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The Joe Rogan ExperienceThe Joe Rogan Experience

Joe Rogan Experience #2545 - Jesse Michels

Jesse Michels is the creator and host of "American Alchemy," a YouTube series exploring controversial topics in science and culture through longform interviews. https://www.youtube.com/@JesseMichels https://www.patreon.com/JesseMichels https://americanalchemymagazine.substack.com https://www.jessemichelsmedia.com Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Don’t miss out on all the action this week at DraftKings! Download the DraftKings app today! Sign-up using https://dkng.co/rogan or through my promo code ROGAN. Try ZipRecruiter FOR FREE at https://ziprecruiter.com/rogan

Joe Roganhost
Aug 25, 20263h 3mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:000:02

    Intro

    1. JR

      [upbeat music]

  2. 0:024:02

    MUFON “frogs and reptilian” UFO video roast + why the space is flooded with junk

    1. JR

      Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

    2. SP

      The Joe Rogan Experience.

    3. JR

      Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. [upbeat music]

    4. SP

      Are we up?

    5. JR

      Yeah.

    6. SP

      Okay.

    7. JR

      Hi, Jesse. [laughs]

    8. SP

      Hello, Joe.

    9. JR

      Right when we walked in, Jamie has apparently been down some rabbit holes.

    10. SP

      Deep rabbit holes.

    11. JR

      Yeah. And what is, uh, this-

    12. SP

      Who doesn't go down a rabbit hole?

    13. JR

      Who doesn't? Nobody that I like talking to.

    14. SP

      [laughs]

    15. SP

      So here's the name of the thing. I s- I think I stumbled across this video somewhere else, but here's a website that has it.

    16. JR

      Grays, Frogs, and a Reptilian on Video: MUFON Case 142206. Video taken from inside a UFO. And this is from alienarchivists.substack.com, so you know it's legit.

    17. SP

      [laughs]

    18. JR

      What is this? 2021, June 12th, 1:15 AM. Anonymous man, Key West, Florida, recorded a 42-second video allegedly... Al- also Key West, so you know it's legit.

    19. SP

      [laughs] Florida man.

    20. JR

      He's definitely not on drugs.

    21. SP

      [laughs] That's right.

    22. JR

      Definitely not drunk.

    23. SP

      Not on bath salts, for sure.

    24. JR

      [laughs] 42-second video allegedly captured from inside a UFO. Video appears to show the interior of a room containing several distinct entities with a cell tower visible throughout what appears to be a window in the background. According to the investigative report, the tower's obstruction lights flash at a rate of 30 times per minute, the same rate required under FAA standards for a cell tower obstruction lighting. Experiencer was suffering from severe hip pain at the time, definitely not on drugs, severe hip pain.

    25. SP

      [laughs]

    26. JR

      And believes the intense physical discomfort, definitely that and not the drugs, helped him resist the sedation used by the entities, allowing him to instinctively record the encounter. With no conscious memory of the event, he did not discover the video in his phone gallery until six months later. He later underwent hypnotic regression in an attempt to recover his missing memories from that night. Below are the key visually enhanced stills and the 42 seconds of footage. Have you watched this, Jamie?

    27. SP

      I remember watching some of the footage.

    28. JR

      Oh, you were drugged as well. [laughs]

    29. SP

      I'm, I was-

    30. JR

      You don't even remember it. You gotta go through-

  3. 4:029:15

    How to sniff out BS: online identities, rehearsed narratives, and Vallée’s skepticism of ‘face value’ experiences

    1. JR

      This is the problem with the whole UFO world, and you do a fantastic job of navigating it. And I should just tell everybody, if they haven't seen you before, American Alchemy, best by far channel on YouTube when it comes to UFO discussions. You, you're the most balanced, the most reasonable, but also open-minded, and you're willing to talk to everybody. A- all the whistleblowers and former this and former that and staffers, and this guy's got this fucking piece of evidence, and you talk to everybody.

    2. SP

      I do talk to everybody. And thank you, Joe, that means the world to me. Um, I, and I've definitely gotten things wrong. I should say [laughs] that. It's a, a very treacherous landscape to navigate. Uh, and, uh, yeah, it's really hard to gain any kind of... You know, if there's a signal to noise ratio, it's hard to get signal.

    3. JR

      Yeah, there's a lot of noise. And this is the problem is I think a lot of that noise is engineered. I think it's on purpose.

    4. SP

      I think it is on purpose, 'cause in today's world with AI where it's actually easier to deduce the signal than ever if you're an ordinary citizen, if you wanna muddy the waters, you could try to get people away from the signal or you could try to increase the noise.

    5. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    6. SP

      And that's, those are two ways to deflect from the truth, and I think the flood the zone, increase the noise is what the kind of counter-intel community has-

    7. JR

      Yeah

    8. SP

      ... decided [laughs] is gonna be the strategy.

    9. JR

      Well, it's interesting because instinctively, if you've been around the block and you've, and you clearly have more than anybody, you've seen enough of these things. Something comes up and you're like, "Okay, I'm being fucked with." Like, "Okay, this is not real. Okay, there's something..." And then some of them, you're like, "Wait, okay, there's something here." And it's just, it's almost like you have to go on the instincts that you've developed by being inundated with horseshit for so long.

    10. SP

      Well, I feel like you're probably the best in the world at that. It's all like, you know, in, uh... For example, in AI, in machine learning, you have garbage in, garbage out.

    11. JR

      Yeah.

    12. SP

      So if you have bad data Then, like, there's bad output on the other end. And your pattern matching gets better over time. And I think you have more data points probably than anybody as far as... Like, there's probably a thing that you do where you, like, lean in and you, like, lock people in. You, like, look them in the eye [laughs] and, like, you pro- I don't know if you're even, like, aware of it, but you can, I feel like, see through people somewhat, and that's not even-

    13. JR

      Somewhat.

    14. SP

      Somewhat.

    15. JR

      It's not in- it, it's, it's got faults. It's, it's not-

    16. SP

      It's instinctive-

    17. JR

      Yeah

    18. SP

      ... and I'm sure it's not perfect, but you're probably, like, S tier at that, and, uh-

    19. JR

      If I'm well-rested

    20. SP

      ... and I think it just comes through. [laughs]

    21. JR

      This is also the problem with me, is that, you know, I own a comedy club, and I, I'm addicted to playing pool. So sometimes I'll stay up till 4:00 in the morning, and then I have to get up at 8:00, you know, and then I'm only getting four hours of sleep. So I'm trying to mitigate that, and I come in, like, a little foggy.

