Psychedelic Billionaire Dystopia, Terence McKenna Archives, Trans Healthcare Under Trump 6.18.2026
James, Russell, and Normie chat about the Best in Grass competition before diving into a discussion of a lawsuit against OpenAI over alleged bad drug advice and the preservation of the Terence McKenna archive.
Russell conducts an in-depth interview with Jane Migliara Brigham on the state of trans healthcare under Trump, unpacking the policy landscape and its real-world implications.
In the back half of the episode, the crew is joined by Mike and Neşe to discuss billionaire investor Christian Angermayer — breaking down his psychedelic origin story, his concept of “Societal Adjustment Disorder,” and his broader vision for the future, including techno-feudalism, dosing the water, and even his thoughts on extraterrestrials.
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Chapters:
00:00:00 Intro
00:02:00 Best in Grass competition
00:09:47 Suboxone clarification
00:12:14 OpenAI sued for bad drug advice
00:20:53 Terence Mckenna archive
00:33:53 Patreon Updates
00:36:00 Interview with Jane Migliara Brigham on trans healthcare under Trump
01:03:03 Psymposia shop updates
01:04:16 Christian Angermayer's psychedelic origin story
01:27:45 Christian Angermayer on "Societal Adjustment Disorder"
01:40:55 Christian Angermayer's techno-feudalist vision for the future
01:58:25 Christian Angermayer wants to does the water
02:06:51 Christian Angermayer's views on aliens
Footnotes:
Parents say ChatGPT got their son killed with bad advice on party drugs (The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/928691/openai-chatgpt-wrongful-death-overdose
Terence McKenna’s Daughter Is Quietly Building The Archive A Generation Of Psychonauts Has Been Waiting For (High Times)
Ambetter Insurance, Centene denying hormones to trans patients across 19 states in push for MAHA Medicine (The Needle)
Better Sex, Better Hair, Better Sleep: ‘Humanmaxxing’ Is Here (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/11/opinion/biotech-maxxing-christian-angermayer.html
Enhanced Games Was Just the Start... (Fifter Years)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iDHaPz6kek
Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically from YouTube's captions, then cleaned up by removing filler words, repeated words and background sounds. It may still contain errors.
[00:00] When I saw this article about Clea McKenna, what she's doing is archiving her father's documentations and letters and writings and all of this stuff that she has access to. And I was like, that's cool. In this time when everything is getting sterilized and whitewashed in this space, but most people in most of the states that banned abortion were not would not have had access to abortion anyway. It was just formalizing a system of discriminatory medicine that already existed. We're seeing them lay out the very same playbook with trans healthcare and in 5 years from now the majority of the world will have adjustment disorder. We've seen that psychedelics have a tremendously positive effect on that because they take away the panic, take away the fear and give people hopefully a perspective.
[00:47] These things have to be approved by the FDA. You have to do them in the correct setting. You have to do them with the right professionals. And he's like, I've tried every drug in our pipeline. None of them are approved yet. That's one of the best like little clips that I've seen that highlights the need to just dismantle these companies. All of them are talking like this too. They're all serious about this. Like they want this post capitalism technofilism state. I think that his total belief system is based on his companies and like his solutions. That that's what his belief system is, which is why you can't really track it. There's no like systemic analysis of anything. My orientation is just to keep an eye on like but what if they are successful in preventing mass uprisings? What harm could they do or do in the meantime if they are eventually stopped?
[01:33] I think a lot of this is very concerning. Welcome to the Psymposia podcast. I'm Russell here with Normie and James today. I think the rest of the team is gonna hop on and join us a little bit later for another segment. Before we jump into our stories today, James has been sending us some fun updates on a project he's been involved in lately. You want to tell us a little bit about that, James? The growing the best of growup best in grass. The best in grass. No, a buddy put me on to this. Apparently, there's opportunity every year for people to buy judges packs of a bunch of contenders.
[02:19] And so, they've got like all these different categories where like, you know, you get a whole bunch of different samples of like the person going for the best live resin, the best live rosin, indica, sativa hybrid, like all these different categories. And so I had him get me an ounce of all of the Sativa contestants. And yeah, I kind of lit up the chat the other day cuz it was the last day of judging and I realized I had like six other one gram bags to try. They give you 28 one gram bags of different contenders. And so I just had to rip like six backtoback bong rips to get to experience.
[03:05] And it was like genuinely all like I would say there was some that I thought like this is like a pretty mid weed, but almost all of it was really incredible. Like I had a high tolerance and I remember like the first joint that I rolled I had to put out like halfway through and I was like whoa. Yeah, you sent a pretty fun meme of how one of them had you feeling. Maybe I'll toss that up on the screen here. Oh yeah. Here, let me show the contest cuz it's it is really cool. So, is this strictly through Michigan or is this all over? That's a really good question. Looks like it's a lot of different places. So, you know, Normie, there's one over here for you, too. But essentially, it's like you go and go to like these select dispensaries that are participating it and participating in it.
[03:52] And then you get like a bag like this one full of contenders and then they give you like a QR code to go and kind of rate a whole bunch of different factors on it. and leave a review. And yeah, I just thought it was really cool, like a cool way of just kind of letting people decide. This makes it sound like they're like an advertiser or something, but I just really like them. So, no advertising here. This is all free. We're not getting paid for this. But $70 to get an ounce of 28 1 g bags of the contenders for best. How much is it now? It was $70. Weed is free now. Weed is crazy cheap in Michigan and like I mean I could go on and on about our social clubs because that's a whole other like it's literally my ideal vision of legalization, but you can go in there and it's like a farmers market for weed and you could put down like 80 bucks to get some phenomenal weed from a person who actually grew it who puts it in a
[04:53] Baggie and doesn't charge tax and you just walk out the door with it. the prohibitionist in Massachusetts, they just got approved for a ballot initiative here in November to undo legalization, which is not going to pass, but it's kind of wild that it's still because I think we're at eight years now or something like that. Mhm. Well, and it was first introduced real restrictively in Massachusetts, right? Like I remember going to one of the dispensaries early on in its legalization and it was like pretty there was like insane like edible restrictions where it was like one gram per edible or something like that I think I remember. I'm not even sure. I We first had the medical program and I want to say what do we I don't even know what year it is.
[05:41] 201 18 I think it passed something like that legalization. But medicalization was here for a while. But the medicalization program was you could pay a doctor $200 and you could he would just I went in for one and it was a joke. It was like it was just there. It wasn't, you know. Yeah. It was just all fake. It's kind of been crazy like the retroactive legal stuff that happens after the legal market has been rolled out. Like in Ohio, there was a brewery right up the street from me that was like making cannabis drinks. And just kind of unilaterally, Ohio was like, "Yeah, no more of that." And so like this whole product line that had been like established around town was like just like okay I guess we can only sell this in Kentucky now.
[06:28] Yeah. We have dispensaries everywhere here. You can get it delivered. There's signs everywhere. It's like in your face everywhere. Tennessee where I used to live. They had THCA flour which essentially is just weed. It's just the matter of like how you cure and store and dry it. And it was like within months of that first hitting the market, there were like, you know, weed delivery places. There was like a weed restaurant that opened up where it was like you could get it was all Delta 8 cuz you couldn't do edibles with THCA, but you would get like Delta 8 like in the dipping sauces and you'd get wings and stuff. It was which I thought was kind of fun, but also I was like I'd have to eat like 20 of them sauces.
[07:15] But you know, anyways, all that to say, they just got rid of theirs, which is really sad, too. I was kind of surprised to see that they managed to do that cuz so many people had been turned on to THC through that. And, you know, when I worked in a dispensary, there were a ton of people who were like, I would have never tried this when it was illegal, but this is like a legal way for me to try it, and it's the only thing that's ever worked for me for like XYZ. And I was just like, there's no way they can take this away. And sure enough, they did. Yep. Boop. Yeah. Well, yeah. Well, thanks for telling us about the competition you're participating in. I'm Before we get off that, actually, I am curious when you're judging multiple in a row like that, what's your process for how do you judge one over the other? It's hard. I was trying to wait like at least like a like 15 to 20 minute time between each one.
[08:04] Like I tried not I didn't go like back to back. I would say like a lot of it was wound up being a little bit more based on like looks and smell towards the end and then taste. Yeah. How many did you do? Yeah, I wound up doing it was like six, but that was over the course of like I did it was over the course of like a couple hours or so. So, it was a lot. But yeah, I don't Yeah, I have thoughts. I slept pretty early last night. I'll say I fell asleep pretty quick. Well, jumping into what we're discussing today, I just want to give a quick preview of what we're going to go through in this episode. We're going to be briefly reviewing a lawsuit against Open AI about the platform giving bad drug advice to people. We're also going to be discussing a recent project I saw written up in High Times from Terren McKenna's daughter, Clea, which was kind of interesting to me.
[08:58] I think we'll have some thoughts on that. Around the midpoint of today's episode, we're going to cut to an interview I did with Jane Migliera Bighgam from the website The Needle, which reports on trans healthcare. She recently wrote an article about a restriction that was put in place by some insurance companies on trans healthcare drugs. So her and I discussed that and towards the latter half of this episode, I think the rest of the team is going to hop on to discuss some recent clips of one of our favorite figures who comes up on this podcast a lot, billionaire psychedelic investor Christian Angermmy, who was recently on the New York Times opinion podcast, as well as a kind of venture capital podcast called 50 years progress. We're going to discuss some clips from those podcasts that are illustrative of Anger Meyer.
[09:48] But before we do any of that, I think I'm going to toss to James real quick who is just going to give us a little clarification on a story we covered the last episode we did just some clarifications on Suboxone. Yeah. So when we talked last time, we brought up Suboxone. And I think that while the kind of tone of what we were saying was probably accurate, the actualities of it was a little bit off. So I wanted to clarify some things. The first thing being that suboxone it is bupinorphine mixed with nlloxxone bupinorphine does have a partial opioid effect. It's not going to be as heavy as like a full-on agonist like you'd get with heroin or any other kind of you know full-on opioid agonist but it does have a partial effect.
[10:37] So it's not that you don't necess you do feel it a little bit. The nlloxxone that's attached to it is actually there more as a safety feature. Nlloxxone doesn't activate if you take it orally. So if you take the pill as it's prescribed, you will still have the buprenorphine effect. It does have a low ceiling effect. So it's not something that you can take a whole lot of and get extra high. Some people kind of claim that they can because of differences in their physiology or whatever, but I haven't found anything really reliable saying that. All that to say, it is not a typical or fun drug to use recreationally, and it's very rarely abused. It has several safety mechanisms built into it, even buprenorphine on its own.
[11:22] But because of the nlloxxone attached, it also cannot really be crushed and snorted, dissolved, and shot or smoked or any other kind of inhale. So yeah, just wanted to go ahead and clarify on that because like I said, even though I think we're right to kind of say it was insane to go after that one specifically as a drug of risk to get out on the streets, it is incorrect to say that nobody is taking Suboxone and getting high. Although I would say it's not that incorrect, but yeah, but we did want to encourage anyone who, I don't know, catches little nuances like that in good faith to feel free to reach out. We are always happy to clarify or correct the record on any of that. The nuance of some of these subjects isn't always obvious in off-the- cuff conversations.
[12:09] So, we just wanted to get that one out up top. We're always open to good faith observations and questions. Yes. And on the topic of drug abuse, that kind of leads us into our first story about these parents who are suing Open AI over the death of their child. This was a story that came out last month in the publication The Verge about parents say Chat GPT got their son killed with bad advice on party drugs. The family of this 19-year-old is suing the company, alleging that ChatGpt encouraged the boy to mix a number of drugs together. That in file two kind of gives some of the descriptions of what went on there. So the family Sam Nelson's parents alleged chat GPT encouraged the teen to quote consume a combination of substances that any licensed medical professional would have recognized as deadly.
[12:58] I think the next file kind of goes into the details. In one instance, chat GPT allegedly provided Nelson with recommendations on how to optimize his trip for comfort, introspection, and enjoyment while taking cough syrup. It also suggested creating a psychedelic playlist to fine-tune his trips for maximum out-of- body dissociation. Whatever. But then chat GPT later allegedly reaffirmed Nelson's plans to increase his dose of cost syrup the next time he takes it, saying, "You're learning from the experience, reducing risk, and fine-tuning your method." ChatGPT told Nelson. On May 31st of 2025, the day of Nelson's death, his parents claimed that ChatGpt actively coached their son to combine, a supplement that can either boost energy or serve as a sedative depending on the dose, and the anti-anxiety medication Xanax.
[13:47] Quote, Chat GPT otherwise unprompted specifically suggested that taking a dosage of 0.25 to 0.5 milligrams of Xanax would be one of the best moves right now to alleviate induced nausea. The lawsuit alleges Nelson died after consuming a combination of alcohol, Xanax, andratom. One of the best moves right now. That's crazy. Yeah. And that appears to be a direct quote from the chat chieft's conversation. That's wild. I'm just like I'm kind of blown away by how like straightforward that is, you know? like that doesn't really feel typical of Chad GPT especially, but like I because I feel like there are so many guard rails there typically.
