Always a Reader

Introduction

“If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup.” — Opening quotation

KMOHello, and welcome to another installment of the C-Realm Podcast. I am your host, KMO, and this is episode number 580, “Always a Reader,” with guest Lex Pelger, prepared for release onto the World Wide Web on Saturday, May 14th, 2022.

In this episode of the podcast, I’m going to share a conversation that I recorded just recently with Lex Pelger. Most of a conversation: of course, I’ll be saving some of the juicier bits for the C-Realm Vault audience. But you’re going to get a big, generous helping of that conversation for free right here on this podcast.

Now, Lex is somebody who’s been on this podcast before, but not recently. So if the name isn’t ringing any bells, he describes himself as a drug writer and a scientist. And until recently, I kind of thought that the scientist part was maybe affected or aspirational, but no, Lex really did study biochemistry and molecular biology at Boston University. So scientist he is.

I first met Lex in 2012, and I don’t know if this is where we met, but my first memory of him that I can easily bring to mind is talking to him outside of the theater where we saw Michael Pope Is Gay for Pay [title as heard; unverified]. Michael Pope also has been a guest on this podcast, but again, like Lex, not any time recently. So it was good to hear Lex’s voice again. This was very much a throwback to my New York City days. So here’s my most recent conversation with Lex Pelger.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast. C stands for consciousness.”

Bordeaux, kids, and a cannabis Moby-Dick

KMOAll right. It’s thinking about it. All right, you’re live. I’m live. Hey, everybody. I am talking to Lex Pelger for the first time in a long time. Damn, how long has it been? What do you think, Lex?

Lex PelgerYears.

Speaker uncertainWe were in that apartment in New York, so I don’t know, seven, eight years ago. Moved out of there in very early 2016.

KMOOkay. Yeah, something like that. Okay, cool. So I’m in Arkansas, and you are in France.

LexMm-hmm.

KMOSay more about that.

LexBordeaux. It’s been nice. My wife is French, and so we just wanted to get close to the grandparents and have the kids learn the language. So we’ve been here for two years now. We weren’t fleeing the country or anything; we just wanted to get the kids in her home country. So my French is getting to be not completely incomprehensible. The French are very nice about it, though, because they’re so proud of how hard the language is. They know I’m trying, and everyone’s like, “Oh, yeah, it’s difficult,” with kind of a gleam in their eye: yeah, it’s hard. But they also give you a lot of credit, because they know it’s just not an easy one.

KMORight. Well, I took half a semester of French in junior high school, so I’m of course quite fluent.

LexIt does help, though.

KMOYeah. All right. And the last time I saw you in the flesh, anyway, child count was zero. You have how many now?

LexYeah, I’ve got two kids: four-year-old Sophia and a ten-month-old, Lucy. So it’s just fun ages, really fun ages.

KMOMy youngest turns 18 in July.

LexWow. Mazel tov. You made it, Papa. That’s great.

KMOJust about over the finish line. Of course, they’ll be my kids forever.

LexIt never really ends. But that’s great. Congratulations.

KMOThank you. All right. Well, we have one viewer so far, I can tell.

Speaker uncertainCool. Who is it?

KMOWill they comment? We’ll see. All right. And last we talked, of course—you’ve been interested in psychedelics for as long as I’ve known you, and also marijuana, cannabinoids, research thereinto, and also Moby-Dick. You were working on a graphic novel, as I recall, sort of mixing up Moby-Dick and your other interests. Where is that?

LexThat’s in pretty good shape. Before the first kid came along, I got two of the books published with my illustrator, and you can see them online at lexpelger.com. And then in between the kids, I got another chapter finished. So I have three books out.

For people listening: it’s based on Moby-Dick, because only that story is giant enough to contain the human story with cannabis. So I’m going to go into the history of cannabis in all the different civilizations, as well as the racist history of the war on drugs; that’s the Captain Ahab side. But the real thing that I’m doing differently, that you can’t read in another book, is a really deep dive into the endocannabinoid system. So all of the whales will be cannabinoids swimming around down in the sea. And the more I dive into the metaphor, the more it just keeps on working and working.

And that’s the only thing that’s not out there. There are great books on the history of cannabis and how to use it and all that kind of stuff. But there isn’t a readable book for a layperson on the endocannabinoid system that doesn’t stop at CB1 and CB2 receptors and anandamide and 2-AG, the first two known endocannabinoid neurotransmitters. There’s a lot more than that, and I wanted to tell it in a way that was comprehensible to somebody who doesn’t know neurochemistry. So I’m treating the human brain like an ocean, with all of the fish and sea creatures and geochemistry moving stuff around. The more I learned about the ocean, the more it really does sound like the human brain. And they’re both so mysterious as well. A lot of the major discoveries happened at the same time, but really, no one would say we understand the ocean, and no one would say we understand the brain. And that’s part of the fun of these books.

So it’s based on Moby-Dick, and I have the first three books done. That means there are only 133 more chapters to go. But I do have the next seven written, and I’m going to illustrate them pretty soon, I think. So hopefully this year, the goal is to get my next seven books out there, and then just keep doing this for the next couple of years until I get the whole thing finished.

The Lex Files and the supernormal

KMORight on. I’ll just say that one thing I didn’t know, which I learned very quickly when I looked at your website, is that you have a podcast.

