Jan Irvin: The Trivium Method and Transhumanism – #96
Click here to download a PDF of this transcript
Dave: Today’s cool fact of the day is when you get a kidney transplant they actually leave your old kidneys in your body most of the time and the new transplant kidney goes somewhere in your pelvis. That is actually kind of gross.
Now, there is another thing that I wanted to talk about before we get going on today’s show. It is how coffee is put in bags. Most coffee places have learned that people want a tight-packed bag. So, they roast coffee beans then they let them sit for 24 or 48 hours in open air oxidizing, so that the Co2, the carbon dioxide from the beans that they naturally release for a couple of days after they are roasted, so that can just off gas.
Once it is done off-gassing they put them in these tight little bags, or cans, or whatever. What we do a Bulletproof is we roast them, and when they are still warm we put them in bags, we flush out all the oxygen, and replace it with nitrogen. That way, when the beans off-gas they off-gas Co2, and all we have is nitrogen and Co2, and you get a fresher bean in the bag. If the bag of coffee that you receive has a little bit of “air” in it, what it is it is not oxygen. We are doing this specifically for the freshness of the bean which you can taste when you drink it. If your bag is a little puffy, now you know the science behind it.
Today’s guest, if you are watching this on You Tube you can already see him sitting there or watching us on iTunes, on our new iTunes video channel is Jan Irwin, who runs a website called Gnostic Media. He is here today to talk about two things. One of them is something called Trivium. The Trivium way of thinking is really useful when you are looking at how your internal dialog works, or how you communicate with other people, or how you rationally look at things you hear especially in marketing or in mass media. I think this is going to be an enlightening episode that is full of useful things for you, but we are also going to talk about transhumanism and I am very interested to hear what the opposing view here is.
If you haven’t come across Gnostic Media before, it is a website you could say is a little bit out there. Jan, do you agree that your website is considered to be a bit out there?
Jan: I don’t know what you mean by “out there.” We publish a lot of cutting edge research, and we do publish a lot of primary documentation, things like that people can fact check, but if you are not into fact checking and verifying citations, it is probably out there. If you just like made-up stuff that you pulled from the Pleiades or something, our stuff is probably pretty out there in comparison to that.
Dave: From the Pleiades. I love it. By the way, what …
Jan: I should have said Uranus but the Pleiades.
Dave: Welcome to the show. What a great opening. When I say “out there,” I don’t mean out there as in the negative fairyland, but you’ve got some pretty alternative use, and you do an almost obsessive amount of research and fact checking. I have seen your large database of relationships between different things, and you’re definitely spending a lot of cognitive and rational cycles looking for the truth behind things, which is one of the reasons I wanted to have you on. Let’s jump right in on this, about the Trivium method. Can you help our listeners understand?
Jan: Sure, the Trivium method is actually something that someone named Geno Denning brought to my show back in 2009, and it is based off the ancient classical Seven Liberal Arts although it is sort of the inverse of it. In ancient Roman times only the elite class, the ruler class were allowed to study the Trivium and Quadrivium or the classical Seven Liberal Arts. They basically used these arts to keep the slaves under control. What we’ve done is we’ve sort of leveled the playing field and put the Trivium out for all of the slaves instead. Everybody gets to see how these tools work and how to use.
Dave: When you say all of the slaves, you are talking about everyone listening to the show?
Jan: The general masses. If you are not a billionaire, you are a slave. Let’s put it that way. When you get into the classical Seven Liberal Arts, and you begin to study how they put logic and thinking together essentially and especially for what is fed to people, you can see that there is a constant barrage of intentional manipulation going on there especially in the mass media, television commercial, radio commercials, pop culture, media idols, all of those sort of stuff. It’s all designed to play on people’s emotions.
Now, the Trivium is grammar, logic and rhetoric. Essentially, it breaks down really simply. Grammar is the components that make up reality. All of the things that we look at. My microphone, the microphone cable, the camera that we are looking at, the computer in front of me, et cetera. These are items, they are all nouns actually. When I see them I can identify each one and know all the things here on my desk that I am dealing with.
Essentially, the grammar aspect is who, what, where and when. Then, the logic aspect is actually why. You are a former computer tech designer guy, you helped invent cloud technology, et cetera. If we think of it in terms of computers grammar, it would be the input into the computer like the keyboard or putting something into the CD-ROM drive, and it’s getting the information in there.
The logic aspect would be the processing. It would be removing any contradictions in the things that we see, recognizing contradictions as errors or lies, spotting any fallacious arguments coming in, as well as fallacious arguments within our own minds, and making sure like a lot of … The most common arguments against my research, they never address any of my research, they will just name call at me. What this is, is total avoidance, you kill the messenger, and to actually attack the messenger, and completely avoid the actual message itself. Now, the last aspect of the Trivium is rhetoric. In terms of the computer that would be the output, what you see on the screen, what comes to the speakers, what comes out of the printer, et cetera. We have grammar, logic and rhetoric.
Now, if you were a computer and you put the logic aspect or the processing before the input, what would happen? Essentially, you have a system failure or as the old adage, garbage in, garbage out. We might have a virus and a complete collapse but essentially the computer, any output that would come out of the computer it has to make up on its own without in any input. That was my joke regarding the Pleiades a minute ago. We have to channel it, we have to make it up, and we ignore any facts in reality around us. Basically, this world, these things, you and I here talking, it doesn’t exist.
Dave: Now, if am driving in my car in traffic listening to this podcast like a ton of people do now, how am I going to take what you just described there and apply it to what I am doing now or what I am going to do later today?