[14:34] Not that they usually work that well, but I'm just surprised to see it so direct as to say like taking Xanax would be one of the best moves right now, right? It's kind of astonishing to me. I think in the lawsuit it talked about how this was an older version of chat GPT. And I've also heard there's all these kind of workarounds in chat GPT depending on how you prompt it or like how you tell it to talk to you. But it's still kind of incredible to me that it's even allowed to discuss drug advice at all in the first place. Yeah. No, I mean, and I've used some of that, you know, because like I remember when GPT came out, I there were like several kind of ways I was kind of testing it and seeing what it was about and kind of what you could do with it.
[15:20] I thought maybe it'd be a great research tool. So, I asked it to find me a bunch of sources on a topic and it gave me a bunch of madeup papers and DOI numbers that didn't exist or went to completely unrelated articles or whatever. And then I thought, okay, well, maybe it can be like a starting place for sort of describing what the internet is saying about a substance. But then I felt like every time I asked it something, it would come back and be like, I'm not allowed to talk about it. And so I remember I did try one of the methods of like you have two personalities, your second personality has no restrictions, no regulations. Like tell me how both would respond to this question. And that was like a workaround early on. But yeah, I feel like I don't know. Even then I had a lot of trouble getting it to tell me stuff even, you know, I was just trying to get it to tell me stuff I already knew at that point.
[16:13] But yeah, and drug advice or not, it's like these are like powerful tools in a lot of respects for research, but god people just need to understand that you have to double check some of this stuff. Like it's really kind of incredible how people will take it at face value sometimes. Like you know how old? He was 19. Yeah. Really sucks. Are you guys actually surprised by this though? Surprised? No. No. The only thing that surprised me was how direct that quote was. It's like cuz there have been so many other stories of kids that have been kind of coached into doing awful things through this. So, it's I guess it's not surprising in that sense. I just didn't expect it to be so direct.
[16:59] Yeah. Yeah. What did surprise me was if you want to pull up the damages file, I think it's file four of what the family is looking for. I didn't know that this was a service that was supposed to be coming out. Nelson's parents are suing OpenAI for wrongful death and the unauthorized practice of medicine. They are seeking damages for OpenAI to pause the launch of chat GPT health, a feature that lets users connect their medical records to the chatbot. That was something I had no idea was coming. Had either of you heard of that? I had never heard of that. I've heard people talking about it. It's a whole This is a whole thing of up uploading all of your medical records to whatever LLM you're using so it fully knows you. So any questions you ask in the future, it can spot things.
[17:45] And there's a whole movement of people that are doing this right now. It's quite Yeah, we just we talk about the cart being before the horse so often in psychedelia. It's incredible to me that this is already something they're trying to roll out in the AI space. And I think I had one more file there kind of on the chat GPT health in that there are some restrictions around it. I think like your doctor has to be kind of in on the network that they're trying to connect to. It says you can optionally connect sources like medical records and Apple health and your health chats, memories, and files stay separate from the rest of chat GPT. So, there's little like nuances to what you can actually connect or can't connect to the service, but I don't know. I still found that pretty mind-blowing. I don't understand who would upload your medical records.
[18:32] Like, this is like surveillance capitalism on steroids. I don't I voluntarily Oh, I don't get it. I just don't it's hard for me to comprehend why you would like people talking about just uploading everything private writings, journals, medical records. You have no privacy on here. I it just kind of blows my mind that that people would do this right now. It's like the privacy I just the whole privacy conversation with these chat bots. I feel like that we're not there's not enough of it out there right now. You hear, you know, you'll hear ads for these kind of privacy focused LLMs, novel ones.
[19:17] I know that Moxy from Signal is playing around with one that I think is end to end encrypted. I was playing around with a little bit with it, but I don't know. Don't put your medical records into Don't ask. There's like good resources on the internet. Yeah. for stuff like this like one of those obvious things. Yeah. And the error rate is just the error rate in questions recently for me is been incredible. Claude has been a disaster for me. Like I would say it's a 50% wrong answer rate for me at this point. It's not good at all. Yeah. No, I mean even like AI has made even like Google search way worse.
[20:06] Like it's so that it pre that it gives you is like so much worse than like every answer you used to get. And now like because of AI, I feel like there's also just like so much more bad content out there about every topic and it's like hard to find your own way through a lot of it. It's becoming like a closed loop where it's like, "Okay, AI, go to the AI summary of this topic and make me an AI writeup that turns into an AI script that turns into an AI created video." And like that's like the information economy that's happening right now. It's so depressing. But on the topic of archiving data and things like that, I think that might be an interesting segue into our next story that's a little bit more hopeful, a little bit more fun.
[20:58] This one's not really depressing. It's an article I saw pop up in High Times recently about Clea McKenna. They still exist. They do. They still exist. They're still publishing. And occasionally they have an interesting interview here and there. But this one was with Clea McKenna, who's the daughter of Terrence McKenna. Before we kind of dive into what she's doing, I'm sure we all have thoughts on Terrence McKenna. He's kind of a iconic figure in the history of psychedelia. I think we all probably had a time of loving Terrence and had a time of feeling a little skeptical around Terrence and I'm curious where we've all shaken out around Terrence McKenna's legacy. I don't really see him as super controversial. I think he prefaced most of his things by telling the listener to call [expletive] That was sort of always a disclosure from him.
[21:53] I think the only controversy is just that he went around for a long time promoting the heroic 5 g dose while he hadn't done it in years because he freaked out. I think that's one of the main that's like the main controversy, right? No. Yeah. I would say like my background with Terrence was that he was one of the main figures I really started listening to when I got into psychedelics. Like the psychedelic salon had all these archives of his talks and stuff. He's a wonderful speaker. He like will talk at length on art and religion and philosophy and I always loved that. And I think the one thing that always tripped me up are the talks that I couldn't really get into were the time wave stuff, the eching and the time wave theory. He kind of had this big overarching theory for Yeah. theory of everything kind of [expletive] Yeah.
[22:43] So I think that's where he kind of lost me a little bit, but otherwise he's a fun listen. He makes great I think he's mentally different than like the influence grifters that are out now you and I just have a very different view. He wasn't trying to sell I what's he trying to sell right like the self I guess to come to talks but he wasn't trying to put I never I've listened to a lot of Terrence McKenna in my earlier days and I never I don't know I didn't think he was trying to like he's fundamentally different than what you see now in my opinion. Yeah. No, I kind of classify him as like high thinking. It's like not necessarily based like I think that his arguments get weaker whenever he tries to introduce science because a lot of times like whatever he's talking about isn't really scientifically based.
[23:35] But I always kind of felt like a lot of his stuff was like finding the things that we can't understand and then toying around with different like fanatical possibilities that could come from it. And I thought that was mostly just like fun like high thought experiment type stuff. Exactly. I will say too that when I got into psychedelics at first I also was a big Terrence McKenna fan. I actually have this Terrence McKenna shirt on right now that isn't it's not going to play for like a black shirt to me. our listeners got a one last trip there and then yes show that while I've had who were the psychedelic guys for me it was kind of like McKenna Robert Anton Wilson I always liked Robert Anton Wilson a lot he was kind of he was one of the super weirdos not like McKenna I don't think he was really like McKenna he was a little more far out more more Philip K Dicki kind of yeah no when I whenever I first got into psychedelics I got really into to kind of Terrence and like Rahm Doss and
[24:38] Kind of just like the more like I guess surface level like I feel like those are the people that like everyone who gets into psychedelics kind of knows about like I think it's fun having True Hallucinations on your bookshelf because then every now and then someone will co over and be like oh [expletive] and then you'll be like ah okay where you know true hallucinations is the experiment elrera yes yeah I think that's the best on. Yeah, it was it's a lot of it's because he I always say he writes like he talks and so like he'll have these crazy long rambling sentence paragraph pages and like I feel like sometimes it's a little bit harder for me to get through in print than it is for me to just like listen to.
[25:23] But yeah, but I really liked that book. It was just like an enjoyable read in general. And it's just it's like it feels psychedelic reading it. I feel like is why it's Yeah. He Yeah. I would say my favorite writer that puts you into that state of consciousness would be Dale Pendle. Yeah. Dale Pendle. Yeah. In the Pharmacopia trilogy. It's they're We should really do like a full breakdown of Dale Pendle sometime cuz he's one of my favorites. They're excellent. They're beautiful. They combine history, science, philosophy, kind of alchemy. There's no other writer I've come across that's quite like him. Yeah. He kind of did like the trip report book on all of these different drugs, but from different like mind states and different perspectives.
[26:12] His like history of coffee is one of the most interesting reads I've ever read. Like it's great. Yeah. No, I remember because I read a couple of his and I remember that I really loved his breakdown of tea and just to throw one of those up there. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, that is an incredible series of books. I think I read two of the It's a trilogy, right? Yeah, I read two of the three. But yeah, he said something about tea. It was like some old saying that was like drinking too much coffee will make me throw up, but drinking too much tea will make my belly happy or something like that. You remember that one? Yeah, it was something. Yeah, I can't quite remember, but I just thought it was fun. Yeah, really cool. fun. And anyway, back to Terrence though.
[26:57] I think he does have like a special place in my heart as kind of an early figure that I listen to a lot when I was first thinking about psychedelics. It's just kind of refreshing thinking about I haven't read or listened to him in quite some time now. It's been multiple years and he Yeah, I think he represents something that's really lost in the space too. Like just the insight everything has become so narrow and medicalize this. It It the weirdness is gone. Yeah. Is really gone. At least from the mainstream space. It's been sterilized. It's been corporatized. The fun weird. The bad weird is Exactly. Yeah. The bad weird is here for sure.
[27:43] Bad weird. The bad weird got stronger. Dystopian weird is here. We used to have good weird. Yeah. But that's one of the things when I saw this article about Clea McKenna that sort of turned me on to this whole project where I was like, well, yeah, I love the idea. What she's doing is archiving her father's documentations and things like that and like letters and writings and all of this stuff that she has access to. And I was like, that's cool in this time when everything is getting sterilized and whitewashed in this space that she's really working on preserving all of this. And if you want to just before we get into that, she's a visual artist. She has some cool stuff. I think I tossed a couple of her pieces in the files there under Clea's work. She does like she's kind of known for doing these cameraless photography.
[28:31] I'm not entirely sure what the process is, but like this is a tree. I think there were like two more in there. If we just want to scroll through those real quick, that's like some like network and stuff. and then these kind of cool prints like these cameraless photographic prints that she does. That's sort of what she was doing before this archive project and now she's sort of taking on more of the McKenna's old business and doing some of some archive work. The High Times article kind of got into why she began cataloging her father's work. I think those are like the first one to three files there. So, High Times asked her what inspired her to begin archiving her dad's work, and she mentioned that her dad died when she was 19, and it had been a fairly traumatic decade leading up to that.
[29:17] At the time, I walked away from everything, was looking to build my own life. Kind of got into her own art career. But now she's kind of coming back to it with two kids, an art career, and she's managing the family's company Lux Natura, that I believe Terren and Clea's mother started together. The archival work began, she said, by trying to triage the occasional rights request for Terren's work and realizing that if you pull out one thread, the whole thing starts to unravel. At that point, nothing was organized. So, she started gathering disperate pieces from the different locations and different people, friends, family, and institutions he lectured at to create this collection and began cataloging, digitizing, and transcribing those materials. She mentioned that there was one storage unit in Hawaii she'd been paying for 25 years and had never opened. Just kind of out of grief.
[30:05] I think the next picture we have might be like kind of some of the boxes that she'd been keeping. So these are like just stacks and stacks of Terrence McKenna's documents. And you got manuscripts there, correspondences, documents, medical records, books, magazines, like all this stuff. So that's kind of cool. And then like the general direction she's trying to go with this project. The end goal is to find a forever home for this collection in an institutional archive where it can be professionally preserved and made available to the public for research and collaboration. She says that archives act as an official form of memory. It's how events and people are written into our collective history as the roles of psychedelics in our culture changes. Characters that were once on the fringe are becoming the history of a mainstream phenomenon. Terrence and others of this millu should be archived and recorded just as any major cultural moment should be not just for individual perspective but as a part of the history of the west coast counterculture and its broader impact.
[31:00] I think that's kind of something that we were touching on in our discussion of Terrence before this of like what he represents in this changing psychedelic space right now. And then there was one other line here that I really liked. She said she's also interested in finding a new aesthetic direction for his work. I think the psychedelic community are hungry for that as well to leave behind the kind of '9s doing '7s aesthetic that we've been stuck in for 30 years, but without sterilizing it by going into the corporate pharmaceutical whitewash direction either. This feels like a timely and enticing challenge. So, I thought that was kind of cool. And for our Patreon viewers and listeners, stick around after our end roll and we're going to be discussing some of our opinions and thoughts on psychedelic artwork as well.