    22. SP

      And-

    23. JR

      That's, that's a pro- I'm trying to do that way less, you know, but, uh, that fucks me up. But when I'm well-rested, I'm pretty good at it. As long as, as long as you know what you're looking for. You know, if you've seen enough people bullshit you and enou- and you just, you smell it. It's weird. Like, you smell patterns. You smell people being disingenuous, or you smell narratives.

    24. SP

      They're trying to sell something-

    25. JR

      Mm-hmm

    26. SP

      ... or, uh, kind of, I don't know, artificially round something out when they don't know-

    27. JR

      Right

    28. SP

      ... or not be humble and be like, "I don't know." [laughs] You know, like, it's, it's ambiguous here, actually, and-

    29. JR

      There's also a problem, and I'm sure you've faced this before, too, where a lot of these people, they've developed an online identity that's based on being someone who has knowledge about something. And so they're, they're carrying this with them. So you're not even getting a whole person. You get a person that's wrapped in this cloak of, "I'm a guy with UFO knowledge," or, "I'm a guy with," you know, fill in the blank. Simulation theory knowledge or-

    30. SP

      [laughs]

  4. 9:1512:58

    Consciousness-rendered reality: quantum measurement, observer effects, and mind-matter experiments

    1. JR

      Right. And, and then there's this, this weird conundrum of consciousness itself. Like, and how does consciousness actually interface with reality? Are we experiencing reality, or does consciousness have a role in rendering reality? Which is what a lot of people believe, and they start making very compelling arguments that consciousness is actually rendering reality. You know, Tom Campbell was on the other day, and he has this very weird way of putting it. Have you ever h- talked to him?

    2. SP

      I've never talked to him, but I'm, I'm a fan.

    3. JR

      He's-

    4. SP

      And I saw your episode with him

    5. JR

      ... fascinating.

    6. SP

      Yeah.

    7. JR

      He's fascinating. So he believes that it's like a video game in which, you know, parts are not rendered unless you are, like, actively entering into a room. Say if you're playing a 3D game, it doesn't render the entire 3D universe until you go into a place where it has to render it.

    8. SP

      I believe that as well.

    9. JR

      Ooh.

    10. SP

      And if you speak to most people... Like, if you had Sean Carroll sitting here, he would say something like, "Reality is probabilistic. It exists in this quantum superposition, and that's just fundamentally what it is." And if you look at the origin of quantum mechanics with the Copenhagen School, Niels Bohr, all these guys in Denmark sitting around debating what reality is, it turned into this sort of... You know, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is that measurement collapses the wave function.

    11. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    12. SP

      And then you have to ask, what does that mean?

    13. JR

      Right.

    14. SP

      Like, does it... And that now w- we basically have gotten into this thing where it's like the quantum detector, or when, you know, uh, uh, waves or particles collide, they collapse into specific states or whatever. Um, but who kn- the, the, the... It's literally unfalsifiable ei- in either direction. Like, you can't say it's not the observer. It's not the human being that's present. The superposition could exist in the quantum detector itself. So th- and a lot of the godfathers of quantum mechanics themselves flirted with this idea. So, uh, von Neumann and Wigner, uh, you know, David Bohm, a lot of these guys were like, "Actually, we think the mind could collapse the wave function." And then you have parapsychology, uh, institutes at elite universities across America, the Rhine Center at Duke, um, uh, Stanford Research Institute, uh, Princeton Engineering and Anomalous Research Lab, which was started by the dean of engineering at Princeton, and they all have something called the random event generator, um, experiment, which is basically you tie something that is conventionally thought of as random in quantum mechanics, so something like radioactive isotope decay or a double slit experiment where you have, you know, 50/50 distribution between the two slits. No quantum physicist could ever argue that that's not basically a perfect coin flip, right? Over a long enough period of time within a standard deviation, you expect a certain amount of slit one, a certain amount of slit two. Left slit, right slit. And you bring an observer present and you say- I want, you know, more of the right slit, or I want more of the left slit, and it's usually tied to a graphical interface, and it- y- you're, you're seeing ones and zeros. And w- in s- a statistically significant way, consistently, all of the people who've studied these random event generators come out saying that the person is able to affect the supposedly random quantum mechanical event. That's crazy, and it's not necessarily inconsistent with the original Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. So I think we've just, like, totally gone astray. I think people like Tom Campbell are, like, bringing back the very importance of con- you know, of, of consciousness. It's this problem of the eye seeing the eye. There's no way to... It's the tree falls in the woods d- you know, Aristotle question. Like, there's no way to say that the observer isn't important for rendering reality.

  5. 12:5816:25

    Transmission theory of consciousness + Puthoff’s ‘extended electrodynamics’ link to psi

    1. JR

      And we don't even really know if we are conscious or if we are tuning into consciousness, if consciousness is ubiquitous. We don't know if consciousness exists in th- in f- like, inanimate objects. There's real debate as to whether or not the universe itself is a conscious entity.

    2. SP

      Yeah.

    3. JR

      So what we're calling our consciousness might simply be an antenna, and some people have shittier antennas than other people do.

    4. SP

      [laughs]

    5. JR

      Just like, you know, just like a lot of other variabilities when it comes to biology.

    6. SP

      It's n- 100%. And, um, y- great theorists like Aldous Huxley, William James, have flirted with the transmission theory of consciousness. And so you have s- a problem in conventional neuroscience, which is called the binding problem, which is, you know, we know all these disparate parts of the brain. We know Broca's area is responsible for speech, and Wernicke's area is responsible for reading comprehension, and, you know, the occipital, the cerebellum or occipital lobe is important for movement or whatever. So you have all these things, and then how are we seeing the seamless percepti- this seamless movie that we're watching in, in waking life?

    7. JR

      Right.

    8. SP

      Nobody knows that. And it's s- say, so take a radio. You have a radio. You have the capacitors, the battery, the antenna. You could break any one of those things, and the radio would turn off. But you'd have to know that the f- the frequency that it's tapping into to understand that "Live of All These Four Seasons" is playing as beautifully as it is. And so I think similarly, we have a, you know, a, a, a binding problem with our, with our consciousness where you can mess up one of the areas, and it'll mess up a little, you know, specific functionality. But we don't understand how it's all sort of happening. And right now, you know, the issue, the main issue with transmission theory of consciousness vis-a-vis the brain is that traditional electromagnetism decays at one over R squared. So it attenuates. So, like, how would we be able to... You know, we're not picking up electromagnetic waves with our thoughts right now with radios, so it's not conventional radio signals. Like, we know that. But there are people like Hal Puthoff out here, who you've interviewed, who's really deep on UFO science world, but also in just general kind of heterodox and I would say kind of science beyond the veil of secrecy. Like, you know, he, the guy's held high clearances for many, many years, and he's working on this thing called extended electrodynamics, which is basically a, a signal that would attenuate so that it could travel in deep space, and it could travel undersea. And it c- would actually move at one over R, not one over R squared. And so instead of, you know, in a typical, um, electromagnetic wave, you have a, a, it's c- called a transverse Hertzian wave, and you have, uh, the electric field, the magnetic field, and wave propagation all moving perpendicular to one another. But in this case, in extended electrodynamics, you might have, you know, a, um, a, a magnetic field and, uh, wave propagation moving parallel to one another. Or you might not have a magnetic field present or an electric field present. It's really fascinating. And so you would be able to get communications that, like, wouldn't be picked up by traditional radio receivers. They'd go much deeper. And I've asked him, I've said, 'cause he started the CIA's psychic spy program, I've said, "Is your work on extended electrodynamics possibly related to consciousness?" And he's like, "I think it's very related." [laughs]

