[00:00:01] Luke: Welcome to the Best of the Life Stylist Podcast 2025 Part 1.

[00:00:07] Now, this year wasn't about trends. It wasn't about hacks. It was about remembering what's real. Across hundreds of conversations, a few themes kept surfacing again and again, sovereignty, consciousness, healing, and the courage to step outside inherited systems, whether biological, psychological, spiritual, or cultural.

[00:00:28] So the clips you're about to hear come from conversations that didn't just inform me, they changed me, and I'm hoping that they'll do the same for you. You'll hear Alex Wolfe tracing the unlikely path from fear to flight and how ancient mushroom medicine is meeting modern tech to rewire the human brain.

[00:00:46] You'll hear from Philip VHF and Ian Mitchell breaking down quantum energy, biofields, and lab-tested shifts in brainwave states that challenge what we think is possible. Paul Chek takes us deep into the intelligence of water, not metaphorically, but spiritually and cosmically, reminding us that divinity doesn't live outside duality.

[00:01:07] Jesse Elder reframes time itself, exploring multidimensional identity, soul continuity, and how we communicate across timelines, including with past versions of ourselves. We'll ground things in the physical with Brandon Amalani, unpacking EMF, PEMF, and what it actually means to heal the electromagnetic body in a world saturated with signal.

[00:01:30] You'll also hear some raw honesty with  Elle Macpherson, talking about surrender boundaries, addiction, and what it costs to stop living for other people. Then Alec Zeck challenges belief systems, governance, and the psychological architecture of control, asking what real freedom demands from us internally. And Zach Leary bridge's psychedelics, recovery, and dharma, tracing the moment when chaos finally gives way to clarity and commitment.

[00:01:56] And because this year held more depth than one episode could carry, this is part one of two. Part 2 drops next week with more essential conversations, deeper cuts, and a few moments that needed some space to breathe.

[00:02:08] We closed today's episode and this year with something deeply personal, a segment honoring my father, his anxiety, his awakening, his late life healing, and the love we shared at the end. And those moments really aren't about loss. They're about continuity, about what survives the body, about love that doesn't end

[00:02:27] This best of episode isn't meant to convince you of anything. It's really meant to remind you of what you already know beneath the noise. So take what resonates, leave the rest, and thank you so much for being here, for listening, questioning, and walking this path with me. Let's begin.

[00:02:42] Alex: One day my dad brought me to the airport and introduced me to this guy, Bill Houston. And Bill Houston started giving me a tour of the airport. And he is like, "Here, I'll show you the hanger. Cool. I'll show you this airplane. Hey, this is cool." And he is like, "Here, we'll go taxi you over there."

[00:02:58] So we taxi, and then all of a sudden we're taxiing the plane. I hear, okay, whiskey, November, x-ray, you're clear for takeoff. And I'm like, "Holy shit, this is happening." So I'm in that fear state. I'm super anxious. I'm probably starting to break a sweat at that point. And before you know it, we're taking off.

[00:03:17] And as we're taking off, he says to me, "Okay, Alex. You have control." And he basically let's go of the yoke. And I had to choose in that moment to take control. And I did. And so now I'm flying the plane. And it was literally in that moment that the fear became an illusion.

[00:03:38] And I realized it in real time, and I was like, "Holy shit, I'm not afraid of flying. This is wild." And I'm going higher and higher, looking over my hometown. I see my neighborhood, my school, and all this kind of stuff. And it was surreal. At that point, it was a peak experience of my life, and literally got to dissolve fear in real time. And from there I became obsessed with flying and pushing the limits.

[00:04:05] Luke: Like an exposure therapy type deal.

[00:04:08] Alex: Heck yeah.

[00:04:10] Luke: How old were you?

[00:04:11] Alex: I was 17 on that first flying lesson. Yeah.

[00:04:13] Luke: Wow. And then you went on to do that professionally?

[00:04:17] Alex: Yeah. I basically showed up at the airport the next day and the day after that, and the day after that. And I was just obsessed. I couldn't wait to get back in the airplane. I became a private pilot at 18. I became a commercially licensed pilot at 20. I went on to teach the military at 24 years old, teaching people in the military. It was super cool. It was this whole Top Gun experience.

[00:04:38] And I really just had that feeling or knowing that fear was fake. It was an illusion that I was believing in. And once I stopped believing in or agreeing to that, everything changed. And I really just full sent it through my 20s in that aviation career and into entrepreneurship. But that was the catalyst.

Mushrooms

[00:05:04] Alex: Yeah. So once I realized the impact that mushrooms can make-- it's really the oldest living technology in this world. It's the smartest living technology in this world, when you really start figuring out how smart it is.

[00:05:24] And it connects all plant life, all crops, all trees. They're all communicating through this mycelium network. It's like the original internet. It's like mother nature's brain. So it's the oldest, it's the smartest, it's the largest, the largest living organism as well as, is the mycelial network.

[00:05:39] So it's like, hey, if I'm going to align with one of these oldest living technologies, might as well be the mushrooms. Might as well be the mycelium. And so that was the inspiration. And it was really to go out and make an impact in the world, especially around mental health. I saw the power that it could do, transform my gut health, which is extremely connected to mental health.

[00:06:02] So it was about creating a vehicle that we could harness this technology and bring it out to the world and make what I believe is going to be the most iconic mushroom brand of all time. And when you think of all time, there's decades, there's centuries, there's millennials, there's epoch, there's eras, and there's eons.

[00:06:24] It's the longest period of time. It's the closest thing to infinity that there is. In every 100 million years, the universe sends out a pulse that changes the paradigm that we live in forever. And that's what this brand represents. It's going to change people's lives, truly.

[00:03:49] Because when you change your mind, when you change your psyche, your life actually changes. And you change the way that your awareness is in your consciousness. And that's what these mushrooms really do. They help actually change your mind.

[00:06:57] Luke: Well said. Yeah. If your mind doesn't change, good luck changing your life. I know that from firsthand experience. Let's go through some of the different mushrooms. We were talking about David Wolfe, no relation to you, Alex Wolfe. Someone asked me that the other day. Is he David Wolfe's son?

[00:07:12] Alex: Yeah.

[00:07:13] Luke: I don't think the ages match up, but I always got to give him credit. He was the first guy 20 years ago maybe, that I ever heard talking about lion's mane, Cordyceps, reishi. What's the other one? Chaga, cacao, Chinese herbs, ashwagandha, Ayurvedic herbs.

[00:07:35] He was the guy that was he raw vegan, hippie dude that only a certain sect of people would buy into. And then over the years I've watched mushrooms and cacao and all those things that he used to promote so consistently, now they're like a thing. It's really cool.

[00:07:55] I see like young people on TikTok, like, "I like Cordyceps." Wow, this is cool. We've come a long way. But I've also worked with a lot of the different-- and we'll get into the psychoactive mushrooms in a second, but just on the food grade, functional or medicinal mushrooms, been using them for a long time, but also have had a wide spectrum of results using them because there's so many fugazi versions of that.

[00:08:27] So we'll talk about that too, extraction methods, growth methods, etc. Because you can call something a Cordyceps or lion's mane and it may or may not have the potency and medicinal value that you're looking for. But let's start with what it was that actually helped your gut. Was that like turkey tail or something?

[00:08:46] Alex: Yeah, turkey tail, chaga were the ones I was using for my gut.

[00:08:50] Luke: And what form of them? We can do alcohol extraction, water extraction, depending on which mushroom, sometimes dual extraction. You're doing something even cooler now with this liposomal thing, which is probably much more cost effective for everyone because it takes less raw materials. But what form of those were you taking where you actually noticed like, holy shit, something's happening?

[00:09:12] Alex: Yeah, it's a great question because it does make a difference. I was taking a liquid tincture, dual extraction. And that's the thing that I learned in that time, working in the CBD company and the cannabis company, and then later in the mushrooms, is bioavailability is a real thing-- the ability for the body to absorb the molecule or the active ingredient in that case.

[00:09:33] And mushrooms typically, depending on the mushroom, but typically prefer to stay wet. It's that relationship with water, the mycelial network with the water relationship. They're hydrophilic, essentially, these molecules. So they like water. So to keep it wet, more effective, that's where I was first using these tinctures. Worked amazing on my gut health.

[00:09:58] In a really short amount of time, I had clarity again. And I was dialed in. And then from there I was like, "Okay, whenever we bring out this brand, we want to make sure that it's bioavailable and that they stay hydrophilic so we can get the molecules into the bloodstream really quickly." So that's the thing. Sometimes these powders and stuff like that, they're already dehydrated.

[00:10:23] They lost a lot of the essence. They're dried up. And not to say that they don't work, but you just may have to go higher on the dose. But in this case, you get the full power of the mushroom and you actually don't need to overdose, which is cool.

[00:10:41] Luke: That makes sense. I never thought about that. Mushrooms are always soggy and moist and like grow in our yard crazy certain times of the year, but it's only when there's a lot of moisture around.

[00:10:52] Alex: 100%. It's a relationship. Everything's in relationship.

[00:10:55] Luke: Yeah, I never thought about that. Okay, so you're playing around with the turkey tail extracts. What about like lion's mane and Cordyceps?

[00:11:09] Alex: Yeah, totally. So I started on the gut health stuff, the turkey tail, the chaga, then got into the lion's mane for cognitive, Cordyceps for energy. And I was becoming a new version of myself, a new human-- more awareness, more clarity, more energy, sleep is better.

[00:11:27] Started taking the reishi for sleep and I was like, "Wow, this is it, man. These things have the codes." And yeah, that was the inspiration. So it was starting with those mushrooms to start off, putting them in products that can actually help modern day problems that we have-- gut health, productivity, energy, sleep, anxiety, these kind of things.

[00:11:52] All with the intention to gain trust, showing people that there's a relationship here that you can have with these mushrooms that actually help your modern-day problems, where they're here to solve a problem. And when you're ready, we introduce the legal psychedelic microdosing. That was always the intention, is to take it to the next level of awareness and consciousness.

[00:12:16] Luke: I remember the first time I met you, we were in the water out on Lake Austin at Josh's son's birthday party. And I was like, "Oh, this guy's cool. He is got long hair. Seems like real chill hippie vibe." And I forgot about this, but you were telling me about the legal microdose, and at that time you were in the R&D phase of figuring out how to get higher bioavailability to actually get it in your bloodstream, thus into your cells so that it does something other than just cost you money. And now, here we are. What was that? A couple years ago?

[00:12:52] Alex: So that was going to be, I think at least two years ago.

[00:12:57] Luke: Yeah, yeah. And here we are and it's happening. When it comes to the chaga, reishi, lion's mane, all the ones that we mentioned, how did you suss out getting the highest potency, cleanest raw material to work with?

[00:13:15] Alex: Yeah, that's the cool thing about being in the mushroom space versus the cannabis space. Cannabis space got pretty cutthroat and a lot of lawyers and greedy people that really had no business being in the space took it over. But in the mushroom space, it's a lot more cooperative. People are on the mushroom, so they're just--

[00:13:30] Luke: Higher consciousness.

[00:13:31] Alex: Higher consciousness. They want to help each other out. They want to bring mushrooms to the world. Everybody I meet in the space pretty much has that vibe, that energy. There's a few bad actors here and there, but for the most part it's people that are more tapped in. The consciousness is higher. They want to bring these mushrooms out.

[00:13:48] And usually, what ends up happening is you start working with the mushrooms, and the mushrooms actually start guiding you and working through you. So it's way more symbiotic like mushrooms are. So I got to just meet some really cool people and referred to some really cool people.

[00:14:03] There's a wonderful lady named Jamie out of Utah that we get our mushrooms off of. There's another guy out of California that I won't mention his name, but he has the best of the best and the other product that we're super excited about. But it's been an awesome experience.

[00:14:19] And again, all about relationships and asking the tough questions and figuring out what their processes are and growing methods and all this kind of stuff. But people in this space, it's refreshing. They're pretty cool.

[00:14:34] Luke: What's the difference between fruiting bodies and the-- what is it?

[00:14:39] Alex: Mycelium?

[00:14:40] Luke: Mycelium, yeah. I've heard that a lot of these mushroom companies that sell the powders are growing them on rice or a substrate.

[00:14:47] Alex: Hold some stuff. Yeah.

[00:14:48] Luke: Yeah. And then you buy it by the weight and you just end up getting an inferior product because it doesn't have the punch that the fruiting bodies have. But I've never looked that deeply into it. I just know people that I trust and seem to be very knowledgeable about the mushroom space are always ragging on the mycelium and boosting the fruiting bodies. Is that something you've run into? Is there some truth to that, or in some cases, is there a benefit to having the entourage effect of having both?

[00:15:20] Alex: I think it's that. In my experience, and for the most part, you can't really go wrong with the fruiting body. There's more moisture in the fruiting body and it's more of the plant or the mushroom's full essence. And Paul Stamets, the OG mushroom man, he's a big fan of the mycelium and saying lion's mane is just best in its mycelium form.

[00:15:42] So we do both. We do the mycelium. We do the fruiting body. We make it bioavailable so it's getting uploaded into the human body. Technology's uploaded quickly, so you feel the state change. You build a relationship. You see that, wow, this is really working in real time. You're not really wondering, is this working or not?

[00:16:04] Everything we come out with has to have a validation experience. Like, I was feeling this way. I take it. Now I'm feeling this way. And it's like now you're building that relationship. For me, it's really all about relationships, Luke, in every aspect of life, every aspect of nature. And so yeah, we believe mycelium and the fruiting body. Some mushrooms are obviously better for the fruiting body and some is good for the mycelium. But yeah, you can't really go wrong with the fruiting body.

Amanita

[00:16:32] Luke: So this Amanita muscaria, about which I've done one prior episode, and we'll put that in the show notes, which by the way, the show notes today are lukestorey.com/wolfe, W-O-L-F-E. lukestorey.com/wolfe. And we'll put a link to the Eons products there as well. Got a code, LUKE20. We'll put all that in the clickable show description on the podcast apps.

[00:16:57] But I did this episode on Amanita, and then of course, immediately I got to get some, got some, started making tea with it and experimenting with it, thinking that it was going to be much more closely related to psilocybin. It's not, in many ways, as you know, and you can unpack for us.

[00:17:19] But the first thing was that the amount of material in a microdose of Amanita versus psilocybin, psilocybin we're talking about one to 200 milligrams. 1,000 milligrams being a gram. That would be the threshold where you start to not be able to operate in your normal way.

[00:17:44] And then if people journey with psilocybin, maybe three and a half, five grams, or something like that. Some people more, but three and a half grams to any size body, you're going to be in a totally different place.

[00:17:54] Alex: Yeah.

[00:17:55] Luke: Amanita, I started making the tea and I start out at three grams in the tea for a microdose, and I'm like, "Oh, I feel relaxed and pretty happy. Definitely noticeable in the sense that I just feel real chill, but definitely not high or anything like that. So I progressively started playing around with it, especially for sleep because of its effect on REM, which maybe you can tell us more about too.

[00:18:22] And then I noticed, yeah, I slept pretty good. I got a pretty good REM score. Then at one point on two different occasions, I put quite a lot in there just to push the envelope and had very challenging experiences. Just way too much night sweats, just weird dreams. Just not a fun ride.

[00:18:42] And I was like, "Okay, thank you for teaching me." I bow to the Amanita. I got a little too aggressive there, and it showed me what that felt like. And then I got scared off because I'm like, "I don't know." What's the right dose if I want to take some during the day and still be functional, etc.?

[00:18:59] Alex: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:00] Luke: So I backed off from the raw materials. And then when you finally brought your-- what's it called? Dialed in?

[00:19:05] Alex: Dailed.

[00:19:06] Luke: Dialed. Do I have one up here?

[00:19:13] Alex: Yeah, it's this one here.

[00:19:08] Luke: Okay. This guy right here. For those watching this, it's in its box still. But you're like, "Yeah, dude. We nailed it." I don't know if you remember this, but I was like, "I don't want to feel it, feel it." So is there any risk of taking too much. And I forget what you said, but you're like, "You could basically take the whole jar and you're going to be fine." But I want to give you props because I really believe in the wisdom of this particular mushroom.

How quantum energy works....

[00:19:38] Luke: How have you guys developed technologies by which people can actually harness quantum energy and apply it to different areas of their life?

[00:19:50] Philipp: So we figured out a method on how to vibrate the ether so that we can make highly concentrated quantum energy available in this reality in a way that hasn't really been done before or in very ancient times. What that means is that we can infuse specific products with highly concentrated quantum energy field, and then there's a certain vibration that you can calibrate on the Hawkins Scale, and you can combine it with all kinds of different frequencies.

[00:20:22] And that's the Leela Quantum Tech side. Now today, I think we're talking about  Quantum Upgrade. So I'm quickly moving out of that. Those are physical products, and you can use them for all kinds of things. For your body.

[00:20:34] Luke: We have them all over the house.

[00:20:36] Philipp: Yeah. You structure water with it.

[00:20:38] Luke: Probably too many. At one point I had the giant one up here that you brought, which is now in the garage. I'll tell you why. And then I had the one on the kitchen counter. I put my water and supplements in, and then I have the Infinity Bloc in my office.

[00:20:52] And Alyson, who's I think just much more tapped in and sensitive, she's like, dude, "You got too much of this energy shit in the house. You need to calm it down." So at various times, I'll move things around or remove things to see what the right balance is. So based on that, I know what you're doing is real because she feels it almost to the point of like, "Okay, this is enough."

[00:21:15] Ian: It's always interesting when there are people who-- most of your audience, I'm sure at this point is super dialed in and knows it, and probably for the most part they've experienced it. But for people who haven't, it sounds so absolutely out there woo. Which is why we've done so much research. We've got studies, what, over 70 studies, I think, at this point.

