← American Alchemy with Jesse Michels
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- [00:01]
Jesse
Lifelock. How can I help?
- [00:02]
Rolf Moat Larson
The IRS said I filed my return, but I haven't. One in four tax paying Americans has paid the price of identity fraud. What do I do? My refund though. I'm freaking out.
- [00:11]
Jesse
Don't worry, I can fix this.
- [00:12]
Rolf Moat Larson
Lifelock fixes identity theft guaranteed and gets your money back with up to $3 million in coverage. I'm so relieved. No problem.
- [00:19]
Jesse
I'll be with you every step of the way.
- [00:21]
Rolf Moat Larson
One in four was a fraud paying American. Not anymore. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast terms apply.
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Podcast Host
Our next guest worked for the CIA for over two decades.
- [00:35]
Rolf Moat Larson
He goes if you are storm, die in your separate foxholes.
- [00:39]
Podcast Host
His name is Rolf Moat Larson. He served in various roles all over the world, some of which he can't.
- [00:47]
Jesse
Even speak about today. What's the most on the brink the world has been that you can talk about?
- [00:55]
Podcast Host
Well, he's been shoulder to shoulder with Putin. He describes working directly with NSA Director Michael Hayden, CIA Director George Tenet, and even briefing former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. But while he's worked at the highest, most illustrious levels of international diplomacy, that is the least interesting thing about our next guest.
- [01:22]
Rolf Moat Larson
In 1991, I went on a pilgrimage to Mount Athos, Greece. And I'm sitting at this. I fell asleep sort of napping on this stone chair fac and with every step I'm taking, time is going back in time. It was as if time was evaporating, but I wasn't aware if I could wake up or get back to my old world because I was going back in time.
- [01:47]
Podcast Host
He claims to be a time traveler. He says that he left his 20th century identity behind in 1991 to go live as a monk in Mount Athos, Greece. In the 14th century.
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Rolf Moat Larson
I became a recluse up there. I burned my hut up there. Like all the things a recluse does, you know, I learned to fly. And when you're flying, you're spiritually open.
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Podcast Host
He time traveled back to the medieval era for months, eating, walking around, socializing and sleeping in his physical body in medieval Mount Athos, Greece. Now, I'm sure you're wondering if I mean time travel in the metaphorical sense. Our guest stated multiple times to me that the reality he experienced in medieval times was indistinguishable from his current waking reality. According to him, not remote viewing or astrally projecting himself there.
- [02:48]
Jesse
Does all of this feel as real as this interview feels?
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Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Podcast Host
If senior CIA time travel whistleblower was not on your bingo card this year, it wasn't on mine either. But here we are. But if it can't get any more.
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Jesse
Interesting than that, it does.
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Podcast Host
Our next guest ran intelligence and counterintelligence for the Department of Energy.
- [03:11]
Rolf Moat Larson
I learned some of this nation's most important secrets at doe, not CIA. DOE does stuff that man.
- [03:18]
Podcast Host
And if you know anything about this show, we are obsessed with UFOs and think and kind of know that the Department of Energy has a lot to do with managing UFO secrecy and crash retreat. So you better believe I threw literally every single UFO program related question at our guest today. I even coordinated on the questions with my friend and UFO whistleblower David Grusch, fellow YouTuber UAP Gerb and author of UFOs and Nukes Robert Hastings.
- [03:47]
Jesse
Do you think that we have propulsion modalities that transcend chemical combustion? Do you think nothing happened at Roswell? Have you ever seen a one of one material?
- [03:57]
Podcast Host
I'll let you assess our guests answers for yourself. And whether you come out of this interview thinking he's just a savvy former CIA case officer running circles around us, or whether you think he's being genuine.
- [04:09]
Jesse
Is up to you.
- [04:10]
Podcast Host
I will say that for me, this was hands down one of the most thoughtful and mind blowing conversations on metaphysics, fringe science and the nature of reality that I've had on this show. So without further ado, here is all four hours of it. Former CIA and Department of Energy intelligence officer, Moscow station chief, time traveler, and religious mystic Rolf Moat Larson.
- [04:37]
Rolf Moat Larson
Ignition sequence. How is this possible? Nothing too unusual about that.
- [04:47]
Podcast Host
Their existence cannot longer be denied. Before we continue, I want to take a second to thank one of my favorite products in the world, Ketone iq, for sponsoring today's episode. I've mentioned this before, but I don't really drink a lot of caffeine, I don't use nicotine, and I don't really do super well with stimulants. Most of these things give me jitters, spikes, or a crash later on. It feels like you're taking credit out on your future energy. As you know, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Ketone IQ is one of the very few things I use that gives me clean, sustainable energy. Without the crash, it's just this little shot and I take a drink and I feel like I'm on fire. No ups, no downs, no nervous system weirdness, just clean, clear mental energy. The reason it works is pretty simple. It gives your brain's Ketones, which are almost by definition its most efficient fuel source. Instead of pushing your system, it actually feeds it. In fact, your body endogenously produces ketones. So when you drink this, it supports deep focus, long conversations and sustained mental performance. It was originally developed through a multimillion dollar military program designed for high stress environments where cognitive performance really matters. And today it's used by founders, researchers, podcasters like myself, and people who need their mind to work when it counts. I always take a sip of one of these things before long podcasts. This product is also really personal for me because I've known the founders, Jeff and Michael for over a decade. These guys are awesome. And for as long I've known them, they've tried every supplement, biohack and Nootropic under the sun. So it was a pretty good signal to me that they decided to start a company around ketones. I use Ketone IQ regularly. It's like a mental cheat code and it's genuinely one of the cleanest energy sources I've ever found. So before we get back into the episode, please visit ketone.comalchemy for 30% off your subscription order plus receive a free gift with your second shipment. Again, that's ketone.comalchemy for thirty percent off your order. Or you can find Ketone IQ at Target stores nationwide and get your first shot free. Seriously, this stuff works. Thanks so much to Ketone IQ for sponsoring today's episode.
- [07:09]
Jesse
I'm here with Rolf Moat Larson. I am so grateful for this interview. I've read your book State of Faith in the CIA, one of the most remarkable books I've ever read. It's really fascinating because interspersed with stories of real life espionage, of kind of moments where the world pivoted and you literally see timelines shift, you're in the Oval Office talking to Bush and Chaney and that sort of thing. Interspersed with that are some very profound mystical experiences. So why don't we start off with just why did you write the book to begin with?
- [07:47]
Rolf Moat Larson
Thank you, Jesse. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm an admirer of your work and I look forward to to telling my story in the context of all the stories you present of people who have things to offer that really expand our understanding of reality and of faith. I wrote the book because I wanted people to benefit from my story, which is really my relationship with God. And I like people to think of it more as a relationship than as a religious book. And it's not, in fact, about that. I don't proselytize or try to convert people to a specific religion. My story started as a little boy where I was aware of the presence of God. And the presence of God that I was aware of was something I felt a need to develop. And I saw God as even a child, as a creator God and a personal God, which meant I could communicate. So he opened with a little prayer. And I like to try to keep a continuous prayer idea with God where I'm always interacting and there's an arena. The reason I entitled my book A State of Mind and Faith in the CIA was A state of mind refers to a desire to be close to God. John Paul ii. It's a paraphrase of him saying hell is not a place, which is an interesting concept of Dante's Inferno. It's a state of mind. It's a state of mind of being separated from God. And throughout my life I had a sort of a fear of being distant from God or not being close enough to God. But it wasn't a traditional thing of go to church and give money. It was more of like in my personal relationship with God, since God knows all things, God would be aware. And when I would pray in the way we started, I got responses and ultimately evolved into a destiny. I felt my destiny became tied to my relationship with God. My destiny was to fulfill God's wishes through my life and my experiences. And that set up certain conflicts with. I call my secular world of CIA, which I devoted my whole career to. Started in the military, went to west point and spent six years in the army at an auspicious time in 70s on the Czech border and then transferred over to CIA. So that whole story, all those experiences had their own role in national security, et cetera, but also in my relationship with God. And the faith part was understanding my faith as that relationship with God, not as what I called myself or what people thought of me in religious terms, but in my relationship with God. How was it developing and was I fulfilling God's will through my actions and thoughts?
- [10:31]
Jesse
And what did you end up doing at the CIA and throughout your intelligence career? I think a lot of people, what we try to do on the show is kind of marrying some of the most out there experiences or claims people have with kind of rigorous credentials.
- [10:47]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah, I think that's really important. So in my CIA career, I started as in Europe, just what we call a European officer. We had different areas of the world we were in. That was where I started. But I got quickly into arms control. And then over the years I seemed to gravitate. I didn't think of this as things went on as being coincidental. It began to converge with my spiritual developments more and more towards war and nuclear war, collapse of the Soviet Union. I did two tours in Moscow in the old days, in the Soviet days, I came back. I was what we call our chief of station in Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Of course, I hope that gives me some credibility on my religious or my spiritual experiences. But they were my credibility as an intelligence officer that I was always seemed to be at the threshold of history, like many. I'm not unique in that, by the way, there are so many of us that have been observers of history, helping to make history in some small way. And I was extremely fortunate in my career. Moscow ended my. We did nine tours overseas each two, three years under cover, sometimes deep cover, through the whole experience, and ended the whole thing, which I don't think was a coincidence. In the Middle east between 2011 and 16, when we served in the Middle east for the last five years. So between Europe, Soviet Union, Middle east, we sort of saw the whole world, served as CIA officers. My wife also worked most of that time in CIA. She's written her own book called Story of a CIA Wife. I'll close with one thing. I mean, people have different reactions. The first day I walked in CIA headquarters, you see the stars on the wall. It makes a huge impact. The stars on the wall are CIA officers who fall on the line of duty. They can't put their names to the star. There's a book that has that code book that tells you this star. Here is this person. There are people who lost their lives serving their country overseas. And of course, I never wanted to be on that wall, like any of us. But right next to that, the stars on the wall, was this large, bold imprint into the marble walls of the CIA atrium. When you walk inside the big building, the old headquarters in Virginia, and it says, John 8:32, you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. And I thought, wow, this is really quite extraordinary that CIA, a secular organization, has this New Testament verse on the wall. And I wondered at the time when I walked in the building whether I would be satisfied that that's what CIA was all about. Were we truth seekers or not truth seekers? And that's the ultimate litmus test when we don't seek truth and we have another agenda, we do bad things as CIA or intelligence officer or army officers or anything in life.
- [13:47]
Jesse
Do you find that at times the CIA has Not sought truth in the past.
- [13:51]
Rolf Moat Larson
Oh, of course, of course. I mean, people are people and organizations are organizations. The problem with giving organizations the CIA has, is on the positive side you can accomplish great things. On the negative side, you can do very bad things, and especially when you're doing them in secret.
- [14:09]
Jesse
You have some interesting stories that you talk about in the book of being in the Oval Office, giving Bush advice, giving Chaney advice. Do you want to give a couple of examples there of just stories where you kind of helped out or advised in very high up American national security context?