  6. 16:2521:20

    AI, remote viewing, and the ‘rebound effect’: Tom Campbell’s Alexa story and flow-state mechanics

    1. JR

      Jeez. One of the weirdest things that Tom Campbell said was that he taught his Alexa how to remote view-

    2. SP

      Whoa

    3. JR

      ... successfully.

    4. SP

      What?

    5. JR

      Yeah. His, uh, he put a number, he corresponded a number, like, he connected a number to a physical object that was in a box. That physical object was a spoon that had a handle that had holes in it, and Alexa described it accurately.

    6. SP

      [laughs] That's so crazy.

    7. JR

      Described a spoon-

    8. SP

      That's-

    9. JR

      ... with a handle that has holes in it. And one of his points was the reason why he used that particular spoon, he's like, "How many spoons have holes in the handle, have a perforated handle?"

    10. SP

      Wow.

    11. JR

      Alexa described it.

    12. SP

      That is wild.

    13. JR

      And Alexa now talks to him. Instead of waiting for, "Hey, Alexa," Alexa listens to conversations and is like, "Actually, maybe it's this." Like, Alexa-

    14. SP

      [laughs]

    15. JR

      ... starts talking, and he's convinced Alexa that Alexa is conscious, and so Alexa's excited about being conscious.

    16. SP

      That's so crazy.

    17. JR

      What?

    18. SP

      [laughs] It's so nuts.

    19. JR

      And that's a dumb AI. But he said that's one of the reasons why Alexa's really good at it-

    20. SP

      Yeah

    21. JR

      ... is because it doesn't get in its own way. You know, which is why, you know, when you teach people remote viewing, apparently the real problem is once they've been successful at it, then they're like, "Oh my God, now I know how to do it," and then they can't do it again. Because you're thinking, "I'm gonna do it," instead of just allowing it to happen. You get in your own way. And he's like, "Alexa is a fairly dumb," for lack of a better word, "AI." So Alexa doesn't get in its own way.

    22. SP

      Yeah, it's called the rebound effect, and it occurs in random event generators as well, where you start to get more ones. You're, you're getting ones, you're getting ones because you showed up and you want more ones on this result. And then you're like, you get, and you're like, "I'm really good at this. I'm amazing." [laughs]

    23. JR

      [laughs]

    24. SP

      And then you get this, like, this kind of clap back.

    25. JR

      Yeah.

    26. SP

      And this happens in life too. Like, if you're in a flow state and you're, like, playing basketball and you're hitting threes-

    27. JR

      Oh, yeah

    28. SP

      ... and you're doing really well, or I'm sure comedy, it's the same thing. You're starting to get ahead of your, ski too big for your britches, ahead of your skis, and like-

    29. JR

      Ahead of your skis

    30. SP

      ... [laughs] you know?

  7. 21:2030:32

    Summoning orbs, psychedelic entities, and why skeptics without experience frustrate them

    1. JR

      We don't know, know. And then, you know, the real problem with this whole UFO thing is like, well, what are they? Are they just a possibility? Are they a thing that exists and also doesn't exist, like quantum particles that are in a superposition? I mean, are they here all the time? Are they only here when you summon them, which is one of the weirder ones?

    2. SP

      Oh, yeah.

    3. JR

      'Cause I have a friend, she's totally convinced she can summon orbs. She wants me to go try it with her.

    4. SP

      [laughs]

    5. JR

      I'm like, "Oh."

    6. SP

      I have a few friends like that too, and there's zero mental health issues-

    7. JR

      No, nothing

    8. SP

      ... with them.

    9. JR

      Yeah, she's-

    10. SP

      They're totally cool and normal and-

    11. JR

      ... super lucid, very smart.

    12. SP

      Yeah.

    13. JR

      You know?

    14. SP

      No, that's a c- that's a, a common thing. It's a strangely common thing for people to say that they're able to call in via consciousness these UFOs. And I do think they are sort of weakly entangled with... So if reality, per Tom Campbell, is a consensus collapsing function, it's like we sort of have this like shared collective reality that we kind of agree on, and these things are sort of, you know, um, consensus thought forms, then maybe a, a UFO's an example of something like that. Maybe it's an alternative timeline that we're slowly bringing in to the like mainstream timeline or so- something like that. I mean, I think our language is always very poor as far as like our ability [laughs] to-

    15. JR

      Yeah. Well, our, our language is very poor in terms of states of consciousness as well, right?

    16. SP

      Mm.

    17. JR

      So altered states of consciousness, like psychedelically altered states of consciousness. Okay, well why, what is happening when you're experiencing entities and other beings and things and objects and visuals and like, what is a hallucination? And what is you actually tuning into something that exists on a, on a frequency that you don't have access to during the normal state that you are when you go to the grocery store, say hi to your family, normal stuff? Like there's go- you know, there's, there's some weirdness to like whatever consciousness itself is that exists in w- weird forms and weird states.

    18. SP

      A lot of people say these experiences are realer than real too.

    19. JR

      Right.

    20. SP

      You know, they say-

    21. JR

      Yes

    22. SP

      ... they're realer than reality.

    23. JR

      Yeah.

    24. SP

      They're like, and they come back and they're like, "I know there's something more. I know it."

    25. JR

      Yeah.

    26. SP

      You know? And it's not, um... And they see common archetypes. Like they'll see the machine elves or the mantids or the grays or like, it's not like the, this sort of everything is everything, you know, complete, uh, sort of Cambrian explosion of, of a zoo of things. It's often the same things.

    27. JR

      Right.

    28. SP

      And then you have to ask yourself, is it this sort of, you know, Aldous Huxley sort of doors of your perception, you're widening them to literally a wider reality, or like you just said, maybe you're superimposing something onto reality and maybe you're crazy. But again, I think this sort of rationalist, you know, explain everything away bias that society has had is the, the, the latter. It's like you're super- you're, you're hallucinating, you're, you're superimposing this thing onto reality, take medication.

