengage with reality and assume that this is the exact same world that you went to bed 8 hours ago for. You assume, but you just reengage with reality. We look forward to it. Everyone's scared to die, but no one's scared to sleep.

And we do it every night. No one's scared. No, I don't want to shut the lights out. I don't want to go to sleep. No one's scared to go to sleep. Everybody's like, oh my God, I can't wait to sleep. Can't wait to sleep and be recovered. And then you get up, you have to do it. It's a requirement. You have to go out, you have to stop. If you don't, you'll die. The universe requires you to stop interfacing with it for long stretches of time.

Yeah, yeah.

Ideally 8 hours, so I hear. Yeah, full 30 a day. Yeah, it's a wild thing. Yeah, full 30 a day. You reboot. Yeah.

We process in our dreams in ways that we don't understand.

It's very strange. Yeah, it's very strange. Just that alone is very strange.

There's many, many strange things.

Yeah. But that alone is a strange, strange one that we've just accepted because if that didn't exist and all of a sudden everybody said, listen, we have found a new thing. Instead of just being awake all the time. If you can just go to sleep, you'll live longer and you'll be better. Like what are you talking about? Like you're just gonna shut off for 8 hours and then what happens to me? Like can I see? No. What if someone breaks into my house? Well, you're asleep. Fuck that. No one would want to do that. Yeah, but it's normal. So we just do it. Yeah, yeah, it's a mystery. This is a crazy ass mystery. And what happens in your dreams? Like why are those damn things so realistic? What the.

It depends on the night.

What the fuck is going on in dreams? One thing happens if you smoke pot. Your dreams kind of dull a little bit sometimes. But if you take long breaks off like we do sober October and during sober October we don't do anything. And when you take long breaks off, you get wild dreams. Wild. And here's a little pro tip. If you want to have the wildest dreams, take nootropics before you go to bed. Take like Alpha brains before you go.

To bed because you want to have these dreams.

Yeah, let's go.

Okay.

I even when I was a little kid, I used to love nightmares. When I was a little kid I would look forward to a nightmare. I would try to make me have one.

Wow.

Cause I like horror movies. So it's like let's have a. Let's get some monsters in here. I would literally go to bed. I like God. Oh my God. Fuck. Scared out of me. I look forward to like having a nightmare dream.

Wow.

I had a bunch of crazy ones too, that I remember. I wrote a bunch of them down cuz they're so nuts. Like plot of movies. They were so crazy. But it just was a thing where I. I thought of it as like an adventure ride. I would thought of like nightmares as an adventure ride. Like I knew I kept waking up, so. Okay, all right. After I was like four or five. Okay, I'm waking up. So I know they're not real, but it is pretty fun if they're scary, if I can just relax. So I was thinking that, I remember thinking that as a little kid thinking like I think there's a way to just make yourself have nightmares and just do it for fun. Just like watching a scary movie.

Wow. Is any of that lucid dreaming?

I've only done lucid dreaming accidentally a couple of times. And every time I've done it, I've recognized that I'm dreaming, and then I wake up because I recognize it. That's the problem. I don't know how to chill.

Do you remember most of your dreams?

No, I remember a lot of them, though. I don't remember most of them. I would say I remember a small fraction of them, but I remember them for a long time. Yeah. What about you?

I do. I remember a lot of dreams. I mean, I could never, nobody would know if you remember all of them, for one. Right.

How would you know?

But, yeah, I still dream about the field.

Really?

Mm hmm.

That makes sense.

Yeah. Yeah, because it's in your subconscious and you just, like, I'm still processing.

I didn't have a bad time in high school. It wasn't the worst. I had a pretty good time in high school, but I would have nightmares that I had to go back to high school, like, legitimate nightmares that, like, I didn't get enough credits, so I didn't graduate, so I had to go back. Nightmares. And high school was not that bad. Now I can't imagine how much that would be multiplied, leaving a culture at 17 years.

Formative years, those years. So, like, even all of you. Yeah, they're very formative. And your prefrontal cortex is not, you know, completely formed. And so it's, we probably all go back to whatever degree to that part of us.