LexYeah, yeah, The Lex Files. We’re in between seasons at the moment, but it’s been a really great ride. Some on drugs and a good bit on health. But what really, surprisingly, came to the fore, because of this guy Dr. Jeffrey Kripal, is that I’m starting to study the supernormal, or the paranormal. It was something I was always curious about as a scientist. Just check out Kripal’s work, either an interview I’ve done with him or anybody’s: K-R-I-P-A-L. He’s at Rice University, and he has just a really nuanced take on all of the science for things like ESP, telepathy, UFOs. And you realize that there’s been a science of this since before the 20th century.

What fascinates me is that for things like telepathy, if you take nothing but the data from before 1900, there’s more than enough data for any reasonable person to say, oh, this is something that exists. And it’s very exciting for me as a scientist, because in so many parts of science we’re just filling in pieces of puzzles; we have a good bit of an idea of what’s going on in a number of the fields. But with this supernormal stuff, there’s something going on, and no one has a damned idea how to explain it.

But there’s so much data. And really, the only way to understand the data is to look at a ton of it. So ever since I had the interview with Kripal, I’ve been reading lots and lots of books on that. And I believe that’s what my next set of books is going to be about. Once I get done writing about the endocannabinoids, my next series of books is going to be based on some other great book—I don’t know, maybe Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy—and use that to explain all the science on the supernormal. But right now I’m still in research mode, and it’s going to be probably five years of research on this, just like it was five years of research on cannabis before I could even write a word.

KMOWell, had I known that you had a podcast, I certainly would have listened to a few episodes before we talked. So I will listen to some episodes before we talk again.

LexSure, sure. No, I’m proud of the show. It’s really good. I’m looking forward to getting back to it once I get a little bit more space, with the baby possibly sleeping at night.

KMOWell, I’m going to ape something you’ve said. The next time I go a long period without putting out a podcast, I’m going to say, “Yeah, we’re between seasons right now.”

LexYeah. I run 23 episodes a season, just because I like that number. It’s a longer break than I expected, but with family stuff, it’s where I’m at right now.

KMOGotcha. Well, young kids, they demand a lot of attention.

LexYeah, yeah. So we’re just enjoying the time now. In a couple of months, the youngest will be in her crèche, her nursery, and all of a sudden there’ll be more time than I know what to do with. And I’ll miss this time when I’m with her so much, even if I can’t get as much work done as I want.

France and the United States

KMOWell, I would like to come back to all topics psychedelic, all things medical and health-oriented. But just for the moment, let’s talk about cross-cultural experiences. Tell me something about living in France and viewing the United States from abroad.

LexThat’s an interesting question. Not many people ask me or care, because people are like, “Oh, the French just look down on us.” And actually, that’s one interesting part: I think I have a little bit more of an inkling of why the French do have a bit of an antipathy to the United States, despite them helping us to bootstrap, getting us started. That’s a good question. Yeah, Lafayette, what were you thinking?

But most of the world looks down on the United States these days, at least a little bit. And with the French, in one sense, it seems like we’re cousins that remind them a bit too much of themselves. It’s two countries that really think the world of themselves. The United States isn’t even very good about knowing the rest of the world; the French are up on politics and what’s going on everywhere. But they both kind of suspect deep down that they’re the center of the universe, one of the pinnacles of what civilization is. And the French are just driven a little bit mad by the Americans, because they’re like the country-bumpkin cousin thinking the same thing. So I think that’s part of the reason there’s that bit of friction.

That being said, everyone’s been incredibly nice to me, and that idea of the French being rude or harsh on people is really bullshit, for the most part. I mean, if you’re in touristy parts of Paris, yes, people aren’t particularly polite to you, but that’s the same thing for Times Square and any other tourist trap anywhere in the world. In general, French people are very nice and very polite. Politeness is a very important feature, and that’s quite refreshing.

That being said, what’s lovely about France is how even it can be. It’s much, much harder to fall very, very far down. But it also means that it’s a little bit harder to go very, very up and wild. My wife and I met in New York and spent a lot of time in New York, and she also spent a lot of time in Paris. And she said it’s easier to be a normal person in Paris than it is in New York, but in Paris it’s harder to be a freak. It’s harder to be really far out there. And New York, obviously, is where they go. That’s where they breed. We breed? They breed? I’m not sure. I don’t think I’m quite a freak.

So that evenness is really nice, and this dedication to art and culture and enjoying life is something that is quite fascinating to me, a very efficient Dutchman—Dutch German from farm country. It’s like, food is there to be eaten, so you go out in the field and work. And here, people just take the time to enjoy life. So I’m learning a little bit of that. I’m not completely taking the lesson in all the way; I still like to work and get my stuff done. But it’s nice to see that focus on enjoying your life. It’s something kind of new to me, I would say.

KMOSo did you find that you became a little bit less of a freak when you left New York City?

LexI should never have even hinted I was a freak. I’m no freak. I’m a drug writer. So what’s powerful, perhaps, about me is that I have good ears. I know a lot of people who are really far out there. I’ve done stuff that’s somewhat interesting in my life, stuff I’ve enjoyed. But what’s been really cool is just being a writer who travels around and sits down with people, and finds people who are just really far out there on whatever their trip is. If I have any superpower, it’s being able to find them and sit down and just listen and find out what their stories are. For me, I think the best idea about it is: if you’re the coolest person at the party, this is a lousy party. So I am pretty much never the coolest person at the party, but I’ll enjoy everybody who’s there.