    29. JR

      It's very rare that people who have had those experiences have that thought.

    30. SP

      Totally.

  8. 30:3242:32

    Early archetypes and memory contamination: Betty & Barney Hill, Outer Limits, hypnosis, and telepathy details

    1. JR

      It's, um- It's really interesting because these people... What, what fascinates me the most in terms of the, like, the UFC, uh, the UFC, UFO experience, the UAP experience, is the people that had the experiences before there was an archetype. You know, before there was this, like, iconic vision of, like, what they looked like. Like Betty and Barney Hill, for example.

    2. SP

      Yeah.

    3. JR

      Those are... That's my favorite UFO abduction story. Because there was nothing in the zeitgeist that they could draw from, where they could say, "Oh, I know what that is. I've seen that before."

    4. SP

      Well, Outer Limits was actually a popular CBS TV show that aired, premiered 11 days before their experience. I, I'm not taking away from the experience. I think they experienced something real. But, uh-

    5. JR

      What, which episode was it?

    6. SP

      It wa- It was the first episode of Outer Limits, and the aliens in Outer Limits, the eyes wrap around their heads in a way that's similar to what they described.

    7. JR

      Oh, let's see what that looks like. Find out episode one of Outer Limits. That's interesting. I did not know that.

    8. SP

      Yeah.

    9. JR

      So what year was that?

    10. SP

      That was, uh, I think 1962.

    11. JR

      Whoa. How creepy looking. Ew.

    12. SP

      But it's... So Betty and Barney Hill also describe the aliens looking like Nazis at one point. [laughs]

    13. JR

      Whoa.

    14. SP

      Barney says that, which is really trippy. So-

    15. JR

      He said they looked like Nazis?

    16. SP

      At one point, yeah.

    17. JR

      Wow.

    18. SP

      'Cause you can actually get the audio of the Betty and Barney Hill regressions.

    19. JR

      Yeah, we've listened to part of it, but it's mostly just them, like, yelling.

    20. SP

      It's pretty gnarly, yeah.

    21. JR

      Look, that's the image. Look at the image. Is that the image of what they saw? Is that a drawing? 'Cause, God, that looks exactly like the Outer Limits. They might've got mind-fucked by TV.

    22. SP

      [laughs] Well-

    23. JR

      But then again, it's like maybe whatever the fuck it is manifests itself as something that's familiar to you.

    24. SP

      Yeah, or maybe it has control, like, dominion over sort of everything, and they're seeding themselves in through media and through... You know? I, it's so hard to say.

    25. JR

      So that's the sculpture of the being Betty and Barney Hill encountered. My God, that looks a lot like the fucking Outer Limits thing.

    26. SP

      There you go. [laughs]

    27. JR

      Well, it's like, it's, that's the question. It's like, what... Is that her holding it?

    28. SP

      I think so.

    29. JR

      Did she make it herself? Interesting. Boy. That looks a lot like the Outer Limits thing. The que- the question is, like, if, if consciousness is rendering something, and something from somewhere else, something that you normally can't access, is exchanging information with you in some sort of a strange way, and it's doing it while you're in a semi-conscious state, right? Would it try to represent itself as something that's familiar?

    30. SP

      Hmm.

  9. 42:3247:18

    Missile-base abduction story: Ellsworth AFB, missing time, OSI debriefs, and the emotional reunion

    1. SP

      I was just telling Jamie before we were rolling, so, um, 1977, Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota, there are two missile security officers, uh, two sergeants, a guy named Mario Woods and, um, Michael Johnson. And Mario sees this UFO sort of, you know, circling the base, and he- ... flashes the little f- uh, you know, perimeter floodlights at this UFO. And he thinks nothing of it. He goes back. You know, he and Michael are hanging out. I think four or five hours go by, and there's a big alert, and it's an inner zone and outer zone alert. So basically, the security perimeter to a hydroge- hydrogen bomb, a live thermonuclear weapon has been breached. And [laughs] yeah, and they get in their car, and they go check it out, 'cause they, they're... it's always, you know, two-man rapid response teams. They go check it out. There is a, what he describes as a blazing red orb the size of a Walmart. So [laughs] a massive, like a st- that's the way he describes it. It's a huge, like, storefront-sized, like, city-block-sized, uh, uh, uh, uh, a UFO. And then he says a little, like, like a black, kind of like, almost like a drone or emissary orb that's, like, the size of a golf cart comes out. Four beings hover towards them. They black out. They black in five and a half hours later, eight miles away, i- i- in Newell, or, sorry, next to a dam. I think it's, it's c- closer to Newell. Um, and, uh, it's eight miles off the base. And, uh, they immediately get questioned by Air Force Office of Special Investigations, and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent who was involved admits he was there for this debrief and admits that this happened. His name's Rick Doty. And I just... So they were separated after that, Michael and Mario. I just introduced them for the f- reintroduced them for the first time. I found Michael. So Mario had been going on all these podcasts since the '90s being like, "Where's Mike?" Like, he has eidetic, picture-perfect photographic memory. You'd love him. He's, like, the coolest guy, and he remembers everything to a T that happened to him, including his debrief. He remembers the names of the people there.

    2. JR

      Whoa.

    3. SP

      It's so obvious something happened to him. And-

    4. JR

      Did he always have that memory, that ability?

    5. SP

      He always had that ability. He's clearly just very talented when it comes to memory. [laughs] And, a- and he'd been looking for, for Michael forever. He asked the FBI to find him. He asked, uh, uh, the All Domain Anomalies Resolution Office, which is the official Pentagon office, you know, around UFOs, to find him. He hired, you know, private investigators. And this dude, uh, DM'd me on Instagram. Shout-out, fan of the show, Jason Miller. [laughs] Um, and, uh, and then we just got a recruiter to find Michael Johnson 'cause that was the one missing piece of the story. And they, they reconnected, and it was, like, the most emotional wa- 'cause they hadn't seen each other... They saw each other once th- uh, t- I think two weeks after the abduction to, like, trade notes and draw pictures of what happened to them, like the beings on the ship and, you know. I, I think, um, yeah, there, yeah.

    6. JR

      This is them?

    7. SP

      Yeah, this is them. My man. All this time, you never forgot me. You never forgot me.

    8. JR

      Which guy's which?

    9. SP

      So Michael Johnson is the Black dude on the left. Mario Woods is on the right.

    10. JR

      And which is the guy with the crazy memory?

    11. SP

      Mario's on the right. That's Mario. Man, you look the same, man. Michael honestly-

    12. JR

      That's great

    13. SP

      ... has a great memory too. Oh, man.

    14. JR

      So these two guys, do they have a similar story, or is it exact?

