Cody Niconi just published: Ep022 - Deep State Psychedelics with Alex Tsakiris

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Ep022 - Deep State Psychedelics with Alex Tsakiris



This week Alex Tsakiris, host of the Skeptiko Podcast joins us to discuss psychedelics, social engineering, and the 'Deep State'. We get into the work of Joe Atwill, and his research regarding Gordon Wasson's CIA connections.

On Skeptiko, Alex interviews leading researchers and scientists looking into the different aspects of human consciousness; mainly near death experiences, parapsychology, and what Alex likes to call deeper spirituality. Last month, Alex was kind enough to have me on his show to chat about psychedelics, entheogens, and their intersection with this idea of deeper spirituality. During our conversation, Alex and I sort of glazed over this whole connection to the Deep State that continually pops up in the field of psychedelic research. Alex has since had Joe Atwill on the show to dive deeper into this concept of the Deep State and psychedelics, and my response to that follow-up episode is what inspired a lot of today's conversation.

Please consider supporting us on patreon.com/psillyrabbits, or by giving us a five star review on iTunes, Stitcher, Libsyn or whatever your favorite podcast outlet may be. If you’re buying something from Amazon anyway, and you click through the links in this sentence, the show gets a small percentage of the total sale.
 
Ep022 - Deep State Psychedelics with Alex Tsakiris



This week Alex Tsakiris, host of the Skeptiko Podcast joins us to discuss psychedelics, social engineering, and the 'Deep State'. We get into the work of Joe Atwill, and his research regarding Gordon Wasson's CIA connections.

On Skeptiko, Alex interviews leading researchers and scientists looking into the different aspects of human consciousness; mainly near death experiences, parapsychology, and what Alex likes to call deeper spirituality. Last month, Alex was kind enough to have me on his show to chat about psychedelics, entheogens, and their intersection with this idea of deeper spirituality. During our conversation, Alex and I sort of glazed over this whole connection to the Deep State that continually pops up in the field of psychedelic research. Alex has since had Joe Atwill on the show to dive deeper into this concept of the Deep State and psychedelics, and my response to that follow-up episode is what inspired a lot of today's conversation.

Please consider supporting us on patreon.com/psillyrabbits, or by giving us a five star review on iTunes, Stitcher, Libsyn or whatever your favorite podcast outlet may be. If you’re buying something from Amazon anyway, and you click through the links in this sentence, the show gets a small percentage of the total sale.
What's amazing to me is how many really bright people refuse to even consider any of the evidence re 911. My sister, Chief Medical Officer for one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, recently called an email I sent her about building 7, "crackpot conspiracy". She and her ilk refuse to even consider the evidence and nothing I or anyone says will ever change her mind. Sad.
 
What's amazing to me is how many really bright people refuse to even consider any of the evidence re 911. My sister, Chief Medical Officer for one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, recently called an email I sent her about building 7, "crackpot conspiracy". She and her ilk refuse to even consider the evidence and nothing I or anyone says will ever change her mind. Sad.
I don't know how it was for you, but it took me quite a long time to come around to this truth. it's just too much for most of us to take in. I can still remember telling my wife, "JFK was a total conspiracy, but those 9/11 nuts..." :)
 
This was a much better dialogue than we've had at Skeptiko lately. I note also that the show notes are helpful. Having a fairly neutral interlocutor made a lot of difference in my being able to discern what the heck Alex is going on about half the time these days. One noticeable thing was the reference to "inside baseball" -- we seem to get a lot of that with Alex, but the difference here is that people took the time to explicitly explain something of what is thought to be going on. Not that I necessarily agree with that, but it's nice to know what the narrative means and what's motivating Alex.

I do wonder how far one can take the narrative: I mean, how many interviews can one have about various conspiracy theories before the field is exhausted? One thing that Alex could focus on more and I think really is inexhaustible concerns metaphysical ideas. He could be interviewing people like Federico Faggin (see an outline of his views in articles here and also this video):


And then there's this video by Donald Hoffman (h/t Kindagamey):


Any chance of interviewing him? I think his "desktop metaphor" of reality is very thought provoking (despite his tacit acceptance of Darwinism!) in terms of its metaphysical implications.
 
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What's amazing to me is how many really bright people refuse to even consider any of the evidence re 911. My sister, Chief Medical Officer for one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, recently called an email I sent her about building 7, "crackpot conspiracy". She and her ilk refuse to even consider the evidence and nothing I or anyone says will ever change her mind. Sad.
I have always been ambivalent about this issue. One problem is that the physics of how very tall buildings collapse is probably not obvious - basically because so few buildings of this sort do collapse. Obviously B7 was not as tall, but it was presumably under intense bombardment from debris falling from the towers.