Jan: While you are driving I suppose, if you are going down the freeway, quick action response, obviously, we have our animal primal instincts, but using a little bit of critical thinking and not thinking “Oh, you know well, my ego is just something that is bad for me and it would be better if I just collided into this car.” You could actually use it to stop something, but here is the thing. It’s you are dealing with all the items in your reality, all the things that you need to do whether it is in the morning or in the afternoon. I have these business meetings, I have these things that I need to do, so what you are able to do is you basically create a mental image of all of the nouns, all the things that you are dealing with, and then you can go through, and figure out the most logical way to deal with them without using fallacies and things like that to come to conclusions.
Dave: What is an example? Show me like a common fallacy conclusion loop that you are talking about.
Jan: A common fallacy would be like “Well, I am supposed to have meeting with this guy. He has been trying to have a meeting, he says it is important. I have never heard his message. I think he is an idiot, or a jerk, or whatever so I am going to dismiss his message.”
Here is the thing, if we think of it in terms of like, let’s say, it’s the fool on the hill. One side of the hill, we have a village that’s at war with the other side of the hill, and one day the village idiot he comes running down. “The army on the other side, they are coming to kill us, they are coming to kill us.” Everybody said “Oh, it is the fool on the hill.” It is like the boy who cries wolf, nobody wants to believe him, or you can just “I know this guy is the fool on the hill, but just in case I am going to go do some five sense reality checking, I am going to go stick my head up over the hill and take a look. Oh, look at that there is an army coming. Now, I can go and organize myself and my troops and be prepared.” Rather than dismissing information with fallacies, we take it in, we consider it, we look at it, and then we make a logical decision on it.
Dave: In an attempt to break this down to some simple principles people can use, tell me if I’ve got this right, we’re talking about applying a rational logic loop to whatever you perceive to verify that it is what is actually there?
Jan: Right, and not only that, but the loop itself actually has a way to check, to make sure that the information really is there.
Dave: Okay.
Jan: Essentially what it is, it’s a systematic method for deriving certainty with any information come in via the five senses. Instead of saying; a lot of times people will hear things from outside sources and then they just repeat it without checking it.
Dave: That’s what’s called the Internet, right?
Jan: A lot of people will say anything is on the Internet, therefore it is wrong; but it is actually a systematic way to go through. Did the person use citations? Can I verify these citations when I look them up? Do they check out? Is the person using name calling to dismiss someone’s entire argument, do they use a strong manner or false represent the argument? If you are approaching information, for instance, you would look at both sides of the information.
Now, my own case, I have done a lot of research on MK Ultra and the psychedelic movement, et cetera. A lot of people will attack my research without ever reading it. They won’t have a single iota of a clue of what my research is about. What they’ll do is they’ll attack me, name calling, because it challenges them. If you’re able to sit them down and get them to look at the work first, then they’re actually able to judge it and compare it.
Now, sometimes, there’s cognitive dissonance and things like that, so then the idea with the logic aspect is we can recognize our own fallacies that we use to trip up our thinking, and get back on the right path. Essentially, maybe a good metaphor would be it’s like we have a jar and it’s our slime jar. What we do is anytime our emotions start getting in the way, we open up the jar, we put our emotions in there, we close it up, and then we say, “Okay now, what are we looking at? Am I letting my emotions or beliefs of religion or love and relationships, or my biases about this or that fact get in the way versus the fact themselves?” It’s essentially the way that our brains work naturally when we’re not conditioned to think with a lot of fallacies.
Now, logical fallacies, they basically come in three categories, relevance, presumption, and ambiguity. When we recognize these three different categories of fallacies, and these are just the informal fallacies or mostly spoken fallacies, and they are written or formal fallacies as well, but when we begin to recognize these fallacies, we can filter them out of our thoughts, verify the information, and then know for certain if that information is true or false.
Dave: Let’s assume that as I am listening to this, I said, “I want to try this and I am going to start doing it now,” what’s step one?
Jan: Step one is I would actually take a good study of the Trivium. For instance, our website, TriviumEducation.com, we put a ton of free information up there for people. Because of the history of the Trivium, we’ve never wanted to charge for the information, so we’ve put all of that information up on the Trivium Education website for free, but interestingly, when you’re using it in daily life, it’s always a grammar, logic, rhetoric, but to start out because some of the concepts and general grammar actually need a little bit of logic, we actually recommend people begin studying a little bit of logic foundation first.
Now, for us grow-ups, as adults learning this stuff, it’s a little bit trickier because historically, the classical arts were taught in elementary or grade school level. In this society that doesn’t have it, the adults have to go through sort of an entirely different process to pick it up. We were taught who, what, where, when, why, and how, and stuck in our third grade but we never really got what it all meant. We never really got the who, what, where, when, why, and how. It’s how we gather all knowledge around us from the entire universe, all those nouns, adjectives, everything that you see around you.
Dave: That doesn’t pass my logic filter.
Jan: How is that?
Dave: The reason for that is that the auditory or visual ways. You read which is visual. Auditory, you hear your words. You also hear bird song. You also smell things. You feel things. You taste things. What you’re doing when you start using grammar on top of all these, is you’re now thinking in words and you’re obviously a word thinker but there are people who are visual thinkers.
Jan: Sure.
Dave: There are people who don’t even speak …
Jan: Now …
Dave: Who also are capable of logic. I am not sure of the use of grammar.