- [14:29]
Rolf Moat Larson
Right. My career breaks down into three phases, really. The first phase was between when I started 1983 to 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's what we sometimes refer to as the good old days, which was espionage in the shadows, like the books you always read, the classic espionage books of running spies and great stuff. And I became really good at that. Then Suddenly, boom, almost 10 years into my career, almost exactly, we get hit with 9 11. And after 911 I was actually in language training to go to Asia to become as chief of station of a large Asian country when I saw on TV that the Twin Towers got hit by terrorists. I had been on the director, director of CIA staff the year before preceding 911 as associate director of Central Intelligence for military support. So I was a staffer supporting the director, good friend of mine, wonderful director of my mind, George Tenet. And we knew that we were going to be hit 9 11. We didn't know where. And I'm not in the school of belief and I know that it's a valid way to think of it, that we failed. Well, we failed because we allowed the attack to happen. But could we have prevented it? I think that's in ways a problematic way to think of it because I don't think we could have prevented 9 11. We just have to give the credit to the terrorists, Osama bin Laden terrorists. But it changed everyone's lives and future of the world. And that was the intent of the terrorists, including my little life. So they pulled me from my language training and George Tenet made me head of what they called the weapons of Mass Destruction department in the Counterterrorism center, which was to stop terrorists from acquiring biological or nuclear weapons.
- [16:17]
Jesse
I mean, that's a. Yeah, it's. If the, you know, future of the world hinges on any job, that's the job.
- [16:24]
Rolf Moat Larson
I did say to George Tenet, who I already knew well because I'd been on a senior staff, I said, george, isn't there Anybody better for than me for this?
- [16:32]
Jesse
How did he respond when he said, you know, hey, can't you find anybody better than me?
- [16:36]
Rolf Moat Larson
The classic George Tenet response. Like I said, great leader. A great leader of men and women. He said, hey, I got worse news for you. You don't have any people yet. I went from three people at that meeting that had been assigned to me to 150 over the next weeks. And then he said, but you were behind the eight ball. And he explained why, which is still classified, which meant there was a plausible reason to be worried that Al Qaeda might obtain a nuclear weapon, which was, I can say the basics, which was they were negotiating with Pakistani nuclear scientists to try to acquire a nuclear weapon they could use in the United States. This was something, as George said to me, we can't fail on this. We're going to fail. We're like athletes playing in sports, team sports. Sometimes we fumble, sometimes the other team scores. We can't let them score on this. We can't let them do this one time and take out the White House or Congress or something. So you're just going to have to make sure the President knows everything we know, when we know it. We met as a group and a lot of this is in my book. Of course, we met every day at 5 o' clock and we just pulled everything together raw. Nothing was going through the normal formats, all our information. We briefed the director and when we had the meeting at 5, it usually lasts till 8 or 9 at night and just going around the table, everybody sharing everything they know with everybody and everybody included, usually the FBI director, Robert Mueller, who of course I also got to know very well. The NSA director, Mike Hayden was part of the group. And just a number of people around the Washington area who needed to know. Somebody would pop in from the National Security Council.
- [18:18]
Jesse
Was Stephen Hadley part of it?
- [18:19]
Rolf Moat Larson
Stephen Hadley was often involved and everything was brief, raw. The President was told everything that night. First thing in the morning, he was briefed by Bob Mueller and George Tenet together, the FBI and CIA directors. And then we would come in ad hoc and I would go in and I outlined some of the most important moments of briefing the President when there was something extraordinary from my area and I felt an immense responsibility. So the answer, the short answer to your question is I would brief the President when there was a possibility we were going to get hit with a biological or nuclear attack because something was developing and he needed to know because usually it was something that we couldn't, we didn't know. Exactly. The timing. And we weren't entirely sure of the. The accuracy or the providence of the threat, but we knew he needed to know because we don't want him to read about it with us when it happens. And, for example, probably the most important of my whole experience with the President was when I briefed him that. Right. Three weeks before we invaded Iraq. So now we're talking 2003. We obtained information that a notorious terrorist that my people were tracking, his name was Abu Musaba. He's a famous jihadist. He was head of Al Qaeda in Iraq later, but this is before the invasion, so this information's very privileged at the time. And I had briefed the President several times on him and his network and how they were trying to obtain these weapons. And I came In, I said, Mr. President, I have bad news. The only people in the Oval Office were me, George Tenet, and George Bush. George H.W. bush. He was in a wheelchair at the time. So it was an amazing sight for me as a citizen. And I have to say to your.
- [20:10]
Jesse
Listeners, you know, so w. And his father.
- [20:14]
Rolf Moat Larson
And his father and George and me. That was it. In the Oval Office.
- [20:16]
Jesse
Wow.
- [20:17]
Rolf Moat Larson
For an hour.
- [20:18]
Jesse
Wow.
- [20:19]
Rolf Moat Larson
And I have to tell you, as an American, I had goosebumps.
- [20:23]
Jesse
Yeah.
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Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah. And everything I briefed the President, you know, all I had from dealing with, everybody I dealt with at that level was they were incredibly dedicated to serving this country. They were incredibly dedicated to doing the right thing. All the things you hear. The president is very smart. He remembered everything from the previous. I don't even know how he did it, frankly. He would recall the facts of the previous time I talked to him. If it was a month earlier or two months or whatever, he'd remember. So this time I told him, we know where he is. He's in this camp in northeast Iraq. Now, remember, this is three weeks before we invaded Iraq. So I said to the president, he's here. And I had the overhead imagery of the camp, and I had a nominated board with all the jihadist terrorists that were working with him, and him on the top, his picture is mugged. And the President, who already knew him well, said, rolf, what would you do if you were me? Now, when I briefed the President, I hope this is reassuring to your listeners. As I tried to make it, I did it as a citizen. Like, I'm not putting any of my spin or influence on anything. I'm telling the President there's no Rolf agenda. That was my key test. I had facts, I had things to say. I never Went beyond the. And that day we had had an internal discussion on exactly what I should say to the president about what I'm describing, including that we shouldn't do anything. We should let this play out. And I was too close to the invasion. But when he looked at me and he said that, I started to say what I was told to say, and he knew me too well, so he said, look, I don't want to know what they are telling you to tell me. What do you think I should do?
- [22:00]
Jesse
What were you told to say?
- [22:01]
Rolf Moat Larson
I was told to say we shouldn't bomb it. We shouldn't attack it, because it could, you know, the invasion. And I was already. Because I was obsessed with this terrorist. I was obsessed, and I knew that it was an unhealthy obsession. I had been known to be slightly obsessive in work, hopefully not other things. But it turned out that my look betrayed me because I was so zealously telling him, here he is, here they are. He goes, no, I mean, what would you do if you were me? You're telling me not to do anything, but you're saying that something else. I think you're thinking something else. So I looked at the director, and he just gave me the. Like. He asked you the question. He didn't ask me the question. He asked you the question. You answered the question. And I looked at the director, looked back at the president. I said, Mr. President, I'd bomb it. So nobody said anything. He went on meeting. He didn't seem, plus, you know, nonplussed by the whole thing or anything. We're driving back in the director's car to this agency headquarters, and he says, well, oh. I said to him, well, should I have said that? He goes, he asked you. You told him, I have no problem with it. He goes, typical. Now, when you get back to our building, you make sure you tell everybody what you said. And of course, there's no one thing I like to. I think I emphasized in my book the right and the wrong and who's to blame is so much less on our minds when we're doing things than people think it is. Like we're just trying to make do the right thing, and sometimes we do, and sometimes we don't.
- [23:36]
Jesse
Yes. Speaking of this pivotal moment, and at least from the kind of public perception, you know, intelligence failure, wrongdoing, people think of the overall invasion of Iraq, which is not, you know, for. For the audience at all, what you're talking about with this targeted bombing of Zarqawi, they think of that as an intelligence failure because they think of us as having tagged Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction when he never had any. And, you know, maybe at most he used, you know, biological weapons in Kuwait, which is horrible. And he was, you know, a very bad guy.
- [24:13]
Rolf Moat Larson
Right.
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Jesse
But, you know, maybe this was this kind of, you know, huge waste of money lives and created this kind of void or vacuum for which ISIS ironically to actually take root, which kind of ended up radicalizing the region even more. So. Yeah, I'm sure you were thinking deeply about this at the time. What do you think happened there?
- [24:40]
Rolf Moat Larson
I struggled with whether I should include this, but I consider resigning when we invaded Iraq.
- [24:45]
Jesse
Really?
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Rolf Moat Larson
And I noted that briefly. I didn't get into it in any detail.
- [24:50]
Jesse
So you were against it?
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Rolf Moat Larson
I was against the war philosophically. But some of my colleagues were also feeling it was gonna be a disaster. The idea that we didn't know that it would turn out badly. I think most people had the most experience knew this was going to turn out badly. Now the decision to do it, at least I believe, and I can't say there's a lot of It's a split decision of views on this. I. I don't see any intent for the administration to deceive anybody that by saying Saddam had WMD and he didn't, it was a failure, a massive failure to conclude that it was based on bad sources, which is usually the origin of all bad decisions and intelligences. When you have dubious sources or bad sources. These were both sources that didn't know much and were overrepresented and fabricating information, we call it when you're making up information. And on that basis we made it terr decision is my view. But it was exacerbated by the idea that even if it had been the right decision, the result probably would have been the same because we couldn't control Iraq like we couldn't control Afghanistan. And it didn't take. I have a chapter in my book where I'm talking to the vice president, Dick Cheney, who I got to know exceptionally well also, where he just called me in on a weekend from the White House. I came in on a Sunday to talk to him about why are we losing the war by the summer of 2003. This is six months after our invasion. But I didn't say. What I was really thinking was, you know, sorry, Dick, but if you don't know what's going on here, I can't help you. And then I was really, like, worried that we didn't seem to know what we were up against. And that was the real shocker to me of Iraq, wasn't that we made a mistake in the invasion side. As bad as that was that we didn't know what we were getting into.
- [26:43]
Jesse
What's the most on the brink the world has been that you can talk about?
- [26:50]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, the Soviet Union had collapsed. And the biggest worry in Congress and in Washington's mind, which we had almost no inkling of in Moscow, where we're actually doing the work, was that one of these nukes would end up in rogue states or terrorists. And the US Government at that time launched a heroic, really heroic effort with the Russians to try to account for every nuclear weapon, the so called suitcase nukes. Nukes aren't just missiles that come in and destroy the world. That's really the answer to your question. My biggest worry was the world will blow up. Literally. There's nothing fun about trying to stop terrorists with nukes. There's certainly nothing fun about trying to recover nukes in a country that's just lost control of its entire empire, like Russia had in 1991. 2 and 3. So I'd say that answers two things. It answers kind of what the biggest big. There are a lot of things to worry about in the world. You know, there's biotechnology, there's AI, there's nuclear. But nuclear weapons are still for me, the king of the hill, because it can happen that fast and we won't even be aware if we're not really serious about stopping it from happening.
- [28:03]
Jesse
Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're in a scary world right now where you have all these kind of, you know, this asymmetric warfare and all these capabilities and then all this ability for, if you're China or Russia or some sort of larger adversary to gain plausible deniability and act through sort of rogue actors. But I want to back up and just talk about. You've had these kind of mystical downloads, and I want to talk about the first one. You were kind of a nihilistic youth at West Point. What happened?