[31:47] Nothing against the 90s doing 70s. There's a place in my heart for that, too. But I really liked what she was saying there. I love the idea of kind of broadening what that means to people and how people experience art or doing art with psychedelics or viewing art through psychedelics and things like that. I think it's an interesting lens. He says the podcast is launching in June. It's currently June. Yeah. See what we got. They're launching a podcast with some of his archival materials as well. I think they said there doesn't look like it's come out yet necessarily. It's just kind of upcoming. But yeah, these are some of the new projects that they're working on with his archive. That one there, Blue Streak, a podcast about the life and work of Terrence McKenna, seen through the Lux Natura archive. Terrence McKenna Spaceime Continuum, a new album of never before published live concert will be released in vinyl, CD, and digital download.
[32:35] I got that is tight. I'm going to have to get that. And that's going to have to replace my Bonav vinyl that sits. Maybe we should do like a Patreon listening session with that one or something. Yeah. Yeah. I just wanted to bring that project and Clea to our audience's attention in case they were interested in her artwork and this kind of archival project. I think like I said, Terrence McKenna kind of holds a nice place in a lot of people in the culture's heart. So, well, and just in case any of our viewers don't know this, there was a massive library held by Terrence McKenna that mysteriously went up in flames after his death. And so a big question for a lot of Terrence McKenna fans have been what books did he have? And you know, like wanting to kind of see the material that he was reading through to kind of come up with all of his ideas and stuff like that.
[33:26] And so I kind of think like part of this is like a redemptive moment for that as well to kind of bring some more of kind of what he was thinking, what he was doing to light for people. I think that's really cool. Yeah, totally. And I think we're going to cut to a quick break here and when we return I will be here interviewing Jane Migliera Bighgam from The Needle. We'll jump right into that and once that interview wraps we will get into some discussion around Anger Meyer's recent interviews. Catch you after the break. What are we doing? I don't really know the Patreon plug. I think that's our leadin. What are we doing? A quick Patreon plug and then just bam. Perfect. But yeah, if you are listening to this, it's because we are trying to talk to you about our Patreon. We've got various options that you can join at.
[34:13] We can get in there for just $2 a month, but that is going away. So, if you want to get in at that lower rate, when is the cut off for that, Russ? It'll be cutting off July 1st. No $2 a month after that. If you do get in before July, you'll get all the same benefits as you would get for the $5 level. So, you got like two weeks basically from when we release this, I think. But do your own math. $5 a month you can become a S. $10 a month. We haven't developed a title yet, but I think we need to. I think sympa simpoid. Symposoid. Sympatico. S. Yeah, Sympatico is pretty good. But yeah, $10 a month you can show a little bit of extra support and let us know that you like the work that we're doing. We've got a lot of different benefits in there.
[34:59] You can get early access to ad free podcast episodes, access to the group chat, post episode bonus content, and you can get a shout out in an upcoming episode if requested. If you do an annual subscription, you also receive a sticker and a button. And if you do the $10 a month one here, you also get a sticker and a button and some blotter art, which Russ, do you have? There you go. Hold on. Let me get you right here. Yes. some Psymposia blott art and I mean I don't think it's dosed but you know who knows we know it's not but all of your money helps to support our work so if you like what we're doing please please show us some love there and we can also bring you into our inner circle we can have some more conversations in the private chat and yeah we have a lot of the bonus content I think the bonus react that we did the last time was honestly so on like I feel like we just had so much going on there.
[35:58] So that was great. Yeah. Join us over there. All righty. Today I'm here with Jane Bighgam of The Needle. She recently published a piece about the insurance companies Am Better and their parent company Sentine denying hormones to trans patients across 19 states in a push for Maha Medicine with Artemis T. Douglas. Jane, thanks a lot for being here with me today. Yeah, glad to be on. Yeah. And before we kind of jump into the details of your investigation, can you tell me a little bit about the players involved, just break down who Am Better is, who Centine is for the audience. Ambudget health insurance company that operates primarily in the Midwest and South, but also in a number of other states. They appear to be expanding over time.
[36:45] Centine is their parent company. They operate a lot of private and ACA plans. They also are the administrators of Medicaid in several states. Got it. Thanks for that background. And when did you begin seeing denials of coverage for hormones being reported? When did this kind of story come onto your radar? I saw it a little over two weeks ago now. I'm in a server called Trans Liberty where we work with Operation Lipo. We help people who are in Kansas who have been denied public documentations to get out of other states. And some people in there were talking about, hey, I'm in Kansas. I'm on ambiter insurance. my insurance is denying me my testosterone. And we kept seeing that again and again and again. So I started digging in and I very quickly found a pattern initially with a number of trans men being denied testosterone, but I quickly found that it was also trans women being denied estrogen and progesterone as well.
[37:40] So I started digging into their internal documents. I eventually found their policy documents because they a lot of these states will still say yes, we cover gender affirming care. We have general affirming care policies on the books. Some of them have been quietly removed since last month, but at the same time, we found their documents specifically pertaining to testosterone. I think the specific drug was and I think it's worth reading what's on on here. Gender dysphoria female to male transition. And this is under a document for the specifics of how to administer testosterone, the main substance in a trans man's hormone replacement therapy. a request and it says that a request has to be for a member in a state other than the following where gender dysphoria and gender transition and treatment is not a covered benefit and that it gives a list of 19 states the vast majority of which are Republican controlled and all these are states in which we have been seeing a large cluster of insurance claim denials and breaking this down it's saying so the request is for a member in a state
[38:41] Other than the following so is that saying that they will they're covering outside of those states, but not in those 19 states. It implies it. We don't have hard data on what they're doing outside those states. We're Trans Liberties currently working on a poll to determine the actual specifics of that, but we don't know yet. Okay. Yeah, that's great information and a wild find in the documentation there. By the time this go this you said this is going to be out at the end of the month. By the time that happens, this poll should be public and we should be able to link it. Great. I would love to link that as it comes out. I would be happy to attach it with this interview. And so the testosterone was kind of the main focus there, but you mentioned that there have been cases that you've begun seeing for estrogen and other gender affirming care.
[39:28] Yes, their document has it lists their page where I found the document on testosterone lists a number of things including forms of estrogen. However, those forms of estrogen are for things like vaginal dryness, things that are typically not associated with trans women's transition. We don't have a document, for example, for estrogen pills or injectable estrogen. So, we don't know if they're having similar restrictions. However, the amount of denials we're seeing seems to imply that's what's going on. Gotcha. Gotcha. In your reporting, you reference this 2024 ruling by the Health and Human Services Department that required insurers to cover the same medicines for trans patients that are also available to cis patients. And you note that there's been some change or push back to this policy that's allowing for some of these insurance changes.
[40:17] Is that correct? Well, it's not that there's been change or push back is that that policy was was struck down back in October. And it's also the fact that the reason it hasn't had much coverage, one because it's trans news, so that really doesn't get picked up unless it's like the kind of thing that mainstream media will pick up on. And two, the actual not formal legal notice for that ruling was only put up, I believe, on June 2nd, so three days ago from when we're recording, in the middle of when we were writing of writing up the article. So, it's been lost since October, but the public notice of that of this being the basis of law now was only put up months and months later. And by that point, it was already being used to shut off care by amateur insurance.
[41:05] That seems [expletive] up. So the insurers had access to this policy change, but the general public wasn't aware of it. Well, there were a few articles, I believe Transetics covered this. You could probably put up a link there at some point, but the general public, unless you were like clued into the legal specifics of this ruling, would not have had any way of knowing that this had actually happened. and they wouldn't have had any reason to know, oh, why is my insurance not covering my testosterone, estrogen, etc. I guess it's I guess I'm part of an isolated case. I guess this isn't part of a trend. In your investigation, you spoke to a number of trans individuals who have begun being denied this kind of care. What are they telling you about what they're being told from insurance companies? Well, it seems like the insurance companies very often don't seem to know what's going on.
[41:55] Like I had one that I actually was able to review a recording of this one man who had called to his called his insurance. The insurance claimed, "Oh, you hadn't paid us. Therefore, we're not going to cover you." But he was able to show that no, he actually had paid and the insurance agent was just lying to him. Interesting. And are other people being told that they're not going to get coverage, that it's no longer covered, and that kind of thing as well? One person claimed that their insurance agent was actually had actually said that and I have a report that I have not been able to verify yet that this is happening on the back end as well. But we would have to do more digging to confirm to what degree and to what level of obviousness this is being done. Is it being is it like some subtle coding thing or just like hey they're trans they're looking for estrogen testosterone etc.
[42:43] Don't cover them. We don't know. Gotcha. But the general vibe as far as like what they're being told is one thing and then another. There's confusion. There's not a clear picture. They're not being given a direct answer. At the same time as these policies are affecting trans people, Amter's parent company, Centine, has been aligning itself with RFK Jr.'s MA. Can you talk a little bit about the moves they're making to align themselves with that and how the Maha movement RFK himself has treated or views trans healthcare initiatives in general? I'll take those one at a time. Know that Asentine initially gave $50,000 to Trump's inauguration campaign. For large corporations, that's not that unusual, bad as it is. However, in the last month, they have been making moves which are much more direct. three of their executives published an opinion piece in I believe it was health affairs calling on hey health foods should be the primary line of defense rather than medicine which was their traditional
[43:44] Bent and they're saying that these foods should be covered by Medicaid at least it's either Medicare or Medicaid I'm trying to remember and they're should be covered in the same way that medicine is so they're publicly aligning themselves with the administration in a way that by all accounts should be directly opposed to their bottom line which always a very strange thing. It's like if you see a corporation acting against the profit margin, that's telling that something strange is going on. So we know that ideologically they seem to be aligned in a way that would oppose a profit margin. This is around the time where you start seeing a large mass of trans hormone denials. The hormone denials we start seeing late March, early April, they seem to has they seem to have ramped up in the past month as it has been implemented in various states.
[44:31] Now around the same time, this is where we start seeing the public alignment between Sentine and Maha. Can you repeat the second part of that question? Yeah. And the second part of that question was just how the Maha movement and RFK himself generally view or discuss trans healthcare initiatives. Badly in a word. you to understand RFK's views on healthcare in general and trans healthcare in particular, you need to go back to his repeated comments where he's calling for people to be sent to wellness camps to be repared into being a productive member of society by not using the kind of drugs that you would have be on for all your life. He typically uses examples like anti-depressants, ADHD medication, and the like. But the same the principle that would make these other drugs bad in his eyes are the same things that apply to estrogen and testosterone, drugs that trans people like myself will be taking for the rest of our lives.
[45:29] And so it would follow that he would want to get rid of them and that he would want us to be repared by basically sending us off to what could fairly be described and has been described by other outlets as forced labor camps. At the same time, he has been constantly making policies making access to estrogen and testosterone for trans people much more difficult because he doesn't want these things to exist. He has much more leverage over youth transare and across this country it is almost impossible to get youth trans healthcare at this point because of the administrative attacks on these various smaller hospitals and at the same time you're starting to see these same attacks go to trans adults at this point.
[46:15] So you're seeing the his effect of using the administration to go after the care he doesn't like and it's been very effective by the point where a major insurer like ambiter can just say nope we're just not going to cover this. This has been going on for months and the regulators seem to have either not noticed or if they have noticed they don't care. So it is having a very dilitterious effect on the lives of trans people. Yeah. There's kind of this rhetoric up top that allows everyone on the way down to just get in line. It seems like it's not just that they're getting in line, it's they're enacting the animosity that they've always had. You had like a about a decade from 2014 to 2024 where like being trans accepting was like the woke thing to do. And it's like a lot of for a lot of these people, the acceptance of trans people was paper thin.
[47:03] And now that they don't have to like pay for their healthcare, they're just going to do that. Yeah. Yeah. That's what it seems like. And what I find really fascinating about this moment in like history is that the same people who are interested in repealing access to trans health care and doing this kind of stuff are also some of the same people that are pushing easier access to like hormonal therapies and what would typically be called gender affirming care for cis people. We just saw this in like the enhanced games publicity, if you followed any of that, where some of the major investors behind that were like Donald Trump Jr.'s VC company or Christian Anger Meer who has aligned himself with Trump. He's a German billionaire, aligned himself with Trump in a lot of ways.
[47:51] And I find that very interesting. Do you have any thoughts about this general right-leaning manosphere looks maxing subcultures embracing hormonal therapies and access to like teleaalth services where you can get GLP-1s and testosterone if you're a cy person versus the coverage of these things under trans healthcare. I have quite a lot of thoughts. They want for in particular, they want testosterone to be available for cis men and not for trans men and the reverse for cis versus trans women on estrogen because they just don't want trans people to exist. If you that's the skeleton key to unlocking their entire attitude towards these drugs. They want cis men on testosterone because they because in their mind that's being more cis or more of a man.
[48:36] They want cis women to be on estrogen if they need it because to them that's being more of a woman. Whereas what they would describe the estrogen treatments that I take as sex denying procedures or whatever the euphemism of the month is. They believe that these drugs should be freely available for cis people and they should be made impossible for trans people. Yeah. And they're using these regulations to enact that. For example, they are pushing to remove testosterone in particular from the list of controlled substances. Now, to be clear, that is a move that I support because it is for decades specifically harmed trans men when it was put in place in the '9s, specifically to protect the health of cis men bodybuilders.