Jan: Here is the thing. It’s when we put strings of logical ideas together, they’re done in words. We have this word for a computer. We can talk about things that we can’t identify. Mystics love to bring up stuff to circulate about all day long, but two people who are capable of rational functionality should be able to say, “Dave, this is a microphone. You can see the microphone. Can we agree that this is a microphone?” You say, “No, that’s a horse.” We have a serious problem here.
Dave: Except stevia, 20% of us think it tastes bitter and nasty and 80% of us think it tastes sweet.
Jan: I think …
Dave: I love that kind of thing. Some stuff that we perceive as important, yet we don’t perceive the same thing.
Jan: It’s not necessarily if we like the flavor of stevia or dislike it. It’s whether we can identify the stevia. If you and I can look on this page and we can see the words here, and we can see right at the top, it says, “Dave Asprey.” Can you agree that that says “Dave Asprey” there?
Dave: Of course.
Jan: We can agree. We can get on the same page, and in fact that’s what that means. Now, if we disagree that that says Dave Asprey, then we have a problem. You and I, if we’re willing to recognize that there is an error somewhere, then we can go back and we can review it.
Now, it’s not to determine whether or not you like the chicken, the flavor of chicken better than beef. It’s to determine the nouns chicken and beef exist and that are you eating chicken right now? I don’t see you eating chicken right now. You’re not driveling off your face or anything. We’re able to take things in from five-sense reality and verify them. Aesthetics, things like this get into the high yards, fine wines, fine foods, whatever you want to get into the aesthetic things that are above the quadrivium of the study.
The Trivium is really just focused on the components that make reality, the things that we see. If I look out the window, I see the glass of the window. I see the blinds. I see a wall outside of the street, a car going by. These are all nouns but things that I can identify.
Dave: Don’t those things exist whether or not they have nouns? What about things like, say, a new element?
Jan: Sure, but I mean humans, when we interact and when we discuss them, when we want to talk about them, we bring them into what is called the commons. If there is a new element, if you make up an element, let’s say you channeled it from Uranus or the Pleiades, and you can just say, “Okay, I have this green fairy elements sitting here.” You say, “Well, I don’t see it.” I can say, “It is right here.” You don’t believe me, you’re not spiritual enough. You’re not this or that enough. You’re just not perceiving. I’ll use some attack against you. When in actuality, the onus of proof is entirely on me to show this new element or that this fairy exists.
Now that we showed that the element exists, multiple people can pull it up under microscopes. We can verify. Now, it’s on the table. It’s in the commons. All of us have common sense because of the commons. It’s things that we can pull up on the table and we can look at. Now, we can speculate about things that aren’t on the table, the green fairies, and the magic, and the ghosts, and things that we can’t verify in reality, but then we get into what is known as the arguing and the arbitrary. In logic, arguing the arbitrary, we can argue possibilities all day long but it doesn’t really get us anywhere.
When we get back down to the grammar aspects of reality, then we can say, these are things that we’re actually dealing with. These are the things that we need to discuss. Then, we can focus on them rather than could be, should be, maybes, and possibilities all day long. Going back to the idea of just arguing the arbitrary, possibilities are endless. You could say, “Oh well, what if it’s this? What if it’s that? What if it’s this? What if this really happened” We can literally create speculations all day long but what are the things that we’re dealing with first? How do they fit together? Is it logical?
When we come across where we have to make leaps of faith without any evidence or when we have to name call people to dismiss evidence, I am going to call Jan Irvin crazy because the dared to say that McKenna, he dared to believe McKenna’s own words, and say that McKenna was an agent rather than arguing like the rest of us that McKenna was lying when he said that.
We have done a lot of background on this stuff. We can actually go in and we can look, do we have the evidence to support this hypothesis versus just making arbitrary speculations all day long with no evidence? The onus of proof is very important.
Dave: Within the Trivium, the way of thinking and evaluating reality that you’re working with, what if 50% of people say, “I see the green fairy element,” and they can identify whether it’s there or not there, and 50% don’t see it. What happens there?
Jan: Here is the issue. If 50% can see it, they should be able to show it to the other 50%. Have you ever found anything, for instance, if I hold this pen up, is 50% of the population going to say that this pen doesn’t exist?
Dave: No, but 50% of the population may say love doesn’t exist. They may say that the bitter tasting stevia doesn’t exist because they cannot detect it.
Jan: Sure. Love is an emotion. Like I said, the Trivium is not about deciding whether or not you like or dislike the flavor of stevia. It’s understanding, does stevia exist or doesn’t exist.
Dave: There is a bitter tasting stevia. I would stake my life on it, yet you probably don’t taste it. How does that work? It’s there. I can sense it and some people can sense it, some people can’t.
Jan: I am not sure if I like stevia or not. It’s something …
Dave: I am not talking about liking. I am talking about the presence of a bitter taste.
Jan: Like I said, the Trivium aspect is dealing with grammar. It’s dealing with the items that compose or make up reality. Is you liking or disliking or is stevia being bitter or not part of it being in reality or not? No, it’s not. Stevia, we do know more people can …
What I am getting at is if I have a bottle of stevia sitting here, you and I can both agree that the stevia bottle is here. We don’t have to agree if we like the flavor of the stevia or not. We can both agree this is a bottle of stevia. We can look at it. We can smell it. We can even taste it. Whether you like it or I dislike it, we can both agree and come to the facts that the bottle of stevia is there. Now, in this case, it’s not there, it’s in my cupboard and I don’t use it anymore.
Dave: Let’s put it like this. We know it’s in the bottle. There’s the bottle of stuff, and one of us take it as it’s a bottle of sweet stuff and the other one says it’s a bottle of bitter stuff. This seems like a trivial example but what I am getting over here is there are some things that some people can perceive. What if the person’s blind? I see this, but I don’t see it.