But those nightmares must be very vivid for you, though, and must be very extreme, because, like I said, I would get nightmares from high school, which was nothing. It was no big deal. It wasn't bad at all. I didn't have a bad time in high school, you know, but it was just the idea of being trapped in that fucking school another year was scary. And that's nothing.

Yeah, it's the being trapped. I have a lot of dreams like that. Yeah.

Do they subside with time?

They've gotten better, you know? So just two days ago, I met this guy who I hadn't seen since I was a kid. So for me, I kind of met him for the first time in the sense of I don't remember him, but he said that reading forager, and he really said this and it was, he said he had nightmares. He's always had nightmares. This man is late sixties, probably maybe even 70, I don't know. And he said that reading, it stopped his nightmares because he thinks, because somebody validated, so he didn't feel like it was trapped in his head anymore. Someone validated and named his experience because he wasn't talking about it, not even to his own family. Like, his whole life, he's never talked about it. And so having just seen in a book made him say, like, I'm not crazy, you know? And so I just wonder sometimes if our nightmares are also things. I mean, it's great that you were, like, causing ones on purpose, but the kinds that are, like, really deeply disturb us. I just wonder if there are parts of us that we haven't fully come to terms with.

I don't know.

I wonder. But some of mine is, like, Godzilla chasing me when I'm on a skateboard. Like, they don't make any sense. I think that doesn't sound that scary. I think there's certainly, like. I mean, I don't try to have nightmares now. I really only did that a few times when I was a kid. But the nightmares that I do have, almost all of them are, like, really primal ones. Like, I've had a lot of nightmares about wolves, like, a lot over the years, like, running from wolves. There's something about wolves because they're intelligent and they operate in packs and they have some sort of nonverbal communication where they understand each other and some verbal.

They're similar to us in a lot of ways.

Yeah. Yeah, they. They freak me out. They really do.

You know, they're not that different from dogs.

Yeah, they're a lot different from dogs. They're a lot different.

Well, they are because they're wild.

But I have a golden retriever.

Okay? They're way different than a golden retriever. I have a strange shepherds, and my.

Dog is a love sponge. He loves everybody. If he came in here.

But you're part of his pack.

Oh, yeah, no doubt. But he's not a wolf, okay? There's a big difference. I mean, he used to be a wolf. If you go back 20,000 years ago, or whatever it was, when they started taking these bitch ass wolves who were willing to come by the forest fire or by the campfire, rather. But the. The wolves that live and operate in the wild are these ruthless, majestic creatures who are intelligent.

Right. But the reason that you love your dog is the same reason that wolves love each other. You know, I mean, there is this because they're part of a pack and because they understand relationships. And I think the wolves with each other, you're just not in relationship with the wolf, but.

Right.

I mean. Oh, no, of course they're scary.

Oh, yeah.

But they're. Because they're so good at what they do.

Right. But that's why we're scared of deer.

Well, yeah.

Yeah. In the woods with a rifle, deer should be fucking scared. Yeah. And that's. That's why they jump and that's why they running away real quick. And that's the thing with wolves and human beings. Like, we've been food for them for a long time. That's what little Red Riding Hood's all about.

That's.

That's really. That's what the big bad wolf is all about. That's the whole story. The story is about wolves that will eat your kids because that's what they did. They eat people. World War one had to be. They had a ceasefire between the Germans and the Russians because too many of them were getting eaten by wolves.

That's why they had a ceasefire.

Yeah, they had a ceasefire and they killed the wolves and they went back to killing each other.

They couldn't have just, like, taken a break and said, like, oh, well, maybe we should be on the same side.

No. They were losing so many people to wolves that they had these packs of wolves in Russia and this was trench warfare, so they had horrific wounds. These people would be lying in the trenches with a bullet hole, and then you'd hear wolves tearing these people apart and they'd be screaming. Yeah. They would send people out on patrol and just find a boot with a foot in it.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

You should be scared of wolves.