Bordeaux, Boulder, and New York

KMORight on. So what’s your living situation? Are you in the country? Are you in a town, a village?

LexWe’re in Bordeaux, but it’s not downtown; we’re a little bit farther out. This is our first house. This is my first room to myself since the garage I was in in New York, five years ago now—six years ago. So it’s nice; I have my own room again. We have a house with a garden, and we can bike downtown in about 20 minutes and bike out to the forest in about 15. And we did just get a baby seat [wording unclear]: the baby just got old enough that she can bike around. So all of a sudden you have both kids on the bike and can actually go places, instead of the three blocks here, which is not very interesting. So the world just opened up for me big time. For me, it’s quite riveting. So it’s a nice situation, and it’s nice to be close to the grandparents and slowly pick up the language and appreciate the writing and the nuances of the French language.

KMOBefore you moved to France, you were in Colorado. Is that right?

LexYeah, we were in Boulder. My wife was going to Naropa.

KMOOkay. That’s why you were in Colorado. I thought perhaps you were there to participate in the emerging weed industry there.

LexNo, no. Colorado is not really quite my jam. I mean, it was nice, but everyone’s so focused on nature and, I don’t know, enjoying themselves and stuff. It just wasn’t quite for me. I miss New York. I wouldn’t have left New York. Now that I have kids, I wouldn’t live there right now, but New York was my vibe. Colorado was nice; for people who like to live outside, it was really cool. Boulder is a bit of a weird town, just because it used to be a freakville, and now it’s kind of high-end, and they still think they’re freaks, but they’re not. But it was very interesting to see the Naropa scene and this Buddhist university, and it was a fun place to walk around and have kids. But it’s not a place I’m probably going to live again.

KMOI’ve never lived there. I’ve had friends who lived there, and one who still lives there. And yeah, Boulder is not Colorado. It’s in Colorado, but it’s not Colorado. It’s a weird state politically.

Cannabis laws in Arkansas, Vermont, and France

KMOSo I live in Arkansas, and recreational, or what I would consider to be the responsible adult use of marijuana, is still illegal. But there’s a weed farm right down here at the end of my road.

LexOh, that’s funny. Is it medical? It must be. Or they’re just getting—

KMONo, they’re not just getting away with it. It’s definitely a recognized, above-board, legal operation. There are big trucks. I mean, they had to repave the road, because it just wasn’t sufficient to handle the traffic of deliveries and things that they need to do.

LexI wonder if it’s hemp. Is it?

KMOI’m pretty sure it’s medical. And they deliver around town. They have this white van that drives around and delivers to people, and it has an armed guard, because of the weird laws here. They can’t bank; everything’s got to be cash. So it’s not an armored car driving around, but there is an armed person in that car, and they’re not the driver. That’s just the full-time guard, guarding the weed and guarding the money.

LexOh, man.

KMOYeah. But it’s a situation that—I was living in Vermont before this, and I was in Vermont when Vermont legalized adult use. And Vermont did it the way I think is proper. They said anybody can grow two plants. Now, what they did that I didn’t like was they said you can grow it, you can carry it, you can use it, but you can’t buy or sell it, which is ridiculous, because not everybody’s going to grow. And the Republicans—what few Republicans there are in the Vermont legislature—were dragging their feet on legalization. But now that it’s legal, they’re charging ahead: “Well, now we’ve got to be able to buy and sell it. If it’s legal, it’s got to be legal to have commerce around it.”

And Arkansas is taking a different approach. This is where Walmart is. Out-of-state big-money interests can come in and buy their way into a ground-floor monopoly. So if you’ve got millions of dollars of investment capital, yeah, you can grow weed here. But if you just have a seed and some ground and the sun, sorry, you’re still a criminal. So, yeah, it’s pretty ugly.

LexYeah, it’s exactly what you don’t want to see. They talk about the state experiments in the U.S. as a place where things can be learned from, and the worst part is nobody’s learning from them. I mean, the lessons are now very clearly obvious: focusing on adult use, and especially limiting it so that people can’t grow their own, is just a recipe for disaster. Because, one, it leaves behind all the medical patients who need untaxed, high-quality medical cannabis with many ingestion methods. And also you have this monopoly where you just can’t put plants in the ground. I mean, it’s just ridiculous in the land of freedom, especially when your new weed regime means that there are more penalties and more criminality involved. You’re going in the wrong direction.

It’s just like with methamphetamine. Most people who get charged with producing methamphetamine—it’s not that they’re getting charged with producing an illegal substance [wording unclear: heard as “a legal”]; they’re getting charged with producing a substance without a license. Methamphetamine is a legal drug; you just need to be a pharmaceutical company to be producing it. And so it’s a terrible thing to see that same thing happening to cannabis, when it should just be treated like tomatoes.

KMOWell, it’s not going to be treated like tomatoes in Arkansas anytime soon. Arkansas is definitely a very retributive-justice sort of state: very law and order, very hammer-the-miscreants mentality. And even though there’s money to be made in legal weed, you’ve got to be a big-money player to be part of that. Over by Walmart, there’s a sort of secondary little parking lot that’s got a dollar store, and it’s got a couple of empty storefronts, and it’s got a store called the Bearded Gamer, where people go to play Magic: The Gathering and things like that. And another store in this little shopping center is the CBD store. You can go in there and buy your gummies and your vape pens and all your different things. I’ve never been in there, because, well, I just smoke regular old weed. It’s got CBD in it, with other stuff, too. But also, I know it’s going to be super expensive just because of the legal regime around here.