- [28:37]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, you know, there was a. A point in my life when I was. I had combined my interest in knowing truth to an extreme where I was receptive to whatever input I would get to the point I pushed myself to an extreme. I had had experiences where I had dreams that came true. And I realized that I started thinking about consciousness and subconsciousness and these were things that were affecting me in terms of being receptive to the idea that there's way more out there than we see in logic and reason or even if you add intuition to that, right. And so at West Point I did these dream experiences. I talk a little bit on the book. They were kind of childish in a way and not very scientific. But then when I graduated, I went to Fort Knox as an armor officer. I was going to go to the Czech border as an arm guy. And they started to become much more vivid. And the first briefing was I got actually in the army, a secret briefing was on the Russian nuclear threat in Europe at that time, because I was going to go out and be what they call the covering force. We were literally the closest American forces on the border to confront the Soviet hordes. Now this was in 1976, so we're talking eight years after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. So everything is very real and palpable. And the Germans were depending on us to defend them and the whole world in a sense. And part of that briefing was the idea that we had tactical nuclear weapons. We would fire on them if they invaded. And that was a shock to me. That was my first introduction to nuclear weapons in a context of war, which nowadays when we listen to where this gone full circle, we listen to Vladimir Putin talking about using nukes in Ukraine. We have to think about this idea of nuclear weapons. The tables have been reversed. Back then we needed them because we were afraid of being invaded. And he's using them now. What he regards to be if Russia's existence is threatened by NATO in the west, he would use them too, which is really what he said. So the point being, at the time I'm in this kind of mode and my friends and I are all going through this together, the ones four of us, kind of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. And so I had this incredibly vivid dream in the midst of all this at Fort Knox, where I dreamt that I was in a battle like a battle of Armageddon. It's the first time the mystical things turned. I would call turned religious or religious history. When I became a big advocate or hobbyist in eschatology, which means the theology of the end of days, which I kind of now I hobby in it because it's such a. It started then, the roots of it, but I didn't understand that at the time. And it was just such vivid dream. And in the dream these numbers appeared, so there were no voices. I couldn't hear anything. And the whole everything was black. So I'm in a dream state or scape in which I can't see. I could sort of smell like, you know, the acrid smoke and things like that. That was around me and I was aware of these forces gathering for great confrontation. And in that sort of context of I would say an apocalypse, it didn't necessarily have to be at the time, but I saw these numbers roll out in cubes and it all was around 747. So the number 747 becomes a lifelong number for me, like a mystical number.
- [32:25]
Jesse
What does it mean to you?
- [32:26]
Rolf Moat Larson
To me? Well, I don't know actually, which is one of the reasons I wrote the book, I don't know. But I think it has to be a divine number. It has to be something related to what I later became, which was a watchman for terrorism and these kinds of things. In my professional life, in my religious life, I was getting more and more interested in understanding what these numbers would mean. So I've done everything from read Nikola Tesla's Obsession because the numbers were 3, 6, 9, 12, 18, 27 and 40. So they're cubes.
- [33:02]
Jesse
So first you get 747, first I get 747.
- [33:05]
Rolf Moat Larson
Then these cubes kind of are circling in the smoke. They were cubes and the cubes were these numbers, 3, 6. Well the 3 and the 6 were one cube, but they kept spinning. So it could be three or six or nine or both, right? Because they turn right. I would never realize that if I hadn't seen. Sounds silly because of course they. And but it was not a. And then the rest of the. All of course, except for 40. A variation or a multiple of 3, 3 cubes, 27, 3, 9, 12, 12 tribes, 40 days and 49. I started to ascribe what had to be religious meanings to the numbers, but I didn't understand why I was receiving them. Like what was the point? I began to think as I lay it out. I tried to do it in a very systematic way in the course of my book when I would see the numbers and why subsequent. But you asked me the first time and I have to say a word to my wife before I'll say how the numbers get completed because that wouldn't be till I was in Germany after the course when I met my wife. She was a German, just girlfriend, we're carousing. She was as nihilistic as I was for lots of reasons. And we were just party animals like. And we had no interest in long term hookup or what became three kids and nine grandkids in our life 54 years up to now. And she's in many ways the opposite of me, just practical. Get stuff done. To this day I Mean, we're like real opposites. I'm philosophical, kind of all over the place. She's like, feet on the ground. Get you through the. With our kids, everything was always that way. And it served me great. Cause I had a tether and she'd always reel me back in. But that night, she was really disjointed and she woke up. Because she's always joked, she said, never. And I never told her this dream. I didn't want my girlfriend to think I was completely nuts. Right? Logical thought when you're 19, 20, of course. But she wakes up, she goes, I just had a really strange dream. I said, what? She said, well, we were at the Schwandorf, which is the town next to the town I was garrisoned, which is Amber, Germany. And Schwandorf was less than a half hour away. And there's a large church on a hill. There's a Catholic church. And she said, I was in by the church now. We had gone. That was our favorite discotheque was in that town. We met all our friends there three, four nights a week. It was like carousing. Party time, as I'm saying. And she says, it was night. I was alone. You weren't with me. I'm never there without you. She was never in that town without me. And she said, but I was going down an alleyway along the church. We knew the geography of it. It was coming down a big hill. And I went to the end of this alleyway. And as I came, approached the end, dim light, just some lights on the church on the side. I saw your desk. And I approached a desk, and there was a chair behind it. And the desk was facing me. And there were numbers cubes on your desk with numbers on them. Whoa. And I said, I started almost hyperventilate, but I didn't want to say anything. I said, do you remember what the numbers were, by any chance? She said, well, how could I forget? Of course. It was like I woke up with all the numbers. That's why I just woke up, because I remember it was 3, 6, 6, 9, 12.
- [36:28]
Jesse
No way.
- [36:29]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah.
- [36:29]
Jesse
Yeah, it was the same numbers.
- [36:30]
Rolf Moat Larson
Same numbers. One additional number, 49. Wow. So now, just to say one last thing, on my wife as a witness, like for me, for no one else. For me, I needed this. It's almost like a sanity check. I said, well, I told her then, of course, about my dreams. I never told her that before. That to this day, 54 years later, well, 55, 56, whatever it is, 1978 is when that started, she said, well, I don't want to read your book. I don't want to talk about this anymore. She had that kind of a reaction to it, but it doesn't in any way diminish. She knows the truth of it. She knows the truth of all of it because she was a witness to all of it. Everything in my book, the earliest mystical experiences were around numbers and war and the final sort of bearing testimony to the truth, because you have to. Again, I stress to everybody, don't start thinking you're having these things. Like you need very deep authentication, very deep testing of your own mind. Are things like this true or not true? I just want to assure anybody listening to any of this that I put myself through all that in great detail at great depth. Test, test, test, test. You know, in the end, you start to know, is this of God? Is this of God? That's the essence of it. If it's of you, if it's of your imagination, if it's of someone else, put it in your mind. It could be anybody.
- [38:04]
Jesse
Did she have any prior knowledge of the numbers that you received in your download before she had her dream?
- [38:09]
Rolf Moat Larson
No, no, none.
- [38:10]
Jesse
Wow.
- [38:12]
Rolf Moat Larson
And the other part, which you know, and I had to actually test my. Because remember, all this is happening in the non interrad. I couldn't look anything up. But right after my, you know, in the same time I'm having these dreams, two other things that now inform me that's all they were. They inform me. A perfect stranger walked up to me in a fish restaurant. It was Long John Silver's. I don't think they're around anymore. There's a fish restaurant, like a fast food restaurant called Long John Silver's, but you go there for fish, which I rarely did. I go McDonald's, but one of our friends says, so the four of us were gathered there, the Four Musketeers, or my friends at West Point Point graduates who all went to Germany together and all experienced all these things I'm saying and partied together. We're sitting in the restaurant and this guy walks right up to me, who I describe in the book and says, read Ezekiel, Daniel, Revelations, and walked away. We all looked at each other like, okay. I mean, there's nothing you do with that. It's just like, that's very strange, but it's coming at the same time. All this other stuff, which he knew nothing about, obviously.
- [39:16]
Jesse
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Podcast Host
Selling merch could be. We talked to a dozen different platforms and companies comparing shipping tools, payment options, website builders, and it all felt like way more of a headache and complicated.
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Jesse
Than it should be.
- [39:34]
Podcast Host
We decided on Shopify, and within days, our store was up. Everything was running cleanly in an automated.
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Jesse
Way so we could just focus on.
- [39:42]
Podcast Host
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- [40:12]
Jesse
A niche like alternative tech, UFOs or.
- [40:15]
Podcast Host
Fringe science, and when you have a.
- [40:16]
Jesse
Very clear brand vision.
- [40:18]
Podcast Host
Plus, their AI tools help write descriptions, organize products, even clean up photos so we can focus on what matters and what we care about. Building the best custom merch line possible.
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Jesse
With the coolest designs like our UFO cowboy tee and the Atomic Age tee.
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Podcast Host
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Jesse
We can see where our orders come.
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Podcast Host
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Jesse
That's just one example, but Shopify really makes your life easier.
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Podcast Host
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Jesse
The state of the art solution in E commerce.
- [41:28]
Rolf Moat Larson
And the final experience, which is just the basis, this is just the foundation for things in the future was when I was at the course getting a lecture on the assembly and disassembly of the M60 tank engine. Now you have to understand at the time I'm very nihilistic or whatever, but I'm also very. I've always been very creative and always wanted to be a writer even at that time. So I'm imagining. And I was so bored in the class, I was like, that's when I realized I'm not very good at tank stuff. You know, I mean, I ended up being, you know, I learned forced Learning I was, I was good it my profession as a tank commander of troops in the army while I was in it. But I didn't really like it. And this was the worst of all which was learning about maintenance related things on tanks. So I'm writing, I'm doodling. So I decided oh, I'd come up with a name for myself as a author. I'll be Frederick Wolf. So I wrote Frederick Wolf. Now that was in honor of two things I admired at the time. Again, young this is typical of the way I was thinking at the time. Nietzsche, who was my favorite Friedrich Nietzsche. But you know, Frederick kind of adaptation of Nietzsche, who I'm obsessed. I was obsessed with even at West Point. I go through some stories of Nietzsche and mainly because he fit this idea of, you know, to know yourself, you have to free yourself. You have to free and even of God. You have to free yourself of all constraints on who you are and confront yourself as to who you are. Which was also a theme at that time of a lot of the novels fiction I like to read particularly Hermann Hess at the Hesse at the time in Steppenwolf Wolf. So the wolf came from that Frederick, the man searching for his true nature, his true character. I'm willing to lay it all out there as a, you know, again, brass brash guy. And so then I said what will be my first short story? I'll write it here in this class. Well, I decided I called it on suicides Suicide note.
- [43:30]
Jesse
Why did you choose that?
- [43:32]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, I, I thought it'd be. I chose it because it seemed like a really dark, deep, deep theme to write about it. So I imagine the note was the note I would leave if I actually committed suicide. So it was like if I left a note now because I don't want to encourage this thinking anybody out there. And I came to my senses, so to speak. But I was getting into the novelistic. In fact the irony was I've never in my life felt in the slightest bit suicidal ever, ever. And I attribute a lot of that to my faith and belief because I'm also inveterate optimist. Even in the future of the world, even with all the dark things I've talked about war and apocalypse and Armageddon. And I'm actually very optimistic about it because it's all tied to this God I know is a loving God. This God is the creator. God means everything around you. In nature you can see God and how wonderful it is. It's this personable God you can talk and interact with who loves you who wants you to love him. So how can you not be an optimist if that's your perspective? So I had that perspective even then because I hadn't forgotten the childhood things in my life that made me feel that way. But I'm going to go down this dark road because it's interesting. And one of my inspirations was Camus, the philosopher, who was obsessed by the question and mused that maybe the only really relevant question to think about was, is life worth living? Because you have complete control of your life from that very basic way of looking at it. So I wrote this thing and that's when I had these dreams. And at that same time, this is all happening concurrent with what I've talked about. So I realized I was getting in way too dark, way too deep. And then the dreams were exacerbating my thinking again. Never got negative or self destructive. That's the funny part. And I'm convinced I could have kept plowing down that deeper, deep, that tunnel deeper and deeper without ever hurting myself or anybody or anything. But that's not necessarily for other people. Something I would advise, right. But it all culminated in the next day. I said, oh, gotta clear my head, let's go play golf. So we were all terrible golfers, but we like to go hacking at golf at Fort Knox, a military golf course right on the base. So we went golfing. And you can look this up if you need to, because I couldn't for years to actually look up on the Internet what I experienced as we're golfing. It was going to be a stormy day. Of course, that fits. It has to be a stormy day with thunder and stuff. But we went anyway, being irreverent. And at one point we reached. I'm trying to shoot to the hole, straight over this cemetery. And of course the ball hooks, there's an iron hooks into the cemetery. And I'm feeling very non respectful, just in a bad mood, let's just put it that way. So I remember climbing over the wall. I go over wondering where the grave is with the ball. And I saw it's sitting right centered on this very small gray oval grave in the ground. And I walk up to the ball, it's right centered on the ball. I said, I wonder who's trapped my ball. Kind of. That literally was what I was thinking again, really tempting fate. I was really tempting fate. And it says, frederick Wolf, German soldier, died November 5, 1944. I had no idea who this guy was, but I know that my birthday's on November 5th, 1954.