You should be scared of wolves. Yeah. I mean, they're reintroducing wolves now to Colorado. They just did. And they just had the full first wolf depredation where wolf killed a calf at a ranch. And that's just the beginning. There's a reason why they killed those things. I don't think they should have. I don't think they should have made wolves extinct in the western United States like they did. I think it was horrible. They put strychnine and horses and they left them out there and the wolves would eat it and die. They did horrible, terrible things. But you don't want wolves. You don't want them around, you don't want a lot of them, especially with these bitch ass people today. They just. You're gonna fucking lose a lot of folks. If those things get to high numbers. You're gonna lose a lot of folks. A lot of people gonna be camping. They're gonna get surrounded. Just needs certain numbers. Needs numbers where they think they can get away with stuff like that. You know, numbers where there's not enough people with guns, they find out that they think people are just hikers, they don't seem to have any weapons.

They know what a weapon is. They figure that out over time. Like wolves. See enough rifles, they know what a rifle is. They're not stupid.

They're not stupid.

They're scary animals, but they're also amazing. But you gotta keep an eye on them. But people that live in cities, don't be suspicious.

Our theme for today, be suspicious.

Well, be suspicious of systems, right? Because that is a system of predator and prey. And if you're having a hard time walking up that hill, guess what side you're on. Guess what side you're on. Well, you're not. You're not. You can't even get up the hill. Wolves run up a hill like it's nothing.

Yeah.

Wee. They just fucking go over that hill like it ain't shit. They can run 45 miles an hour and chase you down and eat you. Stupid.

Yeah, be suspicious.

Be suspicious. Did they teach you guys, when you were doing the survival training how to, like, do everything, like get water, hunt for food, like make your own fire out of the.

I know how to distill. Do you know water in a pit from plants and how to distill urine and all that great stuff?

Wow.

Yeah. It's not really a very practical skill that you don't really have to do that on a daily basis.

But if you know how to distill water, it's like pretty wise.

Yeah, I mean, you can do a lot with dew, just like by putting. But you do need a piece of plastic. You can use like a rain jacket or like a windbreaker or whatever, but you put it. You dig a pit and you put all that vegetation and like, whatever you can get even in the desert, like if you. You can get, you know, yucca or whatever and you put it in the pit and then the condensation, you know, when it rises, you need to collect it and then you can collect the dew. And so you get it off the.

Bottom surface of the plastic.

Yeah, but you make a little, like, pool of it and you. Yeah.

Damn.

Yeah. And you can. You can survive off of that.

Wow. How much water can you get out of dew?

Well, it depends on how you. Ideally, you have more than one pit of this, but you are going to need to at some point, move on a little and forage where there's more plants, but you can live. And you also, of course, want to know what plants can give you water, right. Until you can find a source.

What's the good ones?

Which good plants?

What's the good ones that get you water.

Well, any really, the darker green and the, you know, the bigger the leaf. But in the desert, I mean, generally, if you have the things that give you a lot of water are already at water sources. Right. Because that's. They're water rich. So it's in the desert where you need it. And anything that has. I mean, cactus can give you water, but you're not going to get as much dew as you do off of, let's say, sagebrush.

So. Sage bushes.

Yeah, you can get some.

So what do you do? You take them out of the dirt? You bury them?

Yeah, you dig a pit. You don't bury them like they would grow. You leave them like lush. So you dig this pit so you can use it over and over. And you take the brush and you put it in the pit and then you cover it with whatever, you know, sort of plastic you have. If you have a tarp, that's great. I just don't know why you'd have a part.

Are you planting it or you're just leaving it there?

You're not planting it because you didn't and. Yeah, it's just you don't need the roots or whatever.

So it's just sucking the water out of that plant as it dehydrates in the heat with the plastic over it and the water.

But it's overnight, so it's not really the heat. I mean, it's. Yeah, so it'll like, you've seen condensation, like, even on your car. Right. And so you're just collecting that. It's just a source of collecting it. And you put more of it in one place so you can collect more.

How much can you get?

Well, I mean, if you get a quarter cup, you're pretty lucky.

Wow.

But, you know, you just can't move around a lot if you don't want to dehydrate. But if you do that enough, you can live. You'll survive for a while. Water is really important. Way more important than food.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, you know that.