LexYeah, it makes it tough. I mean, CBD is such an amazing thing, for aging specifically, and it’s just too often too expensive, which is especially crazy when you would only need a couple of large farms in the center of the country to completely supply the U.S.’s CBD needs. It’s not a hard plant to grow; there’s plenty of CBD. But because of legality and everything going on around it, it’s way too expensive for what it should be. And it’s too bad that people can’t be making their own, or acquiring a fairly well-tested, inexpensive version, when it’s just such a great medicine. It’s been the medicine of the people for millennia. It’s been a cheap, effective medicine that you can take by putting it in alcohol, or by lots of different ingestion methods. And it’s just too bad that it’s still so hard to get.

And I’m kind of with you here in France in terms of the laws. France is the one dragging its feet on everything related to cannabis. They’re pushing back, trying to make CBD illegal, even though it’s incredibly popular and it is being sold here, just like in the U.S. when it was quasi-legal. People are still selling it here, but France is trying to make it illegal and trying to get the EU to make it illegal, and they’re just starting to talk about the medical cannabis thing. Meanwhile, Germany is releasing their laws for legal weed this fall. So Germany is charging ahead, and France is still back there saying, “Oh, we’re not even sure if it’s a medical product.” But it’s a conservative country. They ran Mesmer out of town; they’re certainly going to do the same thing to cannabis.

Absinthe and wine

KMOWell, it was also France that led the charge in making absinthe illegal.

LexThat’s right. Yeah. Good point.

KMOI think part of it is just coldly commercial. They don’t want competition with wine, really.

LexYeah, you definitely hear that. I used to share office space with some people who worked in the wine industry, and it was a big fear that it’s going to be cutting the profits. And it’s true. It has hit the alcohol industry hard to have people in California switching to cannabis, because it’s easier, in general.

KMOI was living in Australia when they made absinthe legal, so I went and got some and drank it. And what I realized is it’s got such high alcohol content that if you were to drink enough to feel any of the effects of the thujone, you’re just going to be smashed. You’re just going to be drunk off your ass.

LexYeah. Basically just green grain alcohol.

KMOSo strong. Yeah.

LexThat’s the theory: that’s where the psychedelic effect was coming from, just huge levels of intoxication.

What people keep private about psychedelics

KMOThat’s great. So, when I used to do the C-Realm Podcast more often than I do, I talked to a lot of people on a lot of different topics. I would talk to them, and they would talk about whatever it is they were promoting at the moment—their book, their program, whatever—and then we’d wrap up, and I’d say thanks for appearing, blah, blah, blah, and they’d say goodbye. But then the call doesn’t end; that’s just the recorded interview that ends, and then we’re just talking. And what happened time and again was that I would discover that people who have absolutely nothing to say about psychedelics in their public persona will then, in private conversation, say, “Oh, yeah, they’ve been very important to me in my personal development.” But they just don’t want to talk about it in public.

And I’ve discovered that there’s a lot of value to that. I find that people who want to make a public persona out of talking about psychedelics—and I don’t have you in mind as I’m saying this—run out of things to say that are really worth saying. But that’s now their day job. So it’s kind of like the UFO experiencer who has told their story time and again at all the different conferences, and people who are interested know their story, and they don’t have any new material, and they start making stuff up. It turns from reporting on life to sort of creative writing on stage. I wonder if any of that resonates with you, from any of the interactions you’ve had with folks.

LexYeah. I’ve never thought about it that way, but it’s a great way of saying it. And yeah, it would be more true for the UFO thing, because usually you have one or two experiences and you’re done. But it’s also somewhat true with the psychedelic thing, too, because, as Alan Watts—or no, it was Huxley—said, you only get so many good psychedelic experiences. He advocated for, like, six, twelve, maybe twenty across your whole life. And I certainly feel like that in my own life—not that it’s been quite a while [wording unclear]. But even the last few years, I’m getting the same messages; it was mostly confirmation of stuff I’d heard before. And I have the feeling that at some point soon, I’m going to get that message that so many of my friends have gotten, where they said, okay, hang up the phone; it’s time to stop doing this.

It’s nice if you use a little bit for something nice, but you get those messages, and then they’re there, and they are somewhat ineffable. And even if they were effable, plenty of people have said them already. These discoveries are now out there, and they’re now being monopolized, and helping to make guys in business suits even more sharky, and better business—which, you know, I’m not completely against either. But it’s true that there is a level of repetition that doesn’t help, because we’re moving forward. And where this was in the ’60s and the ’80s, and even five years ago, isn’t where it’s going. We have to be nimble to think about the future and try to have some input about what reasonable relationship to psychedelics we as a society might have, because it’s not going to be what we had before.

And I actually don’t comment much on it publicly, because I don’t have any good answers. I’ve been doing the kid thing for a couple of years; I don’t feel as connected. I don’t think any of us feels connected, because we haven’t seen each other at conferences for the last few years. But it’s also really tough stuff. On politics, I don’t have a lot of answers; I try not to just make shit up. And on exactly where psychedelics should be going—I talk a lot more about cannabis, because I have a lot better idea of what makes sense there. But I do not have as good an idea of what makes sense in psychedelics. I think I have some ideas of what I might not like to see and what I might like to see, but I would not want the job of being in charge of writing the regulations. Or if I did, I’d want five years to do a whole bunch of community input and get everybody’s perspective. But you’re still not going to do something that makes everybody happy. So it’s very thorny, and it’s not a place I feel like I have great answers.