I'm not really arguing this either way, but simply pointing out that the behaviour of tall buildings under extreme stress is going to be complicated.

@Michael Larkin
@KindaGamey

Thanks for the videos of Donald Hoffman. His theory is now quite old, but I have always felt it didn't get the attention that it deserved. His book:

http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/omeight.pdf

lays it all out, but unfortunately it descends into a level of mathematics that I couldn't follow without enormous effort. I think that muted the impact of his theory.

I am looking forward to listening to both videos this evening.

Edit. Having listened to the first video (Federico Faggin), I think his model sounds extremely similar to Donald Hoffman's ideas. Notice that he talked about producing a model that would reproduce QM and GR.

Unlike Hoffman (I think) he also seems to have got inspiration from his own altered states of consciousness.

David
 
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This was a much better dialogue than we've had at Skeptiko lately. I note also that the show notes are helpful. Having a fairly neutral interlocutor made a lot of difference in my being able to discern what the heck Alex is going on about half the time these days. One noticeable thing was the reference to "inside baseball" -- we seem to get a lot of that with Alex, but the difference here is that people took the time to explicitly explain something of what is thought to be going on. Not that I necessarily agree with that, but it's nice to know what the narrative means and what's motivating Alex.
I agree - perhaps a bit more pre-interview planning would help - figuring out what points to cover, and what information the listener may need to make sense of what is being discussed.

David
 
Being familiar with Joe Atwill's shtick, I didn't listen to the interview. Deep State sounds like a neologism for a complex matrix of individual and group ambition, an equivalent of the hippie's The Man, a universal bugbear for anything the liberated individual disapproves of. Put everything in the same box and you don't have to deal with complexity, moreover you can claim all such ambitions are linked, an unfalsifiable assertion at best. It's conspiracy porn.

That said it would be naïve to claim powerful people do not conspire, they do with varying degrees of success, and continually so. Turn off the TV, limit your internet time, avoid paranoia in oneself and others, forsake news streams, trust in your own sophisticated powers of discernment, and like Oz's wizard, the bugaboo loses much of its power to compel and frighten. You're not missing a damned thing, beyond the age old story of human nature's capacity for almost limitless mischief.
 
Like Satan vs. God can be for religious people. Very easy. Explains it all.
On the basis that Deep State is something toxic to the human condition, it's very like good vs evil, yes. However both objective morality and NWO require a degree of belief beyond what sceptics would call evidence. All good lies require a germ of truth, but Atwill's claims require faith to match those of any religious cult. That isn't to say I don't find them fascinating sociologically. If paranoia defines the zeitgeist, Joe Atwill may well be its messiah. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem seems to be his mantra.
 
...both objective morality and NWO require a degree of belief beyond what sceptics would call evidence. Atwill's claims require faith to match those of any religious cult.

False. The claims he made in this interview are documented.

Objective Morality only requires the ability to employ Reason and Logic.

If you are interested, this Christian College President explains that here: Dr. Everett Piper and Stefan Molyneux - 18 Oct. 2017
 
False. The claims he made in this interview are documented.

Objective Morality only requires the ability to employ Reason and Logic.

If you are interested, this Christian College President explains that here: Dr. Everett Piper and Stefan Molyneux - 18 Oct. 2017
I didn't listen to the interview based on the fatuous claims Atwill made previously. If he's tempered his position I bow to your greater knowledge. Isn't citing Stefan Molyneux in this context like a materialist referencing Randi's prize? The few times I've seen his channel he seemed an NWO believer.

Objective morality is the acknowledgement that morals are unchanging and non-cultural, unlike ethics. Morality suggests a source beyond human reason (though not perhaps beyond human instinct), whatever name one gives that source.
 
Any chance of interviewing him? I think his "desktop metaphor" of reality is very thought provoking (despite his tacit acceptance of Darwinism!) in terms of its metaphysical implications.
I suspect people write Darwin into talks like this to try to avoid academic censure.

The interesting thing is that he seems to negate conventional Darwinism in the final seconds of the video!

From his talk, it did begin to seem plausible that quantum entanglement might come out of the interactions of conscious agents.

This looks as if it might be accessible:

http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/HoffmanTime.pdf

@Alex You once said that you interviewed Donald Hoffman some time ago, but there was some reason why you never broadcast the interview - I really think it would be nice if you did a new interview - these ideas are potentially so important!

David
 
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