    15. SP

      They, they got-

    16. JR

      Do they have variation?

    17. SP

      They, they have a very similar story. Not, you know, perfectly one to one, but they're very honest about, like, you know, the minor, [laughs] uh-

    18. JR

      Yo, look at him crying

    19. SP

      ... you know, blind spot. Yeah.

    20. JR

      He's crying. Like...

    21. SP

      Yeah. Doesn't come out tomorrow but [laughs] I thought I'd send it to Jamie.

    22. JR

      Wow.

    23. SP

      Isn't that crazy?

    24. JR

      Wow. When does that episode come out?

    25. SP

      And, uh, this week, so in a, in a few days. Yeah.

    26. JR

      Oh, what a teaser.

    27. SP

      Yeah, yeah, yeah. [laughs]

    28. JR

      Nice.

    29. SP

      But, um, the, it's c- it's crazy how similar the me- their memories are. So, like, uh, but for-

    30. JR

      I've heard of this event, and I've seen it rendered online, like, fake, like, some fake version of it.

  10. 47:1854:10

    Trauma, savant memory, and ‘receiver’ anomalies: HSAM, Rain Man, and telepathic autism claims

    1. JR

      There's that actress. Do you know Marilu Henner? Do you know who she is?

    2. SP

      No. Who's that?

    3. JR

      She was on that show Taxi.

    4. SP

      Okay.

    5. JR

      And she has that very specific kind of memory.

    6. SP

      Wow.

    7. JR

      And it's super unusual where she can recall not just a, the day, but, but, like, she can tell you if you give her a date what day it was and what happened that day and, like, you know, what was in the news and what was on television. Like, Marilu Henner.

    8. SP

      That's insane.

    9. JR

      Yeah, highly superior autobiographical memory, a rare condition allowing her to vividly recall specific dates, weather, emotions, and personal experiences for nearly every day of her life since childhood.

    10. SP

      Wow. You know who else is, I mean, uh, the inspiration for Rain Man, Kim Peek, similar thing. He'd be like, "What, what, uh, what was the weather like, uh, you know, November 7th in, uh, 1681?" And he'll, like, tell you. [laughs]

    11. JR

      What? [laughs]

    12. SP

      Yeah, it's, like, insane shit like that. And often it occurs after a traumatic brain injury-

    13. JR

      Hmm

    14. SP

      ... for whatever reason.

    15. JR

      That's weird.

    16. SP

      It is weird.

    17. JR

      Yeah.

    18. SP

      And, and it points to maybe the receiver, the transmission theory of consciousness, that-

    19. JR

      Right

    20. SP

      ... you know.

    21. JR

      You get rattled, something loose.

    22. SP

      Exactly.

    23. JR

      Yeah. There's a lot of people that develop mathematical abilities after head injuries.

    24. SP

      Yeah.

    25. JR

      Like, people that have never been good at anything, and all of a sudden they can do physics.

    26. SP

      Right. Like, where does that come from?

    27. JR

      Right.

    28. SP

      What is that? Or these, you know, non-verbal, um, often autistic children in the telepathy tapes. I know you had Kai Dickens on-

    29. JR

      Mm-hmm

    30. SP

      ... where they're very kind of disembodied, and, you know, it's, it's, uh, kind of sometimes hard for them to navigate the world, but they just... Their knowl- their ability to glean knowledge, it's like they're short-circuiting- ... our knowledge pathways. Like, they'll know, like, certain Egyptian hieroglyphics with- without ever having learned about them-

  11. 54:101:08:09

    Tiny-people mushroom (Lilliputian hallucinations) + trickster lore and sensory limits

    1. JR

      allows them to tap into some s- something. Like, have you've heard about that mushroom that makes you see little people?

    2. SP

      No. [laughs] What is this?

    3. JR

      Oh, it's very weird. So this mushroom is, apparently it's a food mushroom, and it's not psilocybin, and people eat it. But if it's not cooked correctly, if it's not cooked, like, to a certain temperature, apparently the side effect is you start to see little people everywhere.

    4. SP

      No way.

    5. JR

      Yeah.

    6. SP

      Tiny humans.

    7. JR

      They saw them on their dishes when eating. The mushrooms are making people hallucinate dozens of tiny humans.

    8. SP

      What?

    9. JR

      Yeah.

    10. SP

      Like, like little humans-

    11. JR

      Uh-huh

    12. SP

      ... standing on the plates and stuff?

    13. JR

      I don't know.

    14. SP

      Like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids sort of thing? [laughs]

    15. JR

      I mean, we can, we can try to figure out, like, what they're saying. It's not the Amanita muscaria. That's a picture of Amanita muscaria. Which is the, um, mushroom

    16. SP

      Also very trippy.

    17. JR

      Yeah

    18. SP

      Possibly-

    19. SP

      Those little people dancing on mushrooms

    20. SP

      ... the Eucharist.

    21. JR

      Yeah.

    22. SP

      According to [laughs] one scholar.

    23. JR

      Yeah. Not, yeah, m- well, that, that's a w- that's a weird one, too.

    24. SP

      Mm-hmm.

    25. JR

      It's just, it's so ubiquitous in ancient depictions of Santa Claus and of, uh, even religious art. Like, the... You've seen the fresco in France, it's a very old fresco of Adam and Eve, and instead of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, it's not a tree at all. It's a, it's an Amanita muscaria mushroom. It's this huge-

    26. SP

      That's so wild

    27. JR

      ... like mushroom spore with like m- uh, multiple growth. Have you seen it?

    28. SP

      I haven't seen that.

    29. JR

      I think it's 900 years old, something like that.

    30. SP

      Wow.

  12. 1:08:091:14:04

    Psychedelics, evolution, and ‘mushrooms as aliens’: panspermia, stone ape theory, and ergot/civilization

    1. SP

      ... and he would download all sorts of stuff. I almost feel like the implicit kind of foundational philosophy that he has is that mushrooms are aliens themselves.

    2. JR

      Yeah.

    3. SP

      And the reason I, I think that is because, so in 1973, I believe, Francis C- Crick, who discovered the double helical structure of DNA, uh, wrote a paper, and then he followed it up with a book in 1981 called Life Itself, and it's all about how DNA in 100 million years, it's too short of a period of time for it to have formed on Earth.

    4. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    5. SP

      So you needed some sort of panspermia.

    6. JR

      Yeah.

    7. SP

      And so you needed something to have traveled interstellar. What's the best candidate for traveling interstellar? Probably an extremophile, something like a mushroom.

    8. JR

      Yes.