LSD at the movies

KMOOn the topic of “once you’ve got the message, hang up the phone”: just this past weekend—I hadn’t done LSD in many years—I went to see Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and I had the opportunity to do so on acid. So I did, and it was strong stuff. I mean, it was very strong. It’s one of those things where you take it and five minutes later you feel it coming on, rather than an hour.

LexWow.

KMOAnd I went to see it in 3D, and I’m in one of those reclining things in the front row, and it was a totally immersive experience. But there was absolutely nothing revelatory, much less spiritual, or even interesting psychologically. It was just, I’m watching the film; it’s very intense. I’ve seen a couple of reviews which summarized the plot, so I know the plot now, but coming out of it, I had no idea what the plot was. It was just an onslaught and an ordeal that I had endured.

I had the full bladder going as the trip was really coming on, so I had to navigate out of the theater into a public restroom to empty the bladder. And then once I’m back in the theater and I can really give myself over to it, it was a very intense experience. But I wouldn’t describe it as remotely psychedelic. My brain has done that so many times. It’s like, okay, here’s the checklist: you’re in public, you’re on a high dose, this is how we cope with that. And it’s just automatic. And it sort of turns off all of the deeper, revelatory parts of the psychedelic experience. That’s just not on the menu when you’re at the movie theater in public in Arkansas.

LexGood on you.

KMOYeah. Well, yes and no. I mean, it was an intense experience. It was fun. And it was fun to be there with somebody else that I’d never tripped with before, so there’s that sort of bonding going on. But whatever vistas LSD was going to open up for me, that was decades ago. I just don’t believe there is any further lock that this key opens. Now, that might not be true of certain plant-based psychedelics which I haven’t yet experienced. That might be a new encounter, something novel and interesting, something to learn from. But LSD—my brain and my psyche are just so familiar with it. My response to it is automatic, which I think is kind of the opposite of beginner’s mind, where you’re putting aside all assumptions and really paying attention to the details. Just dealing with an intense trip in public is the opposite of beginner’s mind. It’s falling back into very rehearsed patterns of behavior and self-management.

Patterns, Musashi, and reading deeply

LexYeah, that makes a lot of sense. You get to the point where you can navigate it, and so you just do. But it feels like the patterns get absorbed into you, and eventually you can’t remember what it was like before those patterns. I don’t really remember my thinking before I took mushrooms for the first time, 20 years ago. And I think it’s not unique to psychedelics. I think it’s almost anything where you dive into it deeply, such as deep reading in one direction, or mastery of a sport, or mastery of anything.

By the way, I’m doing TikToks of my favorite books, in case I get hit by a bus; I want my kids to see what my favorite books are. And I just did the one for Musashi, A Book of Five Rings, the old Japanese samurai book, which is one of the most important things I’ve ever found. He talks about how you must study hard in all of these directions: study all of the arts, study all these different types of martial art, study different arts. And in those patterns, you’ll start to see something bigger emerge. And I found that through reading science and reading literature, they start to join eventually: yeah, this is what the flow is going to be. And the psychedelics helped a lot with that, too, but they were just one tool for seeing a different flow. And once you’ve got the idea of that flow, you’ve got it. You can keep reading. If you’ve read all the Jane Austen, you’ve got it; you can keep reading it for the fun of it and get in deeper. But at some point those patterns have been absorbed all the way, and now you’re looking for new patterns, I think.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast, your mind, one week at a time.” [wording partly unclear]

Podcasts, books, and how to read

KMOWell, let’s get back to you talking to other people on a podcast. Is the podcast about psychedelics in particular, or is it a broader umbrella of topics that you’re dealing with?

LexYeah, it’s not psychedelics in particular. I really enjoy talking to my old friends in that world, and whenever I see new people come across who seem to have something interesting to say, I always set up an interview with them. But I’ve been in that world so long that it’s not quite as interesting; you don’t hear as much new material anymore. It’s why I miss the conferences, because that’s when you really do find new material. So the direction has been more helping people with mental health or physical health kinds of activities, in ways that I’m not used to. Whenever I come across a new practice and learn about it from somebody, that’s someone I try to sit down and interview. And then the supernormal as well. The last part of it was a lot of physicists and scientists who have been looking at this and trying to figure out frameworks, or people who are just out there collecting the data as well. And that one is really rich for me, because that’s where I’m still learning. I’m curious about what everybody has to say, but when the topic is brand new, like the supernormal—I’ve only been reading about it for a year or two—it just makes it really easy to get excited.

And then I have to read their books. With a podcast, I have to go through and read their books to get all the questions for it, and it forces me to pound through so many books that otherwise I might not take the time to read. And that’s such a joy, to be able to learn that way.

For me, I don’t listen to many podcasts. Actually, I listen to pretty much no podcasts. I’ve heard that people who produce podcasts often don’t listen to them. But what I do is read. I feel like listening to someone for an hour is nice, and you kind of get the bare bones of what they’re trying to say. And if that’s all you care about the topic, an hour is enough. But if you really care, you read a book on the topic. I once heard somebody say that if you’ve read eight books on any fairly narrow topic, you know about as much as most anyone in the world does on that topic. If you read eight books on U.S. drug policy in the 20th century, and they were decent ones, you would know more than almost anybody out there on that subject. And that’s what I like about books: they’re just so dense, for the ROI, if you can put it that way. I only have so many years left, and I’m trying, in my German way, to pound through as much information and figure out as much stuff as I can before I die—and, I assume, just do this again.