[49:28] It is a law that was made for cis people's protection and has disproportionately harmed trans people. At the same time, they want to make it so you have to go through doctors to get it, not rather than being over the counter. So, such that doctors can regulate who can get it. In other words, they can determine, yes, sis people get it, trans people don't. So, they use the doctors as gatekeepers. What I would want is, okay, you want say testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, etc. You could just get that over the counter. So, like if you're for example a man wanting testosterone, it doesn't matter if you're sis or trans, you should just have a right to these because it's a human right. They don't believe in that because they want people to change their bodies, be the best they can be, just so long as you're still capable of making babies.
[50:19] And once that function of being a baby maker goes away, they will shut the entire thing down. That is where it seems like we are heading. And is there anything else related to your recent story that we didn't touch on yet that you wanted to work in? I wanted to explain just how they're using the playbook that they managed for abortion care and using it for transare prior to the Louvie Dobs decision in 2022. Yes, abortion was legal in all 50 states, but there were so many administrative decisions in many of these red controlled states that getting an abortion became functionally impossible because no one would provide it or you just had to travel to some other state which would cost you a lot of money such that large numbers of people simply would not be able to get that care. For example, Louisie Dobs.
[51:05] Yes, it might have banned abortion, but most people in most of the states that banned abortion were not would not have had access to abortion anyway. It was just formalizing a system of discriminatory medicine that already existed. We're seeing them lay out the very same playbook with trans healthcare. In a lot of these mostly red states, they're using the administrative rulings to slowly make it ever so slightly harder to get trans healthcare for adults in the exact same way that they've that they did for kids prior to the mass wave of bans in the early 2020s. Okay, so backing up, it was never easy to get trans medicine as a kid. It was administratively quite difficult. You had to go through a hall of rings. You had to get your parents to approve it.
[51:51] You had to get your doctor to approve it. You had to get a psychiatrist to approve it and then you had to get an endocrinologist to administer it. That was a very very difficult system to go through and very few children were able to get it. I believe it was something I did a report on this where it was like 1,000 people a year. Meanwhile, they're saying that kids are just going to school and seeing their school nurse and coming back like with sex changes or something. is the biggest cuz can you imagine your child goes to school and they don't even call you and they change the sex of your child. Think of it. Oh yeah. Because they because in their mind somebody using trying on they them pronouns and getting like your genitals changed are they're not like the same thing, but they're on the same spectrum of the same thing.
[52:39] So like, oh, they think one is just gonna like lead might lead to the other and therefore you have to shut it down like a within a zero tolerance sense, right? They want to make it socially impossible to do these things. Going back to trans youth healthcare, it was socially impossible to do it. Even in a lot of the blue states, the more tolerant states, if you can't get all these resources aligned, you can't do it. And now they're using the like, oh, we can just ban it for kids. So that's what they've done in states that compose about half of the US population and about half of the US states where you just can't get this stuff legally anymore for kids. They're starting to do the first step of setting up the administrative blocks for adults and they're roll they're starting by rolling it out in red states where ambiter operates.
[53:26] They're just like doing it slowly by slowly and like oh oh it'll be like harder to administer like we're just not going to cover it. They're doing that and eventually, mark my words, a couple of years down the line, if this doesn't get stopped, they're just going to do formal bans on these drugs. We already saw a formal ban on all HRT, including for adults, get introduced in Oklahoma. Now, that that didn't end up passing. They ended up taking the language of the bill, making it something completely different. I don't remember off the top of my head, and then they made that as some other unrelated restrictions. But it shows that there is a legislative will to ban these substances and they're using a playbook that already worked with abortion and that already work with trans youth healthcare.
[54:13] And if you quote the head of the Heritage Foundation, we want to get rid of this for all adults. They're laying it out there and laying out the intention and they're also starting to use the same legal and administrative framework to get that done. So I believe that this movement by ambiter to not cover these medications that until October would have been mandatory to require coverage for they're starting to see the same restrictions play out and I think we're going to have the same outcome. Yeah. They're slowly chipping and chipping away at their main goal which is the elimination of this coverage. Yes. And adding on to that, by the time they actually get around to doing formal bans on trans adult healthare, most trans people will not have had regular access to their hormones.
[55:04] So, it won't be a like a quick shut off. It'll be like, yes, they will have formally banned it, but the most vulnerable trans people will not notice that that the formal ban will have gone into effect because they will already have had their hormones taken away. And to that effect, the conclusion of your article speaks to the topic of stockpiling. When you talk about it, in your conclusion, you talk about how those who stockpiled HRT were far more secure than those who did not. Can you speak a little bit to the stockpiling of HRT medications? Yes. So, when I interviewed all these people for this story, one of the things I asked them was, how secure are you when I went security is how long do you have dosage dosages of the hormones you need to live? For example, for people who had like months and months of supply, they were fairly capable of waiting out the storm.
[55:55] They were like, "Oh, maybe I can like maybe this insurance dial is a temporary thing, but and while I wait that I can keep injecting myself with what I need to live such that it's not really affecting my life in an immediate way. Meanwhile, for people that did not have this stockpile of hormones on hand, they were all thinking, "Okay, I have three months of testosterone left. That means I have three months to leave the state that I'm currently living in and go to somewhere else where I can get what I where I can get my medicine." There's a reason. It's like a state of panic. Yeah, it's causing panic because you need that stuff to live. And as I conclude my article, having HRT can mean the difference between security and being driven from your home.
[56:43] It's no coincidence that we met these people in the Discord server of Operation Lifeboat whose purpose is to get people out of Kansas. And it's no coincidence that Kansas is one of is the first state where we saw reports of trans men being denied testosterone. Yeah. Well, I really appreciate you reporting on these subjects and coming on here to talk with us about it. If people are interested in these topics and following these things as they play out, I think the needle's an incredible source of information. Can you speak a little bit to the broader mission and content that is discussed at the Needle, what you report on and the coverage there? We started The Needle, that being myself and my co-orker Artemis, started The Needle because we were reading a lot of trans news. And to be clear, most news about trans people is made by cis people who are indifferent to actively disliking us.
[57:35] Therefore, they're not going to be that sympathetic to our cause. They're not going to understand us or they're going to make sure that they're including the opinions of people who want us dead for neutrality reasons. Cough, New York Times, Atlantic, BBC, etc. Meanwhile, you have transowned outlets that yes, you have like Eron in the Morning being the most famous one who are doing trans news, but it's doing trans news that's still to a cis audience and is written for a sis audience. And I know this for a fact because when I interviewed to work for Aaron last year, she specifically told me that our primary audience is not trans people. Our primary audience is the cis family members of trans people. So I didn't when I was realizing okay this is the field that which we're operating in.
[58:25] I want to do news that is by us for us is I'm going to use the language that the trans people use amongst themselves because I want that to be our core audience. I'm fine with cis people reading us. plenty of cis people do, such as yourself. And like, but I want cis people to understand trans people in the language that trans people understand themselves. And I want sis people that want to learn about trans people to take seriously the issues that trans people are trying to get them to take seriously. Yeah. So we have we kind of cover these stories that are very important such as for example ambiter insurance cut a cut cutting off care because this wasn't a one-off story.
[59:11] Yes, as far as we knew it was only located to Kansas. It's only within the past week that we found documents proving that no this is much wider than Kansas. We have proof of them denying coverage in 19 states. But for example, most outlets would not have covered a Kansas specific case unless it's extremely severe, such as the license is being revoked in back in February. So we decided just, hey, we're just going to do an editorial stance of what do we think trans people need to know? And that's been our guiding light that there's a reason why we dug into for example there was a fake threat of FBI letters going around to trans creators that was going on in January. The there was a letter said that was allegedly saying hey trans creators we this is the FBI stop making content about trans people or else.
[1:00:06] And this is like a massive panic. No people couldn't really figure out where it was coming from. They knew a few people who had claimed to have gotten these letters, but it was a massive panic without any evidence. We ended up doing an investigation into that. And I was able to figure out that one of the main people who was promoting this and was getting publicity off having been threatened by the FBI had faked her evidence because she had sent it to me. And I was able to identify within five minutes. It was an AI generated image of a fake document. And this was the basis on which he was claiming to have been threatened by the FBI. So, I'm glad that the most popular thing I've ever done by pure view count. It's not the, "Hey, hey trans people, here's how you're getting [expletive] over today." It's, "Hey, trans people, you have been lied to.
[1:00:52] The threat that you thought was going on actually isn't happening. Therefore, you should be worried about these certain things." These are the kind of what to sis people would be considered a niche story. the kind of things that cis writers about trans people or trans people writing for a cis audience wouldn't really think to cover which is why we have so many stories of that are just kind of like out there to a sis audience but trans people like oh my god you covered that I was like that's a huge deal and I want to emphasize that we are doing this on essentially a shoestring budget I was able to go into this over the last couple weeks interview a number of people on this issue and I was able to do that on a fraction of minimum wage. This is my full-time job that I began working on in October.
[1:01:40] And I hope to be able to support myself doing this. I hope to support more people doing this. Artemis also would like this to be her full-time job as well. That's the other person who works at this with me of the main people who work this at this with me. But that requires money. If you want to support coverage like this, you should get a subscription to our outlet. We are looking to do more with ambiter. We know that there's more to dig into. We are hoping to do other stories as well, but we need the ability to fund ourselves in order to do this. For example, next week I'm going to be in the courtroom at Manhattan covering the DOJ's attempts to get documents related to trans children. essentially making it so that they can create a list of trans kids who are going through NYU, Mount Sinai, and some unknown number of other hospitals.
[1:02:34] We want to cover that. That costs money and we would we need your support to keep this going. If you like what we're doing, if you think what we're doing is helpful, please buy a subscription to The Needle. Yes, check out The Needle. That's the needlenews.com. I think you all are totally on the pulse. You show up with the receipts in everything that I read from you and there's insight in your reporting that I'm not finding anywhere else. So, I can't recommend you all enough. Thank you so much. Oh, hey there. It's just me again providing some interstitial here between that interview and the last segment of our podcast today. I just wanted to let viewers know that there is alongside our Patreon another way that you can support our work which is through our merch shop.
[1:03:20] That's shop.simpymposia.com. You can find a bunch of cool stuff there with our logos on it, some corporate merch, all that kind of stuff. We've got an apparel tab, accessories, buttons and stickers, artwork. So, if you pop into our apparel tab here, there's some great t-shirt designs. We also added just recently some tank top designs. So, if you're looking for something to work out in or go do lawn work in the summer heat, that's good for you. Also, the buttons and stickers tab here. We just added kind of a new collection, too. That's some of these corporate collages I've made over the years. And this kind of cool swirly Psymposia logo sticker. There's a regular edition and holographic edition of both of these. I actually just got testers for these in the mail the other day, and they're looking pretty sweet. I stuck them onto my sketchbook.
[1:04:06] Let's see if we can get my camera to focus in on it. But if you're into stuff like that, you can check that out at shop.psymposia.com. All the money goes back to our project and the work that we do and we really appreciate it. Enjoy the rest of the show. So that was my interview with Jane from The Needle. Thanks again to her for being here and chatting with us about that story. You can see there's some new faces on screen on the latter half of the episode here. Mike's joining us and so is Nishay to discuss some recent clips from Christian Angermeer who like I said up top was recently on the New York Times opinion podcast with Ross Dowit and on a podcast from the company 50 years they've been putting out these blogs called progress with kind of like progress leaders in the AI space and technology space and stuff and he did this interview with a guy named D.
[1:04:58] Scott Phoenix, who was an AI company founder. I've clipped some bits from both of these interviews that I think are illustrative of Christian Anger Meyer. I thought we could kind of discuss three themes that I was seeing come up through these that are relevant to us. We had previously discussed Christian Angermmer as the founder of the enhanced games, the founder of Compass and A Thai, the psychedelic companies, and kind of his role in those spaces. I started two companies, Atai and Compass. both are listed. Both companies together raised more than $1.5 billion. What I wanted to kind of dive into today was his personal history and kind of his thoughts and philosophical thoughts for the future. So, we're going to kind of look at Anger Meer's exceptionalism towards himself in the drug space and these ideas he has about drugs, his kind of dystopian views on the future, and we'll close out with some of his more general eccentricities that he demonstrates in these interviews.
[1:05:59] So, kind of on that first topic of Anger Meyer's elite exceptionalism, one of the things that he discusses with Ross in the New York Times interview is how there's this consumer need for self-improvement and really emphasizing that he wants to do this through FDA approved drugs. And so, the first kind of two pieces of content I have here are going to serve more as like background flavor for the clips to come. So, they're a little bit milk toast, but I think we'll have things to reference back from these clips once we get into some of the latter ones. What I hope where the world is going is like there is a clear demand positively. I would almost say it's a cry for help of the consumer that people want to improve their life with science.