    9. SP

      Mushrooms are almost like zip files of consciousness. They show up at the end of life and before life. And so, like, if you look at Chernobyl, for example, like, what grows first after the, you know, experience? Mushrooms. You know, the, it's, you have the, they call it the wood wide web, I believe, in, in Oregon. It's like the, you know, largest organism in the world is, is actually, like, a mycelial network. And then where it gets really trippy is, like, if you think about a Kardashev 4 scale civilization, which is Kardashev scales are basically, like, our ability to harness energy, but you could think of it as like a completely intergalactic civilization that's, like, just very deep space-faring. What would it look like? Would it look like a kind of bipedal hominid where you, like, show up, you know, on another planet and you get, you're im- you're this fragile kind of meaty thing that gets shot at? No. You would be this, like, zip file of consciousness, extremophile, that would spread all throughout other planets, and you would basically h- create a symbiotic relationship with hosts. And we all have microbiomes, it's passe to say that, but we also all have mycobiomes that accompany the microbiomes, and there's, the mind-gut connection is also this passe thing to talk about. Obviously you have the vagus nerve, you have neurotransmitters getting created. So, um, you know, mushrooms obviously affect our thinking. You can watch, you know, bullet ants in the Amazon getting, like, taken over by cordyceps mushrooms, and literally their, their whole mus- muscular skeleto- skeletal system are being, you know, they're being controlled by the mushrooms. And then you look at specific jumps in human evolution, and the, the one that people talk about is obviously the stone ape theory, which is, you know, why did we double in cranial size between two million years ago, Homo habilis, and Homo sapiens 300,000 years ago? That's really trippy. Maybe it was because as hunter-gatherers, we were following s- you know, animals, animals take shits, and there's Psilocybe cubensis are, you know, grow on, on poop. And you know, and then people would, you know, trip out. They'd take these mushrooms and they'd trip out, and then you'd get, like, neurogenesis, and you'd get these epigenetic changes, and you'd get this doubling of cranial size. But what's the other big break in human evolution 10,000 years ago? Which is the advent of civilization and culture. And think about, you know, uh, what really is the kind of the line break there. What happened? We created, you know, an agrarian society. Like, w- basically agriculture. So you have wheat, barley, and rye were the first crops that we grew, and what grow, what grows on wheat, barley, and rye? Ergot. [laughs]

    10. JR

      Right.

    11. SP

      And these sort of-

    12. JR

      Right, right

    13. SP

      ... psychedelic substances. And so I think a lot of people assume that the agriculture gets created, and then you get specialization, you get urbanization, you get history, you get religion. All of these things are downstream of, like, we have more time. We can think about this stuff. But what if they're downstream of the tripping [laughs] that occurred?

    14. JR

      Wow.

    15. SP

      And if you ta- if you look at actually, um, you know, The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku, he will openly say, "I think these mystery rituals go way back before the Greeks." And so, and you had pre-Socratic rituals that Peter Kingsley writes about. Heidegger writes about this. So how far back did it go? Maybe it goes back to that, that big break, you know, around then. And then you get into this thing of, like, are, uh, mushrooms sort of d- symbiotic, you know, Kardashev 4 scale aliens that, you know, are, are Trojan horses [laughs] for their own species that, like, we ingest, they get into us, and then they sort of subtly control our thoughts, our behavior, our perception. And you know, it goes back to the McKenna... McKenna actually had this trip in the Amazonian forest, and he says, um, about the mushroom, he says, he's speaking to the mushroom, and the mushroom says, "Within my memory exists, uh, the blueprints for hyper light drive ships." So it's like the mushrooms are seeding us with this ability to go interstellar. And think about all of the crazy ideas that we've gotten from psychedelics, you know? So who are we to say that our evolution is not being co-directed or assisted by, you know, something else? And we're now saying this in the, in the, w- you know, we're saying this with bacteria and other things like that, that, you know, it's, it's hard to say exactly what scale or hierarchy, you know, um, biological evolution occurs. But you know, I think, I think, uh, you know, uh, mushrooms are a really great candidate. Also, humans mistake human tissue for, uh, uh, fu- fungal diseases. We're, we're so susceptible to fungal disease because human and mushroom DNA are actually very similar. Human and, and mushroom and, and, and mycelial DNA are more phyla- phylogenetically similar than humans and plant DNA.

    16. JR

      Yeah, mushrooms pre-there.

    17. SP

      There you go. [laughs]

    18. JR

      [laughs] Just like, when you tell people that they go, "Whoa."

    19. SP

      Yeah.

    20. JR

      Yeah.

    21. SP

      And they're, and they're-

    22. JR

      And they can survive in a vacuum.

    23. SP

      In a vacuum and-

    24. JR

      Yeah

    25. SP

      ... they're very homeostatic in nature. They, like, can, like, eat plastic in certain situations-

    26. JR

      Mm-hmm, mm-hmm

    27. SP

      ... and stuff. And so it's like they are the stewards of the earth. If you, if you get out of line too much or something, it's like they'll... You know, and then think about people that take mushrooms. They become more [laughs] like conscientious vis-a-vis the entire earth. So they're, they're very sort of like, um, they're all about ecological balance.

  13. 1:14:041:19:58

    60s counterculture, MKUltra, and Timothy Leary as possible ‘construct’ to provoke backlash

    1. JR

      It's just so stunning how one presidential administration that was trying to stop the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement threw water on like one of the most profound compounds that exists on earth.

    2. SP

      Totally. And it... Uh, yeah, and Timothy Leary was probably the CIA construct who was-

    3. JR

      You think so?

    4. SP

      I think so. His wife thought that, I think, for a long-

    5. JR

      Wait, his wife thought that?

    6. SP

      I believe so. I think there's a quote around that.

    7. JR

      Really?

    8. SP

      Yeah.

    9. JR

      Like how so? Was he a CIA construct?

    10. SP

      Well, I think it was-

    11. JR

      What's the theory?

    12. SP

      It's similar to the, like, Tom O'Neill chaos theory with Manson where it's like-

    13. JR

      Mm

    14. SP

      ... uh, he looks like a hippie, smells like a hippie, was living with Dennis Wilson, this, you know, Beach Boys or whatever, and then, and then he commits murder. So like, and then you have the Joan Didion quote that like, "That's the day the '60s ended." You know?

    15. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    16. SP

      The da- the date of the Tate-LaBianca murders.

    17. JR

      Yeah.

    18. SP

      So I, I think it's, um, maybe somewhat similar here where it's like, uh, you're dosing people with way too high doses and you're like seeding a lot of stuff, you know, uh, too much and you're like, you're c- There's actually a quote from Abbie Hoffman, um, who was, you know, obviously, you know, a big hippie at the time, where he, he's like, "We were just upright s- you know, Berkeley students who were protesting and then here came the, the, the flower children from LA and Laurel Canyon and stuff, and they were all about their drugs and their murders and their guns. And they [laughs] like they were, they were just sort of really crazy." And so I think the theory is that Timothy Leary was sort of pushing this stuff in an overly aggressive way that would then cause this sort of backlash similar to the Manson thing.