[00:21:37] Luke: Wow. God. I remember when there was or two studies. like, "Cool. That's good. I'm convinced."

[00:21:41] Ian: It's been a hot minute. Yeah. But yeah, and some of the latest studies are off the charts compelling. We'll go through some of those, but it really is when you see something intangible expressed in a tangible format, it's always very cool.

[00:21:56] Everybody in the lab always gets incredulous at first, and then after you've done it enough times, people are like, "Oh, we don't understand it, but we're going to do it." Which is actually, you don't really have to grasp the subtle nature of everything to realize that there's import. It profoundly has an impact in a physical sense.

[00:21:14] Luke: Yeah, yeah. I think my tendency is just to do everything overkill to of like, you really only need one of the Leela things probably just in the middle of the house and you're fine. But like, "I don't know. You guys sent me another one. I'm going to put them everywhere." Anyway.

[00:22:29] Philipp: You can have more, and there's a lot of people that have more, so it's all good.

[00:22:34] Luke: Oh, I also have the Infinity Bloc in my car. And I have the  Quantum Upgrade service on my car. And I also have the Blushield scaler thing in there. So I just like to go full on, but I understand some people are more sensitive.

[00:22:47] Okay, so the Leela thing, we've done episodes about that. I've talked about it a lot in social. But today I want to really talk about the field theory, the quantum field theory, and the Quantum Upgrade. Because even though I understand it in a fundamental sense, there's always a bit of a bridge to cross to get my, and I'm sure many of the listeners, intellect to understand that there's so much more going on outside of the physical realm and what we can touch, feel.

[00:23:22] Everything including this thing right here first exists in the realm of non-form, and now it's in the realm of form. So I only think this is real because it's here right now, but the imprint of it, the idea of it existed before this thing was sitting here. Anyway.

[00:23:39] Philipp: Exactly. Yeah. And everything comes out of consciousness. And so the question probably leads to, okay, so how does this  Quantum Upgrade even work? Or how can we explain it to people? So we've built a system that is one of the most powerful sources of quantum energy on earth. And when we place a unique identifier of someone or something into the system, then that something or someone is in the field.

[00:24:10] So it's not that the system sends out energy like a 5G tower does that sends out energy to your phone? No, it's literally via quantum entanglement. You are in the field. And then the trick was that you couldn't just do that and offer it that way. You would have to have the user have 100% control over it.

[00:24:30] And that's something that we really wanted to also take a notch further, where it's not that, okay, so now I want to make a change for tomorrow. No, it should be pretty instant. So if you want to say, "Okay, I want to have more energy." You can set it or you can book in a specific frequency. I think we have 30 different frequencies by now that you can book in. And the system updates every five minutes.

[00:24:57] Meaning that if you make a change now, within the next five minutes, you have that change already. And you can pause it also at any time. That's pretty much how it works. And it's very, very important and critical that everyone and everything that's in the system isn't linked to anything else in the system.

[00:25:19] So that was for us, one of the biggest things to work on in the development phase, that you don't co-mingle any of those objects or cars and phones with something else. And yeah, when we had that, that was the biggest trick, and then connect it to that digital front.

[00:25:42] And now it literally works like clockwork. And that's where the studies come in. Because now you can say, "Okay, this is how it works. It's quantum entanglement." By the way, if you don't believe that quantum entanglement exists in 2022, the Noble prize for physics was awarded for work on quantum entanglement.

Brainwave Energy 

[00:26:03] Philipp: We have first evidence already that it works extremely well with the neurofeedback in conjunction and amplifies the experience and potential, but more to that at another time. So in Europe there was this study done indeed with the most advanced EEG device on the market in Europe, 256 channels, as he said.

[00:26:24] And they are a lab that tests technologies and tests electromagnetic fields and all of that, and all the new iPhones get tested and all of that. I think they had 60 companies so far giving them their products to test and only two had efficacy, real efficacy on the brain. And that's important.

[00:26:50] Not just heart rate variability, not just the blood, which I haven't seen anyone else actually besides us doing the research on the blood with double blind and randomized studies that show these significant effects. Usually they have something else that's not so tangible. The brain for me was an eye-opener, to be honest, because I had known a lot about it. I used to work at T-Mobile, as you know. Then we had done all our own research.

[00:27:17] Luke: You used to work for the dark side. You switched teams.

[00:27:21] Philipp: It was still the bright side when I was there.

[00:27:24] Luke: I was listening to a podcast yesterday. What's it called? The Danny Jones show. He does a lot of cool shit about UFOs and conspiracies and stuff like that. And seems like a pretty awake guy. And then he ran a T-Mobile ad in the middle of the show and I was like, "I'm done."

[00:27:40] Ian: It's like the Imperial March place. [Inaudible]

[00:27:45] Philipp: But what we saw in this study was remarkable and it opened my eyes, what is actually happening with the brains. First of all, the way it was constructed is they had a 10-minute EEG in a completely EMF-free room, completely blocked off. That's a baseline.

[00:28:04] And you can tell the brainwaves flow naturally. It's just literally natural brainwaves, how it's supposed to be. Then they put this person, the test person into a chair, and they get the iPhone 15 next to their ear, like this, basically about half an inch away, and then they simulate a 5G call for 30 minutes and measure the EEG. And most of them develop headaches right away.

[00:28:24] And also the lady who's one of the experts in Europe in regards to EEG measurements, she said what's happening now is the 5G bandwidth puts the brainwaves into an artificial box. So the brainwaves can't flow naturally and freely anymore. You're literally operating in a box suddenly. The interpretation of that, I leave up to everyone else.

[00:28:58] On top of that, all the stressors in the brain got significantly amplified, significantly amplified, so that you wonder even how can someone be even calm if you're exposed to that type of stuff. Then the test persons didn't know what was actually being tested other than the phone, obviously.

[00:29:19] And when something would be turned on after the first 30 minutes with this iPhone there, then there was another test done, same thing. But with a  Quantum Upgrade on. And these investigators, they thought, that's not going to work. We've tested all these products. 98% of those don't work.

[00:29:38] Luke: Like little stickers you put on your--

[00:29:40] Philipp: Yeah, stickers and all kinds of stuff that people have.

[00:29:43] Luke: Remind me. I want get into that in terms of quantum everything these days.

[00:29:48] Philipp: They thought they're coming with this thing over distance. That can't work. And then within the first few seconds with the first test person, when it came on, the Quantum Upgrade came on, that lady was sitting there, "Oh my God, this freaking works. This really works."

[00:30:05] And we could see, she knew. At that point you, we could have stopped the study, and she would've been convinced just because of the first 10, 15 seconds. Because the brainwaves did what they would never do under 5G exposure if you didn't have an intervention running. And it was significant because it neutralized the stressors in the brain so significantly, I think Ian can--

[00:30:27] Ian: Yeah. And the biggest thing is if you look at the image, so you've got the brain in its natural state, then you have the brain exposed to the iPhone 15, and everything is red and orange and yellow, not so hot. And then when the  Quantum Upgrade kicks in, everything goes back to calm.

[00:30:44] It's not as clear as the natural pristine, no EMF brain. But it's so remarkably shifted that the visual, just the visual-- and we'll give you the image so you can post it. But all of the things, so like gamma waves in the limbic system drop 77.6%. And that's a correlation to how much relaxation you can get.

[00:31:04] So your stressors drop 77.6. The beta waves and the temporal lobes, those dropped 82.9%. So just massive precipitous drop. And then the other one in the limbic system is the alpha waves kicked up 1300%.

[00:31:19] Luke: What?

[00:31:20] Philipp: 13x.

[00:31:21] Luke: 13:1.

[00:31:22] Ian: Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly what you want.

[00:31:24] Luke: That's I'm getting in the Sens.ai meditations. I'm just like, "Oh, this is heaven."

[00:31:27] Ian: Yeah. And that's it. So just instantly, boom, 13x.

[00:31:31] Philipp: And it was done. Yeah, it is crazy indeed. And it was done with a  Quantum Upgrade over distance. Not even the highest settings. I would say low to medium, but with the so-called brain support frequency that we specifically developed for these high stress situations.

[00:31:49] So if you're, for example, in an electric car, if you are in an airplane, if you have your phone here, if you use your AirPods, for example, things like that, because that is pure stress to the brain, it literally is pure stress. And that really opened my eyes because I did not know how bad that really is to the brain. And yeah, it's quite phenomenal.

[00:32:13] Luke: So in this particular experiment, you've got a regular iPhone 15. They're activating a 5G call with the phone next to them. You're seeing their brainwaves get totally trashed under normal circumstances. Then you assign the  Quantum Upgrade service to that number during--

[00:32:31] Philipp: No, to that person.

[00:32:32] Ian: To the person.

[00:32:32] Luke: Oh, to the person.

[00:32:34] Philipp: Yes. That's one of the unique things about the colonography. You can have it for the individual. So the biofield literally is in the field. So the brain support frequency is on, and instantly you see this shift. And no matter what 5G is doing there and all of that, it just can't get through it anymore.

Teachings About Water

[00:32:58] Luke: I'm a real water fanatic, and I know a few people that are relatively interested in water and knowledgeable about water. But what I know of you, you might have even surpassed me in your level of understanding and fanaticism.

[00:33:12] Paul: I've studied it a lot and I've done a lot of deep work with my soul to get deep insights on water. Have you ever seen the water charger I built?

[00:33:21] Luke: Yeah.

[00:33:21] Paul: I teach workshops on how to build water chargers, but I built a water charger that you can get about 20 people inside and we use it as a toning and chanting chamber, and it generates a very powerful vortex that structures the water. And when you're inside it, it feels like you're in an energetic tornado.

[00:33:38] It's subtle, but it's obvious. Anybody that I know, if they can't feel it, I say, "Take your shoes off. " Grounds them to the stone floor, but it's strong enough to move those water molecules constantly. And it's programming the sun, the moon, the environmental energies, every animal, every insect, anything that touches it is being printed into the water.

[00:34:05] So when you drink the water, you're in real time flow with the energies of the environment so that you're in sympathetic resonance with the environment. Years and years ago, when my soul taught me how to do these things, it was quite a shock because I was just out in the rock garden building sculptures and things.

[00:34:27] And my soul said, "I want to teach you how to build a water charger to charge your water." I said, "Oh, that's cool." And so I just listened as I normally do. I had this massive cone structure that I had to build a door in to get glass water bottles in. The first thing I did was test all the water, and it was just so radically different when I took it out of there.

[00:34:51] And at that time I was buying cases of Avion and glass. So I would test it against the Avion that hadn't been charged, and that was wild. And then I even took tap water, which I would never drink, charge it, and it actually made it so wildly better. If I had to, I could have drank it.

[00:35:09] Luke: Wow.

[00:35:10] Paul: But what was really trippy is I went out one night after work, grabbed the water, tasted it, and for some reason I was thirsty or something, so I pulled the cap off and tasted it out there, and it tasted like dirt. And I'm like, what in the world is going on? I'm looking at the bottle to see if it's cracked, shining a flashlight through it.

[00:35:37] I'm like, "That's wild." Then another week or so later, I pulled it out and it tasted like nickel, like metal. And this kept happening. So finally, after about the third time, I'm out there and it's at night and the moon's in the sky. I said to my soul, "How on earth is this water tasting like metals and dirt when it's in thick glass bottles?"

[00:36:02] And my soul turned my head and made me look right at the moon. And my soul said, "It's the energies of the moon." Each cycle of the moon is causing resonance with the moon's energy in the soil and the frequency of the moon's energy is picking up the vibration of the metals in the earth and imprinting it into the water.

[00:36:22] So you're tasting the subtle energy imprint of what's in the earth that's in resonance with the moon at that phase of the moon. So I bought a moon calendar, and I started comparing every time I took it out where the moon was and what the water felt like. And on the full moon, the water would get so strong my friends actually thought it was carbonated.

[00:36:43] Luke: Holy shit.

[00:36:43] Paul: It literally bubbled in your mouth. It had so much energy. And on the new moon, it was so empty. It felt like it was going right through your tongue, like a solvent. And so I realized I could use new moon water to help detox people, and I could use full moon water for people that were depressed or had adrenal fatigue or had an energy crisis where they just maybe were healing and needed energy. And so then I could just choose the moon phase based on what they needed. So that was quite a powerful experience for me to see how the moon is really--

[00:37:26] Luke: It’s like homeopathic alchemy.

[00:37:28] Paul: It is alchemy, and it is homeopathic, but it's really energy medicine. And I studied water extensively, and water's absolutely freaking wild. I could go on for hours on water. I don't know how much you want me to say, but I have three comprehensive chapters on water in my Spirit Gym book series.

[00:37:51] Luke: Epic. Have you looked into Veda Austin's work? Are you familiar with her?

[00:37:57] Paul: Mm-hmm.

[00:37:58] Luke: Yeah. I interviewed her a couple of years ago. People often ask me, what was your favorite one? There's been 600 of them or something at this point, but that one really stood out to me because I was already very steeped in just my fascination and love of water. But after that conversation with her, I realized that the way I was viewing water was that it had the capacity to be a conduit for consciousness, right?

[00:38:23] Paul: It is. Yeah.

[00:38:25] Luke: But what I got from her was that it actually is its own consciousness. Because she developed this language where she's able to communicate with the water. It was a deeper level, no pun intended, a deeper well of understanding that she opened up for me. You can't even like grasp it with the mind. It's just so wild.

[00:38:47] Paul: My response to your statement there is that water is a living being. So just like you have your own consciousness and the plant behind you does and everything does, water's consciousness, in my opinion, is as close to God consciousness you can get because water is absolutely unconditional. You can put poison in it, and you can love it.

[00:39:10] You can use it to heal, and you can use it to kill. You can use it under high pressure to cut stones and steel, and you can use it to bake, cook, and make medicines with. Water updates its information. Water's in connection with the zero point field, and it updates itself every one one trillionth of a second.

[00:39:40] And water has a frequency range of receptivity of 65 octaves. Now, most people can't even comprehend what that means, but one piano is about seven octaves. So to understand water, you would have to put eight or nine pianos side by side that progressively went octave by octave.

[00:40:03] And I was so curious when I was studying water, like, okay, 65 octaves. How big of a number would that represent as a frequency? And a friend of mine who is a genius and an amazing guy who's been on my podcast, somebody you should get on your podcast, Father Sean O'Laoire. He's was a Catholic priest for 50 years, and he got kicked out for teaching true spirituality.

[00:40:25] Luke: My kind of guy. I like him already.

[00:40:26] Paul: Yeah. He wrote a book called Setting God Free, and it's mind blowingly good. And he has a degree in mathematics and psychology, and I think physics as well. But I said, "Sean, I need you to calculate this for me." And the number he sent back to me was so big, I don't even know if there's a name for it. I don't even know what to tell you. It's bigger than Google. It's like crazy large. If I had to summarize--

[00:40:55] Luke: In terms of the frequency range of water?

[00:40:56] Paul: The frequency range. If you actually do the math on 65 octaves, you take an octave, you double it, you keep going up 65 times, the closest word I can give you is it has an almost infinite range of receptivity.

[00:41:13] And I've seen tons of research over the years showing it's absolutely receptive to psychic energies, thoughts, feelings, emotions. There's piles of research showing, for example-- Harold Saxton Burr did research, which was mind blowing. I think he did it in the late 40s, early 50s, where he caught mason jars of water.

[00:41:41] First, he got seedlings of the same genus, made two groups of seedlings. He then had his students interact with mason jars, just hold it or put it on the tables where they were studying. And then he went to psych wards and he took mason jars of exactly the same water and just let the psychologically damaged people interact with it.

[00:42:02] Then he watered the seedlings with the water from his students and he watered another batch from the psych ward people. And when you see the pictures of the plants that were watered by the water from the psych ward, they grew away from the sun. They grew down. Their bodies were gnarled and crooked like sick beings.

[00:42:23] And you could totally and utterly see the psychic effect. Now, it's the same water and the plants watered by the water from the students just grew normally. And there's lots of different stuff out there that I've come across that's-- I talk to water all the time. I get in my cold plunge and I pray to it.

[00:42:45] Water talks to you just like that. Water also is an analog of the aether, A-E-T-H- E-R, which is the first step down from spirit. So if you take vibration, so if you use the alchemical model of earth, water, fire, air, plasma, aether, spirit, then you'd go to zero, which would be God or unconditional love.

[00:43:16] So water is in an analog relationship with aether. And this is why almost all creation myths talk about water being the beginning of everything. But then if you take a high-quality crystal, it is another analog of water. I have a Vogel-cut healing crystal that's exotic, very expensive, super-- you know who Marcel Vogel was?

[00:43:39] Luke: No.

[00:43:40] Paul: A genius that developed a lot of technologies for IBM. He was able to take crystal and cut it and chose the right crystal, but he developed what looked like a laptop. Imagine a laptop closed, but it was made of crystal. He could put his hands on it and whatever thoughts were in his mind would appear on it like a television screen.

[00:44:10] Luke: What?

[00:44:11] Paul: Yeah. Now, crystal has water in it. Crystal holds water in it. First of all, that's why stones like to be buried in the earth, because if the stone dries out, it loses its life force. And stones are living things, especially crystals. They grow. The point I'm making is I let friends of mine-- I don't just let anybody handle this thing because it's very expensive.

[00:44:36] And if someone drops it-- and I've had cleaning ladies and people drop very expensive stones. So the paratrooper start talking. If you get too close to that stone, don't touch that stone. But when you come into my house, I will let you hold the stone, and it feels like water frozen in time. It's wild.