- [47:08]
Jesse
Whoa.
- [47:10]
Rolf Moat Larson
And I just dropped my club and. And completely freaked out by the experience at the time because I realized there's no way that could be coincidence. That's the night where I had the 747 dream.
- [47:24]
Jesse
That's fascinating. Did you try to find anything out about the historical Frederick?
- [47:29]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yes, and I did. And he was a German soldier who, after World War II, was sent to Fort Knox as a prisoner of war. And he was involved in like a little mini German uprising over conditions there. And he was shot, shot by the guards and killed. And then he, of course, buried there. I don't know why his body wasn't sent back to Germany. I never found that level of detail. But it became also kind of this very interesting connectivity because I was going to Germany.
- [48:00]
Jesse
Do you think there's something apocalyptic going on? Because this guy goes up to you, he says, read Daniel, Ezekiel, Revelations. All of those books are kind of notably apocalyptic. You're dreaming of this sort of Armageddon like thing happening.
- [48:17]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, yes. And the ways I would tie that together would be. So the first apocalyptic. Well, future dream. Now we were talking Ezekiel, Daniel, Revelations. I mentioned the person who walked up to me at that time. That's another thing I did. I filed that away and I didn't think about it much more, but it was always there. I kept it there. It's going to serve a purpose later. I didn't think that at the time time, actually, but it did. And one of the purposes was after 9 11, I realized, oh, I get it. I'm Ezekiel's watchman. It's my duty to warn the people, which is really the quintessential CIA officer's role. I mean, it is in a very modest way. I don't want to make this sound too huge, humongous. It's just that's what we should do. If we don't do that, there's not much purpose for what we do. And I realized it was much more specific in my case because my first dream, which I chronicle in the book, was Sadat's assassination, September 6, 1981, where I was there. I was on the scene when he was gunned down on a parade field. The interesting thing about it, I wasn't thinking about Assad. I didn't even know the event was taking place the day he was assassinated. And of course, given the time change between where I was at Fort Bliss, Texas, at the time, as an army officer, this is right before I joined the agency where he was killed in Cairo. It was the exact timing I Woke up in the middle of the night having had the dream. And I remembered it in every detail, watching in slow motion while gunmen pulled machine guns out of their cloaks and shot him dead and a number of others. And I pictured this thing so I couldn't verify any of that until the next day. Again, no Internet. And it was reading it in the papers.
- [50:06]
Jesse
Did all the details line up of what happened?
- [50:09]
Rolf Moat Larson
Every detail, including the timing. It was just impeccable. And I did do one additional thing.
- [50:14]
Jesse
Was there an example of a small detail that you dreamt of that was corroborated the next day?
- [50:19]
Rolf Moat Larson
I think. Well, the most important detail which I was tying into 911 was among the. It's never been entirely established, but it certainly was in my mind that Eamonn Zawahiri, who was of course deputy head of Al Qaeda, later the chief of Al Qaeda, was bin Laden's lieutenant. Right. He was one the of, of the conspirators that pulled it out. And I mean, weirdly remember him. And another guy named Sayfa Adel, who was the number three guy in Al Qaeda. Now he's the head of Al Qaeda. So two of the people I pictured in my dream became the heads of Al Qaeda after Bin Laden was killed.
- [51:00]
Jesse
And you know, they were implicated in Sadat's assassination.
- [51:02]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, it's not 100%, but I did in my journal. But if you Google it, you'll see they probably were.
- [51:10]
Jesse
So it's like you remote viewed the event or something, or time traveled or.
- [51:14]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, it felt like that and it felt like it because it happened at the same time. And the more important thing is.
- [51:20]
Jesse
Or bilocated or something.
- [51:21]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah, well, I had no reason to be thinking of this. This is the other, I think, compelling thing. Many experiences, particularly as you get into the Virgin Mary and things that later happened to me later there was no logical explanation why I went in that direction except for the warning theme. The idea that was building up to a series of serve as a watchman, serve as a messenger.
- [51:50]
Jesse
I want to go through the numbers themselves because I think they're fascinating and I think of 747. We were talking earlier, actually before we started rolling. You have the Seven Story Mountain is by Thomas Merton and he is one of many mystics where the number seven is this extremely important number. I just had this guy on, Peter Lavenda, and he wrote a book called Stairway to Heaven, which is a book about celestial ascent, traditions across history, the Merkabah, the Ziggurat, the Hecalote, the Arete, all of these things contain seven levels. Even esoteric orders like Rosicrucianism, you have to go through seven levels and, and leave a garment at each level or whatever. It's always discarding or passing a test at each level. And so I think of seven as sort of something celestial and then four is the ascent or conversion into matter or something. And then seven is like the reascent into the celestial. And so maybe there's something around fallen angels or fallen celestial beings, the fall of man or something. And that seems really important with that first number.
- [53:00]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that's entirely, not only plausible, but I think the track you're on is probably true. I mean, it's hard to. You just have to continue to explore it and see what insights it renders. That's the bigger challenge, is never to think of it as reached a conclusion, a continuous journey and almost a non ending journey to infinity on these subjects. But to understand, to see the associations may be more important than being able to analyze the association completely thoroughly. Because the moment you thoroughly analyze it and you're sort of done with it, it means you've closed your mind to other possible interpretations. Since we're in such a broad vista of reality, really what it is, exploring a reality that's very broad. There's not a lot of evidence we have through our normal application of language, logic and reason. Which is why again, numbers help because they take communication on a far more objective level. But most people, including me, we're not that facile at using numbers in the ways that the real geniuses can with numbers. And the people have defined for us what the numbers mean just for physics. I marvel at what some of the great mathematicians have produced and the insight they've gotten from just looking into things that seem to have no purpose, much less something with a purpose. So I think you're onto something there.
- [54:31]
Jesse
Well, let's keep going. So then you have three, six or nine is three maybe. I mean, have you thought of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, the Holy Ghost? Six or nine? Six, you know, the amount of days before the earth was created. Maybe in Genesis or something. Does nine mean anything to you?
- [54:51]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, it's three threes, you know, it just continues a pattern of where there's an emphasis of three, you know, 12 being lots of things like 12 tribes.
- [55:04]
Jesse
And 12 tribes, yeah.
- [55:10]
Rolf Moat Larson
40 days and 40 nights. Of course, the temptation of Christ among 40 years for the Exodus, for the Jewish people under Moses. I mean, there's just lots of religious significance. But I hesitate that like you've done well, you know, far more than I do about the way it ties into other fields and other potential explanations that broaden really from religion. One thing I've done with ongoing satisfaction, I have no conclusion, is reach out to physicists that have. I've had a number of physicists contact me who've read my book, and those are very interesting, or I've given my book to some other physicist. And through my time at Department of Energy, I spent three years as the head of Intelligence and Counterintelligence at the Department of energy between 2005 and 08, and then beyond that, especially when I continued the nuclear stuff, but expanded it a great deal. DOE is an incredible organization. We have what they call the America's National Laboratories, all based in Department of Energy. So it's been an amazing ride for me to get connected to all these incredibly smart people who could probably be doing anything, don't have to work at lower pay in most cases for the US Government doing things, but do it because they want to serve the country too. So there's all those kinds of people out there that I get to know, but the physicists, that I've given them a challenge, which is kind of what you're doing with the numbers. I said, look, read my book, or you read my book. I now want to know more than ever what's the physics behind mysticism. There have to be physics behind it. It's not something that belongs to a different reality. It's part of our reality. It happens in this world. Therefore, there has to be an E equals mc. It has to be a quantum or relativity, space, time. All have to be taken into account as to what happened and how to explain it.
- [57:11]
Jesse
Have you ever gotten a satisfactory answer?
- [57:15]
Rolf Moat Larson
Nothing that I would describe as answering the question, but I have gotten the kind of encouragement I need that it's not a silly question. That's kind of what I'm looking for.
- [57:26]
Jesse
I mean, the most interesting scientists, whether it be Einstein or, or, you know, Heisenberg has an apocryphal quote that's often attributed to him where it's like the first sip of the science, you know, the bottle or whatever, leaves you an atheist. But when you get to the bottom, you know, there lies God.
- [57:43]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah.
- [57:44]
Jesse
And, you know, so, so, okay, so that's good. So they don't think it's all, you know, that's like a bad. That's a bad framing, at least for. For inquiry.
- [57:51]
Rolf Moat Larson
And you know what Einstein said?
- [57:52]
Jesse
What did he say?
- [57:53]
Rolf Moat Larson
I want to know God's Thoughts. The rest are details. Wow, that's a great quote from Einstein.
- [57:59]
Jesse
That's a really great quote for somebody whose theory has basically become the modern scientific paradigm.
- [58:07]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, I think almost all the great physicists, I would say, were great ones that I certainly have become hobbyists of. I'll never quite grasp the full math and science aspects of it, of course, but like Paul Dirac, people like that, I encourage people to. Which I used to do when I. You imagine a layperson like me, not a scientist, or taking on weapons of mass destruction and trying to stop terrorists from getting bombs and biological weapons. And one of the biggest skeptics, you know, skepticism I encountered was the Russians were really good. I went to Moscow to lecture them and brought a bunch of people so they could stop this stuff in Russia and other places. And it's one of the old Russians I knew from way back when we were. Were catching and recruiting and catching spies. Hey, you know, Ralph, we know, you know, you. You don't know anything about this stuff. So that's why I brought all these other people. Listen to them. Don't listen to me. I'm not. I'm not. If you notice, I'm not telling you the science. They are. I'm pulling it together because you have to establish science is irrelevant without understanding the consequence of science. And I used to say that to DOE scientists. Quite often, if you can't explain this in layman's term and make it relevant to real people, people like everybody listening to this, if we make it irrelevant to them in their lives, then we've lost our sense of mission. So the idea with the idea of the physicists, I asked them, I tasked them, I would call it, jokingly come back to me with some plausible explanation. The biggest roadblock I've encountered from talking to real men of science on this, or women of science, is they say, well, the problem we have is you almost have to create alternative, not universes per se, but space dimensions in the universe in which things occur that we can't experimentally measure. And that becomes our problem because good physicists will say anything I can't experimentally confirm or measure is not. And I would say, this is me talking. So anybody listening could easily contradict me on this if they know more. But I've reconciled quantum and relativity is a problem of scale, nothing else. It's just, to me, it's the idea that you're measuring things at two different extremes, but the underlying reality, there's no conflict. It's the same reality measured in different scales. So we have to start thinking of when we have these mystical experiences, thinking of them as things that happen at scale. But maybe there is no time and maybe there's not even motion. Maybe the idea of an angel. Angel of going between two different. That's why we put wings on angels. Right. It's a tradition is this medium of coming from a world at rest into a world in motion and needing to somehow cross over that divide and that barrier. That's just the way I think of it. So I haven't solved any of these things. But you asked the question of how do you think of them? And all I can say is you open your mind to all kinds of potential explanations.