Jan: Now, if the person is blind, you can go up and say, “Okay, well I am holding a glass. Can you feel the glass?” and you can take the blind person’s hand and put it on the glass. The blind person can sense that this is in reality. Now, is the glass half full or half empty? The person can put his hand in the glass and feel there. “Look, there is something. It’s water. It smells like water.”
Dave: Then, let’s talk about fog.
Jan: Again, we’re not … Okay, fog. Yes. If we go outside and we’re driving down the mountain highway here and it’s really foggy, you’re going to get a line of cars all bunched together. They’re driving slowly down the mountain. They have poor visibility. They can probably agree that it’s fog. Now, a blind person, they may not see the fog but if we take them out of the car, can they feel the moisture and humidity on their skin? Can they feel the cold dampness in the air, et cetera?
There are ways through five sense reality that we can verify things out there. We don’t live in content quantum delusion where we just make it up. Dave, I am just going to wheel it and I am going to be sitting in your seat, and you here.
Dave: Wait, it didn’t happen. It sounds like a …
Jan: Darn.
Dave: It sounds like a good movie though.
Jan: It sounds like …
Dave: I get it.
Jan: It sounds like a movie is already made. Essentially, what we’re dealing with is components that we can verify. Now, if I hold up this glass, I can tap it, I can smell it, I can taste the water in it, I can hear the sounds it makes, et cetera, I can feel it with my hands. These are all things that we can verify in five sense reality.
Again, going back to the words on the page, we can verify each of the words on the page. Now, if somebody refuses to read the page, that’s entirely different. They can say, “I am just ignore it,” but then they don’t know the grammar or the contents of that page, and they have no standing to discuss it.
Dave: Let’s talk about someone … The first step someone would go through to understand the Trivium is to obviously read this stuff about it. Let’s assume someone has read about it, and then the next day, they are saying, “All right, I am going to start applying this to my life.” What’s it going to do for them and how will they go about applying it?
Jan: At first, there are steps. Essentially, what happens is you start to learn it and most people pick up on the logical fallacies first, especially the informal fallacies because they’re the quickest and the finest to learn. You can sit there and you can debate with your spouse, or turn on the TV, or listen to the radio, and just watch the fallacies come at you, and see if you can identify them. TV commercials are fantastic. Your average 30-second TV commercial will run about 40 different fallacies. If you can identify the fallacies, you can actually see how the media is beginning to manipulate you. The first thing though …
Dave: Give us an example. I am not sure that most people listening are understanding what you’re saying.
Jan: A logical fallacy. Let’s say it’s a commercial for men’s hair products and they a playing on men balding or let’s use the gray thing. You’re not going to get laid if you don’t get our hair darkener. What they’re doing is they’ll show pictures of women and the woman is knocking on his door, or if he’s got his gray hair, there is just no chicks coming at him at all. He gets some of this hair dye. All of a sudden, the women are running down the street. These are appeals to emotion. Essentially, they are appealing on the guys’ fear of being single or being alone and all of these types of things.
When we learn to understand how the appeal to emotion fallacies work, then we can say, “They are using these things,” or a Budweiser commercial. They got the four girls with the Budweiser across their chest. Look, it’s an appeal to sex. They want me to associate boobs with beer. These are things that when we begin to comprehend how the logical fallacies work, and we can catch them and filter them out through information coming in via our five senses that we were just discussing.
Dave: What if, let’s say, I read this studies that say that being with a partner means you have less chance of dying at a young age and less chance of having cancer and high blood pressure. All of those are true, by the way, if you’re in a good relationship. If you decide you want to be in a good relationship, now the guy is selling hair product online says, “You have a better chance of being in a relationship if you buy my chemical hair stuff.” Am I not being a rational person if I pay more attention to that ad because it’s something I am interested in and I know that it would help me?
Jan: Now, is the person who is presenting the information, are you saying now, here we have 15 studies that show this specific facts. These studies have been verified through all of these different universities and were reviewed, et cetera. We know that these things are true. This is why I am saying this. You will be healthier if you find a spouse, but you know what? I am not going to associate it necessarily with a beer commercial or with insecurity of my hair color.
Now, I suppose if you think that you’re going to get into a strong long lasting relationship over your insecurity over your hair color, then you might want to rethink that.
Dave: That is a fair point.
Jan: These are things that we can look at. Is my being fearful over my hair color, men have been getting bald forever, and people as they grow, their hair changes. Is this something bad or I can be considered wise? It means certainly I have more wisdom than my seven-year-old, and not that my seven-year-old isn’t quite bright and doesn’t learn very quickly as he does. It just means that as we get older, we have more wisdom, we have more experience, and hopefully with a little bit of critical thinking, we can learn to filter our emotional fallacies out.
Now, going back to what I was saying though, as the information comes in via the five senses, we learn to filter the fallacies and false information out. We’re essentially checking it instantaneously as it comes then. Now, we also have all of these information in our minds. Now, 85% of the information in most people’s minds has not been verified. It’s just stuff that they heard somewhere else and they typically repeat it.
Dave: Hold on. Was that 85% from a study?
Jan: It’s something that my friend and I have discussed it quite some length. Just doing … It’s like, check mark, again, where are all the items in my mental palace that I verified, but let’s just say with how the percentage, most of what most people know is BS. They have not gone out and verified information themselves personally. They say, “Well, that would take too much time.”