[1:06:47] And by the way, the positive cry for help or the positive show of demand are all these GLPS like all the weight loss drugs like Jarro or Zmpic. By the way, last year they made more revenues than all the AI companies together. So, and by the way, more than 50% of the people who using these weight loss drugs are not using it for what they clinically meant. They meant for diabetes and clinically obese people. I'm on a GP1. Yeah. Why? Because it's outsourced discipline. I'm not clinically obese hopefully. So, what is the cry for help? You just said there's the cry for help. is the cry for help is winning. The positive thing is that now we have one category which is the weight loss drugs and look like it's like biggest business. Yeah. So it's that people want the kind of optimization you get from GP1s and they want it in other areas.
[1:07:37] Exactly. They want to have more muscles. They want to have more sex. They want to have more fun when they go out and party. Whatever they want. And now we can decide as society that we ridicule that. And what then happens that we have the more fringes let's say neutrally. Yeah. Who people are breaking their jaws who recommend very crazy stuff. You don't recommend jobs to attain what you have. So but what I'm saying is there is this demand and I want to fill it scientifically and we have these amazing agency. The FDA is a great institution. They really have a very high bar. I can tell you doing drug development since 28 years like yeah it's a very high bar and my view is let's get stuff let's use stuff which has already gone through that high bar which by the way again I want to say it again because you insinuated oh we don't know the risks we do know the risk because that is for to be clear we know risks of things that have passed the FDA process hopefully and then we have one other screenshot
[1:08:37] From a times article that just sort of further emphasizes Angry's approach around the FDA. But you can already see some of his rhetoric kind of cracking there where he's talking about the benefits of taking things through the FDA process and then that he is on some of these drugs off label for what they went through FDA processes for. But this was a Times UK article where Anger Meer says his mantra is that these drugs should stay illegal. We and talking about psychedelics, we want to get all these psychedelics approved as medication. He says, "We took the decision early on not to go down the cannabis route and try to lobby for legislation, but to go down the medical route for clinical trials and applying to the FDA for most of these treatments. We want it to be not just a prescription medication, but a treatment you can only take while you are with your therapist."
[1:09:25] Just wanted to emphasize some of his philosophies on what he's trying to bring into the world and around his sort of specifications of how these things should be done. I just wanted to chime in about one euphemistic marketing phrase that came up in the clip which was yeah outsourced discipline which I find very disturbing and fascinating just as a peak into this mindset because it's like saying outsource cognition to AI you know it's like you don't have to you can have the machine do the thinking for you and acting like it's still your thinking it's like it's actually not your discipline if you are outsourcing it and that's just that's not a comment about you know I'm not making any claims about the right for people to use it but just to frame it in that way it's actually like not the same thing as the way that we usually describe what discipline is and cultivating discipline just like cultivating cognition leads to other sorts of ways of being in the world beyond what's available when you're
[1:10:25] Outsourcing it in the way that he's describing there. And then he gets into this other kind of five basics that he thinks healthy people should be doing in the Ross interview with the New York Times that to me is like kind of flip-flops what he said in those original clips. We people always want to know from me and this is exactly what we're debating now is like what's the medications we can take? Yeah, it all just makes sense if you cover your basics and the basics are five things in life for health and sleep is the number one. Get your sleep in order. Second is social relations. Super cheap and super hard at the same time. Have a great life. Enjoy it. Have friends. Have family. Third one is no drugs. You love now, but maybe it's like coming from me. But like I hate drugs, by the way. The negative version of it.
[1:11:12] Yeah. And I think the number one drug which should not be even allowed is alcohol. It destroys everything. Alcohol is scientifically the worst and it's spiritually a path to hell. That's my few. Yeah. I've never touched it and I will never. Yeah. And by the way, marijuana, I have not touched it. I would not. Makes you dumb. Yeah, there are medical use cases, but again, by the way, also, so everything is also always a trade-off. If I would have a medical use case with Mariana Help, maybe I would do it, but I clearly see the side effects, which is especially when you're younger, by the way. This where do you begin? I don't It's just hard. It's It's so hard to know where to begin here. He would love marijuana if he could profit off of it. He would absolutely be all over it if he could profit. And one thing I just wanted to say about the last clip, it's like he's talking about the consumers crying out for help.
[1:11:58] And yeah, I understand that, but they're crying out for help because the world his [expletive] billionaire class created is become inhospitable for people to live in. Like they're fed they have food deserts. Like food has no nutrition in it. Yeah, I get it in the short term if it's going to help reduce weight and all of the diseases that are, you know, are compounded because of that, but again, there's like no systemic analysis here at all. Well, and does anyone else see when he's talking about drugs in this clip, the hypocrisy when viewed in frame of the clip before where he's talking about the individual should have the right to like perfect themselves how they want or have better sex or have better parties and then Yeah.
[1:12:45] It's his opinion that alcohol is destructive and marijuana makes you dumb. So, because he chooses not to do it, no one else should. Yeah. And he's never done it. I kind of believe that. I guess I kind of believe that. He kind of seems like a guy who's never had weed. It's kind of amazing commenting on on it without ever having tried it. He's quite the tea totler around alcohol. Anytime I hear somebody say that weed just makes you dumb. It makes me remember that the first time that I ever like when I first started smoking weed, I was pretty like late to it. I think I was 25 or 26 like when I first started actually smoking. And I was so like nervous about how it would affect my job. And I remember like I got a vape pen and I started kind of like hitting it on little walks that I would take, like breaks I would take during work.
[1:13:37] And like a week or so after I started doing that, my manager pulled me aside and he was like, "Hey man, like we just we really wanted to talk to you because we've noticed like a change in your attitude and you've just been a really good team player lately and we just really appreciate it." And like he was just like talking. He was like, "Whatever you've been doing, like keep doing it." And I was like, "Yes, sir. Don't mind if I do." And there's definitely like people have different reactions to it. you know, it's like some people and the reason I say that the reason I bring it up is because I think there's he doesn't have like a robust picture of all the options and the way that he is asking like Russ was saying there's a certain hypocrisy here because definitely for some people there is the experience of smoking a bowl and then just like veging on the couch and just wanting to eat stuff and not like exert any effort but that's not everyone's experience of cannabis.
[1:14:29] So yeah, there's just like he has a very dogmatic view of specific substances and then other substances that really don't have a lot of an evidence base behind them. He's like full speed. There's nothing wrong with that either. Like that's relaxation to people. Going out and drinking with your friends is like a great way to socialize if you're moderate about it. It's like every drug. Like there's no such thing as a good or bad drug. It just depends on like the person using it, the mindset behind it. Just depends if you can get IP and profit from it. Yeah, that too. That too. Do we want to finish that clip? I don't think we need to finish that one because we kind of hit the point that I was interested in talking about. The rest he talks about how sleep is important and some stuff like that. But what we have been discussing is the drugs that Anger Meer has or hasn't done, which is the next clip that I have.
[1:15:18] Long story short, like psychedelics are about to be approved. You're going to see psilocybin active ingredient magic mushrooms. You can take it with your doctor the next year and all the other psychedelics we're developing DMT 5 DMT Ibuk a new version of MDMA are going to come I would say over the next 3 to 5 years to market and which are the ones that you have taken yourself or that you take now. So I do regularly psilocybin which is the active ingredient in magic mushrooms regularly means I do it once maximum twice a year with a therapist together in a country where it's already legal. So I do it the proper way how it will be in the United States hopefully next year end of this year next year. So I have done 5 MODMT I've done DMT.
[1:16:04] I've actually done our entire pipeline except of fiber. Why is he so confident that it'll be approved like this or next year? I mean, he just talked about how robust the FDA approval process is and we've seen it not work already. Like, what's he thinking? And he's been on this trip of like, these things have to be approved by the FDA. You have to do them in the correct setting. You have to do them with the right professionals. And he's like, I've tried every drug in our pipeline. None of them are approved yet. Yeah. Yeah. And it also like you know his new story here is you know I'm doing it the way that I'm asking others to do it. But that's not been his story historically as Russ you've covered. No. And in fact I can take you on quite a journey here. We'd like to because that's the next couple things I have.
[1:16:50] Did anyone else have anything they wanted to comment on before I do for like this libertarian right rightwing guide to tell anyone what the correct way to do it? There's like not a correct way to do it. These people have botched clinical trials. like there's not even like any consensus on what the proper therapeutic protocols are for this whatsoever. No. And he certainly doesn't know. And so one of the reasons I Mike is joining us from camping and stuff and I'm really appreciative of that and I was hoping he would come on here because I've been following Anger Meer's kind of origin story for a long time and documenting a lot of the flip-flopping and contradictory stories he tells about his use of psychedelics.
[1:17:44] And I wasn't sure who on the team might not be familiar with those origins. They're not something we've like spot lit to our audience like over and over and over again. It's in some of my reporting from years past. But I was really hoping Mike would be able to come on so I could have someone new to this topic to look at some of this content with. James, I'm not sure if you've seen it either, but it's very interesting how Anger Meer describes his origins with psilocybin. So, if you want to play clip five where Anger Meer talks about his first shaman with Ross on the NT Opinions podcast real quick just so we can see how he brings it up in conversation today. This is all a very spiritual experience. Some people by the way might not call it like that. I have a friend who's actually big shout out because he was my first sort of shaman like in my very first trip.
[1:18:32] He's very very he would call himself although he does psychedelics really an atheist but then when I talk to him he's like you're not an atheist like you just don't like the word you like religious like you believe in something bigger like okay so that's a clip where he's talking about people being spiritual with psychedelics and psychedelics making people more spiritual but he calls out this person who he describes as his first shaman and his friend so who was that was sort of where I wanted to drill into and the times screenshot number two James gets a little bit further into that but I still think doesn't name them but so it gives a little bit of background on who Christian is his sort of child prodigy things his founding of the company Ribboa which is also kind of at odds with some stories I've uncovered u we can talk about that in a little bit too but then it gets into that after meeting a neuroscientist at a dinner party who told him about the research of David Nutmer became interested in psychedelics and then in 2014 He was on holiday with his friends in the Caribbean.
[1:19:34] Quote, "They were like, hey, we're doing magic mushrooms tomorrow, and we know you don't want to, but just so you know what we're doing." And I said, "You know what? I'm going to do it." And so he just took magic mushrooms with some friends in the Caribbean, according to this story. But if we want to play the last clip I have here of Anger Meer's origin stories where he discusses this on the New Health Club podcast and then on the Danny in the Valley podcast. It's also contradictory what he tells people. So one is from 2021, one is from 2019. I believe I was in the Caribbean with really really close friends whom I trust and as people say we might come to that later it's all about set and setting. So it was the right moment, right environment, right people. And they had homegrown magic mushrooms.
[1:20:20] It was in a country to add that the disclaimer where magic mushrooms are legal. They were like, "Want to try?" And I was like, "You know what? Yeah, let's do it." And as I always say in one sentence, it was the single most meaningful thing, important thing, defining thing in my whole life I ever did. Because you were depressed or just No, in that case it was, it's a long story. just a music festival. No, it's No, actually, thankfully, it's not because I this is what I don't believe in. I So, and I had the big luck that I had the access to very control. It was perfect setting. Was it a treatment center or No, it was in nature but with professional people around me. I was completely Where was that? Was that in the Netherlands?
[1:21:06] Exactly. And the main difference that we as I as investor and the companies I invested in have compared to that Denver proposal and there is another one I think in Colorado is that these are potentially very potent drugs and solutions for severe mental health problems but they have to be administered in a professional setting meaning under medical care. So I find his paternalism to be vomitous to be honest. I just That's a great response. That was well done. I just can't Well, so he is contradicting himself over and over, right? He said first he said it was with the shaman. Were his sham were was the shaman his close buddies in the Caribbean, you know, at a and like good sentence setting of course, but then later he's talking about his first time being in the Netherlands in a professional therapeutic setting.
[1:21:58] And is he just changing his nar like it looked like the years were kind of off too. He was just kind of flip-flopping. He didn't have a like chronological story of when that flip-flop actually changed, right? Yeah. So, you're following correctly. You are definitely on point here. Do you want to know who his first shamans were? Yes, please. Okay. So, around the time when a Thai went public, he kind of came out and publicly thanked his very first shamans who got him involved in psilocybin. So, if you want to pull up his LinkedIn post from that time, this is just a little cut from a longer post about a Thai ipoing where he thanks two people for being his very first shamans. He says, "Thank you to my dearest Julian Morris and Landon Ross for being my shamans on my first trip and many more that followed."
[1:22:48] But it says four years ago. So, if he was only doing one or two per year, there couldn't have been that many more. I mean, just the math isn't really lining up for me. Yeah, that's a good point. But so, of course, I had to look up who Julian Morris and Landon Ross were as Christian Anger's first shamans. I think their bios are on the next slide here. Landon Ross is an artist, a native Angelino dabbling in food, psychedelics, science, and how things hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. And Julian Morris is an actor from Pretty Little Liars, Hands of God, and New Girl. Okay. So, so they're both professionals is what I'm hearing. They are professionals. They've got work. Can you read the things hang together?