- [61:16]
Jesse
And the truth is, you know, everybody, you know, I come from UFO world, you talked about your history at the doe, and we will get into some questions there. But you know, I think a lot of people in, you know, in that world think of the truth as something to be disclosed. Like you can say it prosaically and I don't think that's the case at all.
- [61:34]
Rolf Moat Larson
Right.
- [61:34]
Jesse
Like, you know, I always find it interesting. You know, St. Thomas Aquinas was like working on his Sumo theologica, this like rational explanation of God. And I think he had this conversion kind of moment while he was in mass and it was like this mystical experience. And then he stopped speaking after that. There's a scientist, I think his name is Mishka Gregory Perlman, and he's in Siberia right now. And he's known in theoretical physics world as one of the top best guys. And I've even talked to some people who are, you know, if anybody's like sitting on like a, you know, a theory of everything that like marries, you know, general relativity and quantum mechanics, it's probably this guy. And like he, I think he claims that he has like a unified theory and he just won't talk. And so there is this something very interesting about, you know, it's so unmaybe the truth is just so hard to like grapple with. And there's a translation function between like what a person knows and then what they can even describe to, you know, the world. Like, that's a really hard thing to do. There isn't some Archimedean point where like everybody instantaneously gets it all at once and it's just this. It's a semantic truth. But yeah, anyways.
- [62:57]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, the only thing I'd add to that, because I think that's so important too, is as you approach unification of like understanding the nature of all reality. In some equation form or something that could be expressed through physics or mathematics. You are in fact getting closer to what I would describe as what I think of God as, which isn't the head of the Catholic Church or the Protestant church. It's the entity of the creator God and the personal God. On the creator God level. If, you know, on the religious side of that, the idea of God, Yahweh, you couldn't even say it. So you develop a term that you couldn't even pronounce so it gets a little bit backward, like a Perlman who's. If he is at some level where he can no longer talk about it. I think that tends to happen when you reach a point of insight that just you're overwhelmed by the profundity, if that makes sense of what you're looking into.
- [63:50]
Jesse
I want to switch gears because we talk forever on all this stuff, but you have had direct experiences with, with the Virgin Mary, and that is a really rare thing for somebody with your background and in your position to say. Can you go into those experiences and describe them as sort of viscerally as you can?
- [64:14]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yes. For me, it's the most important part of the book.
- [64:23]
Podcast Host
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Jesse
Plan.
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Podcast Host
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Jesse
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- [65:20]
Podcast Host
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- [66:12]
Jesse
To support the show.
- [66:16]
Rolf Moat Larson
So the story was in 1991 when I was in Greece, I went on a pilgrimage to Mount Athos, Greece, which is an Orthodox mountain that's something akin to the Vatican in Greek Orthodoxy Orthodox world. It's 20 monasteries on this amazing peninsula that juts out by Thessaloniki up in northern Greece, right. And I got a three day diplomatic visa to go with Diplomat, the diplomats club. But I did it with a calculation in mind, a work related reason pretext which was I had been given a tip by a Greek very close to the President Prime Minister of Greece about a monk at Mount Athos who was actually a Russian intelligence officer who was getting cover and changing his identity to go on a mission to the US on behalf of Russian intelligence and would be undercover at a Russian Orthodox church in the US to do God knows what. But he would have just wonderful cover to be in the US So it was an amazing tip. I didn't solicit it or it came to me. They came to me with the tip and handed me the file so I could read it. And then I resolved to go up there and investigate through direct contact.
- [67:36]
Jesse
So you're looking for this spy who's going undercover as a monk in Mount Athos and then you go to Mount Athos and then what happens?
- [67:45]
Rolf Moat Larson
I'm going through an all night, experiencing an all night service at the small catholicon of monastery Dionysio, which is one of the monasteries on a huge cliff. And I was just, they were very relaxed on, you know, how I wasn't Orthodox to begin with, which the monks all knew I was just a visitor. I just described myself as a Christian. And so I go out and I'm sitting at this. I fell asleep sort of napping on this stone chair facing the church, little church on the hill in a stone courtyard, all stone courtyard, very severe, very severe looking. Thousand year stones, thousand year walls, a thousand year throne that I'm. There was only chair, I'd call it carved in the stone wall I was sitting at. Reminded me of the scene out of like Conan the Barbarian or something, you know, it really was that kind of a feeling. And with the waves rushing, crashing against the sea, crashing against the walls way below, hundreds of feet below me, you know, and beautiful. Just absolutely gorgeous, you know, amazed, mesmerizing. Balmy day. So I'm just relaxed, sitting there, fall asleep. That's when I immediately went into this dream state. I realized this is one of those, like, that's what had started to happen to me. I knew when one of those men. It was not a usual dream. So your description of. Was it time travel? I mean, I would say that's a possibility. I mean, I don't know. I can't. But I felt like it was something happening.
- [69:32]
Jesse
And first you go to 1800s Paris.
- [69:36]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yes, I go to 1800 Paris. And I just walking down these 18th century Paris streets and I'm walking to a. Bravo. I just want to see what's going on. And that's kind of a typical me thing. And that's when I encounter what turned out to be the Virgin Mary. Didn't call herself that, but I just felt that without an introduction and this one open door, door was open. And it was like all the others. It had like a waistback with soiled condoms and things, you know, and it looked awful. It was blood on the sheets. And I was thinking, oh, this is awful. And I looked at the woman and she just looked at me with these imploring eyes. Just like the suffering of the world was on her, weight on her shoulder. What better place to be to feel that with the exploitation and things of this place. And it's just the gravity of that hit me because I'd also seen a scene where like a rotund priest is, of course, this is coming unbeknownst to me, you know, kind of at the height of the sex scandals in the Catholic Church and things too. So I don't. I'm not tying these things together, but it just, it was very depraved. And I felt, I felt the depravity. I felt nauseous in my own dream. And then, yeah, I walk outside the brothel and this guy meet this guy outside and he says, basically you're odious Maximus and go atone for your sins kind of conversation I have with this guy Harry Hiller, which was one of the characters from Hermann Hess's Steppenwolf. And Harry Hiller basically encourages me to go to Mount Athos to sponge myself or find clarity or salvation or whatever I could find.
- [71:12]
Jesse
So, okay, so you're in 1800s Paris, you meet Harry Hiller, you see this scene and you're confident that this is the Virgin Mary in this brothel.
- [71:20]
Rolf Moat Larson
Because of it was a conclusion I reached not at the time, but only after it became a pattern, if that makes sense. So at the time, I wasn't entirely sure who this old woman went, other than she didn't fit. And I could feel the suffering which became a common. Every encounter with the Virgin Mary, there was an element of the weight of her suffering for the world, for the fate of the world. In particular, for the fate of people who are suffering for the pain and the agony of others. This is the common feeling. I had each of the experiences, but I didn't know that at the moment. I just knew that, wow, this is certainly disruptive. So when I continued the journey dream.
- [72:04]
Jesse
Did you feel love coming from her or.
- [72:08]
Rolf Moat Larson
I didn't particularly feel love. I felt more pathos.
- [72:15]
Jesse
Like her ultimate empathy for everything and all suffering and all beings or something.
- [72:21]
Rolf Moat Larson
Nothing so much directed towards me. I think I put in my mind, more than something, a vibe she gave was the idea that, man, I shouldn't be here.
- [72:31]
Jesse
Did she say anything to you? No. Do you. Have you thought of the symbolism of her being in a brothel where all this kind of corrupt, horrible deeds are being done or whatever? Do you think of that as somehow significant after that?
- [72:50]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, yes. I mean, certainly not at that time again, but certainly looking back, I realize how it fits so well into the subsequent encounters. And the pattern being, okay, you want an image. You want images of what I mean by suffering? This is the image. Right. What can be worse? There's very few things that are worse than that. Certainly the Holocaust. And there are things that are worse than what she. She showed me the reaction everyone should have to this, or her reaction to this reality of the world that I was seeing with her at that moment and sort of stumbled upon. So then when I went back in time, it became kind of. Then it became kind of a disappearance of time to put me in the right state of mind to do the exploration I needed to do at Mount Athos. So the rest of the dream sequence that I outline in. It's called the Bizarre World of Odius Maximus in my book because it's how bizarre I felt when I knew it was still me. But I'm going now into this. I have to adopt this cover of a character, so to speak, which is a CIA thing anyway, so I shoot. But it was so unusual and unique to me that. That it was really scary. I wasn't sure I Could not be that car. I wasn't sure that I'd ever be Rolf again. So then I'm going back in time, as I'm traveling as you would in those days, to Athens and then from Athens to. And with every step I'm taking, the time is going back in time. And by the time I get to Mount Athos at the capital city, which I had sort of landed in when I came off the boat in real life now, and to where I'd had dream a couple days ago, getting there, I saw that town again. But back in. Back in the 1500s, you know, and I go there and I present my credentials, so to speak, at the Capitol to say, if you will, the governance people there, including this guy Monk Gabriel, who was the head.
- [74:45]
Jesse
So Harry Hiller is this character that's in 19th century Paris ish by Lee.
- [74:50]
Rolf Moat Larson
Leave him.
- [74:51]
Jesse
You leave, he said. But he says, you are Odious Maximus. You must go to Mount Athos. You go to Mount Athos and then all of a sudden you're like a few hundred years earlier in history. So like 1400s, 1500s.
- [75:04]
Rolf Moat Larson
Correct.
- [75:04]
Jesse
And you trapped up there, essentially trapped up there. Did was there a gradient of time moving backwards from the 1800s to the 1400s or like all of a sudden you're in math out. Like when you get to that.
- [75:18]
Rolf Moat Larson
It was a gradient. It was a. It was as if time was evaporating. It's a way like with each step you could like it got. That was what was so, say very unnerving was going back in time but feeling it happening as it's happening and it's getting. And I was trying to adjust, but it was getting too difficult to go. So I tried to limit any contact with anybody, like on a ship or on a coach, as I'm going back, because I didn't want anybody say anything that would think I was some insane person and throw me in some.
- [75:50]
Jesse
You also don't want to alter the future forever with changing a variable or something.
- [75:55]
Rolf Moat Larson
I did not think that, but that's a good thought. I remember not thinking anything profound. It was like pure survival. I remember being in pure survival mode, including, I would say, my mind. I hoped I wasn't losing my mind to the point where whatever the, say, inspiration was was to adopt this way of thinking of myself as being a very onerous bad person, that I would overdo that again. I mean, that wasn't really the point. I kept reassuring myself, but I would have to play this out. So I get up there and I describe this and long and short of the monks take me in, even though they argued against it. But this Gabriel, he saw something in me. He said, we're here to open, like Peter said, open our house to those who need it. This man needs it. So I get assigned to the monastery at Dona Dionisio, which is where I happened to be when I was having the dream.
- [76:43]
Jesse
Does all of this feel as real as this interview feels?
- [76:46]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [76:47]
Jesse
So it feels like any sort of real experience that you've had, it's indistinguishable, pretty much.