Let me put it another way. You can go through our entire life with false beliefs and not spend five minutes to check them. What is faster? What is better for you to make proper decisions on down the line in the future? Going out and spending five or ten minutes? Today, we Google on things. It often only takes a few minutes to verify of something is true or false, or if you look it up and right away the person is name called, this is false because that guy is a jerk. That didn’t address the single point erased. Calling the guy a jerk is just name calling. What does that have to do with anything?
Then, you can look through that. He is a jerk because he lied about this, and here is the citation. He lied about that and there is the citation. We can go through and we can verify these things. You can say, “Aha, okay.” Here is more facts. Here is more information. You can also dig down further if there are still contradictions and get down to the truth of the matter, but the idea is that you have a systematic method of filtering information coming in via five senses and also after what happens and going back to your question about when people start to learn it, what happens is after about two months, people begin to catch the fallacies in their own thoughts and remove them. People start studying a lot of false beliefs.
Dave: That’s why I wanted to have you on the show was because of that thing. If you develop the critical thinking skills and you start applying them to the weird crap that comes up inside your head, pretty soon you start becoming aware of behaviors you’re doing that are not based on reality. They are based on amazing edits that your nervous system can make your reality.
Jan: Exactly.
Dave: This is one of the paths that I’ve identified to developing more awareness of those weird internal what I started calling the meat operating system and the things that are going on in your lives.
Jan: Let me just interrupt you and say let’s do this Dave Asprey as the perfect example here. We have Sally Fallon, and Dr. William Davis, Dave Asprey, pretty much the key people out there, maybe Denise Minger, the key people out there getting people back on a healthy dietary track.
If I go to the local grocery store and I see the woman over there in the bread aisle buying some bread and buying low fat milk over in the dairy section and it’s pasteurized, and all these stuff, and I walk over, and say to her, “That stuff is really bad for you,” and she might look at me and say, “My brother had a heart attack and died at 42.” It’s like, “Okay. What does that have to do with low fat milk?” “My doctor says that high fat and saturated fats is bad for you.”
Obviously, there is a lot of this information out there and people like yourself, and Dr. William Davis, Denise Minger, Sally Fallon has spent year going through and pulling up the facts that saturated fat is not bad for you, that the polyunsaturated fats cause oxidization and poisonous, that the grains contain mycotoxins, the proteins we can’t process that are loaded with sugar, all these mycotoxin, all this stuff that we can’t deal with.
You guys pull together all these facts and you know what? I can personally tell you, Dave, after having you on my show twice that out of maybe 1000 respondents between yours, Sally’s, and Dr. Davis’ shows, 100% of them without exception were positive feedback from people saying that they had dramatic life and health turnarounds. Not a single person, period, wrote me to say “I went on a high fat diet. I started eating the butter and the salts every day, and it made me sick and worse.” Not a single one.
Dave: In terms of full disclosure, I finally found one guy out of …
Jan: You did?
Dave: Hundreds of thousands. One guy who got liver ischemia and we still don’t know why. I am working with her on figuring it out, and he’s talked with his doctor a lot. I don’t know if it’s genetic but now, we have one case study of someone who didn’t do better on the diet, but the sample thought was amazing.
Jan: Then, you have to, of course, dig down and do your grammar going back to this issue and find out what happened, where the contradiction was, was there some other factor in his health, or environment, or whatever that actually caused that.
Dave: We’re working on that. It’s actually gratifying. Thank you for letting me know that you’ve had that kind of response. This is what this is all about.
Jan: Sure. I did that show with Mike. If I just interrupt you real quick. Mike – what was his last name – Adams or something. I forget. We did a whole show.
Dave: Mike Adams, he is awesome.
Jan: The guy who had cured his MS, excuse me while I pull up my own website here.
Dave: Carry on.
Jan: The guy who had cured his MS with your advice. Michael Adams, Curing MS with the Paleo Diet. I just simplified it with Paleo. That was a guy that had wrote after our show. He had MS. He had a three-year-old son, couldn’t take care of his son, couldn’t work anymore, and after a few weeks of no wheat and high fat diet, he was back in high gear.
Dave: Wow. That’s so cool. I love hearing that. I want to switch gears if you’re up for it, our conversation.
Jan: Sure. Why not?
Dave: Two more big topics. I’ve done ayahuasca on South America and I don’t believe in recreational use of psychedelics. I think it’s dangerous but I’ve certainly in my own experience had some benefits from it, and I know literally hundreds of people who believe that they gained better awareness of their internal voices even so they could apply a Trivium to it from specific targeted use of psychedelics. What’s your take on these things? What’s the role in our culture and are they dangerous? What’s the deal?
Jan: Sure. That’s quite a double edge sword there. I’ve been [inaudible 00:34:57] my colleges for more than 20 years. I’ve written a couple of books on psychedelics. I’ve got a 1000-page manuscripts over there that I haven’t published.
Dave: You’re the right guy to ask.
Jan: A lot of people will attack me, “Jan Irvin, how could he dare say that McKenna and Leary. These guys were agents.” They said it themselves. I didn’t say it.
Dave: You said they’re agents but what do you mean agents? Agents from agency or something?
Jan: Most of them were MK Ultra operatives under the CIA.
Dave: I have to pick your brain about that. Okay, cool.
Jan: There is a documentary or a video called the Conversation on LSD where Tim Leary is sitting in group of people who we know like Oscar Janiger we know with MK Ultra. Cindy Cohen, we know with MK Ultra. He’s in a room with these guys and he was talking about how our undercover agents that were traveling around. It’s like, “Okay.” He is in a room full of CIA guys and he is talking about his undercover agents.