[00:45:57] Water is an analog. And aether, just like you have stem cells that can turn into hair, eyes, teeth, ears, brain, anything, the aether is the stem cell for the creative matrix of what David Bohm called the hollow mo-- what I call Spirit Gym. And so the aether is what takes God's dream of itself and becomes crystallized in this matrix that I call Spirit Gym, which is David Bohm's hollow movement.

[00:45:37] And there's a lot of technical details about what happens, but basically if you take God consciousness, God's dream, put it into the aether, it then drops down to plasma and it keeps going down progressively in-- the Kabbalah tree of life shows you the same thing, if you understand what it's showing you.

[00:45:56] It's showing you how consciousness crystallizes into form. And so water begins at the top, at the highest level, and it can resonate at that frequency. And then it is in resonance down to water itself, and then it goes down to the crystals. So you're actually seeing a three-fold step down matrix process, and then crystals will amplify consciousness.

[00:46:21] That's why shamans use them. That's why healers use them. They'll amplify sound frequencies, thought frequencies, emotions, whatever. And so does water, except water is a liquid crystal. A crystal is a solid crystal in three dimensions. And the aether is really a liquid crystal that broadcasts spirit.

More Esoteric Water Teachings 

[00:46:42] Luke: Yeah. I interviewed her a couple of years ago. People often ask me, what was your favorite one? There's been 600 of them or something at this point, but that one really stood out to me because I was already very steeped in just my fascination and love of water. But after that conversation with her, I realized that the way I was viewing water was that it had the capacity to be a conduit for consciousness, right?

[00:47:07] Paul: It is. Yeah.

[00:47:08] Luke: But what I got from her was that it actually is its own consciousness. Because she developed this language where she's able to communicate with the water. It was a deeper level, no pun intended, a deeper well of understanding that she opened up for me. You can't even grasp it with the mind. It's just so wild.

[00:47:31] Paul: My response to your statement there is that water is a living being. So just like you have your own consciousness and the plant behind you does and everything does, water's consciousness, in my opinion, is as close to God consciousness you can get because water is absolutely unconditional. You can put poison in it and you can love it.

[00:48:54] You can use it to heal, and you can use it to kill. You can use it under high pressure to cut stones and steel, and you can use it to bake, cook, and make medicines with. Water updates its information. Water's in connection with the zero point field, and it updates itself every one one trillionth of a second.

[00:48:25] And water has a frequency range of receptivity of 65 octaves. Now, most people can't even comprehend what that means, but one piano is about seven octaves. So to understand water, you would have to put eight or nine pianos side by side that progressively went octave by octave.

[00:48:47] And I was so curious when I was studying water, like, okay, 65 octaves. How big of a number would that represent as a frequency? And a friend of mine who is a genius and an amazing guy who's been on my podcast, somebody you should get on your podcast, Father Sean O'Laoire. He's was a Catholic priest for 50 years, and he got kicked out for teaching true spirituality.

[00:49:09] Luke: My kind of guy. I like him already.

[00:49:10] Paul: Yeah. He wrote a book called Setting God Free, and it's mind blowingly good. And he has a degree in mathematics and psychology, and I think physics as well. But I said, "Sean, I need you to calculate this for me." And the number he sent back to me was so big, I don't even know if there's a name for it. I don't even know what to tell you. It's bigger than Google. It's like crazy large. If I had to summarize--

[00:49:39] Luke: In terms of the frequency range of water?

[00:49:40] Paul: The frequency range. If you actually do the math on 65 octaves, you take an octave, you double it, you keep going up 65 times, the closest word I can give you is it has an almost infinite range of receptivity.

[00:49:58] And I've seen tons of research over the years showing it's absolutely receptive to psychic energies, thoughts, feelings, emotions. There's piles of research showing, for example-- Harold Saxton Burr did research, which was mind blowing. I think he did it in the late 40s, early 50s, where he caught mason jars of water.

[00:50:25] First, he got seedlings of the same genus, made two groups of seedlings. He then had his students interact with mason jars, just hold it or put it on the tables where they were studying. And then he went to psych wards and he took mason jars of exactly the same water and just let the psychologically damaged people interact with it.

[00:50:47] Then he watered the seedlings with the water from his students and he watered another batch from the psych ward people. And when you see the pictures of the plants that were watered by the water from the psych ward, they grew away from the sun. They grew down. Their bodies were gnarled and crooked like sick beings.

[00:51:07] And you could totally and utterly see the psychic effect. Now, it's the same water and the plants watered by the water from the students just grew normally. And there's lots of different stuff out there that I've come across that's-- I talk to water all the time. I get in my cold plunge and I pray to it.

[00:51:30] Water talks to you just like that. Water also is an analog of the aether, A-E-T-H- E-R, which is the first step down from spirit. So if you take vibration, so if you use the alchemical model of earth, water, fire, air, plasma, aether, spirit, then you'd go to zero, which would be God or unconditional love.

[00:52:01] So water is in an analog relationship with aether. And this is why almost all creation myths talk about water being the beginning of everything. But then if you take a high-quality crystal, it is another analog of water. I have a Vogel-cut healing crystal that's exotic, very expensive, super-- you know who Marcel Vogel was?

[00:52:24] Luke: No.

[00:52:25] Paul: A genius that developed a lot of technologies for IBM. He was able to take crystal and cut it and chose the right crystal, but he developed what looked like a laptop. Imagine a laptop closed, but it was made of crystal. He could put his hands on it and whatever thoughts were in his mind would appear on it like a television screen.

[00:52:55] Luke: What?

[00:52:56] Paul: Yeah. Now, crystal has water in it. Crystal holds water in it. First of all, that's why stones like to be buried in the earth, because if the stone dries out, it loses its life force. And stones are living things, especially crystals. They grow. The point I'm making is I let friends of mine-- I don't just let anybody handle this thing because it's very expensive.

[00:53:21] And if someone drops it-- and I've had cleaning ladies and people drop very expensive stones. So the paratrooper start talking. If you get too close to that stone, don't touch that stone. But when you come into my house, I will let you hold the stone, and it feels like water frozen in time. It's wild.

[00:53:42] Water is an analog. And aether, just like you have stem cells that can turn into hair, eyes, teeth, ears, brain, anything, the aether is the stem cell for the creative matrix of what David Bohm called the hollow mo-- what I call Spirit Gym. And so the aether is what takes God's dream of itself and becomes crystallized in this matrix that I call Spirit Gym, which is David Bohm's hollow movement.

[00:54:21] And there's a lot of technical details about what happens, but basically if you take God consciousness, God's dream, put it into the aether, it then drops down to plasma and it keeps going down progressively in-- the Kabbalah tree of life shows you the same thing, if you understand what it's showing you.

[00:54:41] It's showing you how consciousness crystallizes into form. And so water begins at the top, at the highest level, and it can resonate at that frequency, and then it is in resonance down to water itself, and then it goes down to the crystals. So you're actually seeing a three-fold step down matrix process, and then crystals will amplify consciousness.

[00:55:06] That's why shamans use them. That's why healers use them. They'll amplify sound frequencies, thought frequencies, emotions, whatever. And so does water, except water is a liquid crystal. A crystal is a solid crystal in three dimensions. And the aether is really a liquid crystal that broadcasts spirit. So that's a very short summary on--

[00:55:29] Luke: So epic. It's also interesting that water can be representative of the elements based on temperature. It's not just one thing.

[00:55:38] Paul: It can be everything. And I don't know if you know this, but probably five or six years ago, I'm just guessing it could be up to 10, but I remember when I first came across this because I was actually doing some research on water at that time. It was either an astrophysicist or astronomer had the question, I wonder what happened if I tuned my telescope to the frequency of water.

[00:56:09] And so he was one of these guys working with a professional observatory. And I can't remember what frequency range his telescope was in because they have microwave telescopes. They have infrared telescopes. But anyhow, he tuned the telescope to the frequency of water, and he found that water was everywhere in the entire universe that he pointed his telescope.

[00:56:32] So we used to think that water was this thing that was limited supply, but he actually shows pictures. I found an article or two, and it showed pictures of the sky, and when he tuned it to the frequency, just like you see water vapor in the sky or clouds in the sky, once he tuned that telescope to the frequency of water, everywhere you looked in the cosmos between the stars, water everywhere. And it glowed on the images like a light blue. And instead of seeing the black sky at night on the telescope, you saw a blue sky at night.

[00:57:07] Luke: Epic.

[00:57:08] Paul: It was really cool.

Elder's Time Philosophy

[00:57:12] Luke: So first I'm going to give you my cartoonish, Flintstonian understanding of the fact that there's no time. The way I look at it is like this, and it's best done on like a blackboard. So those watching the video, you'll see my hand movements. The rest of you just imagine this.

[00:57:31] So there's a line that is perpendicular to the ground. So there's a line, horizontal line, and on one end is infinity and on the other end is infinity. What I perceive to be the now is one spot where I stop on that line. And it seems like there's the time of now because the perception of my senses is only able to perceive that particular moment. And so I would call that the now, being in the now.

[00:58:09] And then without knowing better, I would look at 10 years ago as somewhere that has to come from memory that doesn't exist anymore or the future on the other side of the line as a fantasy of what I believe might happen. But in reality, that infinite line that has no beginning and no end is all one eternal moment.

[00:58:33] Jesse: Yes.

[00:58:34] Luke: And when I look at life that way, it becomes much more fun and less serious and gives me access to go into the past and reconcile things that I felt before were locked away in some realm of memory and also makes my future seem more malleable and at the whim of my creativity.

[00:59:02] Jesse: I think that last part especially is really useful. Because I think most of us look at the future as this completely unknown thing and the best you can do is extrapolate past experiences into the future and then avoid the past painful experiences if they come up again and do the best to replicate the positive ones in some way that ties in with our dreams.

[00:59:29] But it's too whimsical for a lot of people, or they go hyper logical and they're just trying to plan for every single possible way and then they just get over scripted and end up missing all these cues on what might actually be good for them. And I love the way that you said it about this continuum of infinity.

[00:59:50] When I first started playing around with this and I just kept asking questions, the big things that came up for me were memory and imagination. If time is made of three things, past, present, and future, and only one of them is verifiable, which is, as you said, the now, then you can only have a memory now and you can only imagine the future now.

[01:00:15] So really, past and future also only exist now. So then there's like, shit, okay, then neither of those is real except now. So I started to think about it this way. This localized experience of consciousness that we're having, this sensory, physically located experience of life, we're here in your home and we're on these cool chairs and we've got these clothes and we've got these bodies.

[01:00:46] So this is a concentrated experience of consciousness. But is that the only part of reality that our consciousness can experience? And I would say that it's not. Because, again, this is completely anecdotal and this is probably poetic license more than anything that can be scientifically verified right now, but we're the user having the user experience and this body is like an app. It's like an interface within the OS of this time and space, this dimension.

[01:01:21] But we've all had the experience of being on our laptop or on our computer or on our phone and it's like you're typing to somebody but you're listening to a song while you're watching your crypto or whatever, and you're getting incoming messages. You, the user, are having all of these experiences simultaneously. And it can be overwhelming, but it's also very enriching because you're having all these experiences tied together that are part of your life experience. And yet you're only experiencing them on just this one screen.

[01:01:53] But each of those applications, Spotify or SoundCloud or Telegram or whatever, they are siloed experiences that don't have anything to do with each other. If Telegram had a consciousness, it wouldn't be like, oh, I'm operating with SoundCloud right now.

[01:02:11] It's just siloed experience that only at the level of the user are then joined in this sensory thing. All that to say it just started to make sense to me that if we do have a soul that's the ultimate operator of this consciousness, would that soul be limited to this time and this place? Probably not. So if the soul isn't bound by time the way that we are in this dimension, then that means it could access all of the localized experiences at once and be just having all these tabs open like, whoa.

[01:02:48] Luke: Through multitudes of avatars.

[01:02:49] Jesse: Infinite avatars. Even avatars that are this consciousness like Luke Storey has a lot of past Luke's, the one that you lived, all the perceptions of all the actual memories that you've got, the experiences you've had, but also parallel memories.

[01:03:09] There's a lot of other ways that it could have gone that you're here. And then the future just fractals out even more. So I think all of those exist and that higher self, or that oversoul, or whatever people want to call it, is observing and experiencing all of them simultaneously, and it's just enriching the user experience of the soul.

[01:04:49] Luke: This brings me to another realization/conundrum that has really broken my mind. And that is-- I don't know why exactly because I wasn't raised in any dogmatic belief system that was inclusive of reincarnation, but it's just something I don't remember when I first became aware of the concept, but I was just always on board with it. Like, well, yeah, duh.

[01:05:30] And some of it has to do with some of the spiritual teachings from which I've benefited and it seems to fit in the model, the Vedic worldview and so on. But I'm not one of those people that has had many past life experiences or memories with the exception of one occasion, but I feel like I've been here before.

[01:05:50] I feel like I've known people that I'm here with, especially Alyson. This is not our first rodeo. There's just no way. But what trips me out about that is when I try to reconcile what I also feel is true, that there really is no time. There is no past, now, and future. There's just one big eternity. Then the idea of a past life would be negated and it would just be another life that's also happening in the eternal now.

[01:06:22] Jesse: This is good.

[01:06:23] Luke: So it's not like my soul incarnated in 1432 and lived in Greece. And then fast forward time that doesn't exist and now there's a Luke Storey that exists from 1970 until now is that the eternal soul, to your point, is experiencing all of these avatar lifetimes in one simultaneous eternal now. I don't even know what to do with that.

[01:06:48] It just makes my head explode because the logical part of me wants to create a linear sequence, not only of this lifetime, because that's a lot to manage in and of itself, but it wants to create a linear experience of multitudes of lifetimes through the model of reincarnation.

[01:07:08] Jesse: Do you know the term ethnocentricity? It's the bias--

[01:07:12] Luke: I've heard the word.

[01:07:13] Jesse: Towards the best. So like somebody grows up in, I don't know, they grew up in Mississippi and they're Southern Baptist and they were just like, "That is the best religion." Well, why? Because I'm in it. It's like, why would I be in something that's not the best? Or like Americans are like, "America, have you traveled?" Well, yeah, I went to Cancun one weekend. It's like, mm.

[01:07:37] So how do you know America is the best? Well, because look at it. But it's that bias of ethnocentricity, the tendency to believe that where we are is the best possible thing. Otherwise, why would we be here? And I think what you just said made me think of that because we're here right now and we want to believe that this is it. We're here. I've reached the ultimate. Or I'm learning my lessons, and that other thing isn't there anymore.

[01:08:05] But there's no proof that it's not there. Just because I can't see my truck parked outside, I'm pretty sure it's there, but I don't know for sure that it's there. But if I were to be looking at a satellite view or drone view of the house, I could clearly see, oh, these guys are inside and the truck is there. So it just comes down to perspective, I think. And we don't have that perspective from inside of this brain and inside of these senses other than to conceptualize.

[01:08:35] But we tend to carry that conceptualization of time and try and make it fit into a place or non-place where time doesn't exist in the same way. And that's when our brains break a little bit. And that's why I stopped-- probably when I was 20 years old, I stopped asking what's true and I just started asking what's useful.

[01:08:56] Is this a useful belief for me to have? Cool. Game on. I don't need to be able to convince anybody, even in all of my teaching and all my courses and clients and everything. This is a description of what I found useful. This is not a prescription of what you should believe. And that in itself seems to be useful.

[01:09:17] The way that's made the most sense to me and why I continue to explore this is especially related to the future, because if the future is completely unwritten and if we're using the old or the common model of, let me take all my known past experiences and try and do the best I can in the future, man, there's so many variables, the stuff that hasn't been invented yet for us, beliefs that aren't widely known.

[01:09:48] The 80% of the stuff that runs my life today, I had no clue about five years ago or 10 years ago. So based on my current beliefs, current skills, current confidence levels, current relationships, for me to assume that I know what the ideal future is based on all of these knowns, that just doesn't make sense to me.

[01:10:09] But what started to make sense to me is when I got really curious about like, what is imagination? And I had some bonker experiences that were real enough for me to trust and detest, and one of the things that I started to understand is that if all of these selves are operating simultaneously, if you go up, I don't know, a dimension, if you go up a little bit and you see that all of these Lukes and all of these Jesses are having their experience in one ultimate time field, but from this place, it's just one time field at a time, but you can access the other ones through memory or imagination, that means that us today-- you could remember the last time we hung out.

[01:10:57] Or maybe more usefully, you could remember a time when you were a kid and it was a Saturday afternoon and you were just laying on the grass and looking at the clouds and seeing if you could change the cloud shape with your mind and all this. You could go back to a specific memory.

[01:11:15] And I believe that that kid could imagine his future and could imagine, well, I wonder what I'll be like when I'm like in my 50s. That imagination of that kid and the lived experience of the man today is the same thought. It's the same idea. The man today is living that.

[01:11:39] So it's a denser idea because it's in sight and sound and touch that kid back then could only envision it and maybe feel it. But what if it's the same idea? And then I started to think about just the thought energy, which nobody knows what it is, but it's obviously something. And it can't just be a chemical file that's stored in your brain.

[01:12:02] How do you account for intuition? You're a musician and you know what it feels like when you get in the pocket and all of a sudden something just starts happening that you don't know where it's coming from, but it's coming and you're just on along for the ride. Where's that coming from? Yes, it might be a composite creation of influences, but any musician, any artist knows that there's just this thing that happens and you're just there. It just happens.

[01:12:30] Luke: I'm experiencing a lot of that writing this book I'm working on.

[01:12:33] Jesse: Mm. Yeah. So this is where--

[01:12:36] Luke: It's so fun.

[01:12:37] Jesse: It's super fun.

[01:12:38] Luke: It's fun to watch whatever the muse is use my fingers to write a book.

[01:12:46] Jesse: And to me, this is what's so fascinating.