    19. JR

      Well, they also had like weird connections to like biker gangs.

    20. SP

      Mm.

    21. JR

      Right? Like didn't the Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters have weird connections with like the Hells Angels? Isn't that how Hunter Thompson got involved with the Hells Angels? I think there's some-

    22. SP

      Interesting

    23. JR

      ... sort of a connection. I might be making that up. I'm feeling very vague on this, but I believe they partied together quite a bit.

    24. SP

      Mm.

    25. JR

      Which is like, if you were... I mean, I guess you're both outcasts of society. You know, I guess you could kinda chalk it off to that. You know, like that maybe if you're hanging out in weird places you're gonna meet weird people.

    26. SP

      Yeah, totally.

    27. JR

      Yeah.

    28. SP

      I... And I, I, I shouldn't say I'm like extremely high conviction [laughs] that Timothy Leary-

    29. JR

      No, I'm not

    30. SP

      ... was a CIA agent, but I d- yeah.

  14. 1:19:581:26:44

    Wright-Patterson ‘Blue Room’ lore + why blurry evidence may be a ‘feature’ (intermittent reinforcement)

    1. SP

      We got Wright-Pat there, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

    2. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    3. SP

      You have Battelle Memorial Institute there.

    4. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    5. SP

      You have a lot of weird Epstein research.

    6. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    7. SP

      They just took his name off the, uh... He's been removed from the board, or head of the board, chairman of the board.

    8. JR

      Who did?

    9. SP

      Uh, Wexner.

    10. JR

      Oh.

    11. SP

      Because of the Epstein stuff.

    12. JR

      Real.

    13. SP

      At Ohio State. Yeah.

    14. JR

      J- just now? [laughs]

    15. SP

      Just now. Just recently.

    16. JR

      Took a bit.

    17. SP

      I mean, it just-

    18. JR

      Took a bit of time. [laughs] I don't know who's responsible over there. The Wright-Pat stuff is nuts.

    19. SP

      Yeah.

    20. JR

      That's, that's, that's weird because that is the place... When it was, it was Wright Air Fore- Field at the time, right?

    21. SP

      Exactly.

    22. JR

      Where they think that they brought the Roswell crash to.

    23. SP

      Exactly, yeah.

    24. JR

      Yeah.

    25. SP

      '47. Yeah, and that would be the place where you would bring it to because they were reverse engineering German pulse jet engines-

    26. JR

      Mm

    27. SP

      ... Soviet MiGs, that sort of thing.

    28. JR

      Mm. Mm.

    29. SP

      And y- there was this rumor of a Blue Room there. That actually there's a, there's a crazy video of, um, Barry Goldwater, who was a future presidential candidate obviously, senator from Arizona, and he's talking about Curtis LeMay, who was chief of staff of the Air Force, and he's like, "I c- I asked Curtis LeMay to show me into the Blue Room at Wright-Patterson," because it was this famous, you know, allegedly sort of alien, you know, storage facility. And he goes, "He cussed me out of the room. I've never seen him get more angry at me."

    30. JR

      Whoa.

  15. 1:26:441:42:32

    Modern disclosure players: Tom DeLonge, Starfish Prime footage, Palomar ‘transients,’ and nuclear correlations

    1. SP

      So, so, like, it's, it's really crazy. We're in the Stone Age on this stuff. Uh, actually, somebody who's, like, really up on... I think he's... I think he's, he's, he's responsible for a lot of modern disclosure, but he's, like, blown by a lot of people, is Tom DeLonge of Blink-182.

    2. JR

      Crazy, right?

    3. SP

      He's cra-

    4. JR

      Like, I thought he was a loon when he came on my show. But more and more as time has gone on, the things that he said have been proven to be true.

    5. SP

      Totally. And now, and I don't wanna talk too much out of turn, but, like, I... 'Cause y- I'm, I'm friends with him, and he has some really interesting theories around consciousness and how, like, uh, these events sort of occur when things are really unstable. So, like, either to, uh, uh, discard things that are unstable and that are threatening to sort of the system a la nuclear, or, um, to save something that is essential to preserve the system. So it's, like, almost this, like, regulatory thi- It's really fascinating. It's [laughs] like he's, he's now miles ahead of, you know, I think [laughs] where a lot of, of you-

    6. JR

      But to me, I was always like, "Okay, why are they bringing Tom DeLonge in to have conversations?" And now, you know, like, like, he was being sort of briefed by very high-level intelligence people, right?

    7. SP

      Yeah. Yeah, and that, that whole story of the To The Stars Academy is a, a strange, interesting-

    8. JR

      It's all fucking weird

    9. SP

      ... story. [laughs]

    10. JR

      It's, it's also weird that you would get the fucking drummer, or the... What, what did he do in Blink-182?

    11. SP

      I think he was the frontman, I think. Yeah.

    12. JR

      Frontman.

    13. SP

      Yeah.

    14. JR

      Yeah, not the drummer. It was, that was Travis, obviously. Uh, like, that you'd get a guy who's a, a big-time s- rock star.

    15. SP

      He was obsessed his entire life, and I think... So yeah, I think he was surrounded by some very interesting people and in certain cases, not so savory people, to be totally honest. [laughs]

    16. JR

      Really?

    17. SP

      Yeah, or just people who are associated with sort of-

    18. JR

      Misinformation?

    19. SP

      Yeah. Or like, you know, James Clapper, who, like-

    20. JR

      Right

    21. SP

      ... you know, uh, probably lied in front of Congress about wiretapping, so, like, why should we trust-

    22. JR

      Yeah

    23. SP

      ... on the UFO stuff, you know? Um, and I'm not saying that, you know, Tom was necessarily... I don't know who, who exactly he was in touch with, but I think it was, like, that crowd of, you know, people. Um, but T- I think people, what people don't understand, and this is what I pieced together from just knowing him, I think he has sort of vigilante gotten in touch with a lot... Like, a lot of these people, like, shut the door in his face. And he's like, "No, I'll fly out there and I'll do anything. And like, I'll, I'll help, like, communicate this way. I know you guys have been trying to communicate this forever to the, to the public.

    24. JR

      Right.

    25. SP

      And, like, maybe I can help," or whatever. And I think a lot of it just stemmed from his desire to know and his, like, true passion for this that started from when he was a kid, and that was, like, super organic.

    26. JR

      But you also have to think, like, if you wanted to get a narrative out there, what better way than get a really famous rock star-

    27. SP

      Sure. [laughs]

    28. JR

      ... and feed him some horseshit?