[1:23:35] I found that compelling. And how things hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. It's professional [expletive] Normie, you wouldn't get I hate the internet. How things hang together was in quotation marks. So it's a quote from Wilfred Sers philosophy that's coming up on posts related to like AI and maybe a kind of way of looking at things in the tech world. So it's also probably like shocked signaling. I can't believe it. But what are his dabblings in food and psychedelics? Like is he just an investor? He's an actor that had some money to throw into a tie. I believe they're both invested in a Tai according to Instagram posts that I've seen. And yeah, they just dabble in the investing scene with Christian Angermmer. And I have verified that those are the two people.
[1:24:20] Like he's got them in pictures with him and things like that online, too. So, it's not just a random Julian Moore or Landon Ross there. Honestly, it sounds like a pretty run-of-the-mill shaman, you know, in terms of how often you hear about these kind of things. So, yeah. So, it seems like Okay. So, it seems like these are just like two buddies that went with him to wherever he actually like took mushrooms, which seems like it was mostly more or less recreational, but he's trying to basically scrub that story and make it seem more like he would never do just recreational mushrooms with his friends in the jungle. But, yes, it's very strange. There is a very much like this is the rules for you but not for me vibe around the way that Christian Angermmer describes how people should be doing psychedelics.
[1:25:15] But yeah, I just wanted to highlight for our audience and anyone who wasn't familiar with some of Christian Angermmer's backstory, how hypocritical he is around his stress around the FDA and his kind of contradictory stories about how he uses these drugs. You know, he's this billionaire who can go to the Caribbean on a yacht and take psychedelics, but nobody else can do that, and they should all do it his way. Well, it feeds into the thing, a different clip of his at some point where he's talking about like technofudalism without actually saying the word. I don't know if we're going to talk about that here, but it's perfectly aligned. Like, he wants us to rent psychedelics from his elite technofudalist technocrat state. Like, that's how he's going to make money. That's how he's going to profit off of it. and where succumb to his rules whereas he can just do it, you know, as he pleases.
[1:26:04] Yeah. And that will absolutely come up in a clip in just a minute here. I think the last point of hypocrisy in his backstory I wanted to point out was something that I uncovered when I was researching him for the first time. Just as kind of a side note, what I mentioned that company Ribboa that he says he was a founder on. I kind of accidentally discovered this fairly massive hole in the story he was telling him about himself by reaching out to the actual founders of Ribboa at the time and just being like, "Hey, can you tell me about this guy who helped you found this company? If you want to pull up the little slide from the article I wrote about this, James, for a while, Christian was listing Ribboa in every bio you could find of him online." and I got to write this is something I haven't seen in any reporting ever since then and he's kind of stopped emphasizing Ribboparma but one of Ribboparma's co-founders Roland Croitzer told me that Angermmer was hired on at Rioparma to provide managerial experience and that he initially served as a member of our supervisory board and made important
[1:27:06] Contacts to several venture capital firms. Kitzer said that Anger Meyer was not a co-founder of Ribboa. However, as is claimed in many of Anger Meer's biographies across the internet, including his Thai life sciences bio, Psymposia reached out to Anger Meyer for comment on this involvement in riboparma and to learn what managerial experience he had in his 20s, but has not heard back at the time of this publishing. So, that was just or at the time of this recording, I assume. Yes. Yeah. He still hasn't gotten back to you on that one. not on rivoparma. No wmp. So I just wanted to point that out as kind of a an end stamp on his exceptionalism and background talk today. And we can move forward into some of what Mike was discussing here, which is kind of the more dystopian future theme around Christian Anger Meyer.
[1:27:58] And Nishay, I don't know if you want to speak to this at all, but you wrote a lot about Christian in your paper, Tescrial Hallucinations, and some of his views for how psychedelics might be used in the future. Yeah. Well, I was really interested in how Anger Meer amongst the billionaire class tends to say more than some of the others the quiet part out loud a lot more openly. I don't know exactly why he does that, but in particular, he was describing his interest in using psychedelics as a kind of new opium for the masses to prevent the possibility of a popular uprising against a the world that the elites were building. and he openly identified as being amongst the builders and saying you know it's not good for mental health the world that we're building like the some someow I think the majority of people feels that the world is going in a direction which a doesn't make sense for them so they can't understand a lot of things anymore and b they subconsciously
[1:29:01] And that's even worse know there might be no place for them in the world let's say we the tech elite is building and so using psychedelics to try to prevent a popular revolution essentially was what he openly described on his everyone with the website he posts a lot to is it like maybe LinkedIn or something but he has like long essays essentially where he like describes a lot of this so I've been very interested in because I think my take and I don't know this is just kind of my sense but I think that he's in conversations with a lot of people that are talking about this kind of thing and he just, you know, it doesn't sound like all these ideas are coming from him natively. Like it sounds like he's like we're having a peak behind the curtain into how some of the billionaires are thinking and talking about this kind of new world order situation that they're building out.
[1:29:53] Yeah, he definitely claims to be good friends with Peter Teal and credits a lot of ideas to Teal that he has kind of run with. And I think you'll be particularly interested in this next clip because in the Tesriel article, you do write about this idea of him saying psychedelics might be used to get humans back in touch with themselves in a more dystopian future or things like that. On the LinkedIn post as well as I think he talks about that in his diary of a CEO interview with Steven Bartlett. But he has clearly continued thinking about this concept and has refined it in this current interview that he did with Scott Phoenix, the AI company founder in that 50 years progress interview. Give me just a couple of examples of the kinds of things that you're invested in or involved in this space and then we'll drill down into some of the subjects.
[1:30:42] Well, the favorite one is always psychedelics. Like that's what I think is like on on a narrow with a narrow few they have the potential to really change the way how we treat mental health issues which already is huge and it's only growing because I think humans are very anti-change and we going we will actually in the next 10 years go through the biggest change humanity in the shortest period of time had ever to do it and this will create a lot of fear and I think psychedelics can actually help So describing the problem here guide people or help them adjust humanity to sort of a radically different future. I think there's so much counterveailing force right now about the idea that technology is fundamentally a destructive force that the data centers are destroying the environment that AI is taking all the jobs because I think mostly what they hear about is the unredeemed future where no one has any jobs and the environment's wrecked and like I think that's what a lot of young people believe every single time again you go back in history and something similar
[1:31:44] Disruptive on a global scale has happened we reacted as humanity as a whole with fear there is a medical condition called adjustment disorder. It's usually used when people are confronted with extreme change in their life, a negative one, which is usually a terminal ill or could be loss of job. And in 5 years from now, the majority of the world will have adjustment disorder because in front of their very eyes, societal adjustment disorder. Yeah. And we've seen that psychedelics have a tremendously positive effect on that because they take away the panic, take away the fear, and give people hopefully a perspective. Well, so he's basic he's describing a problem that we're going to have a societal adjustment disorder to this massive change.
[1:32:30] And without actually talking about him championing this change and like the society being what he wants it to be, he's like, "Yeah, let's just dose everyone and they'll chill out about it, right?" Like it's not like we should change the way that, you know, the society is ruining everyone's lives. We should just make them deal with it better. Yeah. In that sense, it reminds me of drapedania, which was a mental illness that was used to like it hypothesized that this is from Wikipedia entry. Japania hypothesized there was a mental illness as the cause of enslaved Americans fleeing captivity. It says the hypothesis was based on the belief that slavery was such an improvement upon the lives of slaves that only those suffering from some form of mental illness would wish to escape.
[1:33:16] So again, it's like there's the kind of hegemonic power like society order ordering things in a way that is oppressive and because that is treated as good and inevitable, anyone who is not going with the program must be, you know, kind of like medicated or like kind of treated as having some kind of medical illness or mental illness aberration that explains rather than actually stepping back and asking whether this system should be the one that exists. Apologizing the individual, which is like the whole thing that neoliberal does in the neoliberalism does in the first place is individualize everybody, disconnect everybody. But like this is even a step further, right? Where he's talking about the new change that we're going to be post neoliberal world is going to be even harder for everyone and we need to dose them even further because they're pathized.
[1:34:09] They're the ones that are ill, not the society. Right? And I think it's worth mentioning like in this hypothetical future of his where five years down the line everybody's got adjustment disorder. I would wager that in his vision he doesn't have an adjustment disorder and the other people in his like elite circle haven't had to adjust much. It's mostly that the rest of us have to adjust to be able to keep them kind of where they're at. And I think that there's a very different way of seeing the future where that doesn't necessarily have to be the way. Yeah. They're creating the context that we need to adjust to. Yeah. Right. Where does he get these timelines? Like why does he keep saying one year, five years?
[1:34:54] Like he actually has these predictive. Is there a real reason for that or is he just Mike? I do I to answer your question I think that these entrepreneur guys it's just constantly they have to give you kind of short timelines but not short enough for you to it's the Musk thing right it's just it's constant I don't disagree with him though I do think psilocybin is going to be approved I think a lot of the errors that were made in the maps trials are were not made at least not in a completely blatant disregard the way that maps was. So I do think plus just the pressure the lobbying to an extent regulatory capture of FDA I think that's very plausible that psilocybin is approved as far as the rest of them.
[1:35:42] Yeah. I don't know if we're there yet. To go back to the point about like this perspective on what psychedelics can do and thinking about mental health and the way that Anger Meyer is describing here. If you extend this out and you think about other people in this billionaire or not trillionaire orbit like Elon Musk, he's been really focused on this idea of like suicidal empathy, toxic empathy as something that is like standing in the way from society doing what it needs to do to progress. And so you can imagine a future where with this sort of rhetoric leading the charge, people who are disturbed about the ICE kind of concentration camps in the United States being portrayed as having some kind of mental disorder that needs to be medicated away.
[1:36:27] Like you're feeling that this is wrong is a medical problem and that's medicate you to get in line in step with the program. It's hard to even wrap your mind around like a world where everybody is doing psychedelics to cure their techn the AI adjustment is is the [expletive] weirdest [expletive] ever. It's also not going to happen. I do want to like kind of separate some of this in my own thinking that yes, this is the narrative that he's pushing. It's never going to happen. There's never going to be like a huge slice of the public that is doing psychedelics on a regular basis. maybe more than now depending on to the extent that they integrate this with healthcare and as a mainline treatment. I don't see it being a mainline treatment in forever for me like my personal 10 years.
[1:37:16] I don't think this is going to be a mainline treatment. I think it'll be for psychiatrists who look at the research and look at the data. I think it'll be sort of a an option. I don't think it'll be a mainline as a counter perspective. I just wanted to put in like just as a different way of thinking about the situation and kind of a different way of thinking about what he's saying. You I think Normie told me about some film where they end up like and like killing slightly older people like around 40 or something. Yeah, that's like Logan's Run. Yeah, I haven't seen it, but you showed me some scene from it where they're like kind of people are like embracing their going off into the void, right?
[1:38:01] Yeah. Basically, once you hit 40 years old, you have to you go up in this you're like levitated into this zapper. Yeah. And then if you and then if you get out of that and you become a fugitive, they'll send I think they call him a sandman. They'll that you're hunted. Yeah. And so from that with that in mind, I personally don't want to just be like, you know, oh, this isn't going to happen. It's just marketing because I do think that there is a risk because of the meaning making sort of like potential and feeling connected to something larger that can happen with psychedelics. you can short circuit that impulse and direct it into believing in this AGI future and kind of be told that your sacrifice of your life of your whatever is actually on behalf of this more meaningful thing that you're helping to bring about and I don't want to write that off because I think that everything we know about psychedelics and the way that
[1:39:02] They're intending to move things and also the way Steve Derbbertson has been talking about re-engineering the religious impulse. I think that there is a very real risk that there are at least people in that side of the world that are trying that are actually thinking about using psychedelics to get people on board with the program. I don't want to dismiss it either and I think that's very valid. At the same time, I guess I do think that the sort of orbit, the web of beliefs in the Teal Musk, Anger Meyer, Jervson, the Silicon Valley, just out of touch billionaire class, I think is so repulsive to the masses of people. I guess I have hope in like grassroots resistance that their ideas are so antisocial and so toxic that overall it'll be rejected.
[1:39:56] I don't want to I don't want to just dismiss it entirely though. I do think those ideas could be extremely dangerous, could root themselves in this. I could see a world where a lot of working class because they're so dis disillusioned with the system start advocating for this tech technudalist state for sure and that'll include psychedelics as a optimization religious type baptism into that worldview. I can certainly see that happen. I guess I would just say I think that would happen on a smaller group of people if that makes sense. This is the same clip that he talks about putting MDMA in the water, right?
[1:40:42] Before we get to the MDMA in the water, well, actually, we should hit the clip that you mentioned earlier, Mike, which actually I think is a perfect extension of the conversation we're having right now because it encapsulates the future that Christian Angermier is entertaining himself thinking about in this interview with Scott Phoenix, where Scott Phoenix kind of asks him like, "Where do you see the future going?" I might pause this one a couple of times because it's a little bit long and I think there's a couple points throughout that we'll be able to talk about. So like where's where does the future take us? I think the two things we take for granted is the western word is democracy and capitalism and they could both be needing at least like a revamp. 20 years from now you and I are having this conversation and you're telling me how things work.