[01:12:47] Luke: It also removes a lot of the fear self-judgment because I'm like, "I'm not doing it. It's not me."

[01:12:53] Jesse: Right. It wouldn't be there without you.

[01:12:55] Luke: I'm the vessel through which it's going, and it has my imprint, but I'm not forcing an idea of a sentence or a concept or paragraph to come to fruition. I'm turning the rudder a little bit, and I know what direction I'm going, but the wind is going to have the velocity that the wind has. And then I end up in some destination. Well, how did I get here? All I did was just turn the rudder.

[01:13:21] Jesse: That was a perfect setup because if thought energy, for lack of a better term, is omnipresent, it's this field, just like these phones. If my phone's on airplane mode, all I can play are the songs that are already loaded on the phone, which is maybe 100 different tracks and musical pieces and voice memos, but I can't access all the tracks on SoundCloud or all the songs on Spotify or all the videos on YouTube because that's in the cloud.

[01:13:52] But where's the cloud? It's here. So if I take the phone off airplane mode, all of a sudden I can access every single song on the Internet because the phone is not the container. It's a conduit. All those songs already exist. Take that idea or take that example and then just think about if thought energy, that is all thought that has ever been thought can be thought, is possible to be thought, if that operates as a cloud where all of these thoughts exist, then our brains, our minds, our bodies, if we're not on airplane mode and we can start accessing those thoughts, then what if the version of you that has already written that song or already written that book is looking at the finished product going, "Fuck. Yeah, this is good."

[01:14:48] And in that moment of just intense presence of completion, that thought is so potent. It's like a beacon. It emits something. And then here you are else when, like you're over in your now, and he's in his now in what for you would be the future and to him, you are the past. And what if he's thinking about you, going, "Bro, you got to see this thing. This thing is epic."

[01:15:20] And you're tapping into that same energy that he's in and you're getting the ideas and the words just start flowing and now you're in that thing. Well, what if you're being remembered by your future self? And what if that's what imagination is? What if imagination is when you're being remembered by your future self?

587: 00:02:40 – 00:12:31 - A high level overview of EMF, PEMF etc. This may be the only concise section of the podcast and works as a single clip.

[01:15:42] Brandon: Essentially, magnetism is the fundamental force. It's basically the loss of dielectric inertia. So everything that manifests in physical reality comes from a rest point. And all force vectors basically seek rest, which Ken Wheeler, he's probably the most profound-- he knows way more and is more articulate about magnetism. Probably living, but arguably ever as far as his research and what he's understood and how he's broken down magnetism.

[01:16:10] And basically, he calls the earth itself the dielectric inertial plane, and that basically magnetism is fundamental, and gravity, and all these kind of processes. And if we're looking at it from a health perspective, everything you're doing with exercise, nutrition, hydration, herbalism, Qigong, all this stuff has a magnetic component because we're electromagnetic in nature.

[01:16:31] In traditional Chinese medicine, we've understood this for a long, long period of time, we're physiochemical, so we use herbs and we use substances that we consume internally to send signals in the body. But basically, every cell in the body has a voltage potential, and magnetic fields basically directly interact with magnetism.

[01:16:52] And we've had conversations on EMF, which is essentially a electromotive force or electromagnetic field. So magnetism is intertwined with all of our technologies, our physicality, life on earth. And again, I'm in the EMF world, but I'm not like a hammer that thinks everything's a nail. There's good, coherent EMF that's healing and beneficial, like the ARC provides to the body.

[01:17:18] And then there's incoherent noisy signals that really wreak havoc on our voltage-gated calcium channels in our physiology. So really, magnetism is everywhere in reality, and really getting to the crux of what it is is really key to understanding energy in general, I think.

[01:17:35] Luke: In our last conversation, we did focus a lot on EMF because you're the US rep distributor for BluShield, which I have all around the house. Actually, someone today on Instagram was asking me on a DM like, "My husband has Lyme and he's really sensitive to EMF, and so we just bought a new car and we have three days to determine where they're going to keep it. And he gets really nauseous when he's in the car." And I'm like, "I relate."

[01:18:04] All new cars are just horrible with EMF. I don't care if they're a Tesla or not. To me, any car that has these running on microchips and has radar in the bumpers and a Wi-Fi router inside-- yeah. My car is just horrific with the EMF, but I have two BluShield devices in mine. I have the little plug in one that goes in the lighter. And I was like, "Eh, I don't know. It's small. I don't know if that's enough." So then I have one of the big--

[01:18:27] Brandon: The home unit.

[01:18:29] Luke: Not the cube, but the one that's shaped like this.

[01:18:30] Brandon: The premium Ultra.

[01:18:32] Luke: Yeah. I have one of those plugged into an adapter in there. And so people that are interested in the negative kind of EMF and ways to protect it can go back to number 506. But I forgot. Yeah. You're really knowledgeable about that. I'm going to resist the temptation to go too deeply into that, but maybe a great place to start to unpack this is really the difference between non-native EMF and what would be native or natural EMF in the conversation here of PEMF, where we're actually talking about EMF that's more compatible with the body and is replicating the EMF of the earth.

[01:19:17] Because that's one argument I get from people when I start going on about the dangers of EMF. You'll get trolls that are like, the sun is EMF. Everything's EMF. I'm like, "Yeah, but it's native. You're talking native versus alien." So maybe define the difference there. One deleterious to our health and energy, one very positive and supportive.

[01:19:38] Brandon: Yeah, so that gets a little bit philosophical because we come from nature and what we develop is coming from nature, and all there is is basically a white noise of energy out there. All there is is there's really energy. So to simplify it even more, it's more about coherence and incoherence.

[01:19:54] So if you have a router, which we're calling non-native EMF, these repetitive and chaotic signals. For example, you have this really nice sine wave coming in your house. And a lot of people say, "Oh, the sine wave coming to your house at 60 Hertz or 50 Hertz or whatever country you're in, that's bad EMF."

[01:20:11] Well, no, it's not really that chaotic until it starts hitting your refrigerator and all these alternating current devices that create the sturdy electricity that builds a field effect in the room. That incoherent field will affect the biology negatively. With a Wi-Fi router, for example, you're getting a signal, but there's all these informational wave packets on it.

[01:20:29] And with cell phones, the same thing. If I send you a text, the carrier signal that gets it to you is encoded with these informational wave packets, and that's what wreaks havoc on our body. And probably the best research-- I don't think it's the full picture, but it's a huge part of the pie-- it's Dr. Martin Paul's work when he studied the voltage-gated calcium channels.

[01:20:49] There's basically two different pathways that are affected by electromagnetic radiation in general. And so you can have incoherent electromagnetic radiation that stimulates the flooding of these voltage-gated calcium channels up to 100 times normal amounts, which is huge for the calcium signaling as far as sending signals in your body and normalizing or regulating physiochemical responses in the system is thrown off massively by just a small increase of calcium, let alone a lot.

[01:21:18] And there's potassium channels. There's all these different channels. So that affects the proxy nitride pathway. That's a high or far upstream mechanism of oxidative stress, which is connected with every chronic disease. However, if you use something that's coherent, like a point source magnetic field, for example, that goes on a different pathway of the voltage-gated calcium channels to the nitric oxide.

[01:21:38] And then that converse in our NRF2 pathway, which has the healing qualities that we see from EMF. So it's a very nuanced conversation. It's not just like EMF is bad or EMF is good, or EMF doesn't matter. All there is is an energy and it's just about the coherence, the type of signal, how it's generated, and what the application is and subject or user for therapeutic or deleterious effects, like you're saying.

[01:22:02] Luke: That makes sense. Yeah. The coherence is, I think, the key there. And if you think about music being frequency, vibration, dissonance sounds bad, generally speaking. There's some jazz and stuff that, if it's done intentionally, I think there's a way dissonance could be cool. Or you could listen to Sonic Youth or something. It's like, oh, cool.

[01:22:26] It has a vibe. But generally speaking, if you go up to a piano or guitar and you a certain couple of notes together, it will sound irritating and other notes together harmonize and create chords and sound beautiful. It's like we just innately know this. Anyone that's been at someone's house who doesn't know how to play electric guitar very well and is doing so will irritate the shit out of you.

[01:22:52] Someone that's pretty good at it sounds nice. And you're like, "Oh, do more of that." So I think we innately understand the idea of coherence because it just sounds better, feels better, and has that effect. But I think when it comes to magnetism and EMF, the thing that's so frustrating about trying to convey some of the negative effects of it to people and also to explain as we're going to do here today, the positive effects, is it's invisible.

[01:23:24] So it's like, ah, you can put some glyphosate under a microscope and you see it there. Whereas EMF is just like, I don't know. I feel fine. I don't notice that there's 45 smart technologies in my house and I'm sleeping with my phone under my pillow. You only feel the effects.

[01:23:45] And it's difficult to distinguish causation from correlation when it comes to the impact that they're having on you, the negative impact, because it could be anything in your environment. So that's the thing I'm always like, "Ah, someone needs to invent some kind of special camera, show the magnetism in the fields in our environment so that you can see like, oh wow, that router over there is making a bunch of crazy incoherent waves that are flying through our house."

[01:24:13] Brandon: It's interesting you say that because people are fascinated with magnets, especially as kids, because you can take magnets and push them together. And depending on what polarity is facing it, they'll repel each other. There's a invisible barrier that you can actually-- it's demonstrable.

[01:24:27] You can see the effect of that happening, or you flip them the other way, they'll collapse or implode towards each other. And that has to do with the dielectric and magnetic, which is essentially the same thing. And we can go deeper into that idea, but there's also a Pharaoh supercell, which basically, it's two pieces of glass, and it's optically flat glass.

[01:24:45] You can visually look at flat glass, but under a microscope it looked like a Canyon, is just jagged and shards of glass everywhere. But optically flat glass under microscope is perfectly flat, and you can put a ferro reactive fluid in there and basically backlight it and you can see the lines of force.

[01:25:02] So that's like a viewing tool that you could use. And people that are watching, you can go online. There's tons of pictures, tons of videos. And that's a really cool thing because what you see in the center of a magnet is a black hole. And that black hole is the dielectric. So that's where the energy flows into.

[01:25:17] And they're always trying to dominate each other, like black holes in space. When you look at it, like from a cosmology point of view, it's the dielectric. It has basically superseded magnetism's ability to keep things in the physical reality, so it implodes into an infinitesimally small point.

[01:25:37] And likewise, the magnetic is basically the loss of dielectric rest energy or inertia because we have to understand a primary aspect of what energy is, and energy is rest. Everything, again, seeks that rest point. And then the loss of inertia, like if you explode a bomb, you can look at that and most people are conditioned like, think, wow, look at all that energy being generated. But that's actually the loss of potentiality.

[01:26:01] So a magnet is actuality and the dielectric is potentiality. And they're essentially two sides of the same coin, if you want to think of them that way. They're the same thing. It's very similar to use the analogy of water. We look at water and we get very pinpoint focused on things as humans, and we like to isolate and segregate things.

[01:26:19] And we're like, okay, well, ice is different than steam than water. And we all know just obviously that water is all of those, but there's a modality of cold, applied to water to create ice, or there's a modality of heat to create steam. So the magneto dielectric nature of the reality is the taurus and the hyperboloid, the dielectric and the magnetic. So that's a key understanding, and that's something you can visually see under a ferrocell pretty easy.

Love vs Control

[01:26:47] Elle: It's control, and control is the opposite to love really. If love is allowance, control is the opposite. And we want to be in love and consciousness in all that we do. So it's finding that balance between giving 110% and doing it from your heart for the circumstances without trying to impose your perspectives on others. And that's a really fine line. It takes time and experience to master.

[01:27:20] Luke: Yeah. A marriage is a great place to learn that.

[01:27:22] Elle: It's so true. Any relationship. Relationships with children too.

[01:27:26] Luke: Oh, I couldn't imagine. Yeah. That was always one of my fears about having kids, is like, how am I going to let them go and just have their own experience, but still be a guide? How have you navigated that, the sovereignty of your boys versus the mother bear that is rightfully being mindful of possible danger or missteps, etc.?

[01:27:54] Elle: Nothing is like the unconditional love you have for a child. No other love that I've experienced. Or at least prior to having children, I didn't understand what unconditional love was. And then when you have children, you realize that it doesn't really matter what they do. You may not like it, but you will always love them. And it's to apply that in everything that we do in life.

[01:28:17] But with the boys, I have chosen to be a wise guide for them and to allow them their experiences even if I don't agree with them, some of their choices that they may make in life in earlier life or later life. Because that's the only way they're going to learn. They're not going to learn by me telling them what to do. They learn through their own life experiences. And so why would I rob them of that by trying to manipulate their life path?

[01:28:47] And how would I know what their life path is? They have their own higher power, their own source, their own heart, if they use their heart as a compass. That is their journey. And I try not to interfere with that, or I choose not to interfere with that. It takes some discipline on my behalf, on any parent's behalf and a belief system that, as I said, they have their own heart. And that is the divine compass really.

[01:30:43] Luke: You talk a lot in your book about following your heart, and I think it's a vague concept for many of us. We get it. Like, oh, I have a gut feeling about something. And you can tune in to whether something is intuitively feeling like a yes or a no. But I think it's harder in application to have the level of presence that's required to have that fine-tuned discernment. How have you cultivated that to guide yourself?

[01:31:18] Elle: It's a practice. It's like if you have a friend and you don't speak to them very often, are you going to trust what they have to say if you ask their opinion or their support in something, or their guidance in something?

[01:31:36] And so having a relationship with yourself is the first step. And an ongoing relationship, a daily relationship, a daily check-in, not just once a day, but often throughout the day. And then you start to trust that inner knowing that you develop through time and through practice.

[01:31:59] And I use the zing zong method, and I talk a lot about this in the book. If I think of something, any action that I want to do or any decision I'm going to make, or any incoming experience that comes into my life, when I think about it or when I first hear about it, if my heart skips a beat and I go, "That'd be really great." Or I move towards it.

[01:32:31] That is, for me, a zing. Even if it's followed by trepidation, like, "Oh God, I don't know how I'm going to do that. Oh no, I'm scared. It's the unknown." But I go to that first feeling that I have. And in order to hear that, or feel that, or sense that, it requires us to be quite still in a daily practice, whether it's in meditation or whether it's just taking a breath and stopping before every circumstance.

[01:33:02] So it's a practice, and it becomes stronger and stronger over time, and we start to trust it over time. And it has been a wonderful guide for me throughout my life. And I choose to tap into it as much as I can. In fact, I'm the most uncomfortable when I can't hear it. And I can't hear it if I'm in fear. And that happens over time.

[01:33:33] Luke: Because then everything feels like a no.

[01:33:35] Elle: Everything feels like I can't cope.

[01:33:38] Luke: Yeah.

[01:33:39] Elle: Yeah.

[01:33:39] Luke: I think about that sometimes in terms of self-will. In recovery, that's a huge topic and obstacle to sobriety, is running on self-will, which to me, it's the opposite of presence and stillness and mindfulness. It's just a charging forward, unabated, unexamined.

[01:34:02] And it's something that I've struggled with myself a lot over the years because that way of going through life is very insidious at times and hard to see when you're in it. You start to see the collateral damage of it because other people will inform you or your decisions don't pan out in the ways that you hope they would. And you go, "Oh shit. I need to slow down and check myself."

[01:34:28] I recently had one of these myself, which was brought to my attention by my lovely wife, and she didn't have words for it. She's like, "It's just this thing. You're just going and going. You don't slow down." And I picked up my big book for the first time in a very long time. You know how it is. You flip to a page. And I was like, "Our problem is that we're on self will run riot." And that word "run riot", I was like, "That's the thing." Oh my God. I learned that 28 years ago, I thought.

[01:34:58] Elle: Yeah. We relearn it as we have experiences. For me, the self will is more like the fear, if I don't do it, I'm going to suffer. Rather than, if I do this, it will be in the best interest of my life. I've found that I do things because I'm afraid not to do it. So if you look at addiction, it's like, I'm going to feel like shit if I don't do this. And so that is self will run riot, and you do feel like shit actually, as we both know.

[01:35:41] Luke: Yeah, yeah.

[01:35:42] Elle: So I think it's just checking, is it coming from a place of fear or is it coming from a place of love? And when we come into that, just ask ourselves that question, often we'll realize that we are doing something because we're afraid not to do it, rather than we truly want to do it.

[01:26:01] Luke: Very true. Or sometimes it's like something I've worked on a lot is boundaries of just choosing to live my life in a way that I see fit and be less dependent on other people's approval. And sometimes that decision to not do something involves other people, some kind of venture partnership, go hang out, whatever. And it's been difficult for me to learn, I guess how to just have sovereignty in that way.

[01:36:32] There's a fear of what are they going to think. And sometimes it's an authentic fear of not wanting to hurt their feelings. But if I'm really honest and I dig deeper, I often find it's not so much about how they're going to feel. It's how is their perception of me going to change, and is it going to be negative? There's still a bit of attachment to that of just, why am I living my life for other people? This is mine. Is that something you've had to face and work on in your life?

[01:37:01] Elle: Absolutely. My whole career was about executing other people's visions of me. Modeling in itself is somebody has a vision of how they think that their clothes are going to look and the photographs are going to look, and you come in to play that role to be that character almost.

[01:37:24] And I was paid to do it. So it was like along the way, the lines between what is you and what is somebody else's vision of you, especially when I was married to a photographer, become very blurred. And there's a strong motivation to keep performing to other people's expectations of you because you're paid to do it.

[01:37:52] And it was my livelihood, and it was my independence card. And there was just a strong motivation to do that until the time where it became so painful and so unfulfilling that I started to take small steps towards reclaiming, making choices that really resonated with me rather than what resonated with the people around me. And it's a process, and I learned the hard way.