- [76:55]
Rolf Moat Larson
There are things that occasionally, in all the dreams, like the Sadat dream, and I'd had other dreams also, which I lay out pretty much all of them that I can remember in the book. I had a dream, a basketball game dream, even, like when I was a teenager. And when I did, I knew immediately qualitative reality in those dreams was close to reality, but I could usually still understand it was a dream, if that makes sense. So in this dream, I still knew I was in a dream. I could still distinguish the Rolf I was from the character going back in time.
- [77:30]
Jesse
But otherwise, outside of that, it seemed.
- [77:33]
Rolf Moat Larson
Totally real, to the point where I don't think there were historical. Like you've seen movies, where there are things in movies that shouldn't be there at a historical time. I didn't see telephones in the 16th century or things you shouldn't see.
- [77:46]
Jesse
Were you wearing your clothing from.
- [77:49]
Rolf Moat Larson
And it changed. It was changing. It was going back time.
- [77:52]
Jesse
So your clothing was becoming more and more appropriate for the time.
- [77:55]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, I also found myself, and I don't remember specifics on this, trying to find more appropriate stuff so I wouldn't look like a space traveler back in the 17th century. I was trying to, like a person would do, to try to fit in. I was trying to alter my look and things like that. And I was getting a beard because I didn't shave. I remember those kinds of details. So when I'm at the monastery, then it got deeper and deeper into what monks do, which I learned a lot about through the dream, but also through what turned out to be two trips there, spending a grand total of a month in Mount Athos. At the end of the story, that's what it consisted of, because I got quite a course, very into this, to understanding not just a dream, but then the encounter that followed, which was the idea that you live a life in a monastery. A lot of people just sort of quickly jump to the conclusion. That's world evasion. You just Want to avoid the world, you want to go off on yourself. It's very selfish. So I understand people when they say that about monastic lifestyles. I don't feel that in large measure because I had this dream where I experienced it on such an intense level. Because for some people, it's the only way they can pursue God. It's the only way they can be close to God. It's the only way they can get themselves closer to God. They don't give up on the world. In most cases, they're not doing it to avoid the world. Most they're doing it to get close to God, sometimes as a consequence of those other things, when you do that. So I felt that. And so when I experienced the life up, there was not experiences I had felt spiritually before, which made again. This was a new reality I was learning from. It wasn't just adapting what I already knew and living it vicariously as a monk. It was something very different. Through the character I became in the monastery, I was growing, I was developing. I became a recluse up there, you know, I learned to fly, you know, And I remember and I've talked to other people who have had the flying experience. That's a different conversation we can have one day. Because I've had reactions from people who read that part of my book and said, oh, I've done that. I've been able to fly. You know, for me, flying was a manifestation. The more I think about it, I see it as a reward almost, in a way, a reward you're not asking for, but it's a tribute to opening your mind. And when you're flying, you're spiritually open. You're just in a different state of consciousness than you are when you're just praying, if that makes sense. And what we talked about, even right before the interview, is what I didn't expect to find was as I went through the whole experience, there is the flying monk, and I burned my hut up there. Like all the things a recluse does.
- [80:40]
Jesse
Were you doing. You were burning your hut?
- [80:42]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yes, yes.
- [80:43]
Jesse
And so this is happening across months or days?
- [80:48]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, yeah, in the dream, it's months. In reality, it's the course of the dream, which I. That's easy for me to do, years in a dream, but in my dream state, it was weeks. Days went to weeks went to months.
- [81:02]
Jesse
And so you are aware that your reality has drastically shifted from 20th century Rolf, CIA case officer, to it was trying to catch the spy on Mount Athos, to. It's like you entered A portal. And you are here for days upon days and you were going to sleep and waking up within this.
- [81:24]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yes, within a dream.
- [81:26]
Jesse
That is fascinating.
- [81:27]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, the biggest thing about it was I knew at the time I had the dream as I was dreaming that I was dreaming and I might not be able to get back. That was the scariest thing was I felt trapped and I wasn't sure I was going to wake up. And at one point I told one of the emissaries. So this Father Gabriel, who I got to kind of know, sent this other young monk called Evagrius and he would come and meet me and I remember my encounters with him and he was encouraging me and we were talking all the time. And I remember some of those. I just put a snippets of them in the dream and I frankly forgot some of them. But I just knew that was a really light. That was my only contact with a human being when I was in a recluse stage, which was when I was doing the flying about. And he told me, yeah, the other monks had seen me and wondered if it was real. So I remember that stuff. It was just so palpable. But then I of course had three dreams within a dream. Now we're reaching the culmination, or I would call the fruition of the dream point of the dream was what follows. The farther I'm getting away from myself, the farther I'm detaching my faith in God from a selfish interest in me. That's when I start flying, that's when I start my spiritual growth is happening when, when I'm being less selfish. When I'm joining sort I call the general universal salvation idea of mankind, if I'd call it that. And the more intense my spiritual experiences were getting within my dream to the point then I had three dreams within a dream and very quickly, and they're very intense. One night I go to sleep in my dream and I have a dream where I'm in the middle of a big room and we all have to go pick numbers from. Looks like a barbershop number thing. You pull the number and I got my number. Two digit number. Oh, I don't remember the number. It's too bad. It would have been great to add to the number collection. I was so frustrated I forgot the number. But it was a two digit number and everybody got a two digit number. I thought, well, this is very strange. There are way more than 20 or 99 of us here. What's the number? No one explained to anything. Nobody talked. It was just MURMURING walking around. Then I woke up. The barber shot clang with the number. I pulled the number up. I woke up from the dream within a dream. It startled me. So then in my dream, the next day, I go to bed, I go to sleep in my hut and I have another dream. It's the second dream now in that dream now I'm standing in the room again. It's a big round room with seven doors. TaxAct can think of a million things more fun than filing taxes. TaxAct is going to name some now. Sitting in traffic, folding a fitted bedsheet, listening to your co worker talk about his fantasy team digging a hole.
- [84:17]
Jesse
Digging an even larger hole next to that original hole. Unfortunately, TaxAct's filing software can't make taxes fun.
- [84:25]
Rolf Moat Larson
But tax, Tax act can help you get them done. Tax act, let's get them over with. And I'm looking at my number and I just had this wild thought, which I had never thought religiously, like until the dream. I thought, man, what a bummer. I mean, we're all going to go through these doors, I guess. And these numbers must be. Oh, we were wearing clothes. They issued clothes. And I had fine clothes, I remember, with brown suede shoes.
- [84:52]
Jesse
Yeah.
- [84:53]
Rolf Moat Larson
And some people with rags. And I saw an old woman in the corner who again, I thought, is this the Virgin Mary? The same woman I met in Paris? I didn't know, I don't want to overstate it, but I thought, is that her? And I said, well, we'll see what happened. I kept my eye on her, but I didn't want to go up to anybody or say anything. I was like, everything in this, I was just like trying to survive. That's really. I was trying to survive even in my dream within a dream. And then the doors open, seven doors open. And we had to walk through the doors. And I remember thinking the heretical thought, like, in a way of doubting God again, what if my number's like right under the ones that are going to heaven, I'm going to hell. I mean, imagine missing by one number. But it's kind of stupid, thought you, like, if the situation were real, that's a real thing. If there's such a thing as heaven and hell. Right. Which I've never believed after this and other things, that there's such a literal thing as that. I think heaven and hell is in your mind, but partially because of this. So then wake up again, startled by this, the doors groaning and having to walk through them. And then the third dream is walking through the door And I remember it very carefully, particularly, I reread it last night, actually, where I'm standing at the beach. And it brought it all back to me really clearly. There was a dark, dark night. Not a star in the sky. I remember that. But the sun, it was bright light. I thought, well, the sun's not up. But it was a bright light on the other side of the. And I remember thinking of the contradiction that the sun's not out. What's that light? It wasn't the moon. There's something very bright on the other side of the seashore. And it was like a river kind of thing, like a wide river. And it was turning dark. And I could tell we were all being encouraged. We knew no one was saying anything, announcing anything, but you had to walk across. Crossed the river to the other side, which I took at that time. This must be salvation. Salvation. Test of salvation for all of us. And I'm walking on the top of the water like Christ in Galilee. And I'm thinking, oh, this can't hold me with my brown suede shoes. But it started to work. And I said, well, if I put all my effort into my faith, maybe I'll make it to the other side. And then people are plump. I heard plunk. Like it was a terrible sound, like somebody going into the water and being swept away in the depths. You couldn't see below except like an inch below your shoes. And I was stupidly thinking, my shoes are getting wet. I remember thinking that. I was like, oh, these shoes are going to get ruined. They're going to be stained. I really did.
- [87:36]
Jesse
Wow.
- [87:37]
Rolf Moat Larson
And then, you know, sure enough, I get halfway across, and I think, I could do this. I can make this. And then the old woman's right next to. To me, and she stumbles and loses her step. And I instinctively just tried to grab her arm to hold her up, and we both went swept away. And I woke up.
- [87:51]
Jesse
The Virgin Mary. Well, I don't what you interpret, probably.
- [87:55]
Rolf Moat Larson
Because it tied into the. But then the final scene is that I wake up, I'm done with the dream. Getting swept away was the final part of the dream. So I wake up at the throne, sitting there, and I realized I saw a light in the church. This was like this from distance, maybe we're going to say 6, 7 yards or whatever it is. 15ft to your windows over there, Right? That's where the wall of the church was with the windows. Stained glass kind of windows I had. And I saw this red light moving along the thing. And I got up out of the chair, I moved toward the window, and it gone all the way up to. To the front, you know, of the church, the altar, and was sitting there burning, you know, red. And now I think. But the lights are related, the light and the red light, of course, of the other, and the red light of Mary. So I attached all the Marys together in the dream. This must be this. But I. But to be clear, I had never seen the Virgin Mary. So I saw the dream image of her, and then I saw the light, which I took to be. I took that light immediately when I saw it. I talked to a monk the next day. I said, I saw this mysterious light in the church after it was closed, and it moved from here to here. I thought he would just say, oh, come on, were you dreaming something? I said, well, I was awake. I said. But he said, no. He said this. It was like his name was Monk Timotheus. And I ended up going back to oath, I'll seek him out. And he ended up taking me back to his cell that they call it, where they live their little, like, bunk in a stone place where really austere, rugged kind of living conditions. He had like 10 books on his shelf. He gave me three of them about Athos, because he said, I just want you to read more about this because this seemed like you saw that for a reason. He goes, there are monks who have said they've seen. This is the light of the Virgin Mary going down the thing. And it seems like you might have seen that. I don't understand it. He was very confused by it because he said, you're not even. He even tested me and said, you're not even Orthodox, are you? He said, no, no, he went through that. He said, well, I don't know, but I'm not going to doubt it. And that's when he gave me. And I kept those books for. I still have those books.
- [90:12]
Jesse
When you wake up and you're at the church and you see the red light, and maybe that's somewhat symbolic of the Virgin Mary.
- [90:17]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah.
- [90:18]
Jesse
Is that in 19. Is that 1990s or is that.
- [90:22]
Rolf Moat Larson
Okay, that's. That's 1991.
- [90:25]
Jesse
Okay. So you basically, you go back to 1800s, Paris, then you go to Mount Athos. Mount Athos is. Days turn into months. You are Odius Maximus, this monk who goes through all these kind of ascetic protocols and you're fasting and you say you're burning your huts and stuff.