Dave: I think some of them probably aren’t on top of what MK Ultra even is or was.
Jan: Good point. MK Ultra was a CIA program that ran from around 1953 or 1956 in through the early 1970s, until it has blast all over the media due to the Frank Olson murder. The CIA had murdered one of the chemical engineers, Frank Olsen, and through him up the tenth floor of a hotel in New York to hush him because he was going to go public about the CIA’s LSD experiments on the entire village of Point-Saint-Esprit in France that killed five people. When he got back from that whole thing, he panicked and then George Hunter White from the CIA had him killed. Then, this brought the church commission about which blew the root of the entire operation.
Dave: To get this out for people, about 40 to 50 or so years ago, the government was doing some psychedelic experiments without any permission.
Jan: On entire villages, entire cities. In fact, we have Operation Midnight Climax up in San Francisco and there is another location. Basically, they would have little brothels set up and they would bring johns in to have sex with these women who would dose them unaware, and then CIA guys would sit behind glass and giggle at these guys, going out of their mind, and those so-called studies observed these guys going out of mind and collect blackmail information and stuff on them, et cetera; but the idea was really to see how they could use psychedelics to confuse people.
Now, the military I should mention called psychedelics psychotomimetics which means psychosis mimicking. It was Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond who remained them to psychedelics. Then, later on Gordon Wasson who is the propaganda manager for JP Morgan Bank and he also headed the MK Ultra subproject 58. He and Professor Carl Ruck at Boston University renamed them yet again or remarketed them the third time to enthegeons.
Now, back to your question, what do I think about the values psychedelic? Have I tried them? One of the biggest attacks I get when people are new to my work and haven’t read my books or the first ten years of my research or my stuff stored at Purdue University of Psychedelic archives library forever, they think that I’ve never tried psychedelics. I have in fact. In fact, I have done psychedelics more than 1000 times. I’ve done ayahuasca.
Dave: What’s your favorite one?
Jan: My favorite is or was mushrooms. I’m finding as I’ve gone through and done them so many times, I am finding less and less benefit from them. Now, my coauthor, Joe Atwill of Caesar’s Messiah, and I were at different odds because I came through the psychedelic community, just the mind control and I can also see some of the benefits, but they are very dangerous. What I can tell people is without a systematic method of processing information like the Trivium, you can get yourself in a big mess.
Dave: Agree, by the way.
Jan: Now, the information that we have exposed on the psychedelic community and on its founders shows that it was a CIA mind control operation. Now, you can ignore that. You can call me names and call me crazy all you want but it doesn’t dismiss the fact that the “discovery of magic mushrooms” was the PR man for JP Morgan Bank, Gordon Wasson, and headed – as we have the CIA documents for – headed MK Ultra subproject 58.
Dave: Hold on a second. Isn’t that like saying Columbus discovered America when it was full of Indians?
Jan: I know. That’s why I said quote/unquote.
Dave: Okay.
Jan: Now, obviously, the Mazatec Indians who I give full credit to had used them for hundreds of thousands of years before that, but he is the “who discovered …”
Dave: The western guy.
Jan: The western guy. The rich, white, academic who brought it to the CIA and made them popular. We can put it that way if that makes better sense.
Dave: I got it.
Jan: He is accredited for discovering them and he is the one who popularized them in the May 13, 1957 Life Magazine articles Seeking the Magic Mushroom. Now, Timothy Leary, a self-admitted agent, he claims who have gotten his knowledge of psychedelics from that article. Never mind, they all worked together behind the scenes. That’s a different subject. You just got to ignore and pretend that it doesn’t exist, but we know that Larry and Wasson were agents, their own words, their own documents, et cetera. These are the key guys that not only that we have a lot of information on now. The Huxley which we can go into in a bit.
Dave: Your position is that the adoption of psychedelics in the west was led by government mind control MK Ultra stuff rather than something else.
Jan: Right. Now, let me put it this way. A lot of people will get confused. How can that be? If we look at the origins of Ethnobotany and Ethnomicology as a field of study and what its purpose was, originally I thought it was to study these virtual practices of ancient cultures but what if it was actually more to study how shamans kept control of those cultures? When we think of the shaman becomes the priest, the king, the government, we can see a line of progression there.
These guys wanting to get back to the simple stuff of how the shaman can control the stuff. In many cultures, the shaman was the huckster, the trickster, the manipulator, the guy who did the slide of hand and stuff. You put on a headdress and you do some peacocking and you get all the women swarmed around you.
Dave: Kind of like the presidency, right?
Jan: Sure, or any Hollywood thing they show. Some star with a bunch of lights flashing and everybody goes, and they run off and run after them. Actually, when you get in to Edward Burnett’s earlier stuff, Edward Burnett has actually created the pop culture idols. Anyway, what we’re looking at is how these cultures used them for control.
Now, there is also other aspects to them. I’m not saying that some form of spirituality doesn’t exist. The quadrivium does show that something is out there but it’s not in any of the books that we’ve seen so far today. Everything that I’ve seen so far is agenda-laid. We’re not saying that something doesn’t exist because if I stick a bunch of chemicals in a bucket together, it doesn’t create a life. Something sparks that life.
Dave: You have a very distinguished background in psychedelic research and you acknowledge that there is some spiritual spark out there but we’re still figuring out what it is if we ever do. That’s the …
Jan: Let me say this one more point before I continue on. Now, there is an issue that I sort have been contemplating. It’s we have these stories in the Bible of the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, and the fruits, and Adam and Eve eating this fruit. What if all of this was put there as a warning because this had happened before? Now, when we get into the history of psychedelics, the sin and mysteries and Ancient Greece, et cetera, this was a government sanction psychedelic religion that lasted for 2000 or 4000 years, I forget which right now, but it was government sanctioned for that length of time, for thousands of years.