[01:38:29] Luke: I bet. I bet. What was New York like when you arrived there in the '80s? Being from California, my perception of New York at that time was always that it was really dirty and dangerous and there was junkies everywhere. It was like that movie Escape from New York, which I think was a '70s movie, but it just seemed like this daunting place. And I didn't end up going there, I think until, I don't know, 2010 or something.

[01:38:55] Elle: Wow. And it had changed a lot by then.

[01:38:57] Luke: Yeah. And I was like, "What's everyone talking about? It's beautiful.

[01:38:58] Elle: I know. It's true. '83 was when I arrived in New York, and remember, I'm a girl from Sydney, Australia. I grew up in the beaches. I was going to go to law school. I'd never really traveled. Certainly hadn't traveled overseas. And I arrived in New York City, and I was so afraid.

[01:39:18] The book starts, in New York City in 1983, and it was dark and dusty and cold and dangerous. And I was constantly afraid. And it wasn't the bustling, center of the universe that New York became, particularly in the '90s and 2000s.

[01:39:40] I'd never seen anything like it. And I didn't know how to dress for the weather. I didn't know how to be. I had no money, no food. A lot of the time I lived on trail mix and yogurt and whatever I could scrounge at the studios when I was working.

[01:39:56] Luke: You were at the craft services table.

[01:39:58] Elle: All day.

[01:39:58] Luke: Eating all the calories you can.

[01:40:01] Elle: And so it was a huge culture shock, but exciting, the energy and the pulse of New York City. And I was free. I was away from my family who I loved, but I was living by myself for myself and in survival mode a lot of the time. And it was exciting. And I got to experience a lot of that craziness in the '80s and '90s, nightclubs and meeting famous people and going to restaurants and travel. It was so invigorating.

[01:40:39] And I was forging my way in a career that was really kinetic and inspiring in many ways. So I was a fish out of water, and I loved it, and I gave it a go. And that's the first chapter of the book, is New York City: Give It a Go. And that's what I did.

Elle's story of getting sober + Luke's Addiction

[01:41:03] Elle: Look, I've been sober for 21 years and so it's not like I'm newly sober and I'm just spouting off about, oh, everybody should get sober. I've had a long history of many, many meetings, and there are old-school sponsors and people in AA that always say anonymity is extremely important.

[01:41:28] But then you see people like Eric Clapton who speak and who go to meetings all the time, and he is a very valuable member of AA, and I'm not breaking his anonymity because he speaks about it. And he has been an inspiration for a lot of people.

[01:41:49] My book is a book of tools and wisdoms to help people on their journey. So if I was to not write about that aspect of my life, which it has been so important, a, it would be inauthentic, and b, I'm not using an opportunity where I could be helping people who are struggling.

[01:42:09] And so I felt that it was important for me to be honest about it. And in fact, the whole chapter on getting sober is a direct lift from the share I gave 21 years ago. The whole chapter is just reliving exactly what I said in that meeting, what I was thinking, what I was feeling, and what I said in that meeting.

[01:42:34] And I thought that was the most authentic and honest way to talk about it. And my aim is to help people. And if one person decides that they want to consider getting sober because it feels resonant for them, then the job is done. It only takes one person for it to be a valuable and worthwhile exercise.

[01:42:57] And I felt that it was really important. But I did struggle with that. I struggled with it from all the years of being ingrained from AA saying, you must never talk about it. But in a book like this, how could I leave that chapter out, honestly?

[01:43:15] Luke: Yeah. Or it would be so laborious to maintain some ambiguity. You know what I mean? It's like, hey, here's what happened.

[01:43:25] Elle: And here it is.

[01:43:27] Luke: It's interesting. I think too, where we are now culturally versus where we were in 1935, when AA started, 1939, when the book was written, we're in such a vastly different place that I sense that some of the-- well, I don't throw any of the traditions out wholesale. Things are also much different now.

[01:43:52] And 12-step groups are so interwoven into culture now, at least western culture primarily. But there's not the stigma that there was at that time, which a lot of the anonymity-- why it was called Alcoholics Anonymous was because it was so shameful to be a drunk. And most people that wound up there were such low bottoms. It was basically bums on the corner with a brown paper bag kind of thing.

[01:44:22] Elle: And also, AA, it was just starting out, so they were protecting the community. They wanted to keep it pure and they wanted to protect it, and so they didn't want people going out and talking about it who didn't have long term sobriety, especially.

[01:44:37] Luke: Right.

[01:44:40] Elle: But now it is such a strong community and there's so many different facets of it between Al-Anon and AA.

[01:44:48] Luke: I've been through most of them.

[01:44:50] Elle: Childs of alcoholics. There's all the different flavors, and it's been around for a long time, and it is a beautiful life path or life map for many people that saved many people's lives.

[01:45:05] And I'm not saying that everybody should go to AA. I share my experience getting sober really and why I got sober and how I got sober and the benefits of it. And it's attraction not promotion. And I am not promoting this specifically. I am sharing my experience. And if you want what I have, then go check it out.

[01:45:31] Luke: Yeah, yeah.

[01:45:32] Elle: That's really the way I see it.

[01:45:35] Luke: Yeah. It's a beautiful thing. Anytime someone makes it out of that, it's meaningful to me because I know how difficult it is. It's not for the faint at heart.

[01:45:47] Elle: And I'm thankful, like you. You talked about Aerosmith. When I first started going to meetings in London, in the beginning, I would go because I saw a lot of famous people, actors and musicians, and it was way cooler than the people I was hanging out with.

[01:46:03] Going to a 7 o'clock AA meeting, there were more interesting people, wise, connected to their heart, honest, talking about stuff that nobody ever talked about, being real, and glamorous people. And so that kept me going to meetings for a long time. I'm so grateful that they went.

[01:46:29] Luke: Yeah, that's a good point.

[01:46:30] Elle: Until I developed my own sense of strength and reasoning to be in meetings. And today it's a question of service. And I see this chapter as being a service chapter. And in fact, the how chapter, which is the honest, open, and willing, how to stay sober, the publisher originally didn't want to put it in.

[01:46:50] She said, "Oh, it's too boring." I said, "No, no, no, no, no. This is the whole reason for it." This is not to tell a drunk log of what my life was like and all the different things that happened. What I want to share with people is how to stay stopped doing any compulsive behavior.

[01:47:09] And it's not just alcohol. It could be anything. How do we stay focused on what we want and not what we don't want. And addiction today is not reserved just for alcohol. And you're talking about it a lot on your podcast, which I love. And we look at kids addicted to their phones.

[01:47:30] Luke: Not just kids.

[01:47:31] Elle: Yeah. It’s true.

[01:47:34] Luke: My addiction, I'll be real about it, and it really is an addiction because it qualifies based on my criteria, which is any behavior I'm doing that has deleterious effect on my life or lives of people with whom I'm relating, and I'm aware that it has deleterious effects, and I can't control when and how much I do it.

[01:47:56] Elle: Yeah. Or if you do it or not.

[01:47:58] Luke: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Especially that. But I think some of the other addictions also are much harder because they don't have as devastating of consequences as a drug addiction or alcohol addiction. For me, it's what used to be called Twitter and is now called X.

[01:48:19] There's an app called Freedom you can put on your computer and your phone, and you can set it to block whatever, like your email, all Internet, different social media. And I have that block, and I'll wake up in the morning and put the block on. And I'm like, "Ah, I'm just going to check real quick."

[01:48:34] And it's that thing. I'm just going to have one drink or whatever. I never fooled myself to think I'll just have one drink, but maybe I'm going to drink tonight, but I'm not going to do hard drugs. That was my self-delusional denial.

[01:48:46] Elle: And of course one led to the other always.

[01:48:47] Luke: Oh my God, yeah. Yeah, insane. But yeah, for me, it's that. And I think that and nicotine are probably the two things in my life now I feel like they have more control over me than I have more control over. But because they're, on their face, not that destructive, they're not going to cause me to lose my career or get a divorce or spend all money.

[01:49:11] Elle: Yeah, but you're not living the life that you want to live.

[01:49:12] Luke: It's more of just a fine-tuned mental health kind of thing. I know I'm much happier when I'm less tied into what's going on out in the world, especially things that I can't control, which are the things that I feed on on Twitter, mostly around what's happening geopolitically and just in culture.

[01:49:30] Elle: And you'd like to stay in touch because you have this podcast, and so you're going be talking to people. You want to know what's going on. So there's a great reasoning for it. And you're right, any behavior that we do that is undermined is unself loving and we're repeatedly doing it can be an addiction.

[01:49:49] There are many people that are addicted to fear and to drama in their lives. And it is so self-damaging, perhaps even more than alcohol because it's so insidious. It's hard to pinpoint, and it undermines everything we do. And so it is a nefarious road, the road of refining, living the life that we truly want to live. Bringing our true essence into the world and living the kind of life that we really want to live without the dissonance or without the-- what do they call it, in the Law of One?

[01:50:35] Luke: I forget.

[01:50:36] Elle: Distortion. Without the distortion.

[01:50:39] Luke: Yeah, yeah. You guys have been reading that?

[01:50:42] Elle: I've been listening to it. Yeah, yeah. I saw your podcast on it. I listened to your podcast.

[01:50:45] Luke: There's some cool stuff, man.

[01:50:47] Elle: Yeah, it's interesting. The concept of service to self and others in equal measures is something I've been mulling upon for quite some time. So it really resonated with me. I haven't listened to the whole thing. It's a long listen.

[01:51:12] Luke: And there are multiple books too. I remember when I first got the audiobook. I was like, "Which one?" I guess I started with the first one. But there's volumes.

[01:51:20] Elle: Yeah.

[01:51:21] Luke: That one to me, I think so many of my friends have recommended it and been into that. I'm always a little bit resistant to channeled stuff just because there's so much margin for--

[01:51:36] Elle: Interpretation too--

[01:51:37] Luke: Interpretation and fraud. Like David Hawkins used to say, "Man, don't get all the channeling stuff." We can't even discern someone's character or truth or falsehood in this realm of reality. You're like, you have no business going off into these other realms of reality and trying to think you can talk to entities and that they're authentic and so on.

[01:51:57] So I've always just like, let me stay grounded. The 12 steps, very grounding, just rooted in just very simple principles. But then something like that comes along and I give it a shot, and I go, "I can't poke any holes in this." There's like nothing I heard so far in the Law of One where I was like, "No, that's bullshit."

[01:52:15] Everything resonated. So wherever it came from is less relevant. It's, does it align with what feels like truth and something that's valuable and applicable to me in my life?

[01:52:26] Elle: And that's really the key, isn't it? Is it aligned with where you are right here, right now? Because you can listen to something now and it doesn't make any sense. And in six months’ time or a year's time, it's like a penny dropped. So I explore, listen, take what resonates, let go of the rest.

[01:52:47] And it doesn't really matter where it came from, because ultimately, if it's in your energy field now and something resonates with you, it's because it's meant to, to trigger a new behavior or a new way of thinking. There's no mistakes. So if it's come your way, there's good reason for it.

[01:54:38] Luke: On your spiritual path, what teachers or teachings have stood the test of time, where you go back to it and it still carries weight and has resonance?

[01:54:50] Elle: Osho, Ram Dass. I read Be Here Now when I was 18. I talk about that in the book too, I think. I didn't understand it at the time. It sounded good and felt good, but today I think I have a more profound understanding through my own experience, trial and error method.

[01:55:16] It was like, yeah, actually that is true, whatever principal you're talking about. I think one of the greatest teachers in life is our own life experiences, and living our life and learning through it is one of the greatest teachers. There's so many podcasts and enlightened audibles that you can listen to, and you can have all this information, but unless it's applied to your life, it's meaningless.

[01:55:50] So what are you capable of applying to your life today or in this moment? That's where the value lies, not just in the theory or the philosophical understanding of things. How can you apply that, whatever that understanding is, to your life, the application of it?

[01:56:08] Luke: I love it. I love it. That's so pertinent to the 12 steps. Early on, I thought it was just about being physically sober. Abstinence was it.

[01:56:21] Elle: And it is for a while.

[01:56:22] Luke: And you just can be a maniac outside of those confines.

[01:56:25] Elle: And you're.

Sovereingnty and Belief Systems

[01:56:27] Alec: I firmly believe that this vessel was created in such a way that it is so incredibly powerful. It is the most brilliant technology in existence that myself, and if I gather with a bunch more people and we focus our thought awareness on dissolving that, or at least diminishing the effects of it, we actually can do that.

[01:56:52] And ultimately, this thing that I'm in, that I'm harboring is so damn resilient. And I trust in God, creator, source, and my body's own wisdom that I know that whatever the fuck they're spraying in the sky, my body can overcome that. And I think when you take this position, it makes all those conversations just totally nonsensical.

[01:57:15] And that doesn't mean that I don't draw awareness to them sometimes, but it's because I think that what I do with my audience is go through my own internal processes on what I think about something in order to reflect back to them so that someone else who follows me might be able to be like, "Oh yeah, you know what? I was outsourcing a little bit. Or I was buying into false hope instead of buying into the power of us as individuals and as community." And that's why I do comment on them sometimes. But I hope that answers your question.

[01:57:46] Luke: Yeah, totally. It's a great opener to this dialogue because we have a negativity bias in the brain for survival. So we're always looking outside of ourselves for safety or the lack thereof. And if we haven't identified and integrated our own power, the next logical move is to look for something or someone to save us from what we perceive to be threatening.

[01:58:28] And I see this in my own life because I agree. I can choose the water that I drink. I can choose the food. I have a little bit of agency over EMF, in my house at least, when I'm there. So even though there are a few things within some degree of control, as an example, the geoengineering, that's the one thing that really bothers me because I feel totally powerless to affect change.

[01:58:58] So I find myself, like, I'll be on Twitter tagging Donald Trump and Elon Musk and RFK. I'm like, "You guys, fuck your DOGE, your Epstein files. I want to see the pilot files." It's sad that all those kids got abused. I totally relate to that on a personal level and deeply. Yet, what's that going to actually change about our future if some of Epstein's clients are actually held accountable, which I know they won't be?

[01:59:30] Alec: They're not going to do that anyway. Let me comment on that one more time.

[01:59:32] Luke: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:59:33] Alec: Again, I'm not saying that you shouldn't do that either. I hope that they take that on. But the more that I outsource power and agency to them, and I as one individual do it amongst a sea of other individuals who are looking to them to do it instead of all of us making decisions collectively-- it would be a little bit difficult and it would take some time when it comes to geoengineering, but we can affect change.

[02:00:00] We remember those pilots are human beings in and of themselves. I used to be an agent of the state. I went to West Point, the world's preeminent government indoctrination camp. I was fully indoctrinated to believe that that was the right thing to do to be a part of this machine that is the Department of Defense "fighting" for freedom against enemies, foreign and domestic.

[02:00:20] And if I can wake up to the problems with that, so too can all these other people who are acting as agents of the state. And what it requires is that those of us who can see what's going on truly embody our own position and continue to educate people to, rather than vote for a new authority figure, vote with their dollar, vote with their decision making.

[02:00:40] Because just like you said, you can control your EMF environment in your own home to a large degree. Yeah, you go to hotels and things like this and they are riddled with non-native EMFs. But the more that those of us who are just average people take back our own power and make decisions ourselves and then educate others openly, unashamedly, authentically, and stop trying to rely on government, who has time and time again given us false hope when a new person comes into power, the more that it will actually create change in the real world to where hotels won't have freaking anyone come there because it's like, oh, the people are now aware of non-native EMFs and they don't want to come to our hotel unless we deal with this.

[02:01:24] You saw some companies do that over the last five years where they are forced to change because of not government doing anything but societal trends of people now being hip to certain things. So it's like, ah, shit. If we want to save our bottom line, we are going to have to adjust a little bit to this. And that's the real power that we have individually and collectively.

[02:01:43] Luke: Totally, man. I think about that when I'm on Twitter trying to get one of my fantasy saviors to do something about geoengineering, for example. I was doing that yesterday and then I got a text in our Law Dojo and someone's like, "Hey, I'm doing the Cal Washington InPower thing. We're going to start litigating against 5G and chemtrails."

[02:02:05] And I was like, "I am too busy." Which I am. I have my own way of contributing to that solution, but that's a lot harder to open that text, join the group, go on some Zoom meetings, figure out who we need to litigate, who's going to spearhead it, how do we prepare the motions, how do we file, yada, yada.

[02:02:25] There's a lot to do and a lot to learn. It's a massive responsibility. And myself included, I'm like, "No, too hard." I'm just going to tweet at some person that I assume to have authority to protect me and save me from it because I don't want to deal with it myself. That's just one little example of what you speak to here.

[02:02:45] It's just we're ingrained, I think, from being in school. And you ask the teacher permission to go to the bathroom. It's like, what? My body wants to do something. I don't need to ask anyone. I go do it. You know what I mean? From day one, even our parents, giving birth to us in a hospital, it's like the man in the white coat is their authority telling them how to handle us from the time we enter this world. And we observe that on some level and we follow that. I think when you turn me on to, what's it called, the greatest superstition?

[02:03:16] Alec: The Most Dangerous Superstition.

[02:03:17] Luke: Most Dangerous Superstition. Dude, I've read a lot of books that have been meaningful to me and I would say changed my life. That one, by Larken Rose, we'll put it in the show notes, that just nuked my entire worldview in terms of the external world because he so clearly makes the case that our single issue as a species is this delusion, this hallucination that any man or woman has any authority to tell us what to do.

[02:03:53] It's like so simple. You can't even get the gravity of it. It's like that is the root cause of the entire fucking problem, is that we somehow buy into that. And it's like, if I think about my own life, let's say I'm a control freak because I feel inherently disempowered and weak.