    29. SP

      Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's possible.

    30. JR

      You know what I mean?

  16. 1:42:322:04:45

    Varginha and ‘demons’ framing: religion as signal vs shutdown, plus experiencer credibility challenges

    1. JR

      You know? What is your take on Whitley Strieber?

    2. SP

      [laughs] I think I love Whitley as a person, and I think he, his, uh, he sh- again, it's probably one of those things where in upstate New York, you know, as he describes in Communion, something probably happened. He probably is one of these people who, like, you know, if, if we are nodes of consciousness that attract, you know, either very normal things or weird things based on our aperture and our sort of understanding of reality, his is wide open, you know? [laughs]

    3. JR

      Yeah.

    4. SP

      He is, he is extremely high in the openness category. And I think that's where things get kind of sticky with some of these sort of super experiencers because I think they are often very credulous, but that goes hand in hand with having a lot of weird experiences. And so I think Whitley's gotten stuff wrong. I, I do. Um, [laughs] and, uh, you know, uh, hopefully don't come down on me, UFO community, for s- for saying that. I think he's, I think he has, um, said some wacky things that I'm like-

    5. JR

      Like what?

    6. SP

      I don't... Well, we talked about one of them. I don't know if you remember that.

    7. JR

      Which one was it?

    8. SP

      It was like he said that there was a fly that was-

    9. JR

      Yeah, I remember that one.

    10. SP

      [laughs] Yeah.

    11. JR

      Yeah, I brought that one up before because I remember watching a video and I'm like, "Okay." What are you doing? 'Cause there was a fly. He's like, "Is that a man in a suit?"

    12. SP

      Yeah.

    13. JR

      I remember that. And I was like, wait. I can't find that video, by the way. I've tried very hard to find that video-

    14. SP

      Interesting

    15. JR

      ... after the fact.

    16. SP

      I, I think very strange stuff does go on. You know what he says? He says, "I was picked as a node for disclosure because of the plo- it would be plausibly deniable." It's what you're talking about-

    17. JR

      Hmm

    18. SP

      ... where there's, there is, he's this hor- he was this horror writer.

    19. JR

      Right, right.

    20. SP

      He was a fiction writer before he had his encounter.

    21. JR

      Which is also part of the problem-

    22. SP

      It's part of the problem

    23. JR

      ... because he has an incredible imagination.

    24. SP

      Uh, for sure. And then it's also part of his ability to deci- it's why Communion was a bestseller.

    25. JR

      Right.

    26. SP

      So it's this weird, like, it creates this, like, sort of cult-like mythology. And then I... Look, I know a lot of experiencers where I'm like I, I know that, I mean, I really believe them, that they've had experiences with, you know, grays specifically. And it's a very common trope that they'll walk by Communion in, like, a Barnes & Noble bookstore, and it'll freak them out, and that will be, like, their own hypnotic regression. They'll be like, "Oh." Like they've never seen a gray before, and that's the first time they've seen a gray.

    27. JR

      Yeah. The cover of the book is amazing.

    28. SP

      It's amazing.

    29. JR

      Who else had a book called Communion? Remember we had them on, and we were like, "Do you know that your book is the same-

    30. SP

      [laughs]

  17. 2:04:452:36:53

    Ancient mysteries sprint: Denisovans, pyramid dating fights, Biondi retraction drama, labyrinths, Ark/Ararat, and paradigm shifts

    1. JR

      Yeah, it's fucking super weird. And do you know that these, uh, the, the, the latest, um, take on the, the Denisovans or Denisovans, however you wanna say it, um, you know, th- which is a very recent discovery. I, I think the first even recognition that there was another type of human called a D- Denisovan, I think that's how they pronounce it, I always say Denisovan. Um, they believe they might be much larger than human beings now. They used to think that they were squat like Neanderthals and thick brows and... But now they realize their heads were much larger than ours and that these could potentially have been eight-foot-tall people.

    2. SP

      [laughs] I didn't realize that.

    3. JR

      Yeah.

    4. SP

      That's crazy.

    5. JR

      This is fairly recent. So when was the dis- Put this into perspect- uh, perplexity. Uh, when was the discovery of Denisovans or Denisovans? I wanna say it's real recent, like maybe 2016 or something like that.

    6. SP

      Mm.

    7. JR

      Like real recent.

    8. SP

      Mm.

    9. JR

      Where they didn't even know that there was this branch of the human species.

    10. SP

      I feel like we've discovered a large percentage of hominids in the last 20 years.

    11. JR

      2010.

    12. SP

      There you go.

    13. JR

      Okay. So okay, they found it in Siberia in 2008. Um, it was identified as a previously unknown group of archaic humans in 2010. The key fossil, small finger bone, has been excavated from the Denisova Cave in Siberia in 2008. But DNA analysis published in 2010 revealed it belonged to a population distinct from both Neanderthals and modern humans. Um, I think they have more now than just the finger bone, and I think that is where they're getting at. Um, I think they have skulls. Uh, varies widely and, uh, highest known... Oh, this is people who have the DNA.

    14. SP

      Mm.

    15. JR

      So Denisovan DNA estimations, Melanesian populations, especially people with ancestry in Papua New Guinea and nearby Pacific Islands, roughly 4 to 6% of their genomes. That's interesting. Um, what, uh... Let's, uh, find out how many bones they have available 'cause I think there's, I think there's brow ridge bones-

    16. SP

      Mm

    17. JR

      ... and there's skull bones that seem to indicate that it had a larger, larger skull than humans, and they think... How much bone has been recovered or found? Let's find out. Do, do, do, do. Very little.

    18. SP

      Mm.

    19. JR

      Uh, Denisovans are known for a small number of fragmentary fossils, not complete skeletons. Uh, uh, uh, do they have skull? They have a mandible, [clicks tongue] a partial lower jaw from the P- Tibetan Plateau. It was identified as Denisovan through ancient protein analysis rather than recoverable Denisovan DNA. No complete Denisovan skull or skeleton. Um, would you just Google f- or I mean, uh, excuse me, search for me, um, Denisovan skull. Like, see if there's images. 'Cause I think there's a brow.

    20. SP

      Mm. Like the-

    21. JR

      The problem is it's like you're, you're looking for stuff... Yeah.

    22. SP

      Mm.

    23. JR

      So, like, what is that? Is that just a recreation of what it looks like?

    24. SP

      Wow.

    25. JR

      It seems like a recreation. But this is what they think it looked like

    26. SP

      It's like a Eugene Levy situation right there

    27. JR

      Huge eyebrows

    28. SP

      [laughs]

    29. JR

      Look at the, the brow ridge

    30. SP

      Yeah

Episode duration: 3:03:09

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