Dave: Who cares if it was government sanctioned? Government also sanctioned things like feeding people.
Jan: Because it’s sanctioned by the government and it was controlled by two families for thousands of years. When we get on to the history of this, when psychedelics are supposed to create individual spirituality, and independent thought, and all of this stuff, we can also see the other side of that, how a government can offer psychedelics and become the good guys, say, “Look, we’re giving you this, so now, we’re the good big brother. We’re here to nurture you,” even though we can read out history books and play those to the public, and all of this stuff, and now that they were up to the same shenanigans as these governments today.
Dave: I think that’s probably a lot longer conversation we could have around psychedelics.
Jan: There is.
Dave: We have to get to transhumanism in order to fit this into our interview.
Jan: I do recommend people to jump on my Manufacturing the Deadhead article with Joe Atwill on the Gnostic Media website. It goes into a lot of detail on these issue there.
Dave: We’ll put a link in the show notes to that, and people can Google for those manufacturing the what?
Jan: The Deadhead.
Dave: Manufacturing the Deadhead. Just Google that and it should come up first, I imagine.
Jan: It should.
Dave: You got a good amount of traffic on your site.
Jan: Right.
Dave: Okay, cool. Let’s talk transhumanism. You’ve come out flat out and said it’s MK Ultra, I believe, plots to …
Jan: It’s not MK Ultra flat. It’s the people who were involved in MK Ultra were directly involved with the foundation of transhumanism as well.
Dave: For people listening who haven’t heard of transhumanism, there is a couple of different flavors of it. One of them is we’re going to upload ourselves a new kind of internet and this is the Ray Kurzweil singularity stuff.
Jan: Sure.
Dave: The other one is we’re going to upgrade ourselves into basically cyborgs. I would argue there is a third branch of transhumanism, one that you could say I am a believer in which is that you don’t really need to replace your hardware until you’ve taken advantage of the hardware you have already. Call it the overclocking side of things.
Jan: I would be in the third camp with you there. Let me be clear that I am not against the upgraded self and taking – excuse me while I sip some Bulletproof Coffee.
Dave: I guess that means you’re not a [inaudible 00:46:15].
Jan: Yeah, the point. You got my point there. What we’re looking at here is like looking at the Trivium, the transhumanist will argue that people are not getting smarter and they’re just … I have quotes from Aldous Huxley where he says 99.5% of the population are imbecilic philistines. The issue is when we get into the study of the classical Trivium and quadrivium, we see how this education has been withheld from the masses since at least played those republics time, at least 2500 years. We know from dictionaries and write-ups on it that it was always used to control the masses and manipulate them. It was withheld from the masses. This is why we’re helping for the masses. The only way it can be used against you is if you don’t have it.
My point here is that with intelligence and thinking, if you remove critical thinking, if you remove people’s ability to gather information properly, then they’re not going to be as thoughtful and as critical thinking or as intelligent; and then you’re going to sit there, and you’re going to complain about it. Now, for instance, I have this quote from – let me see if I can find it here – from Sir Thomas Morrison where he says, “For if you, the rulers, suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education dispose them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and outlaws, and then punish them.”
What we have is this problem and it’s found throughout the compulsory education system today. John Taylor Gatto’s work, Charlotte Iserbyt’s work, et cetera. They’ve dedicated their lives to expose the dumbing down of the compulsory education system. Obviously, the dumbing down isn’t a hardware problem. We don’t need our brains upgraded. We need the compulsory government education removed and the classical arts brought back.
Dave: It is a hardware problem. If your mitochondria are broken because you’re eating what some people call slave food.
Jan: Sure, and I agree. That is another issue because if we were taught the proper critical thinking and the proper Seven Liberal Arts, we probably wouldn’t be eating the cow and pig food in the first place. There is that level also where the realization of what is food and what isn’t. Without the Trivium, I may have come across your stuff or I may not have but with the Trivium, I was already on the path. I fought looking at Sally Fallon’s work for years, and then I finally got that little bit, and then I finally stepped over to Dr. Davis’ stuff, and then I finally got over to your stuff, and mycotoxins, and then when I got to the mycotoxins because it was “Ugh.”
Dave: Given your background in studying psychedelics, that’s why you connect the dots that well. Even most of the Paleo community hasn’t got the mycotoxin. Now, I just understood why you connected with that because you studied some of it.
Jan: Not only that, I was in and out of the hospital for 15 years. I got sick and tired of being sick all the time. I got sick and tired of being sick and tired. In 2009, after the doctors here in the States said 12 of them had totally proved their incompetence, they took a trip down to Arequipa, Peru, and found a Harvard-trained gastroenterologist down there who cured two of my problems, and I left Peru no longer feeling the constant gastrointestinal pains but when I got back to the States, the irritable bowel syndrome and other problems started reappearing right away, and it was a really weird. I was totally healthy in Peru. What happened right when I got off the airplane?
Of course, it was the mycotoxins, and then we’re eating the processed foods, and of course, the grain-fed beef, and all of that stuff isn’t much better either.
Dave: You really have belted. Okay, cool.
Jan: You could call me somebody who is extremely hyper sensitive to toxins on the environment. If I get something bad, I pretty much react immediately.
Dave: I got it. You’ve got the canary genes, not so fun. Let’s go back to the transhumanism thing.