KMOYou know, I don’t read many books these days. And when I do, it usually comes at the end of a sort of process. If there’s a book I’m interested in, first I’ll go and listen to a couple of interviews with the author. And sometimes listening to the author give a talk or a long-form interview, that’s enough.

LexYeah.

KMOBut if I really enjoyed it, and every time I hear something new from this author, they’re not just repeating—if I can tell they have a wealth of material that they’re picking and choosing from in their various interviews, rather than a short rap that they’re repeating over and over again—then I’ll probably get the audiobook, and I’ll listen to the audiobook. And if, in listening to the audiobook, I think, oh, there’s a bunch of stuff where, if I were reading it, I’d be taking notes or making highlights, then I’ll get the book. But by the time I get the book and start reading it, the material is already very familiar. And I find that that’s when I really get into a topic. But rarely does any book actually make it through all those stages to the point where I actually have the physical book in my hand and I’m reading it. It just doesn’t happen very often.

LexYeah, that makes sense. That’s a smart way to dive in, I think. What did Melville say? “Lord, keep me from ever completing an erection.”¹ He means a building. But you’re never going to finish any of your research in any of your topics, and all you can do is just keep pushing the ball forward: okay, in this direction, I’m going to do this much. But I think it makes sense as a way to explore. It’s really an art, to try to figure out who and what to read and how much time to invest. And you never quite feel like you’re doing it right or doing it justice, but that’s life.

Kindle or paper, and notes in the back

KMOAnd then when it comes time to read, the question is, Kindle or paper book? I move around so often, and books are so heavy, and I have just boxes and boxes of them. And I know it’s very unlikely that I’m actually going to go dig through all those boxes to find a particular book. Whereas the Kindle weighs nothing; I can find stuff in an instant. But I’ve read, and my own experience bears out, that you do remember more when you’re reading from a page than you do when you’re reading from a screen.

LexYeah, I’ve found that to be true, and that’s why I generally go with paper books. For the supernormal research I’m doing now, I’m doing Kindle, because I often can’t find the books here in France. And also, I know I’m going to be going back to them a bunch of times and needing to use the research; I’m just highlighting the passages that I’m going to use in my writing. So for that, it makes sense. But for the stuff that I’m reading for personal interest—I’ve got a whole bunch of books on the floor here, because my bookshelves aren’t in. And I actually inherited a library from a dear friend who passed. So I have 67 boxes of books in the basement of this beautiful, beautiful library. And it’s nice to have old Buck Plattick [spelling unverified]. Sometimes I’ll just think, I should open this box tonight, and I open the box, and there’s just the book that I need right now. And I can hear old Buck kind of chuckle over his shoulder, and I can find his notes in it. It’s really a beautiful thing.

And that’s part of the reason it’s fun for me to read paper books: my method. What I learned in my twenties is that the best way for me to read a book is—the first thing I do, as soon as I buy it, is write in the back cover. It’s unobtrusive, in case I die and it goes to a bookstore; I don’t want to mess up someone else’s reading experience. But I use the back cover, and I write where I got it and where I was when I started reading it. And then all the notes I make, I make in the back of the book. I might put a little line on the page, just so I know what passage I’m referring to. But I write my ideas and the quotes, and I have a little symbolism system for some of my stuff, and I just fill up the back with my notes. It makes it really easy to come back years later and look at the stuff that you thought was really important. And I hide little jokes in there, and things going on in my life and stuff like that, in the hope that one of these kids that I’ve got, or somebody someday, might go through these and think it’s kind of fun.

Because my dad always says to me—he’s like, “I do all these notes, and I do all this stuff, and I know that you’re going to be the only person who looks at these before this stuff goes into the trash. So I hope you enjoy it.” And maybe no one will ever look at any of this stuff, but it’s fun for me to do it. And most importantly, for my memory, it helps to physically write it out. For the way my brain works, seeing my notes on the page helps.

KMOOh, you’ve got it in your hand. Yeah, and I think that’s true for a lot of people. The motion of the writing helps get it into your head.

Longhand and rewriting

KMOYou know the science fiction author Neal Stephenson?

LexYeah, yeah.

KMOHis last few books, he has written longhand, on, I think, legal pads.

LexWow.

KMOAnd he says he prefers that method because it’s slower than typing, so the sentences have to stay in the buffer longer while he’s getting them down onto the page.

LexThat makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. I just saw a video of a guy—it was a well-known director; I can’t remember who now—but his method was, he would write out his entire screenplay, and he would write too much, and it’d be 120 pages. And he’d put it away in a drawer for half a year or a year, and then he would get it out again, read through the whole thing, and then throw it right in the trash, and then write it out again. And that’s when he got the gold of what was really in there, and none of the dross. And I thought that system made a lot of sense.

KMOYeah. I had a philosophy professor who used to suggest that you write your paper, and then when you go to revise it, don’t edit that file; start a new file and write it again. And I never did when I was in his classes, but now, decades later, looking back on that advice, I see the value in it. But in college, I wanted to party, so I wasn’t going to write a paper twice. Come on.