[02:04:16] And so I feel like telling you and her what to do when this podcast ends, like, "Hey, go pick up that thing. Hey, put these other pants on." What? You guys would be like, "Get the fuck out of here. Who are you to tell me what to do?" But if I come in here in some uniform and start telling you what to do, oh yeah, no. Yes sir, Luke. Why? What is that? That's insane.

[02:04:42] Alec: Right.

[02:04:43] Luke: And what type of person-- and I'm sure there's some well intent. I've met RFK, for example, on a number of occasions. I really believe that guy has high integrity and that he's a kind person and that he really cares about people. So I think there are rare exceptions, but by and large, what kind of person spends their life energy to put themselves in a position to be able to control other people? That's a weird motive. I don't want to control anyone. You know what I mean?

[02:05:19] Alec: Let's say you even had good intentions behind it too. Can you imagine thinking that your perspective and your outlook on life is so incredibly good and it's the best perspective that you need to wield it against other people using the mechanisms of government?

[02:05:34] Luke: Yeah, because the mechanisms of government are coercion, violence, and death, or imprisonment.

[02:05:41] Alec: Right. Exactly.

[02:05:43] Luke: If you don't follow the dictates of these assumed phony authorities, that's how they enforce. It's enforced through threat, coercion, violence. That's the only reason any of us listen to any of them.

[02:05:59] Alec: Right. And I would say the other one too, this is the unspoken one, this relates back to geoengineering as well, is tacit agreement too, is this perspective that because we don't set a hard firm boundary and say no, individually and collectively, they'll just do it.

[02:06:16] Luke: Right.

[02:06:17] Alec: Which is why--

[02:06:18] Luke: It's like an unrebutted contract, an offered contract, is agreement, tacit agreement.

[02:06:25] Alec: Tacit agreement

[02:06:26] Luke: This is stuff I've been learning through studying law, and you've turned me on to so many great resources. But it's like basically, from the first time we sign our name on a document when we're 16 and we get a job at Pizza Hut or whatever, we've unknowingly contracted in to all of these agreements that don't serve our interest because we believe in the authority that asked us to sign them.

[02:06:47] Alec: Exactly, exactly.

[02:06:48] Luke: And I even read that thing, your W-9, whatever. Oh, this is what everyone does, is what we do. You got to be a good citizen. This is how you're a good person. You're responsible. You're an adult now. It's part of the thing. Driver's license, you got to have one. And you come to find out later, you didn't need to do any of that stuff. It was all voluntary.

[02:07:04] Alec: Right. And that's what it all comes back to, to me, man, is belief itself. Your foundational belief systems that lead to your thoughts and feelings that lead to your spoken words, that lead to your actions, that is the foundational thing. And that, I think, had a huge impact, for example, when it came to COVID. Not only when it came to the illusion of authority itself, but to the manifestation of disease symptoms.

[02:07:30] I don't think people really grasp how much their foundational belief systems individually and then also collectively play into the actual physical reality. And that's why I love Veda Austin's work, is because that is a perfect example of that. That water, which we are 99% molecularly, two thirds by weight, water permeates all facets of this reality, permeates all of biological life, and water is very clearly impacted by thought awareness oriented towards something.

[02:08:05] And again, what precedes that is someone's belief systems. And just to give an example of how that played into COVID, I brought this up last time we talked, but the second strongest risk factor for death associated with COVID was fear/anxiety-related disorders.

[02:08:21] But there's another piece of that; this book that just came out by this guy named Daniel Roytas, and he's a naturopathic physician out of Australia, and he wrote this book called Can You Catch a Cold? Where he examines the studies throughout history attempting to demonstrate that disease is spread by healthy people coming into contact with sick people or their bodily fluids. I'm getting to a point about belief here.

[02:08:48] Luke: I can't wait to go into that one. Anyway, go on. We'll get there.

[02:08:53] Alec: I'm just trying to indicate how much belief plays into things and people don't realize that more than just on an individual bringing in symptoms, but on a mass scale. So in his book, he examines these two, I guess you could say meta phenomena, mass psychogenic illness and social contagion.

[02:09:15] And one example that he gives of mass psychogenic illness is, in New Zealand, this drug that was an antidepressant had just gone off patent, so other companies could make their own generic version of that drug. A lot of people who are taking this one specific generic version of this antidepressant started reporting to whatever New Zealand's adverse event reporting system is that they experienced side effects related to that drug.

[02:09:43] There were 27 side effects that were being reported across the board, 27 common side effects. The mainstream media in New Zealand decided to run a story on this generic drug that was causing side effects of which, again, emphasized there was 27 common ones. For whatever reason, when New Zealand's mainstream media organizations were running a story on this generic drug, they only named six of the 27 symptoms.

[02:10:10] So they ran a story saying, "Hey, a lot of people are experiencing negative effects associated with this generic drug. Here are the common symptoms to look for." They only named six of those 27. What then followed was adverse events reports skyrocketed only in those six symptoms that were named by the mainstream media and not in the other 21 symptoms that were commonly reported before.

[02:10:35] The reason I bring that up is because I think that this is one of countless examples of how much our belief systems dictate, whether we realize it or not, the outcomes in physical reality. So going back to the illusion of authority, how much our belief in the so-called elites or the parasitic class, having this power of which I have to catch myself on that shit all the time too, and not slip into that, oh, look at what they're doing. This is ridiculous.

[02:11:04] And it's like, no, dude. No, no, no. Those are just men and women. Maybe reptiles. I don't know what the hell they are in some cases. But point being, they're probably men and women, and I'm continuing to outsource my power to them, thus giving them more power by my foundational belief systems that have a measurable impact on reality itself.

[02:11:21] And if I'm one individual who's doing that, what happens when we're doing that collectively? What happens instead if we get those same individuals to focus on the power of community, the power of coming together to create something that makes that whole paradigm obsolete and makes it the man behind the curtain and the Wizard of Oz that it actually is. It's all predicated on our belief systems. That's it.

More Sovereignty and the dangers of the government

[02:11:50] Alec: I'm just trying to indicate how much belief plays into things and people don't realize that more than just on an individual bringing in symptoms, but on a mass scale. So in his book, he examines these two, I guess you could say meta phenomena, mass psychogenic illness and social contagion.

[02:12:12] And one example that he gives of mass psychogenic illness is, in New Zealand, this drug that was an antidepressant had just gone off patent, so other companies could make their own generic version of that drug. A lot of people who are taking this one specific generic version of this antidepressant started reporting to whatever New Zealand's adverse event reporting system is that they experienced side effects related to that drug.

[02:12:40] There were 27 side effects that were being reported across the board, 27 common side effects. The mainstream media in New Zealand decided to run a story on this generic drug that was causing side effects of which, again, emphasized there was 27 common ones. For whatever reason, when New Zealand's mainstream media organizations were running a story on this generic drug, they only named six of the 27 symptoms.

[02:13:07] So they ran a story saying, "Hey, a lot of people are experiencing negative effects associated with this generic drug. Here are the common symptoms to look for." They only named six of those 27. What then followed was adverse events reports skyrocketed only in those six symptoms that were named by the mainstream media and not in the other 21 symptoms that were commonly reported before.

[02:13:32] The reason I bring that up is because I think that this is one of countless examples of how much our belief systems dictate, whether we realize it or not, the outcomes in physical reality. So going back to the illusion of authority, how much our belief in the so-called elites or the parasitic class, having this power of which I have to catch myself on that shit all the time too, and not slip into that, oh, look at what they're doing. This is ridiculous.

[02:14:01] And it's like, no, dude. No, no, no. Those are just men and women. Maybe reptiles. I don't know what the hell they are in some cases. But point being, they're probably men and women, and I'm continuing to outsource my power to them, thus giving them more power by my foundational belief systems that have a measurable impact on reality itself.

[02:14:18] And if I'm one individual who's doing that, what happens when we're doing that collectively? What happens instead if we get those same individuals to focus on the power of community, the power of coming together to create something that makes that whole paradigm obsolete and makes it the man behind the curtain and the Wizard of Oz that it actually is. It's all predicated on our belief systems. That's it.

[02:14:47] Luke: 100%. Looking at some of the key actors in that class of parasitic individuals that we attribute all of this power, and in many cases, fear too, let's take an Anthony Fauci or a Klaus Schwab. If those guys walked in the room right now and I had no background on what I believe their power to be, they would be weakling, little, cowardly worms that I feel like I could squash with my little toe.

[02:15:23] They're nothing. They're weak. They're petty tyrants. They're total cowards. But when I see them on social media doing this and that and da da da, it's like part of me hates them, but the hate really is a cover for fear. I'm afraid of the power that they have over me in my life and the way they're going to hurt people that I love and hurt society as a whole, etc.

[02:15:50] But to your point, they literally have no power other than the power that I give them by believing they have the power. It's like the uniform example I gave you. It's like when I went in Whole Foods during the plandemic and if a customer came up to me and said, "You need to be wearing a mask," I'd be like, [Inaudible].

[02:16:11] But if the manager came over in their little Whole Foods shirt, I didn't respect them, but I was more afraid of them than I was the customer, Karen, because I want to get my bananas or whatever.

[02:16:25] There's something there that I want and I believe that they have the power to prevent me from getting it. But if you switch those people and just put one in the costume and one not, now I'd be afraid of the other one, even though they're the same person I just wasn't afraid of.

[02:16:37] Alec: Wild, right?

[02:16:38] Luke: Yeah. So much of this is a mind game.

[02:16:41] Alec: And we all do it. And that's where it's important to have people around you who are of the same mindset because it goes without saying that it's much easier for multiple people to stand up to some paradigm than it is for just one person to do by themselves.

[02:16:55] There's examples of during the whole charade of 2020 through 2024 of, when the mandates rolled out, people trying to stand up by themselves as one individual within whoever they were employed by and failing because it is much harder for one individual to do that. A lot of them were able to hold people accountable afterwards.

[02:17:20] Some of them weren't. Some of them were still working through that. But what was incredible was to see when a large group of people stood up authentically together, they had the power to make their workplace be like, oh shit, we can't lose all of them. We literally need these people, so we're going to go ahead and reverse this policy really fast.

[02:17:40] Luke: Yeah, absolutely. To your point earlier of voting with our dollars, this is a really cool phenomenon to see when companies would go woke over the past few years and shit. Their shares would tank because people are like, "No, full. I'm not going to shop at Target or whatever." Because they're trying to trans my kids and all this stuff. You know what I mean? You actually see the real impact of that.

[02:18:04] I'm just so curious. Other than having conversations like this and hoping that they resonate with a certain number of people, I wonder what the real needle-moving antidote is in dispelling the hallucination that any single man or woman or group of men or women have any authority over us whatsoever. And I think part of it might be in reviving historical context in the sense that over all of recorded history, the number one cause of unnatural death has been the government.

[02:18:47] Alec: Right.

[02:18:48] Luke: Everywhere in the world for all time that we know time existed, nothing has killed more people than the government in one shape or form. And the government is given that power to destroy us solely through our believing they have the right to do so.

[02:19:08] Alec: Yeah, 100%.

[02:19:09] Luke: Or our fear of the repercussions if we don't give them that right.

[02:19:12] Alec: Have you heard of the Free State Project in New Hampshire?

[02:19:14] Luke: Mm-mm.

[02:19:21] Alec: Dude, I think the more that things like this can be replicated, and you could say that loosely what's happening by the congregation of large amounts of people in the Austin area who are libertarian-minded might be another great example of that, although it's less formal, you could say. But the Free State Project is a project that I don't remember exactly when it started, but it's a formal project.

[02:19:41] It's literally an organization, I believe they're 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4). Anyway, that the intention is to get libertarian or voluntary agorist, anarchist-oriented people to move to New Hampshire in mass. And so I interviewed Eric Brakey--

[02:19:58] Luke: Oh, wow.

[02:19:59] Alec: The CEO of--

[02:20:00] Luke: I'm all in, but then I realize it snows there.

[02:20:02] Alec: But the more that things like this can be replicated, not that everyone needs to congregate in one area, and that's why-- shameless plug again-- for the platform that we're creating is like, I guarantee you will find people around you. And the more that you have 10, 15, 20, 30 people around you, the more that you're going to start feeling more powerful, more emboldened to share that message amongst other people, which is going to have more people come on board. You're passing out Larken Rose's book and things like this. I don't think many people can argue against this position.

[02:20:35] Luke: The only thing with Larken's book is I wish they would redesign the cover.

[02:20:39] Alec: Yeah, I agree.

[02:20:47] Luke: It's like if the graphic design was just a little more up to date, I feel like it'd be an easier sell. I've shipped that book to people and I tell everyone to read that book. But then I look at it on Amazon. I'm like, "Oh man, I would've to really trust someone to open this book just based on the--"

[02:20:55] Alec: Totally agree with that.

[02:20:56] Luke: It looks like a 5-year-old patriot drew the cover. No offense to Larken or whoever did it.

[02:21:01] Alec: No, yeah. But the Free State Project thing is an incredible example because what Eric shared with me when I interviewed him for my podcast, he's the CEO of the Free State Project, so the organization, not necessarily dictating what happens in New Hampshire, but again, charged with getting people to understand, hey, the Free State Project is operating here. Our goal is to get as many people to move to New Hampshire as we can.

[02:21:24] He shared that during the charade of 2020 through 2024, even though overwhelmingly the New Hampshire government was left-leaning, it didn't freaking matter because the people who were moving to that area that were libertarian-oriented, that at the very least wanted minimal government, if not no government, didn't believe in the illusion of authority, didn't acknowledge their power. Didn't matter. It did not matter.

[02:21:52] Luke: We don't see the potential of mass non-compliance because it's never demonstrated.

[02:22:00] Alec: Yeah.

[02:22:01] Luke: It's like when I moved to Austin in '21, it was much more free than Los Angeles, for sure. But if you went to downtown Austin, it was very repressive and weird. And I started to see the only reason they were able to get away with it is because everyone goes along with it.

[02:22:20] To that voting with your dollar thing, see, at that time, if everyone was of my mindset, your mindset, freedom-oriented, could see through the fallacy of that whole thing, if everyone was like, cool, we're not going to any restaurants or stores. Fuck all you guys, which is what I did.

[02:22:39] I went to Whole Foods a couple times and I was like, "No, I can't do it because I'm going to behave in ways that I don't feel good about. I'm not going to be kind to people because they're asleep and trying to tell me what to do." But if everyone just said, "No, we're done. Shut everything down." They'd be open the next day.

[02:22:57] That's the thing. It's like the only way these ghouls get away with it, it's because everyone's like, do, do, do, do. I got to be a good person. Or it's like we have this innate need to be accepted amongst our tribe. And it's like we don't want to be the one black sheep that is bitching about having to put the mask on, so we just comply and go along with it because we don't want to be judged or be called a grandma killer or whatever.

[02:23:22] And so in the plandemic, even people that knew better still folded just out of peer pressure. Because there wasn't enough peers to stand with them. If there were a higher number of peers going, yeah, I'm with you, they would have the courage to stand against it and just ignore all of that shit.

[02:23:41] Alec: Yeah. Which is, again, why I stress the importance of community and finding your in-person, local community. Especially because, again, at this time, it seems like it's getting a lot better for us, and I think it will continue that way, but I am not confident in the mechanism of government to continue to initiate that change.

[02:23:57] It's going to require that we come together outside of the mechanism of government and start uniting in community and putting our eggs in that basket to start forming parallel things that make the old structures obsolete.

[02:26:01] Luke: One of the pushbacks that I think is common when you start bringing up the radical idea that no group of people has the inherent right to rule over another group through violence, threat, coercion, death, etc., is that someone has to run things because people aren't trustworthy and humans are dangerous.

[02:26:24] We're these feral animals. So you have to put someone in charge of us when we're in large groups of people. And I know Larken's answer to that is something to the effect of, okay, so you have a group of people and you can't trust them to do the right thing. They're going to hurt each other, exploit each other, violence, etc. So we need to bring in some other people to control those people that can't control themselves. That whole idea is nuts.

[02:26:52] Alec: Human beings are fundamentally corrupt and immoral, so let's take human beings who are fundamentally corrupt and immoral and give them the exclusive right to issue commands, dictate, give orders, and threaten those, or initiate aggression against those who don't comply? Makes a lot of sense.

Pyschedelics, AA, and Bill's Vision

[02:27:07] Zach: And Humphrey Osmond again. Humphrey Osmond is the one who actually-- because Humphrey Osmond turned on Huxley with mescaline, which became the doors of perception. Humphrey Osmond is the one who started the 1950s LSD research on alcoholism, and he's the one who turned Bill on.

[02:27:25] And yeah, Huxley was around for that, but Osmond was really the pied piper for both of them. And yeah, now the story, that movie-- what was it called? I think it was called Bill W., the documentary about Bill, which talks a lot about the LSD use and stuff. But until that came out, there is an official piece of AA literature on-- some bigger meetings might have it. That book called Pass It On, it's a green cover.

[02:27:53] Luke: Yeah, I know that book.

[02:27:54] Zach: Yeah, you know it?

[02:27:54] Luke: Yeah, yeah.

[02:27:55] Zach:  But it's not at every AA meeting and most people haven't--

[02:27:58] Luke: You got to go to central office to the library and get it.

[02:27:00] Zach: And get it. And then you might be--

[02:27:02] Luke: Dude, I want to point I had every book that that organization ever put out because I'm just like, "What is happening here?

[02:28:08] Zach: Right, right? And that book is fascinating and talks a lot about Bill Wilson's LSD, and I always used to challenge old school AA guys. That's urban legend, and no, it's in the book man. It's here. And he, what, had six experiences and--

[02:28:22] Luke: Six? Wow.