Jan: Blond hair too.
Dave: That’s right. At least you’re not a redhead. Redheads have the most problem. Seriously, it’s really amazing but the [individual 00:50:54] and aesthetics, everything is different when your hair is naturally red. Notice, I said naturally.
Now, let’s go back to transhumanism. You’ve got the canary genes and maybe we really should have [inaudible 00:51:09]. Let’s do some viral slicing of some genetics. Let’s just …
Jan: Clearly, my stomach is bad. I need a metal mechanical stomach to function. My heart, just to make sure I never get heart disease, that just needs to be cut out in place or I don’t put crackers in my jeep. How about I don’t put them in my stomach either? My jeep runs really well on oil. Is there something to that? My body runs really well on oil, I find out. If I will take a cracker and I light it, it just flashes. Not that the law of thermodynamics do I think plays any part whatsoever on dietary calories, you and I have talked about the absurdity of that theory in the past, but it’s like how the body absorbs calories isn’t necessarily how a flame absorbs something under it.
Dave: I get you there but the point about transhumanism, wouldn’t you like to be more resilient? Let’s say that we could replace parts of your GI tract with a cool non-biological system versus just better cells?
Jan: I don’t know. Would it make me feel better? Would I perform better or would eating the proper fuels do the same thing?
Dave: Of course, it might do the same thing but seriously, wouldn’t it be convenient?
Jan: It did do the same thing. Actually I can …
Dave: Right. It takes work. Wouldn’t it be nice? Now, I am just going [inaudible 00:52:43] here. If you could just pick up a branch in the forest and stick it in your mouth, and you’d be perfectly fine.
Jan: If I was the koala bear, sure.
Dave: You’re either dodging the point or you’re not hearing the question.
Jan: I get the point. To me, it’s not looking at the root of the problem. I am looking for real solution. I think it’s brilliant.
Dave: Sure. Increase human resilience. Give me more fuel source.
Jan: I could get more fuel sources but what would having a mechanical stomach do? Would I enjoy food more? How would it absorb things? It raises so many more questions that it does solutions and other potential problems and whatnots that rather than I know if I eat a solid strong Paleo mycotoxin-free diet, I am going to achieve that result. I know except for that one guy that you had, I know time and time and time again, over thousands of results that the end results except for that point 0.0001 guy, the results is going to be the same almost every single time without doubt, and I don’t have any of these drastic unknowns that we’re going to have deal with.
Dave: Your big concern there is the risk of transhumanism?
Jan: Number one, I don’t even like classic boots but …
Dave: Just talking about what you like because this is not a discussion about what you like or don’t like.
Jan: True that. Granted. There’s questions there logically speaking, would I benefit with a metal stomach of some kind? I have no idea.
Dave: It’s possible is all I am saying.
Jan: It might be possible but it could cause ten times more problems that it would fix. Then, just the fact of going through a major operation to have a metal stomach put in, the risk and complications with that, and so many different things to factor in. when we go back down to the grammar level and apply critical thinking, and we look at the options, we go, “Hey, rather than eating tree branches, why don’t I just eat the proper foods and I don’t have to go through all this.”
Dave: As long as you have an assured supply of the proper food, that makes great sense.
Jan: Right. Of course, it goes back to critical thinking and making sure that people and governments don’t interrupt our proper food supply and provide us that healthy pasteurized milk.
Dave: I couldn’t agree more. Jan, it’s been fun to talk logic, and rhetoric, and psychedelics, and transhumanism, and a few other cool things along the way. We are out of time on our show today.
Jan: Already?
Dave: Yeah, exactly. Thank you for coming in. Can you lay down your URL, your Twitter, your Facebook, and whatever other things you want to do, and then I’ve got to ask you more question.
Jan: The main Gnostic Media website is just GnosticMedia.com. That’s G-N-O-S-T-I-C media dot com. For those who want to study more on the Trivium Education that’s TriviumEducation.com, T-R-I-V-I-U-M Education dot com. That’s the main stuff. Sometimes, I twit or whatever but I am not tuned to that.
Dave: Awesome. Thank you. We’ll put all those links in the show notes so people have access to your research and to your writing. Now, final question, the one I’ve asked everyone on the show. Top three recommendations for people who want to perform better based on your whole life experiences? It doesn’t have to be anything we talked about on the show.
Jan: Eat a lot of fat. Eat the fat off your steaks. Listen to what your grandparents and parents said, at least in my generation. Ignore the dietary advice from the doctors to eat your healthy whole grains and that sort of stuff. Kill your television would be another good one. Listen to Dave Asprey and Gnostic Media.
Dave: There you go. A little plug there. No one plugs himself or anyone else in one of those answers before.
Jan: Fantastic. One of these days, I will have to put together a full show or something on just the transhumanism aspect because there is such a vast amount to go in there and it is surrounded with eugenics. We hardly touched on it but the entire operation was created by … The term transhumanism came from Jillian Huxley who run the British Eugenics Society in UNESCO and his brother Aldous Huxley did work for the CIA and headed MK Ultra. A lot there we need to get into one day.
Dave: I’d love to chat about it some more. Jan, thanks for coming on the show. Have an awesome day. If you’re listening to the show now and you’re in front of your computer and not driving, I’d really appreciate it if you took a second to go on to iTunes and click like or do a review or whatever exactly you do on the iTunes app versus on the website. I always forget. Anyway, tell the world that the show is useful, and fun, and interesting if you would. I’d sure appreciate it. Thanks again, Jan.
Jan: Thanks, Dave.
Featured
Resources
Bulletproof