- [90:47]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, then I finally requested permission to go away from the monastery and just be A recluse in the wild, in the wilderness. There's a tradition there. Some monks go out and they just separate themselves from everybody, even their fellow monks. And the only time they see anybody is they come in to get provisions or medical emergency or something. I mean, they don't completely abandon all ties to civilization, if that you call that civilization. They just limit it as much as possible to get even closer and closer. And in fact, I ended up meeting a recluse who I feel was like kind of a full circle experience that I actually met a real recluse the second time I went to Mount Athos, who gave me a book and tremendous conversation we had about the Apocalypse. I mean, normal people get together. I'm sitting on a curb with this guy and talking about. About things and he's asking me who I was and where I worked. And I have a family back in this day. And he said, I haven't seen anybody in a few weeks. This is kind of nice. He was carrying bags of. He's carrying some lettuce and one bag, plastic bag, and the other bag he's carrying a baguette. You know, he's going back to the wild, into the woods. But anyway, he stopped and chatted me up. And the next thing you know, we're talking for a couple hours on turn down into the Apocalypse and everything else. It was amazing. Like we both had studied the same books about this. But that's aside, that's just the idea of what it meant when I went into this. It was almost like I needed this full circle, which is so much of the story for me, where things are explained later. So at the time I saw the light of the Virgin Mary, I mean, I honestly didn't think that much of was a light. Maybe it was a light. Even the image of the old woman. Maybe it was her, maybe it was not her. So I had all those things. The dream itself is the way you describe and that has its own, own. It's its own story in a way. But it wasn't until two more things that happened with the Virgin Mary that it all came together.
- [92:42]
Jesse
It's fascinating. And you also then come to realize that there had been Virgin Mary apparitions all over Mount Athens.
- [92:52]
Rolf Moat Larson
Not at this point.
- [92:53]
Jesse
Okay, that was so.
- [92:54]
Rolf Moat Larson
But later, you know, I had talked to people there later. Everything was later, including the story of the Virgin Mary being on the mountain. That I Learned was until 2006 or 7, 2007, that I heard some of the backstory of the history and lore that included the site so I'll save that because at this point I don't know any of this, including I wasn't ready at that point, prepared in the sense of thinking it would happen to me. So there was no predisposition, for example, to actually meet the Virgin Mary or understand what know, like what has happened historically with the Virgin Mary. Some people ask me that, well, when you started to have your Virgin Mary experiences, were they in any way because you read about, you know, Lourdes or Fatima and all they say, well, I honestly knew nothing about any of that at this point. And this was 1991.
- [93:46]
Jesse
What did you find out later in 2006 and 7 about the Virgin Mary showing up at Mount Athos? Because I think it's very fascinating that there's some historical corroboration on other people are experiencing.
- [93:58]
Rolf Moat Larson
Right.
- [93:59]
Jesse
What you're experiencing spiritually in this specific location.
- [94:03]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, I find out that there's at least a legend lore that they have at Mount Athos that the Virgin Mary, after Christ was crucified and rose from the dead, was traveling along with other Christians at the time or apostles around in ships and whatnot. Of course, they were all based in Corinth and places like that. So she was on a ship on its way to sea of all things, John at Patmos and also to go to Cyprus because Lazarus supposedly fled Israel when the Romans started looking for him because they wanted to execute him as being this person who rose from the dead. A very disruptive idea that Jesus was going around raising people from the dead. Right. It was the reason why both the Jews and the Romans saw the early Christians they called the Way at that point. They weren't called Christians as being saboteurs, disruptive to order and society. So they're hunting him down actually. So he fled apparently. And I didn't believe that story either until I believe I didn't like maybe it's true, maybe it's not. And there's actually. If anybody listeners goes to Nicosia, Cyprus, I urge you to take a look at Lazarus to tomb, which is supposedly in Cyprus, was where he went and became the first bishop starting the church in there. So Mary was supposedly traveling on a ship and there was a big storm which that part of the Aegean is famous for that going all the way back to the Spartans and the Athens, having huge summers that ruined fleets and everything, shipwrecked fleets. And she got blown on the island of Mount Athos and there's a monastery placed on the site where she supposedly landed or went ashore called Eva. It's on the west coast of this peninsula, at that monastery in the south part of the monastery. And I've been to that monastery, but it wasn't until this 2005, 6 period when a monk told me the whole story about this little icon in a hut right on the shore, that this hut, this is supposedly the spot where she landed at that time. I said, wow, this has got way more. And of course, I've sent my book and gotten letters back from the Vatican and also from the Orthodox, Orthodox Church hierarchy in Istanbul, Turkey. And the letter I got from the Orthodox Church was really priceless. It said, basically, we wish you had become one of us and still join the Catholics, but we still consider you a friend of ours and your book is in our library and His Eminence is Reddit and all that. I really appreciated that because I've said to many people, the accident of me being Catholic or Orthodox is not what any of this is about out.
- [96:54]
Jesse
Right.
- [96:55]
Rolf Moat Larson
And I think they appreciated that Mary belongs to the world, not to Catholics or Orthodox. Orthodox in Mount Athos, they consider her the whole object of the veneration that the mountain is dedicated to, which is why women to this day can't go. Now, I think this is misguided just to put that out there, but women to this day cannot go on Mount Athos, step foot on Mount Athos, because it's dedicated completely to Mary at the exclusion of all women. As I said, I think this is veneration that goes too far. But the point of it is to emphasize how fundamental Mary's history and role is.
- [97:36]
Jesse
Have other visitors or pilgrims experienced Mary that explicitly, just like you there at Mount Athos specifically?
- [97:45]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yes, yes. And I can't like enumerate their examples, but I know it's not a unique phenomenon. So much so that I would say, like I'm having with you, Jesse, this is highly unusual to have an easy conversation on these subjects. Right. You can do that. Most people can't. What's been very gratifying is that I never bring it up, the subjects, any of these subjects almost, except the just, you know, obviously the intelligence and all history and all that I do. But any of the religious or focus on God with anybody who doesn't bring it up. And then I usually bring it up. And I found some very fascinating takes or additions that people have to make on what I've said that they've experienced. Like really close friend of mine, I would never expected this came to me especially to say he's had very vivid dreams of flight, flying after Reading about that part of my book and it's very gratifying to hear. I've also had more basic things of people saying, why would you join a church with all this that you describe yourself in your book as having all this sex abuse and this and that. And I said, well, I said, I never give up on the church. Like I never give up on your faith. But those kinds of conversations have been the great gifts of writing the book.
- [99:06]
Jesse
So while you're at Mount Athos and you're this character, Odius Maximus, what do you feel like it is? So you feel like it's your mission to get closer to God by sort of detaching yourself from the contemporary world in some ways. So what are you doing on a day to day basis? You're fasting and you're praying or what's your day to day life like? And again, this feels as real as you waking up, you know, in, you know, Maryland, where you live. Right?
- [99:37]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah. Well, I remember feeling a bit of a contradiction of feelings. On the one hand, being there and doing things like tending to the grapes and cleaning the dishes, you know, until I become a recluse, then it's just trying to survive in the wild and, you know, that kind of thing, doing like continual prayer, that kind of thing. But up until that point, I'm thinking, man, I'm also miserable. I want to go home. So I never lost the feeling I wanted out.
- [100:08]
Jesse
Do you feel stuck?
- [100:09]
Rolf Moat Larson
I felt stuck, yeah. I said that a few times. But I felt very stuck when I was in the recluse phase. But I understood without any. There was no messaging or voicing, which I've never heard, by the way, with mystical experiences. Any audio, it's interesting. Real audio, real talking, the words. But it was the idea that I needed to do this to go home. I needed to go through these different levels of this experience and the dream before I could. No one said that, but I knew it. I knew that until I had gone through the different levels of what was expected, I couldn't go. It was almost like it was a spiritual training. I mean, the Jesuits call it their spiritual exercises that they go through is this was much more intense than the dream.
- [100:54]
Jesse
How old were you? You as Rolf, when you went back, when you time traveled as Odius Maximus, how old were you? In my real life, yeah, in your real life.
- [101:03]
Rolf Moat Larson
So it's 1991 and I'm born in 54. So it's what, 47? Yeah, 37.
- [101:11]
Jesse
Interesting.
- [101:12]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah.
- [101:13]
Jesse
And so you're communing with Gabriel and the other monks as well. Did you ever tell them, hey, like, I'm kind of trapped here.
- [101:22]
Rolf Moat Larson
Oh, the only.
- [101:23]
Jesse
Yeah, no, I actually exist in the future.
- [101:25]
Rolf Moat Larson
No, no, it was like a cover. I was living my cover until at the very end, near the end, after, you know, in one of the times, I wore the brown. The brown suede shoes in my dream within a dream. And then they were suddenly under my hut. So they're in the dream now. They had gone from the dream within the dream to somehow appearing in my dream. And that was very discombobulating, right? And at that point, when Evagrias came back on another to check on me, make sure I hadn't plunged off a clif. Something I told him. I told him who I really was. And I remember the reaction, by the way. I never knew exactly all some of the things I said, but I knew that all of it was consistent. So when I had to create dialogue with Evagrius on this scene in my book, that I don't remember exactly what.
- [102:19]
Jesse
The dialogue was, as with waking memory.
- [102:21]
Rolf Moat Larson
Right. So I did with my best. So I don't want anybody out there to think I got this photographic memory or anything, but it's very close.
- [102:28]
Jesse
What did you reference?
- [102:29]
Rolf Moat Larson
The main thing I remember that I based the dialogue I created on was to be true to that was the idea that Evagrius was wise beyond his years. He was a young, spry little monk, wise beyond his years. And when I told him the reality, I did it because I knew he was wise and I. I needed somebody to tell, and it was him. He was someone I could trust. And he reacted in a way that redeemed my idea that this was a good time to do it by basically reacting as I would have hoped, which is, I hope you get back to your family and keep praying to God and God will take care of you. In a way that I suddenly felt a sense of peace knowing this wasn't going to go away without somebody knowing what had happened to me. And maybe I will get back, because I think this guy would offer me some wisdom and insight into that. And he did.
- [103:31]
Jesse
Did he freak out at all and say, what, you exist in the future?
- [103:35]
Rolf Moat Larson
No. No.
- [103:36]
Jesse
Did you say, there's this place, it's called America or the United States, and it ends up breaking off from England in 1776. Did you have to, like, go through any of that? Or he just. Just kind of took it on its more spiritual dimension or something and kind of ran.
- [103:52]
Rolf Moat Larson
Jesse, there was one thing. No, I didn't do Any of that. But I made a big slip up early on that I realized. And nobody called me on. And I think they knew there was something really wrong. Going back to my presentation of my credentials, so to speak, to Gabriel, when I said I was Odious Maximus and all this stuff, not who I was, but I did say something really absurd, absurd where I said, I'm an American mystic, because I knew I'd have to present myself as a mystic because I wouldn't be able to go through any grilling on doctrine or theology or stuff they might expect. So I had to play the mystic card. And then you maybe don't, or you can grunt or I was going to fake it in a way that I knew I couldn't. If I had actually explained my knowledge of liturgy or anything else. And they saw through it. And he did, but he had pity, right? That was the earlier description, but I'd said it at that time, I'm an American mystic, thinking I came from this continent, called them that didn't exist, at least in their minds. Nobody said anything. And so when I presented the story at the end, my real name and future, I'm from the future to this monk, he seemed to take it all in stride. And it's really interesting because if there are people, I think, who understand the notion of future time travel, there's no super religious, no super spiritual person in the least in the Christianity, I think, all of them, honestly. And the monotheistic religions who aren't able to separate time from discussion in a way where they're comfortable with the idea of past future. Because for one thing, the most credible, incredible witnesses to what's going to come and what the past means are the prophets, right? It's Ezekiel, Daniel, Revelations, John. It's Christ who talked about the raising of Jerusalem. The history of the Church is in question when people, in fact, even Christ himself said he can't predict when the future ends or that's up to God. So there are limits, Limits. And I don't look at prophets as soothsayers in the, you know, sort of Shakespearean tradition of Ides of March or. No, prophets are those who concede into the future what happens. They don't influence it, if that makes sense.