[02:28:23] Zach: Six, yeah. And thought it was going to be-- he called it the Great Ego Sublimate. Thought it could be a cure for alcoholism in conjunction with the research that Osmond was doing. Because I think they worked with 215 alcoholics and had a 60% efficacy rate after a year.

[02:28:42] Luke: Wow.

[02:28:42] Zach: Yeah. 60%. And alcoholics who said they no longer after I think maybe two LSD sessions. And Bill thought it was going to be the next great step in recovery, but I think it was his wife who pulled him from the edge of that. She was the one who was like, "I don't think this is going to be a good idea. I don't think this is going to land well in the fellowship." And I think it was her who—

[02:29:12] Luke: Lois kiboshed it.

[02:29:13] Zach: Lois, yeah, put the brakes on that a little bit. Yeah. But it's a fascinating story.

[02:29:18] Luke: It is fascinating. And it's so counterintuitive. I think that's the thing that's so interesting about that relationship. What our recent history has shown us is that the most successful model for addiction recovery is total abstinence. And it makes the most sense. But then if you look at the inception of Alcoholics Anonymous was in a sense predicated on an experience in part brought about by Bill Wilson drinking this Belladonna drink in Towns Hospital.

[02:29:54] Zach: Yeah, that's right.

[02:29:55] Luke: And I thought that he had his white light experience while on that. But then I looked a little deeper and it looks like it was within a couple days of that, then he had this famous white light experience, this transcendent experience that essentially cured his alcoholism and led to what we now know as the 12-step movement.

[02:30:15] Zach: But that transcendent Belladonna experience, even while he was on it, it did give him the download for the steps in chapter four, how it works and all of that. Yeah. I think you're right. It wasn't until a couple of days later did he put it on a paper.

[02:30:30] But I think it speaks to the larger issue though, of like what do we consider to be intoxication, and what do we consider to be mind and mood altering and the contexts and the thought bubble in which we view that?

[02:30:51] I think the 12-step culture, because of the expansion of the treatment industry and how that fed into criminal justice reform and mainstream hospitalizations and things like that, I think they just by default landed on that, all mind and mood-altering things. But when we look at plant medicines and psychedelics, not just plant medicines-- and LSD is not a plant medicine. I think, yes.

[02:31:24] Luke: Neither is Bufo. Or really even mushrooms aren't really a plant either. Anyway.

[02:31:31] Zach: That's right. Yeah. But I used to talk to Ram Dass about this all the time. I think having a psychedelic experience with your focus being on your recovery is an embodiment of the third and the 11th steps, seeking only for his knowledge of his will and the power to carry that out and proving your conscious contact with God as we understood him, she, or it to be, and all of those things.

[02:31:55] I can't think of a better method to establish a deeper connection with spirit. So yeah, that's how I'd look at it. And I think as time goes on, fortunately, I do think more people in the 12-step community are becoming a little bit more malleable and yeah, a little bit more valuable and open-minded to the breakdown of how that looks.

[02:32:20] And also too, I think there's also has to be a recognition around the hypocrisy. And this is not a judgment at all, but a huge number of people in the fellowships, they're on some kind of psychiatric medication. So how can we say, "Well, a doctor gave you that. That's okay. But a shaman who gives you this, that's not okay." And so I think if we look at it objectively and try to reframe or cognitive bias, I think it's a different lens.

[02:32:53] Luke: That's a really good point. At one point in maybe the first year or two of my sobriety, I'm sure a well-meaning psychiatrist put me on some psych meds. I was fucking nuts, son. Oh my God. Just thinking back, oh my God. I was crazy. Then I got addicted to them, and I was like, "Wait, I know what happens when you start to feel dope sick. It's a different kind of withdrawal."

[02:33:23] But I was crazy on them that if I ran out, I would start to lose my shit. And to the point where he would leave extra sample meds. You know how they get the little sample packs because I would run out of the prescription? He would leave it under the call box at the office building in the bushes and stuff.

[02:33:43] It was super weird. And I was like, "Wait a minute. I'm supposed to be sober." So yeah, that's a great point. Going back to what you said about the steps and step 11 and improving our conscious contact with God and that part. But in step 3, that surrender, turning your will and your life over to God, any legitimate psychedelic experience is inherently about that.

[02:34:10] Zach: That's right. Yeah.

[02:34:11] Luke: Right? You close your eyes and you're like, "Okay, I'm going somewhere. I'm not here anymore." If that's not the ultimate act of trust every time you do it. Have you made other correlations between some of those teachings and psychedelic experiences?

[02:34:27] Zach: Absolutely. That's a really good example because I think, at least large doses of psychedelics, what's the primary thing that it requires? Surrender and trust. The second you start to fight it, the second you start to resist, then you're going to be caught in whatever the challenging loophole is, and you're going to struggle and you're going to push back and it's not going to work.

[02:34:53] And you're going to be writhing around on the floor for eight hours. But when you get to that place of surrender and trust, to me, it's like turning your will in your life over is dharma. My primary spiritual method is from the East, and that to me is the embodiment of dharma. It's going to where you can best serve the world and best serve your own path.

[02:35:23] What's in harmony? What's in equanimity? How do you spend your time and energy? Is that in harmony with your somatic experience, with your emotional intelligence, with spirit, with service? So I can't think of a better example of-- I don't think psychedelics are a sustainable everyday method in and of themselves, but they're great accelerants to help point out where you're out of balance, to help show you where a little course correction is appropriate.

[02:35:58] Luke: Right. So like in taking a personal inventory, right?

[02:36:04] Zach: Yeah.

[02:36:05] Luke: There's no other inventory. Drinking some ayahuasca. I remember one mushroom journey I had. I'm 23 years sober at this point. Written a million four steps. For those listening and don't know what that is, that's where you really get honest with yourself about your behavior and motives and things like that. I uncovered gross shit within myself that I had never even contemplated once. Just think like, oh God, just ways I had treated people in the past.

[02:36:40] Zach: And the mushroom showed you that.

[02:36:41] Luke: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. And I'm just like, "Holy. I don't know if I ever would've uncovered that." And also uncovered a whole new list of people to whom I owed amends to. And then there's like, wow, talk about integration. I just realized, shit, there's 10 people I really hurt and I never even knew it, or let alone acknowledged it to them.

[02:37:04] Zach: For those listening who are in recovery and who aren't, I think the point, the moral of this is that you're waking state of consciousness has a limitation into what it can uncover. Yes, of course, there are spiritual practices, meditation, breath work, and we can go on endless lists of great spiritual practices that help soften that to a bit.

[02:37:28] But understanding that your waking state of consciousness has limitations, has a mechanism put in place that does not allow you to see the entire sphere, does not allow you to pierce the veil. And that's intentionally designed that way because we all have to live in balance with each other in this construct of reality. We all have to sit here and agree that this is reality. And we all can't be poking holes in the fabric of reality or else it would be chaos.

[02:38:03] There has to be some as semblance of. But the same thing is true for our own personal experiences too. And I think, like you said, I have never done that, and it's a pretty cool story of doing a fourth step after as like experience.

Hitting Rock Bottom

[02:38:19] Luke: Did you struggle getting that initial sobriety?

[02:38:22] Zach: Yeah. So when I first got into recovery, I stayed clean two years, then a relapsed. And I stayed clean for nine years. So yeah, it stuck. When I first got into recovery, I was 26, I think.

[02:38:34] Luke: Yeah, me too.

[02:38:35] Zach: Oh, okay. And I loved it. I loved it, man. I loved the people. I loved the culture. I loved the support. Like I was telling you earlier, I didn't know how to pay a bill and things like that. Those people taught me how to live, basic life skills. And they were just the support group and the family that was built in, and I took to it.

[02:39:00] I did. And also, I do admit, initially, the language and the structure of the program did resonate with me. I also had the best sponsor in the world, and he sadly died of cancer, but he was an incredibly saintly human being, just amazing guy. To this day, I have him on my Pooja table, a picture of him still.

[02:39:22] Luke: Oh, cool.

[02:39:23] Zach: He was an extraordinary human being. But I do understand why it doesn't take for everyone, why that language, why that culture, why that low grade, I wouldn't officially call it a cult, but I'd call it low grade cultism, entry level cultism doesn't stick for everyone. But I needed structure. I needed order. I needed someone to hold me accountable. I needed someone who said, you need to call me every day and tell me what's happening. I needed that.

[02:40:05] Luke: Me too.

[02:40:06] Zach: So it was all good for me. And even to this day, I go to a meeting now and then, and I still have tremendous fondness for the 12-step community. I know there are many in the psychedelic recovery sphere who do not, but I do. I still have a tremendous fondness for them for it. And yeah, I hope that that community will change its views on what spiritual exploration looks like. But until they do, it's not my problem. I go for what works for me.

[02:40:42] Luke: When you relapsed at nine years, what did the progression into that look like? Looking back, what were some of the signs where you began to drift toward that outcome?

[02:40:59] Zach: Yeah, that relapse was I had my gallbladder removed, pain pills. And I remember having maybe about four Percocets left and sitting in the bathroom, and I was fine. I was out of pain. I could have taken Advil. And I remember sitting there going, oh, I'm actually not in pain. I'm good. I can move to Advil now, and I should flush these. And I didn't.

[02:41:28] And that was the first spark. And then, yeah, the progression just became, oh, going back to my doctor, saying I needed more, etc. He gave me one refill that ran out. Then, sure enough, I was in downtown LA again. That one was just like you're doing everything that you were told not to do.

[02:41:53] Luke: Right, right. Did you ever spend any time around 6th in Alvarado in downtown LA?

[02:41:57] Zach: Oh man, all the time. Are you kidding, man? The Jack in the Box?

[02:42:00] Luke: You know Bonnie Brae?

[02:42:02] Zach: The Jack in the Box.

[02:42:03] Luke: That Jack in the Box?

[02:42:04] Zach: Of course, man.

[02:42:05] Luke: Dude, I got it.

[02:42:09] Zach: I lived there in the late '90s, man.

[02:42:10] Luke: It's just East of--

[02:42:13] Zach: Alvarado.

[02:42:13] Luke: Alvarado.

[02:42:14] Zach: Bonnie Brae.

[02:42:15] Luke: 6th in Bonnie Brae. That's hilarious. I haven't talked to someone--

[02:42:17] Zach: The drive-thru.

[02:42:18] Luke: Dude, I haven't talked to someone in, I don't know how long, decades probably, that is familiar with that particular location.

[02:42:26] Zach: Yeah. And just for people-- well, it's okay to say it now because that's been cleaned up. You can't do it anymore now. But it used to be literally like you drive through. You pull up to the parking lot and these guys with balloons in their mouth would just spit out the balloons. It was just crazy. It was insane.

[02:42:47] Luke: That's so funny. I was just writing about the balloon phenomenon, and at one point, one of my drug buddies was this girl, Margaret, and her parents had given her a Mercedes, this gold Mercedes. And I didn't own a car. I was a total fuckup.

[02:43:05] And so we were using, and she would let me drive her Mercedes down to that Jack in the Box, and if I rolled up in that Mercedes, man, a swarm of dealers spitting their balloons into their palm and vying for your business. It's a funny thing for those that have never experienced that. It's really, really wild. I haven't thought about that in some time.

[02:43:32] Zach: Yeah. And you're writing about it now?

[02:43:34] Luke: Yeah, yeah. Because I just happened to be writing the chapter that covers that six years I spent in Hollywood where drugs became really dark and, yeah, just thinking about what a different life it was. And also, when I first got sober, I worked at a restaurant called Rita Floor that was in—

[02:43:50] Zach: I know Rita Flour, of course.

[02:43:51] Luke: 6th La Brea. And I was a delivery boy. And so they'd send me delivering catering in the van, and sometimes I would deliver to office buildings in downtown LA, and I would be taking 6th Street headed East. And I would pass that 6th in Bonnie Brae, where the Jack in the Box is.

[02:44:12] And it was one of the first times I realized, in a very tangible sense, that God had done something for me that I couldn't do for myself because I had money in my pocket, two or three months sober. Two or three months ago, I was down here trading my last CDs for an 8-dollar balloon of heroin.

[02:44:32] And now I'm in a car and my steering wheel keeps going straight. And I was like, why am I not pulling into that Jack in the Box right now. What the fuck is happening? I'm not doing this. Something has taken over my will. Or I guess I allowed it. I offered my will to it, even though I didn't know what that really meant. And that was one of those early wins that I really held onto. Wow, I actually have the ability to choose how rest of this day is going to go, whether I'm not going to end up in jail or I'm going to go back to work and get a paycheck.

[02:45:14] Zach: And you kept going.

[02:45:15] Luke: Yeah, yeah.

[02:45:16] Zach: Interesting.

[02:45:17] Luke: Never relapsed. Yeah.

[02:45:19] Zach: Amazing. Yeah. That's great.

[02:45:22] Luke: It's such a demonstration of, what changed? Did I just pull myself up by my bootstraps and I'm not going to live like that anymore? No. Maybe there was one decision. Hey, I'm going to check into treatment. But after that, it was really something operating within me and through me that I had very little to do with. It's like being restored to sanity.

[02:45:45] Zach: Being restored to sanity. Yeah. And once you're in that and you have that taste of it, it's almost like a tangible thing. That restoration to sanity, it's almost like you can feel it and touch it and you want to protect it. And the thought of it breaking is just, no, I'm going to keep driving. Yeah. But on the flip side, I also remember that-- it's so funny that you know that intersection and that you used there too.

[02:46:17] Luke: I know. I haven't bonded with someone on that in a long time, so forgive me for getting so excited, but it's just like, I don't know. It's one of those things you had to be there.

[02:46:24] Zach: You had to be there. But I just remember so many times where I just felt like my car was pointing itself to that intersection because it was just so accessible.

[02:46:35] Luke: Yeah. No choice.

[02:46:37] Zach: No choice.

[02:46:37] Luke: No choice.

[02:46:38] Zach: Yeah.

[02:46:39] Luke: You wake up. You're sick. You're like, "Don't do it. Don't do it. I'm doing it." Boom. And then you're there.

[02:46:42] Zach: No. When you're sick, all bets are off.

[02:46:45] Luke: Yeah. Speaking of restored to sanity, as we were talking a little about before, you've had a couple, not a few experiences, of relapse in your sobriety journey. One of the ways I think about insanity reentering into the equation of an addict is beginning to believe the idea that this time it'll be different or that I've changed and my circumstances are improved, so therefore I could probably experiment a bit and I'll be able to control it. Was that particular thread of insanity ever part of your experience?

[02:47:23] Zach: Absolutely. It totally was. I'll even take it a step further in that there are parts of the combination of the drugs that I use, which was heroin and crack together.

[02:47:37] Luke: Me too.

[02:47:38] Zach: That. And I'll completely own it that are favorable, creatively. I'm a bass player. I could literally sit down with a pile of drugs and play my bass for eight hours nonstop, till my fingers are raw. And this is the phenomenon. This is Jerry Garcia, Jimmy Page.

[02:48:02] That's why there's a window when it does work. And it does till it doesn't. And of course, everybody falls apart. And for me, that was part of the insanity as well, was like, okay, the beneficial parts of this, I know I can just--

[02:48:21] Luke: Isolate.

[02:48:22] Zach: I can isolate that.

[02:48:23] Luke: Isolate the benefits.

[02:48:24] Zach: Yeah, isolate the benefits.

[02:48:25] Luke: That's great.

[02:48:26] Zach: And the three times I've relapsed, that lasted, what, 10 days or something. And then sure enough, no money or success or spiritual advancement in the world will protect you from what's to come.

Dad's Mentor

[02:48:50] Alan: Us kids would be by ourselves a lot. We'd be a lot by ourselves and they'd be doing stuff. That's what I remember. And then he'd come home drunk and there'd be a lot of screaming and fighting and my mom be screaming and glass breaking and just a lot of that.

[02:49:03] So I remember most of my life growing up, what I really know now today is I had no boundaries. I did whatever I wanted to do because nobody around. They were pretty much vacated. Jula, in my opinion, was a lost child. I was a hero. I could do no wrong.

[02:49:18] And Carla, she was a scapegoat. She couldn't do anything right. So we had that family dynamics going on my whole childhood. And living out there in the ranch was really lonely because I was a long ways away from any kids to play with. So that's where I learned how to hunt and fish. I had a mentor.

[02:49:36] Luke: Who was your mentor in hunting and fishing?

[02:49:38] Alan: Oh, his name was Robert Mobley. My dad hired him to irrigate for us and do the farming with a tractor and stuff like that, run the cows. He was about five or six years older than me. And he became my surrogate father. Everything he did, I mimicked. He was my hero.

[02:49:58] He had a Westclox watch and I had to have one. He had a tree-brand pocket knife. I had to have one. He had a brown cowboy hat. I had to have one. He walked straight without his feet going out like a duck. He walked straight. So I had to learn how to walk just like he walked.

[02:50:12] Everything he did, I was like a little puppy dog. I mimicked everything he did. And he was just a great guy to me. He taught me how to hunt, how to fish, how to tell difference between buck tracks and dough tracks. He taught me all about pheasants, all about ducks, everything. He taught me everything.

[02:50:27] Most of our time, when we're irrigating or whatever, we'd go and we'd fish between water sets along the river and fish with worms. We'd always dig in worms and putting coffee cans and go over there and sit down there. And he'd have Bull Durham in his pocket and papers.

[02:50:43] And we'd sit there and roll Bull Durham cigarettes and smoke that Bull Durham. That was pretty funny. But he was just a great guy to me. And he joined the Navy when he was about 18, I guess. And then he left and I didn't see him again for a couple years, but never forget him driving down the driveway and just the tears coming out of my eyes when he left.