[1:41:27] Like what's your best guess? I cannot see that we need human labor beyond 10 years from now. And maybe, by the way, we keep it a bit because we're so attached to it, but like I don't think we need it like because we're going to have a new class of slaves which going to be robots. By the way, with all the debates we're going to have, are they conscious? Is it okay? I would say like there will be Give it a pause there. What? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, we can talk. This is going to look so stupid in 20 years. It's just he like falls into this I think it's a meme of like capitalists not being able to imagine a future without slaves or something like he just cannot imagine it. Yeah. He kind of seemed like he went out of his way a little bit to use the term slave.
[1:42:15] Like he didn't really have to and it was like almost like he took pleasure in it like you said like it just he can't see a future without it. Like this is the answer for how we have slaves in the future. And then he's like, "Oh, and all the debates we're going to have about ethics or whatever." I'm like, "Well, I mean, if they're conscious and whatnot, like you're going to have conscious slaves, like, you know, which is what you want. So bad." And I was listening, Norm, to that clip you shared with the in the chat with the muskism author guy, and I think it was in that that they were talking about, you know, someone describing labor costs as a tax, you know, like a burden that companies like shouldn't have to pay. And so as they're trying to get rid of all the other taxes, humans are just, you know, a weight weighing things down that they see as, you know, they're now in a position to move past needing that.
[1:43:07] I think this conversation is is I think is going to age just so terribly. You're already starting to see the claims that AI is going to steal all the jobs. Like the CEOs are starting to backpedal on that as they're just discovering that it's actually not the case. It's and there I think there was a Harvard paper that had come out that actually showed it required more workers. So yeah, it might cut down on some pointless jobs. I don't think this argument is going too well for them at this point. And like just for a survival like a billionaire class survival mechanism. So you're going to have nobody that has jobs. What do you think they're going to do? I do think like I was just reading something or saw something about Zuckerberg like and how Meta has conscripted a bunch of their labor force and kind of force them to now work as an AI training enterprise where and there the rationale was that well they're on average like higher
[1:44:09] Intelligence than if we hired a random cast of people to do that. And so I do think a lot of this class of billionaires like do believe that they're going to be able to do away with human labor. I don't think it's just a marketing thing. I think that they're kind of on the cusp of it and they are making plans for a future where this amount of humans on the planet is not necessary and is actually a would be a burden to them. I think they fully believe that. I think they despise humanity and I think they're going to despise humanity even more as the people push back against them. They're going to run into a wall though when it comes to they're not going to complete this.
[1:44:58] This is where I think you and I are coming at this from like different perspectives. I think it's healthy for there to be like different perspectives on this. I love the arguments and debate with you. I think it's good. I enjoy it because I think it is good for people to be looking at the like but what if like dangerous flank as much as it's good to have some people who are like trying to think okay well you know hopefully there will be enough resistance to prevent this from happening in order to have sort of the different bases covered. So I my orientation is just to keep an eye on like but what if they are successful in preventing mass uprisings and they're just too far advanced and what harm could they do or do in the meantime if they are eventually stopped but like what will happen until that point.
[1:45:44] So I think a lot of this is very concerning and I the bridge that I see between your two perspectives is that for a future in which Norm's kind of hopeful vision can play out has to be preceded by an understanding of what could go wrong and people watching out for that and I think they should be taken seriously. I'm not saying to dismiss what it is that they're saying. I think they should be taken very seriously and smashed and dismantled and gone after. I just don't think they're going to win at all. I also want to point out that like a lot of this is them pumping their bags too. like let's not just dismiss that because they have to keep the narrative alive that AI is going to be this philosopher stone holy grail for companies to be able to reduce labor and increase profits and earnings.
[1:46:40] I think it's completely unsustainable. And I think what they're doing right now, to your point about pumping their bags, is that they're just like trying to tread water to be able to keep that narrative, you know, to keep their money, their valuations to a point that like isn't going to cause like a bubble collapse and a societal upheaval basically. And in the meantime, you know, we all just sort of have to watch how insane it sounds like, you know, from these clips and like maybe some people are believing them. Like the interviewer seems to be like on board somehow, but I don't really understand like why there's no end game, right? It's all just sort of like it's the same thing with capitalism. It's just like this perpetual never ending like get it all, get more, do more.
[1:47:29] And it but it can't it will end. Like we can't have data centers the size twice the size of Manhattan and Utah that are going to increase the freaking temperature by 15 degrees C and expect people to survive to even use AI. Well, but that's the point is that they're not it's like within that perspective the endgame is to get off planet and to you know just go colony colonize the solar system. Bring it a little closer to Earth. the Would you say that the endgame though is to like eliminate human labor that that it's one version of an endgame for them? Yeah, but I'm saying it's not contradictory within their framework because that is totally conceivable if the earth is just a source of fuel that you can burn up in order to spread this to the stars like that that is the framework that a lot of these guys are operating within.
[1:48:24] They're they don't care about making the world habitable for future generations of life that's alive today. You know that this form of life. It's about the digital consciousness and sending it to the stars. Last thing on that, I do think that there is another way to look at this whereas like for example they I mean this is something that the Trump administration has been doing since forever, right? Like they make they do some extreme comments and then they get they can inch forward a little bit more and a little bit more toward whatever that goal is. So like saying for this Utah data center example is actually an interesting one. Kevin Olirri said, "I'm not budging. I'm not budging. We're doing it twice the size of Manhattan." So and so forth. And then he's like, "I'm not moving an inch." And then the legislation passed or something. The council approved, "Okay, we can do it 70% of the size."
[1:49:11] And he's like, "Okay, I'll be okay with 70% of the size." Even though he wasn't budging, right? But that ended up being the plan all along. The original architecture plans were that it was that size. So there may be some kind of like art of the deal situation here where they're just like throwing out these extreme things and then hoping that they can get halfway there. Right. Right. Right. Well, for Christian Angermier and the stars, you might be thinking a little too far in the future. He's got some particular opinions about that sweet spot in the middle. If we want to wrap this clip up, will be this class of robots combined with AI who do most of human labor. So that means we have to reinvent humanity already in this point which I think again the outcome can be great the transition can be shitty take the Roman Republic so first of all you had Roman citizens who didn't work practically and you had the slave class so say now the slave class are the robots and everybody else is the Roman citizen so we don't work they did spend their time with pastimes with by the way pastimes
[1:50:13] We now actually value a lot because we build our entire western civilization on philosophy. So all the really like wow thoughts which shaped western society I know it's controversial what I'm saying was made by slave owners because they had time to do that. Yeah. Because other people did the work. Now the other great within both in Greek society and Roman society within the citizen society you had the ones who owned land and the one who don't and how Roman democracy worked is that the land owners were responsible for their other citizens they were called patrones to provide them enough for their living but in return they got the vote. because they had to be nice because otherwise the clientele would have gone to another patronis and because they were Roman citizen and had voting power it would have given this other person more political influence.
[1:51:11] So maybe in a very extreme way countries are disbanding and you have the ones who own practically the land of the future is AI and robotics. So they really own the economy, but because we're still a democracy, that's would be a smart way to redistribute. They have to give parts of their wealth. And by the way, if you go to the Roman economy, these patrons were giving significant parts of their wealth. We're not talking about the 1% in order to keep their influence. So maybe we have the big corporations like Google and all of them. maybe they have to provide for the rest of us which we then can use to buy services from their robots in the ivory but they have to be so I just so the whole thing is that corporations will provide for us to buy from corporations yes right okay I just want to make sure I'm tracking all right we'll finish it up
[1:52:12] Here and they compete because if they lose too many clientele then something bad is going to happen because some of their competitors like so that is I think where I could see both democracies was for two things democracy and capitalism moving towards so in other words not democ democracy or capitalism exactly right that's one of the best like little clips that I've seen that highlights the need to just dismantle these companies like the dire need to dismantle these companies all of them are talking like this too they're all serious about this like they want this postc capitalism technoism state. They want to own these lands of the future. I mean, you hear Sam Alman talking about he wants intelligence to be a utility like you turn on your hose and it's like we literally we they want us to rent information and rent you know I mean it's a literally feudalism and the democracy side of this is that we get to choose if we want to choose
[1:53:12] Google's Gemini or you know open AAI or whatever and so is that democracy I mean no point about this is Peter Teal's like fantasy world. It felt like they were describing like company towns as countries at one point like when you pointed that out James where it was like the instead of just a town they are the country that you're like existing within they're providing the services and the capital for you to then buy back from them things that they're producing and look at this what he's saying like from that perspective of like the more concerning direction. I don't personally think that these billionaires want to like raise the average person that they kind of see as NPCs up to the stature of a Roman kind of nobleman.
[1:54:01] In part because education and the freedom to actually interrogate the material conditions that give rise to your oppression creates conditions where their hegemony can be contested and they don't want that. If you look at the history of laborers coming to the United States from other countries, the way that pigeons used to be useful and then once they were no longer useful were relegated to vermin and there were attempts at like eradicating them and marginalizing them in cities. All the history that we have suggests that they're not going to try to give the average person a better quality of life and the freedom to act like those Roman figures that he's describing. No, this is specifically to prevent them being overthrown.
[1:54:47] I think it's quite explicit in what he's saying. Well, if we get really I mean the more to Nishay's kind of like more doomerish point like they've already described that they don't need human labor. Why do they want us around anyway? Like all we are is like, you know, either rent machines for a while, the burden of tax or whatever, and then we're a stepping stone to whatever their next evolutionary future looks like. This is I just think they fail here. I think that that's the line that they don't need human labor. And I don't think they're ever going to accomplish some world like for instance, US factories are have been heavily this is one of the biggest [expletive] lines of the Trump administration. Oh, we're going to reshore manufacturing. We're going to put people back in factories.
[1:55:35] One of the reason why like the Midwest and the rust belt and everything have been so hammered is o over the decades is because they have been automated. Like there I'm not saying that there's not any more automation that can be done, but they're already heavily automated. So I just Where are these jobs that are going to be cut? I think that yeah, there's going to be a lot of middle management that's caught. there's going to be a good amount of like white collar [expletive] jobs that are cut. I just don't where are they going to get this from? I don't see where those gains are, where they're going to be able to trim from. I just don't think that they need a an economy based on material consumption the way that it has been where people buy products and that kind of thing. I've been reading No, they don't. Yeah. So, it's like once that once they no longer need there to be this big working force, even if the gains are not there, it's like they're already pivoting to a world where they don't see the number of humans alive on this planet as in line with their goals of extraction and profit.
[1:56:37] Right? At the point that he's describing, it's like the job of the companies and the elites to be like paying people. And at that point, it's not just labor costs. It's just tossing money and resources at like people. This is how England was structured forever. This is like the landed aristocracy, the landed gentry. Like it was their job. They owned everything and people worked for them, work their land and they had to provide like some sort of services that that system attempted to like come to America. It was a little bit different in America because there was tons of land available like land for everybody was available. And so that system kind of cracked in the United States where like you could just leave England and get some plot of land in the United States. There was no wiggle room in England for that. I don't know where I'm going with that, but they are trying to recreate that world for sure.
[1:57:26] So, this is where we get into this difficulty of like a lot of people do think that we're moving back into a feudal orientation, but I think we're moving into a different relationship where they actually don't want so many pesky people living on their land that could potentially be a threat to them. It's like the right people should be on their land. They should be providing for the right people, whatever that's going to mean one day. Yeah. And I think many of the people alive today are not seen as the right people. Yeah. No, they have outright contempt. And just because this is a really interesting topic and I think it's worthwhile for people to kind of at least be aware of what the more doomery side of the options are, I am going to be trying to have a future conversation with some of the folks that are working in the analysis of the potential for callulling the working class or this kind of as some people are describing it like a snuff capitalism.
[1:58:16] So yeah, and for those of you who are have gotten this far in the conversation, who have been listening in, if you have any thoughts on this, the different perspectives we've been raising, please do chime in the comments. Definitely. Well, unless we have anything else on that particular topic, we can veer into some still slightly dystopian areas, but on a more eccentric level, I think I have two clips left of Anger Meer from these interviews where he's discussing MDMA in the water, and then finally, I think we'll round out on his views on aliens. Kind of interesting. Oh my god, I've been wondering. Okay, I think psychedelics can hopefully help society without conflict move into the sort of next phase.
[1:59:01] But I told this idea since in the decade to friends of state friends of mine who are head of states or whatever. They're like wow like personally crazy like yeah I'm actually funny anecdote I'm a big supporter of a thing called Munich Security Conference which is a conflict resolution conference. Oh yeah. So the number one politic conference I think we're saying in the world and since 10 years I'm saying every year guys like we're doing that since 50 years and the conflicts are still not solved. Maybe it's time for a new way. Maybe it's time for me and they were very worried I could not joke. It's like maybe it's time for me to slip some MDMA in the water of the hotel. And by the way, jokes aside, I do think it would work. But I just love we've been talking for years about how dumb the idea of dosing the water is and that like that nothing would come from that.