LexYeah, probably not worth the effort.

The supernormal

KMOAh. You know, I’m familiar with the term “supernatural” and the term “paranormal,” but I guess I’ve been out of this stuff for too long. I don’t ever recall having heard people use the phrase “supernormal.”

LexYeah, and I always hesitate to use it, because it’s not well known. I only got it from Dr. Jeffrey Kripal—I forget who he got it from—but it’s not the most widely used term. But to me it seems like the most accurate, because “supernatural,” as he says, isn’t really something that exists. There is nothing that’s supernatural; everything that you’re going to interact with is of a natural origin somehow. And “paranormal” also doesn’t—you know, what’s not normal? So the idea of the supernormal, being something that just happens very rarely, makes a lot more sense to me. But I don’t love using it, because it’s not meaty [wording unclear]; people don’t know what you’re talking about. But I’m still grappling with this. This is a subject matter I’m still getting my head around, so I don’t really talk about it too much publicly. But I’m happy to. It’s just that no one really wants to ask, or is that interested.

It’s such a willful blind spot in human affairs. I was a scientist; I didn’t particularly care one way or the other about it. And I’m like, oh my God, this isn’t “oh, this might be true.” It’s like, no, by any measure of scientific data, almost all of this stuff is well proven, especially UFOs. If anyone out there doesn’t believe it—I mean, Leslie Kean’s² book: she’s a journalist who just collected a bunch of military accounts. And if you don’t believe all of this radar and military data by people trained to look at stuff, you’re—well, I mean, yeah, I don’t know. It doesn’t—it’s very rational [wording unclear]. But there’s been such a misinformation campaign, and I know there are a lot of reasons people don’t want to, or just don’t care. It’s also, how much does this affect your daily life?

I’m not sure why I got obsessed with it, except that it’s finally something mysterious again. And it might even hint at all my fantasy visions when I was young, where I would always hope that a portal would just open in the wall and a beautiful young woman would hop out with a sword and be like, “We need someone with a deep knowledge of science fiction to come and save our planet right now.”

Speaker uncertainYes, I want that too. [wording unclear]

LexAnd now I’m starting to believe that there’s more magic and strange things in the world, that maybe what I believed when I was young is a little bit closer to the truth than I believed. And that’s kind of hopeful. I’m not expecting much, but if I just get to sit and read books about this for the rest of my life and never have anything particularly supernormal happen to me, that’s completely fine. Reading everyone else’s story about it is very satisfying.

Courting the encounter

KMOYou know, there are supposedly—I haven’t tried them. I practice meditation daily, but I’m definitely taking advantage of the 80-20 rule, where your first little bit of effort is going to yield the most results, and thereafter you’re chasing diminishing returns. It’s just very, very basic, run-of-the-mill mindfulness stuff. But there are meditations that are specific to inviting encounters with non-human intelligence, be it aliens or spirits or what have you. And I don’t do them, but I’ve thought about doing them. And I’m conflicted, because I’m curious. I’m curious enough to have been to the Amazon four different times to drink ayahuasca, and never really had that super-satisfying encounter that I was hoping for. But at the same time, the rational part of me says, well, if you do that, you’re basically just hypnotizing yourself and programming yourself to have an experience which is not particularly informed by reality. You’re just programming yourself to have this waking dream in which you think you’ve encountered some other mind, but it’s just you. So that’s a source of sort of unresolved tension for me. Do I court the encounter, or do I just sit around and wait for it, secure in the knowledge that it may never come?

LexYeah, it’s a conundrum. And I can’t answer for anyone else, but for myself, I am very purposely not doing any of that yet, because I don’t feel ready. I know that Crowley said that you shouldn’t start practicing magic until you have PhD-level knowledge in eight different fields, have pushed your body physically to all of these different limits, and know your mind very intimately through meditation already. And I don’t have any of those things.

And I also kind of subscribe to something that helps me, which is that those ages where the numbers match up are your special ages. So 33 was a big year for me, and I kind of put in my head that 44 was going to be the year that I would start—I would try to be a magus, someone who’s practicing this stuff. But that’s still four years away for me. And it gives me some time, especially as I’ve started diving into reading the history of folklore.

If anyone else is interested, the Dictionary of Folklore by Katharine Briggs³ is just really a beautiful collection. And I think it’s necessary for anyone who cares about the UFO phenomena: you have to see the history of where this is coming from. If you’re into this, you probably know about Jacques Vallée and his book Passport to Magonia,⁴ where he talks about the history of folklore and how that bleeds into the UFO thing. Which makes a lot of sense: these things that are perhaps super-dimensional to what we are—they’re not from other worlds or from other dimensions, whatever that means—they present as whatever our brain can handle. And that’s angels in one culture, it’s spinning wheels in another culture, it’s Buddha in another culture, whatever.

And when you look at the history of folklore, it is so informative, I think, to all of this work, because the Good Neighbors, as the safest way to refer to them is, are often not at all friendly folks. They’re not people you should be putting yourself into any kind of debt to. You shouldn’t even say thank you to them. They will either harm you for that, use that to their advantage, or disappear, if they were helpful brownie-type creatures. In the beginning, when I was reading about the Good Neighbors, fairies, I was excited: oh, maybe. And then I started to read more into it, and I’m like, no, this is dangerous stuff. It’s just like getting involved with the gods: if you were human and got involved with the Greek gods, you almost certainly had your life ruined. Once in a while it helped you out, but mostly—for women, it was always terrible, and for men it usually was a curse. And as H. P. Lovecraft said, you should not call up what you cannot put down. So I feel like, for myself, I am very, very much in research mode, and trying to avoid any kind of attention from any of this kind of stuff. I’m just in study mode.