[02:51:07] I was just overcome with grief because he was the closest thing I had to a relationship with a guy. He was actually more of a parent than he was a worker. I walked four miles up to his family's place to play with him and his brothers and sisters. And they were dirt poor.

[02:51:29] They had lived in a shack. They had one big coal stove in the middle of the house, just a piece of garbage house. And they were so poor, they ate chicken feet. They'd boil chicken feet and eat chicken feet. And I had a hard time eating chicken feet. And they raised their own chickens. They cut their heads off out there like they did.

[02:51:50] You don't see that happen today. And then chickens would go around in circles and fall over and croak. Then they'd dress the chickens out and we'd eat those fresh chickens. We'd eat the eggs. About everything they had was homegrown. They had their own garden. So everything they did was self-maintenance type of living.

[02:52:06] And they're very, very poor. And she was a sweet woman. She was really overweight, probably weighed 300 pounds, and her husband's named Dave, and he probably weighed 150. But they were so kind to me all the time. And I would walk four miles each way just to go visit them, each way four miles a day to go visit him. And I learned how to walk real fast.

[02:52:30] Luke: And so is he the one that taught you how to fish, and did he teach you how to use firearms for hunting and how to load guns and [Inaudible]?

[02:52:37] Alan: Yeah. I had to have a 22 just like he had. He had a Mossberg 22 to hold 18 shells with little scope on it. My dad bought me one. My dad was real good about buying me stuff. He wasn't good about spending time with me, but he was real good about buying me stuff like a gun. He knew I loved to hunt. But Robert taught me how to hunt. He taught me how everything about rabbits and things like that. We hunted a lot. I killed a lot of rabbits, and hunting was my thing, and fishing.

[02:53:05] Luke: When you were a kid and you started killing your first animals, you were shooting rabbits and stuff, did you ever feel a sense of guilt or feel sorry for them or anything like that? That the animals had died with your hand?

[02:53:18] Alan: No. They were meat to me. We ate rabbits. Just kill a rabbit. You eat a rabbit.

[02:53:25] Luke: So there no moral implication to you because it was just normal life where you lived.

[02:53:30] Alan: That's ranch life. You eat what's there. You eat your own livestock, eat your own chicken, eggs, whatever. People kill their own chickens, eat their own chickens. That was how it was. But it was rural America.

[02:53:41] Luke: It didn't gross you out cleaning a rabbit and seeing all the blood and guts, any of that?

[02:53:44] Alan: No. Uh-uh. Seeing my own blood and guts would gross me out.

[02:53:49] Luke: And then what was it like when you were in school? Because you were real small. You didn't hit your growth spat unit your late teens.

[02:53:57] Alan: Oh, that was awful for me. First four or five years of school weren't bad, then after everybody else grew and I didn't, I was 76 pounds as a junior in high school. I wrestled 76 pounds. And I was bullied a lot and I was ridiculed for being skinny and scrawny.

[02:54:16] That's all I ever heard. And I was afraid. I was real sensitive little kid. I loved everybody. I didn't want to hurt anybody. Nobody hurt me. I just loved everybody. I loved people, loved kids. And then as time went on, I got bullied and ridiculed. And over a period of time, I wouldn't sleep at night because I was afraid to go to school because I'd get bullied.

[02:54:43] And then I was afraid to go home because my home life was so radical, I was afraid to go to bed at night. So I lived in constant fear of going to school and coming home. So when I get home at night, after school, I would take my gun. I go hunting. Because I never knew what shape my dad was going to be in when he got home, if he's going to be in the booze or mean or whatever.

[02:55:05] I never knew what to expect. So yeah, I'm not going to go into detail, but I was sexually abused, emotionally abused, and physically abused as a child. And I'd go home and I'd pray at night that I'd grow. And I said, "If I grow, nobody's ever going to hurt me again." And I'd pray and I'd pray and I'd pray and I'd pray.

[02:55:25] And there was two bullies. And this was interesting because there was two bullies that bullied me in my school. And they'd bully me almost every day and I'd avoid them like a plague. But they'd get me and they'd hold me down. I couldn't breathe. They'd be two of them on top of me. And I just started to hate them.

[03:55:40] And then I started praying that they'd get killed. I said, "God, you take these guys and kill them. Would you kill them, God?" Used to pray to God that they'd die. And when we left the ranch and moved to Denver, when I was a junior in high school, I was down there in Lakewood, which I hated too. One of them got killed on the highway.

[02:55:58] He had an accident. Car run over him, killed him. And I went to his funeral and I thought, man, I'm really powerful. That prayer really works. I was pretty much into prayer by that time. And so I got to Lakewood and my first day off the school bus, I didn't know anybody in town. I'll stick with Rangeley a little bit.

[02:56:18] Rangeley, I had a sense of community there because I knew a lot of the kids in school and I had a lot of friends, but there was always two or three that were picking on me. And the rest of them I was pretty close to. I had some pretty close friends. Ironically, they all came from alcoholic families.

[02:56:35] So I blended in and I'd stay at their house, and I knew when it was time to leave because their dad had come home drunk or whatever. So basically, most of my friends were afflicted by the disease of alcoholism, and they still are today, the ones that are still alive. A lot of them died. I had classmates die from alcoholism still in high school, and they died of it. I had kids--

Dad's Chronic Anxiety 

[02:57:04] I get another phone call, "Dad, I let this kid 13-year-old drive this car and he wrecked it. Can you bail me out?" Oh my God. What's next? What's next?

[02:57:15] Luke: Funny thing about those experiences is that was after I'd gotten sober.

[02:57:18] Alan: I know. That was after you'd gotten sober. Yeah.

[02:57:21] Luke: We went down on that trip to Mexico. That was right before I got sober.

[02:57:25] Alan: Yeah.

[02:57:26] Luke: That was at the end of the line there. But you remember, when we were in Morelia, we had some issues you and I.

[02:57:33] Alan: Yeah, totally do. I had a big issue with you. Supposed to be back. We were in a strange town, Mexican town. I don't know anybody there. Be back at 10 o'clock. Midnight, you still weren't home. Streets are dark. 100% Mexicans. What am I going to do? I think you got kidnapped. My mind goes into the ozone. What could happen? He got kidnapped. Later on I found out what you were doing on the roof.

[02:58:01] Luke: And I had taken Andy and Cody.

[02:58:03] Alan: You took them with you.

[02:58:04] Luke: Who were young.

[02:58:04] Alan: Yeah, they were little kids. And I was scared to death. And so when I got mad at you, it wasn't the anger. It was the fear underneath that. I was terrified something happened to you, all three of you. I was just terrified. Maybe they got kidnapped or something. I was terrified. And you were the oldest one, so I took it out on you. You guys went down there. You're the lead of the pack. And so I was really upset. But it was just fear.

[02:58:33] I couldn't sleep. I was just laying there wondering what to do. Should I go see the police? I talked to the guy, the driver. What can I do? What can I do? How can I find them? I don't know anything about Morelia. I knew where I was in the hotel, but I didn't know where the hotel was in the city.

[02:58:51] Didn't know anything about it. But luckily, you showed up later. Oh my God. I said, "Oh my God." I felt so grateful that you guys got back alive. Because I didn't trust the streets of Morelia at night.

[02:59:05] Luke: That sounds like the name of a song. So when did you meet May?

[02:59:12] Alan: I met her when I was still having so much anxiety and depression and just so much of that stuff's still going on. But she'd been with me my whole life. I looked up counselors and she did EMDR, which is a technique.

[02:59:30] Luke: Really? She did that?

[02:59:32] Alan: Yeah, she taught that.

[02:59:33] Luke: I didn't know that.

[02:59:34] Alan: Yeah, she did EMDR, so I picked her up just--

[02:59:35] Luke: Where you stare at the hand or-- that kind of thing?

[02:59:37] Alan: Yeah.

[02:59:38] Luke: Hypnosis almost.

[02:59:39] Alan: Yeah. It's like hypnosis. And so I needed some help because I was anxious all the time. I couldn't relax, couldn't settle down. I met her down there and she asked me to fill--

[02:59:49] Luke: Grand Junction.

[02:59:49] Alan: Yeah. She asked me to fill out a form, a confidentiality form and all that stuff, and no hanky panky, none of that. I had appointment for the next week. She says, "I don't want to see you again." I thought, oh, great, Alan. You're really good. I called her and said, "If you won't see me again, will you go out with me?"

[03:00:14] And she says, "Yeah, I'll go out with you." I said, "Okay." So I took her to a Mule Deer banquet where I was president of Mule Deer Association. And I just talked to my buddies and she sat at the table real calm, real nice. And I started going to movies and doing a few things with her and hanging out with her, just developed a friendship.

[03:00:37] And she says, "We can't fiddle around because it's against my code of ethics with the profession I'm in." I say, "Probably good idea." So we just grew into caring about each other and liking to spend time with each other. And eventually, we decided after a couple of years to get married. And I was terrified.

[03:01:06] Luke: How long have you been married now?

[03:01:07] Alan: I don't know. We've been together 18 years.

[03:01:09] Luke: Eighteen years. Yeah. Why were you terrified to get married?

[03:01:13] Alan: Because I've been through two horrible divorces. I know what I'm doing. When you start to, when you get to that point where there's calls for commitment, that's where the rubber meets the road. I didn't have any rubber on my tires. I was heading for the hills.

[03:01:34] I was looking for a way out, like I had been doing for 20 years. No, that's what it was. But I went ahead and I knew that this was the right thing to do, and I just knew in my heart that couldn't find anybody better. There was nothing wrong with her. I couldn't pick her apart.

[03:01:52] My escape mechanism was always finding fault with them, somebody, and then vanishing. I'd be something really important, like, I don't like the color of her shoes or something really important, but it was just fear. Just fear of getting munched again, emotionally and psychologically and financially and all that.

[03:02:15] I was pretty much terrified, but I had to overcome that fear. And I learned I can't go overcome the fear if I don't do it. My chance of finding anybody better than her, slim and none. Or I get to choose to live by myself the rest of my life. Which one makes the most sense? I said, "I don't want to choose to live by myself the rest of my life. I guess I'll have to face the fear."

[03:02:41] So I faced the fear. Believe me, I was scared. I had night sweats for three months after I got married with anxiety. But what that is is, see, I had a hyperactive amygdala. My limbic system was in a trauma loop, so everything I saw was exaggerated 100 times.

[03:03:07] Like a mouse to normal people would be this big of a fear, a mouse, to me, which I'm not afraid of mice, but if I was a mouse, to me, would be 10 feet tall. So I magnified everything in my life, no matter what it was. Anything threatening at all was magnified 100 times. I didn't know. And I started listening to my mind.

What Are Key Things Alan Learned that helped...

[03:03:29] I don't read newspaper anymore. I don't do any of that. It's all negative press. I'm doing everything I can in my life to segregate myself, separate myself from the negativity that's in front of me every day.

[03:03:41] Because what I've learned is the normal mind has a negative bias. Now you put an alcoholic there with an alcoholic mind, with that mind, and his negative mind is off the charts. So I know that, I need to stay away from that negative input, negative influence on my mind on a daily basis, and watch comedies, watch sporting events without being invested who wins.

[03:04:09] Don't get caught up in controversy, in politics, or religion. I have my own feelings about it, but as of a year ago, I've disengaged from that. I don't read the paper about Trump or what he's doing, what he's not doing. I don't argue with my sister anymore. I don't have to prove myself right anymore with either one of my sisters or my family.

[03:04:30] I just let them believe what they want to believe and let it go, and it seems to work out pretty good. I just avoid certain subjects to talk about that I have opinion on. It doesn't mean my opinion's right, but it seems right to me.

[03:04:43] Luke: You seem to have a really happy, healthy relationship. What are a couple of the key points that have helped you to have a successful relationship with May?

[03:04:56] Alan: I think the key thing I had to learn right off the bat was women need to be cherished. That means I have taken myself out of my selfishness and care about somebody else. Because inherently, growing up in an alcoholic family, the way I was growing up with no boundaries, no limits, I was pretty selfish and self-centered my whole life. I did what I wanted to do.

[03:05:19] Everybody in the back of the book, those 42 stories, almost everybody in the back of the book did what they wanted to do, when they wanted to do, who they wanted to do it with. It's a lot of selfishness in there. So I could identify that. So with May, I had to learn I had to cherish her for who she is.

[03:05:36] And what I had to learn is men need to be respected. Those two things are primary. I need her respect and she needs my cherishing. And I need to take care of her and protect her. And she needs to show me appreciation and admiration at some point for things that I do do.

[03:05:55] And that's another thing that makes it as being clean and honest. Same principles as AA. First principle is honesty. Got to be honest with her. I don't go out and cat around. I don't go out and do any of that stuff. Or any place there's women that could twist my head a little bit, I go somewhere else. I don't put myself in dangerous situations.

[03:06:19] My dad was a flander and I don't want to do that. So it hadn't been easy to change that behavior, but I've had to do it because I don't want to live with the guilt I would feel if I change back to the old behavior.

[03:06:32] And the best thing about marriage is sharing. It's like we've talked about, having similar interests, similar values. I can trust her no matter where she is. She can trust me no matter where I am. There's no jealousy. There's no battles. There's no fight over who's right and who's wrong. As long as she understands that I'm right, there's no problem.

[03:06:55] It just works out pretty good. But I had to find women that are feminine. That's just me. And I like women that are nurturing. See, what I didn't realize is we all have these needs, physical, emotional, and nurturing needs, and most of us that grow up in alcoholic families never got the emotional needs met.

[03:07:08] So we struggle with that in trying to get those needs met. And almost everybody in EMDR in my program I'm doing now, almost everybody has been affected the same way that I have been affected and you've been affected. So we just didn't get a very good chance growing up. Created a lot of pain in our lives all the way through our lives. It created a lot of pain.

End - Luke and Dad Exchange Love and Sign off

[03:07:50] Everybody I sold property to in those days made money. Everybody. I did Basalt Business Center East. It was a 15-space industrial park. Took me two or three years to get there. I had $300,000 in soft costs. My infrastructure costs were 160,000. That's water lines, sewer lines, curb gutter, sidewalk landscaping, blah blah blah. Was 160,000. Cost me twice as much to get approval as it did to do all the improvements.

[03:08:19] That's what government can do to you. That same subdivision, 15-lot residential subdivision, Lions Ridge, my soft costs were less than $25,000 compared to 300 in Basalt. And the one in Lions Ridge was 100 acres. The one in Basalt was six acres.

[03:08:38] Luke: Was that just because one was in one town that had tougher regulations?

[03:08:43] Alan: You got it. It was like Aspen.

[03:08:45] Luke: More bureaucracy.

[03:08:46] Alan: Yeah, tons of bureaucracy. Exactly. I would never do it again.

[03:08:50] Luke: Interesting.

[03:08:52] Alan: So that's what I've learned.

Luke Reads His Father's Obituary 

[03:08:55] Luke: Alan Andrews Storey passed away on January 26th, 2025 in Naples, Florida, at the age of 81. Born in Chicago on August 31st, 1943. He lived a full and meaningful life, leaving behind a legacy of love, wisdom, and resilience.

[03:09:16] He lived his life as an avid outdoorsman, hunting and fishing in the vast Colorado Rocky Mountains, he called home. He was fascinated by the history of the old West and held a deep confession for the plight of the Native American peoples to whom the land once belonged.

[03:09:55] As a man who lived life to the fullest, Alan's many passions included racing stock cars and snowmobiles, riding bareback Broncos, team roping, working as a ski patrolman and instructor, guiding hunting and fishing expeditions, serving in Mountain Rescue in the Forest Service, teaching English as a second language, and volunteering for hospice care.

[03:10:22] Alan was also a successful and driven entrepreneur in ventures ranging from land excavation and development to real estate investment and brokering.

[03:10:33] Alan has survived by his wife, May Storey, his sons, Luke, Andy, and Cody; their wives, Alyson, Paula, and Emily; his grandsons, Bjorn and Weston; his stepsons, Erik and Kurt Bosson, and his sisters Carla and Jula.

[03:10:59] While his achievements in business and life were many, what truly defined Alan was his steadfast commitment to his own personal development and spiritual growth. Although he never experienced a lasting connection with a particular religion, he devoted the last 40 years of his life to seeking a higher power in ways that enriched both himself and those he loved.

[03:11:21] Alan was a man of integrity, kindness, open-mindedness, humor, and unwavering moral character. He was truly one of a kind, and the world is a better place for having known him. May he find peace he sought in the wilderness now among the heavens.

[03:1:55] Alyson: Amen.

[03:11:57] Luke: Amen.

[03:11:59] Alyson: It was really beautiful, honey. Yeah.

[03:12:05] Luke: Seeing that printed in the Aspen Times. My brother was going to send me a copy of it, but he sent me a scan, and that, I don't know. It was different. It hit different when it was made in public.

[03:12:19] Alyson: And in print.

[03:12:20] Luke: Making it public again here also hits different, perhaps even more so.

[03:12:26] Alyson: Yeah. It lands it and grounds it. It anchors the experience of the reality of that happening more in different ways each time. And I've said it before, and we obviously all chatted about it when we were all together in Florida with his wife, May, but it stood out again. And listening to you read that, just the fullness and richness of Alan's life, that fella really lived the heck out of some earth life. Just the range, Alan's range.

[03:13:01] Luke: The guy was a legend. I know everyone loves their dad, and all of our parents are meaningful and special to us in many ways, but apart from our relationship, just objectively, he really was a unique person. When I talked to my mom the night before we flew to Florida, she said something to that effect. She just said, "Man, your dad, he's a different kind of guy."

[03:13:33] Alyson: Yeah. He is. He was.

[03:13:35] Luke: Yeah.