Yeah. You could survive a long time without food.

Yeah.

We talked about this dude that was really fat, and he went on a fasting diet with iv vitamins, and he did it for 300.

If you're heavy enough. Yeah, but most people could go a month. Pretty.

Yeah.

Like, even if you're not fat, you'd look like shit. Yeah, of course. But you could live. You can't do that with water.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow. Yeah, I'm sure you hope you don't ever have to use those skills.

I do hope that, and I am sure my skills are not as good as they used to be.

Yeah. But just what you've told so far, if the shit hits the fan, I'm calling you.

You should.

I bet I should.

Yeah.

I mean, how many years did you have to learn that stuff?

I mean, I learned them for a lot of years. And it gets inside of you. And I think that's the thing about muscle memory. Right. And I believe in exercise, by the way, too. I mean, I was trained. Like, that's why I can't not exercise. And I think that just, like, exercise. Like, I'm sure you feel like shit if you don't exercise, and as do I. But I also feel like when it gets inside of you, like, what survival is, you feel, I think, without doing some of those things, that you're not really fully human. At least I feel that way.

Wow.

Yeah. I like to eat off the earth even now, like, when I can, you know? I still.

I mean, that's what picnics about, aren't they?

No, I meant, like, actually picking things out of the ground that I didn't plant. I don't mean gardening. I mean, you know, like, foraging off the land. If you know what to eat. It's still really great to have something that grew there naturally, like indigenous plants.

Yeah. It's rewarding. If you find a blueberry bush and pick blueberries, it's rewarding.

Yeah. Elderberries.

Yeah. I think it's a part of our path, too, like, in our DNA. You get excited.

Yeah. Every chapter of my book has, like, these descriptions of something you can eat in the Angeles National Forest.

Oh, really?

Yeah. I mean, not to say that, you know, somebody would need a little bit of training. Like, I'm not advocating that you just go out there and, like, you know. But, I mean, if you know what you're doing. Yeah.

Yeah. You always hear that with mushrooms. Like, people fuck up and they eat the wrong mushrooms and wind up dying.

Yeah.

Mushrooms are scary.

They are.

There's a lot of them that'll kill you.

Yes. And then there's a lot of them will keep you alive.

Yeah.

So if you're gonna survive, you should know the difference.

Yeah. See this? Our Garrick on that Paul Stamis gave me. This is a giant.

Wow. That's a real mushroom. Oh, my God.

It's huge. Let me check it out.

Wow.

Came off old growth forest.

Wow.

That's a real mushroom.

That's incredible.

Not nuts.

Don't eat it.

No, you don't eat that one. Don't stay on the table.

Give me some advice.

No, no. But he sells the in pills. He actually. Yeah. His company is called host defense. You get it in pill form. It's good for your immune system.

All right, so it's foraging, I think.

I think so, too.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure. Even just getting dirt on you and being in the wild and, like, that's what we're supposed to do. Right? Like, being in sterile environments is probably the worst thing for your immune system.

Yeah.

I mean, like atrophy.

That's actually been studied, yes.

Yeah. Like just sort of like exercise. Right? Like, if you don't exercise, you have. If you don't experience some other organisms. We're a host of organisms.

We're not just all interconnected.

Yes, we're all interconnected. Listen, I really enjoyed this conversation.

Thank you. I've enjoyed it, too.

Your journey is remarkable. It's very unusual. And I think you came out of the other end a very interesting person.

Thank you.

And I really appreciate you being here.

Thanks for having me on. It's been wonderful hanging out with you.

I enjoyed it very much.

Thank you.

So tell everybody how to get your book.

Oh, right. So forger field notes for surviving a family cult. It's available anywhere. Books are sold so you can get it online. And do you have social media?

Do you have instagram?

I do. I have Instagram. I'm on substack. I am on Twitter, but not a whole lot. And. Yeah.

What is your instagram? Michelle Dowd Z. Michelle Dowd Z. Yeah. All right, beautiful.

I wasn't the first Michelle down on Instagram, unfortunately.

Well, thank you very much. I really enjoyed it.

Thank you, Jay.

All right, bye, everybody.