Non-human intelligence on Earth

LexAnd we have a nice comment here from Parker, I just see on the side, who says there’s so much non-human intelligence on Earth: other mammals and birds, many societies of creatures. And I think that’s a really beautiful way of looking at it. As a scientist, I love reading about sociobiology and how groups of animals work together. I think E. O. Wilson’s textbook on that is still worth just reading through, for anybody, and looking at how the whole planet operates as one giant organism. There’s so much to learn from the patterns of how other intelligent animals, slime molds, and plants handle things.

Even in my front yard here: when we moved in, the garden hadn’t been touched for five years, and there was a vine that took over everything. So I had to spend a month battling this vine, pulling it up everywhere. In the beginning I was annoyed; I was fighting it. And then one day I was just high enough—I was out there working—and I realized that this thing is so smart. If I were a vine trying to figure out the best way to take over this garden for my own benefit, I could never have designed such a good system: how it laid its roots, all the different directions it went, where it climbed, how it did it. This thing is so much smarter than I am in many ways. So I did pull the vine back very far, but I left it in the corner of the yard. So there’s still some of it there, and now I’m happy to have it and think about its intelligence. And already it’s starting to climb all over everything so quickly. It’s just such a highly evolved being.

So I think for all of this kind of stuff, as much reading and research into the patterns of everything in the natural world is going to be the most informative. As the early Christians said, half of knowledge is in their holy book, the Bible—excuse me—and the other half of knowledge is in the natural world itself. And that’s a place that you can really learn a lot from.

Program identification: “On the C-Realm Podcast: a mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”

KMO’s closing remarks

KMOAll right, we’ve come to the end. It’s not the end of the conversation with Lex Pelger; that will conclude in the next episode of the C-Realm Vault Podcast. That is a paywalled podcast for the serious C-Realm diehards, who have my thanks for their ongoing support. And if you enjoy this free podcast, they should have your thanks as well.

All right. Now, I have still not listened to a single episode of Lex’s podcast, although I definitely plan to remedy that soon, and I’m going to start with his conversation with Dr. Jeffrey Kripal—and I hope I’m pronouncing that last name correctly.

If you’ve listened to this podcast for years—and I don’t think there are many new listeners coming in these days, so if you’re listening to this episode, you’ve probably listened to many others—you also probably know that while I have dabbled with what Lex is here calling the supernormal, with multiple trips to South America to participate in ayahuasca rituals and whatnot, I’m most comfortable dwelling in the world of physical objects. I describe myself as an agnostic, metaphysically speaking, but I think a lot of people who are more inclined to the esoteric would describe my position, pejoratively, as reductive materialist. And while I say that it would be a pejorative, it’s also pretty accurate—not in terms of any absolute conviction that I have about how the universe works; just, as far as I can tell, looking around, that seems to be the universe that we live in. Except every now and again, once in a blue moon, once in a month of Sundays, something weird pops up that makes it seem like the world is more esoteric and strange than I had previously imagined.

Which—that’s not even true, really, because there have been many times in the past when the world has seemed much more magical, surreal, directed by intelligence and imagination than it seems most of the time to me now.

And thinking back on the final portion of the conversation that you heard with Lex, about non-human intelligences: I had never heard this before, but it makes sense. Don’t put yourself in debt to them. Don’t even say thank you. Or, as H. P. Lovecraft put it, and Lex quoted in the podcast you just heard, you should not call up what you can’t put down. And it is for that reason—I just call it an abundance of caution—that I’m going to continue to operate, at least in the near term, as if we lived in a physical universe in which the only complex intelligence that has language and technology and culture is human intelligence. I know that’s definitely a buzzkill of a position to take, and it may come back to bite me in the ass someday. But calling up that which you can’t put down: also not a good idea.

All right, as I say, the conversation with Lex will conclude on the next episode of the C-Realm Vault Podcast, which I hope to get up onto the web tomorrow—that little walled-garden portion of the web where episodes of the C-Realm Vault Podcast are to be found. All right, thanks so much for listening. I will talk to you again soon. Stay well.

Editorial notes

1. Melville’s wording, in Moby-Dick, chapter 32 (“Cetology”), is: “For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything.” Source: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851), ch. 32, Project Gutenberg eBook #2701 (gutenberg.org/ebooks/2701). ↩

2. Heard as “Keenan’s.” The journalist described, who collected military and government officials’ UFO accounts, matches Leslie Kean, author of UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record (2010); the name is spelled from that identity. Source: Wikipedia, “Leslie Kean” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Kean). ↩

3. Heard as “Catherine Briggs.” The folklorist is Katharine M. Briggs, whose reference works include A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language (1970–71) and A Dictionary of Fairies (1976; US title An Encyclopedia of Fairies). The title is left as Lex said it. Source: Wikipedia, “Katharine Mary Briggs” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharine_Mary_Briggs). ↩

4. Heard as “Mangonia.” The book is Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers (1969). Source: Wikipedia, “Jacques Vallée” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Vallée). ↩