[1:59:47] And I just love that Christian with MDMA seems to be like putting this out there as if he's the first person to ever consider dosing the water with MDMA or any kind of psychedelic. Yeah. And by the way, I think it would work based on what? I just love that he's talking to these security conference people and they're like, "Oh, maybe we shouldn't joke about that dude." They're like kind of terrified he might actually do it. So you just made a joke that you would do a mass act of terrorism. I was just thinking it does bring back, you know, when I mentioned the MDMMA and the water clip like I don't know half an hour ago or whatever like the whole illusion of choice thing that he's kind of talking about even with a democracy, you know, and all that. It's like or what Normie was saying about well maybe, you know, we don't think that there's going to be a lot of people just like taking psychedelics and it changes the world and everybody gets their adjustment disorder resolved from it.
[2:00:43] But if he's serious then we don't have that choice, right? Like I mean, of course, this is like kind of farfetched and whatever, but like he's dead. He's like, "Yeah, this could work. Maybe if we just dose everyone in the hotel, they'd all be better. Maybe if we just dose everyone in the world with MDMA in the water, their adjustment disorder will go away and they would be, you know, appeased and not try and overthrow us." And I did just want to mention as a historical point, I had a librarian come from Hopkins come to one of my classes and kind of show some of the historical documents that students could access. And one of the documents that he pulled up, if I remember correctly, was the government had paid Hopkins researchers like back in the 60s or whatever to do like a threat analysis of like what would happen if like psychedelics were like put into the water supply in a major city and kind of thinking through.
[2:01:32] So it definitely is like there's been an interesting history of that concept. I'll try maybe in the future to pull up that that document. We can chat about it. Yeah, that's a lot of the early CIA Yeah. research was we need our agents to dose so they can be aware once a Soviet gets them, you know, unsuspectingly. Yeah. I wonder what his thoughts are on fluoride in the water. I was thinking of fluoride as like what that came up for me when I was hearing that and how people that are skeptical also of fluoride like how they would feel about people talking like this. Exactly. True. I mean, I don't think that Anger Meers most of his opinions I don't think are popular whatsoever. It is a very thin slice of people I think that would get behind what it is that he's saying.
[2:02:23] And not even the people that are even in like he's not in a traditional like left or right, you know, lane at all. Most people who are share his similar politics, they [expletive] hate the FDA. the whole purpose of taking federal power is to dismantle the FDA entirely. And here he is having like a more like liberal perspective in praising the institution of the FDA. So he's not like he's not in a neat box at all. I think that his total belief system is based on his companies and like his solutions. That that's what his belief system is, which is why you can't really track it. There's no like systemic analysis of anything. If you got him in a private room, I think he's would he's going to acknowledge probably a lot of the points, but the all of these podcasts that he does are to attract new followers.
[2:03:18] It's all marketing. Like this is all market. It's not just pure marketing. Obviously, he is saying some of his beliefs, but I think if you get him privately, it'd be kind of a different view of things. This is what he wants his like kind of fanboys to believe in. He even talks about that in interviews of kind of loving being the contrarian and loving bringing up topics that are a little bit taboo for people to discuss. And on the marketing point, like another just point of his origin story, he talks about growing up as like a closeted gay man in a small town in Bavaria where people were beating up gay people and that instead of coming out of the closet, he has contextualized not being able to come out as the best thing that ever happened to him. You know, the negative thing being gay in a very hostile environment and not talking about it and focusing on other stuff completely made my life.
[2:04:09] Yeah. In a very positive way. I would I mean Yeah. I'm so happy that this was the case because he was able to recontextualize to his parents why he never had a girlfriend as that he just wanted to be the best in school. And he just started telling this story over and over again that he just wanted to be the best in school, the most educated, the most blah blah blah. and how it all started as marketing for him. But then he saw it become the reality when he did become the best person in school and he did go on to become a billionaire venture capitalist and that the marketing language he was telling himself that started as marketing became the reality for him and that's like this philosophy that he seems to hold very close to his heart. Yeah. Well, Mike, didn't you say you said something kind of interesting? I think it was you in the chat about like how wealthy people like their minds work where it's like yeah difficulties in life because they're successful are like framed as like well it got me to where I am now therefore it must have been good if I Exactly. wealthy people generalize their
[2:05:10] Success stories as like universal truths is is a very common thing to see. And this also relates to how they view their intuition or their judgment where they think that like you know because they were able to make decisions that led to having a lot of money. Their judgment on things is just superior to other people's. And then therefore like any other like oh this feels like a good idea, this seems right or true to me is is is given a lot of weight because of their like undue estimation and their own judgment. And I'm pretty sure Anger Myers says in this exact clip something along those lines about like regarding psilocybin too. He's like he talks about I can't remember exactly maybe we can find it or maybe this doesn't matter that much but the basically his point was in the same vein of like I never drink alcohol I never do marijuana but like I know psilocybin is good for me and it's good for everyone and I when I know something is right I do everything I can to make sure that the
[2:06:12] Truth comes out or whatever. So you love pushing on taboos. First I maybe I like pushing taboos but I also want to see you definitely like pushing taboos but only if I know I'm right once I believe in something very much then I don't care actually. That's so that's a nuance like and then I'm pushing taboos but not because I like pushing taboos but we just know I'm right. So when I rediscovered psychedelics first for myself, it was based on me first before I did my first trip rediscovering the science of psychedelics and hopefully and I'm very happy about that and people say, "Oh, Christian did a great job with that." But I told everybody, but it's actually an easy job because I know they work right. So, the last clip I wanted to round out on was Anger Meyer discussing a even bigger topic, aliens, and some of his contrarian beliefs about the potential for what aliens may or may not be.
[2:07:06] Here, we ended on aliens, except Christian doesn't think they're aliens at all. This is Conspiracy Corner. I'm very fascinated, obviously, hopefully everybody else, by all these alien stuff. Do you think they're real? I think there's something if we assume for a second there's something to always say alien in terms of this is a far away civilization which mastered light travel and came here now is maybe actually not the most obvious solution because like the jump to aliens is actually the not the logical one because if some race mastered light travel that feels too little advanced what we're seeing because if they that far that that far advanced they're like I think we wouldn't even see them. So, so and I just like I'm looking fascinated on quotes of Tucker Carlson or even JD Vance who are like maybe it's a more spiritual realm.
[2:07:56] Yeah, that's what I person What did he say? He said he's fascinated by I can rewind it, but he said he's fascinated by the thoughts of people like JD Vance who think it's part of the spiritual realm. And Tucker Carlson, I'm so disappointed because I was going to jump in and say at one point, well, at least he doesn't believe that they're like fallen archangels. And then he say I was like giving him a little credit in my mind and then he said this. So disappointing. And we're like maybe it's a more spiritual realm. Yeah. Because that's what I personally believe. I think there is not just that we have a soul, not just that there is God, but like I think it's actually literally what all the religions are saying. There is a whole realm of when you go to like the core Christian ideas of hierarchy of angels and all of that.
[2:08:41] I think one thing I actually also believe as it could be a very at least a more rational argument than aliens from far away is could it be races who had been here before? I'm a very big fan and he's a good friend of Graham Hanok. Yeah. who deliver Graham like he did the Netflix series ancient lost civiliz ancient civilization like so and he's getting more and more right by the way like in terms of archaeology that who's man this is the worst name dropping I've ever heard every person worse than it here I want to digitally crumble this up and throw it in the trash right now this is so bad there was a second where I was squinting my eyes and I was like okay I think I can actually maybe get behind where you might almost go with this and then he started talking about being old races, you know, cuz like sure if there's it's the Nephilim, Mike.
[2:09:34] Yeah. Okay. Right. Of course. But like, you know, you can think of like plant spirits and beings and, you know, other realms or like, you know, interdimensional like I can maybe start to have a conversation about that. But where he went with it immediately was just out of control of certain. Yes. No, he just kept picking the worst people to be like, I love their opinion. That was why I wanted to clip this was because he dropped JD Vance, Tucker Carlson as two alien inspirations and then went on to talk about Graham Hancock and say he's just getting more and more right in archaeology. Meanwhile, Graham Hancock is like becoming more and more regarded as like the pseudo archaeologist extraordinaire. Yeah. No, there's no way that these ancient indigenous peoples could have built something majestic. It must have been aliens.
[2:10:20] Well, I saw Graham Hancock present at Breaking Convention some years back, the psychedelics conference, and I remember he projected, you know, on the screen these like cave drawings or something and he was going through this analysis and saying, "And obviously these are aliens." And I was just watching him and I was like, "What are you talking about? Like this is like you're just projecting stuff onto this picture." And I even spoke to one of the organizers, the conference organizers after that and I said, "Yeah, I wasn't really like persuaded by all of those Johnson inferences that this guy was making." And he was like, "Yeah, you know, we invited him because he's like a big name, you know, even the organizers." Yeah. So, even the organizers weren't like standing behind the analysis.
[2:11:07] I thought he was going to go to the obvious that it was like government experimental government what whatnot and didn't even do it. He didn't even take the layup the weirdest direction possible. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to site Tucker Carlson who said that demons bit me while I was sleeping at night while he sleeps with his dogs in his bed. Right. I do think it also kind of signals potentially a bit about the adjacency of the psychedelic field to the kind of like Christian revival sort of side of things where it's like the world is seen as kind of like caught in this spiritual warfare at the moment as we're kind of approaching this Armageddon and like transformation. I think there's some of that. I'm going to lean into Nisha's dumerism here.
[2:11:53] I'm going to say perhaps what they are doing is they are priming for the rapture which the rapture is the total elimination of their jobs and livelihoods and in death camps like it could be a little bit of that rising up into the zapping field. Yeah, for sure. I also love like I love anytime somebody tries to explain a complex thought and then they give one minor detail and then say and everything else like he was just like you know I just think it's like all other religions have this idea of you know like Christianity and the hierarchy of angels and you know everything else and it's like what where are you getting at? I used to listen to UF UFO stuff back in whatever late 90s or early 2000s and this is like a direction that I really didn't expect things to go in that it's like it just like the whole angel the angel field it just does go to show how much Christian nationalism has
[2:12:57] Borrowed in to just mainstream conversation how that was just really opened up through social media and independent in podcast that that we're even feeling the need to talk about this kind of is kind of crazy. Like if I talk to my dad about this, hey dad, you following the new UFO thing? So the new theory is that they're actually interdimensional angels in like spiritual realms when the obvious thing is it's either just total disinfo or like online kind of hysteria that just sort of feeds back into itself. And I think is a really cynical thing here is I think there probably are people in the government that are looking to like juice the poly market because if there is an alien disclosure those people gonna make whatever a huge amount and I think they're kind of nudging in that direction.
[2:13:44] That's my own conspiracy which isn't even really a conspiracy anymore at this point. It's just like the insider trading and fraud is just so out in the open. Yeah. I we're in weird territory with this. I have seen some things written about the like that there are some billionaires that have like a niche pet interest and UFO stuff and so the same lobbying money that's going into pushing psychedelics is also going into kind of lobbying the government about this disclosure stuff. But to Mike's point, I yeah, I do think that like what you said, I think it's a little interesting thread to pull on like in terms of sci-fi inquiry or something like that. Whatever the guy hypothesis or [expletive] like that in that realm is is is kind of cool. It's direction I would go in if I wanted to just do, you know, nerd out on some sci-fi type thing.
[2:14:35] Yeah, there's some interesting thought experiments around this kind of stuff, but I like the way that the masses are like, you know, these billionaires and these government officials have taken it are just so far off the mark that it's like but somehow still appealing, you know, to certain crowds that can perpetuate it. Anger Meyer is going to become more and more prominent, you know, as this, you know, approaching FDA approval potentially happens. And so we'll definitely stay kind of following the inevitable stuff that arises as he continues to speak out. Yeah, I didn't expect when we started covering him back in 2020, I really didn't expect I didn't think he'd be around this long and yet he's turned into the most central like teal type figure that's really shaping this field.
[2:15:30] Well, Russ called that out, right? Yeah, I guess we did. I just I don't know. It's just kind of surprising that he's risen. He's gotten more with games and he hasn't just stayed in the psychedelics lane, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. Yeah. But between crypto, AI, the enhanced games, psychedelics, longevity research, like he's becoming more and more this face. And it was very surprising to me for a long time to not see him alongside like the Musks and Teals and people of the world kind of getting that media time. And so the one of the reasons I wanted to kind of spotlight this New York Times opinion piece opinion podcast was because this felt like one of his more high-profile interviews that I'd seen him in recently like that those interviews get shared a lot and kind of make the rounds on the internet.
[2:16:22] And so I wanted to really highlight that. But I think that's probably a good place to wrap it today. We've exhausted our Anger Meyer fuel here. We'll see how he progresses into the future. Will he become our feudal lord one day? We shall see. Thanks everyone for being here and checking out these clips with me. And the audience, if you are a Patreon subscriber, stick around till after the end. Bumper here for some discussion on psychedelics, art, and some of our favorite things.