- [106:23]
Jesse
Do you think right now, as we speak, Rolf is also Odious Maximus, living in 15th century Mount Athos, Greece, trying to, you know, commune with God.
- [106:37]
Rolf Moat Larson
Oh, wow. See, now we're getting into fun stuff. But everything I've said is a product of.
- [106:43]
Jesse
You could speculate, and I will.
- [106:46]
Rolf Moat Larson
I'll just say As a preface, that everything I say on this subject is really philosophical science. It's drawn from my greatest love intellectually in the world, which is philosophy. Which is what? The love of wisdom, the love of knowledge. And so. So in that spirit, I think that it's possible and my experiences bear this out for me, that the dreams we create are as real as the physical reality we're in. Which means the answer to your question would be yes, because if I dreamt it and I created it and it.
- [107:23]
Jesse
Felt real, it didn't feel.
- [107:24]
Rolf Moat Larson
It felt real and I created it. Now, the more you get into whether you're taking a trip, taking a trip, so to speak, in reality, versus like I make this great distinction, which I'm not sure is as great a distinction, as bright lines as I make it between when I met the Virgin Mary and when I've had interactions. Just like when you pray to God and you think you're getting responses versus actually like meeting God.
- [107:50]
Jesse
Yeah, but let's go a little deeper into this Odius Maximus example. Do you think that that is a real historical figure?
- [107:58]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah, I know he is. That was one of the ironies. So to my great shock, great shock, this was like a wonderful shock when I went back to Athos in. So one of the things Mary said to me at the end of the experience In Paris in 1998, I neglected to mention it, the first iteration, she said, we will meet again. Like a reassurance, we will meet again. So I thought, this is so great because this is like, so this is the highlight of my life kind of thing. And part of that would be come back and visit me at Mount Opos again, where it all started. So it took me a long time between 1998, took me about seven years to go back. Seven years, isn't that interesting? And I went back to Mount Athos and back at the Holy Mountain only because I felt the Virgin Mary would now be my tour guide. So I did something kind of extraordinary. I got the Greeks to allow me. I knew the. I was still like with CIA, like associated with CIA. I was at Department of Energy at that time, by the way, head of Intelligence there. But I still had all my contacts and friends at CIA, including the guy who was head of our office in Athens. Right. And I lined it up with him. He's a close friend of mine and he's also, interestingly enough, a religious scholar as CIA officer. But he lined me up with a month long visa. Now normally, someone like me, I could only get three days and I'd gotten one and I'd never get another one. But he had his contacts and they explained my past and they were like, oh, this good stuff. And I got a month. So I knock on the door, carious. I feel like. I feel a little like Alice in Wonderland or something. And sort of my mentality, right, kept going back and just like I'm just going to soak it all in. And I felt guided the whole time. And unlike most people, I didn't have to register what monastery I went to, what nights. I just go one of the 20 monasteries. And they have a number of what they call skits. Skits are like minors. They're not considered monasteries. They're one or two monks there and they're safeguarding a specific tradition or history of Manathos. So, for example, and I wandered and ran into these things. It's a huge peninsula if you look on a map. But I was wandering around and running these things like I was being guided. And I felt like I was going from place to place, showing up unannounced, spending a night, going off into the woods, by the way, just as a hiker, adventurer. It's like almost one of the most wonderful places on the planet. So I end up at St. Ansky, which is where St. Anne's named in honor of Mary, Mary's mother, Anne. I didn't even know that historical fact at that time. Now, later, many things. So I got into biblical archeology and lived in the Middle East. I got into all of this stuff. And just as an aside, I didn't just do biblical archeology of meaning Christian, I did Old Testament Judaism, Islam.
- [110:45]
Jesse
Did you try to find certain.
- [110:47]
Rolf Moat Larson
Oh, I tried to find. I tried to find all kinds of. But anyway, Saint Anskiet, they claimed to have her bones, some of her bones or whatever. So, I mean, I'm kind of fascinated. Fascinating with that stuff too. And then the next day I take off from there. I said, well, I've been introduced to Mary's mother. That would be something she would want. So I take off from there and I go down the coastline, I catch a boat, go around the corner, the horn of Mount Athos. And I end up at this bottom of this pier with a big walk up the side of a mountain. And coincidence, right, coincidence is this. A monk walks by with the donkey, who's going to go up there? Little monk. And I got my big backpack and stuff. Got me there a month. I got a big pack back, one backpack for the month. But that's, you know, I got everything in it. And he goes, hey, why don't you take my donkey to the top of the mountain? I said, this poor donkey, are you sure you want to do it? He goes, oh, he's used to it. So the guy just slaps him in the rear and off we go. And I'm sitting straddling this donkey up this cliff, afraid, like I wouldn't want to let the monk down. I was afraid I was going to go off the side and off the. Into a cliff, an abyss, you know, there's that kind of a thing. And then it starts raining and it's getting very steady. Donkey, just up the mountain, get to the top of the mountain. There's nobody there. There are no pilgrims, there's nobody there. I walk into the entrance of the skeet and this guy comes out, greets me. Young monk, probably, you know, 30s. He's the guy caretaker there. And he goes, let me tell you this history of this skeet. It's called the Skeet Kaflo, Slovakia. I said, oh, that's hard to say. It's a mouthful. He goes, yeah, this is named in honor of one of the saints we have here, St. Catholos, known as Maximus the Monk. He was not odious Maximus, and he was known as a flying monk. And he burned his huts and he had these miracles and they were sightings of him flying. I almost lost. I mean, not lost is not the right expression, but I was. Had a. Like gasping for air just at the thought. I hadn't made this up.
- [112:52]
Jesse
So crazy.
- [112:53]
Rolf Moat Larson
This had a historical connection and I was there. Now, normally you could go a month, in a month because you never run into this place, but here I was, standing right at the front door, so to speak.
- [113:04]
Jesse
Well, you were meant to have that running.
- [113:07]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well by now, I'm not doubting things like that. You can take, by the way, I don't want people go now. Think everything that happens to them is not by chance, but you also have to be attuned of the possibility things aren't coincidence. It's not believing everything is not a coincidence. It's getting the right. Being able to make a right judgment of when things aren't just coincidence.
- [113:25]
Jesse
Yeah, I think discernment is viewing patterns and synchronicities as possibly very meaningful and being attuned to them, but not always, like, not always taking them at face value. But I mean, yeah, you could literally right now Google Maximos Katsuko Colvia. And this is this flying monk from Mount Athos. And he was known for burning his huts and so it's, it is fascinating that you went back in time not having any. You had no context, no idea. And then you, you find real historical corroboration for this through happenstance. And this is just online like people can search this open source. It's. That's pretty remarkable and interesting. Interesting. Do you think this was, you know, people talk about like past life regressions. Do you think this was like a past life for you or.
- [114:17]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, I haven't really thought of that. I don't think of. I don't say I don't believe in reincarnation, but nor do I reject it. I just, I mean, I don't know. I do have a fairly strong discipline. Discipline in submitting everything we've talked about to a high degree of scrutiny to the point where, and you and I have talked about this where sometime I'm reticent to say the full, to provide the full effect of what I think I've learned or what I experienced because I don't want to. The one thing I can't do is misstate any of this because that judgment comes down on me from God and God, God knows. So you go through all this trouble to tell a story about your devotion to God and how you fulfill your destiny as being to fulfill God's will and do the right thing and do right by people. Which is what it all boils down to really does I can't misspeak on that. So I'm not going to inflate or add to an experience. So the idea of like I love exploring with you. I'm just being careful for your listeners and others. We could talk about that over a beer or something. I go far way farther. I don't know. I think there's evidence out there that's like all the things, all the phenomena you research, Jesse, it should all be researched. We should be very chary of drawing conclusions to things that we don't have really solid evidence for. But nor should we be so respectful of conventional wisdom in science that we don't explore it.
- [115:58]
Jesse
And you should also give yourself the grace to speculate. A have everybody has a game of telephone they're playing in their mind where they don't remember anything accurately that's ever happened to them one to one, perfectly. But also the ability to speculate, which I know you do.
- [116:15]
Rolf Moat Larson
Oh I do, I do. And the thing about these experiences that I've described is that they do form a pattern and the pattern becomes a major part of their authentication as being genuine. Truth related things, not truth Seeking rather than self focused or self fulfilling. I think part of the dreams at Mount Athos that I experienced was a necessary part of my own faith based development that I would. The more you discuss or try to convey a belief in God, the more you have to remove yourself as the object of your intentions. This is one of the most important things I can say. If you're one of the apostles who followed and I'm not, I'm not putting myself on any level with the people I'll describe. You have to be willing to be a martyr to pull that truth forward and become part of human history. Because God needed Christ, needed them to go out as they did all over the world in the way they did. And they needed, in a way, one of the proofs they were willing to do is lay down their own lives for the truth. And it's easy to say lay down your life for the truth, but it's a harder thing to do it. And the other thing is to not do it for their own benefit. Because you can even lay your life down for the truth because you think it's to your benefit, but it's not even your goal. At some point you try to eliminate yourself. The object. The paragraphs I wrote of my time at Mount Athos in my dream, I tried to be very, very careful to describe the essence of what I was experiencing in the dream, which was this process of shedding myself. It's the reason when I read Meister Eckhart or somebody like that, he talks about looking down at God, not up. It's a psychological thing. You know, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The more you can remove yourself from any honor or glory in faith, the more responsibility God will give you, if that makes sense, to promote the faith. Because it can't be about you.
- [118:26]
Jesse
And there's a. Yeah, well said. There's a Yale professor, he's very well respected religious studies professor named Carlos Ayer. He wrote a book called they Flew and it's all about flying saints and monks and. And St. Joseph the Divine. St. Joseph of Cupertino is probably the most famous example. I think he was 16th century. You have Teresa Avila, who also seemed to experience bilocation and all these sort of other paranormal things. Even St. Francis of Assisi by some accounts might have levitated. And this guy went into this research thinking, oh, this must have been written about sort of historically in this sort of metaphorical way. And he came out of it being like, no, there's enough eyewitness testimony around these flying saints to call it History, and it's well beyond the threshold of evidence. We'd need to say that the war of 1812 was fought or whatever. And I think he truly believes that. And I have a friend named Diana Pasulka who's a religious studies professor at UNC Wilmington. She's gone very deep on St. Joseph of Cupertino, and she has gone through a lot of his files, and she agrees with that. And it's across, like you said, it's across different religions. So maybe this is a real phenomena where you do shed the baggage of individual ego and you become one with God and you fly. There's even, in fact, Jeffrey Kripal, who's a religious studies professor at Rice University in Houston. He was giving a lecture on flying Saints at mit.
- [120:07]
Rolf Moat Larson
Oh, wow.
- [120:08]
Jesse
And a guy who I've met, actually, who runs Revolutionary Technologies at Skunk Works, it's their most advanced R and D division, obviously, of Lockheed Martin, and he's running their most advanced R and D division of Skunk Works. He attended the lecture and was very interested in Flying Saints.
- [120:27]
Rolf Moat Larson
That's so great.
- [120:28]
Jesse
It's interesting.
- [120:29]
Rolf Moat Larson
So great.
- [120:29]
Jesse
Yeah.
- [120:30]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, I don't think there's any question that once you start believing in certain mystical experiences, either because you've experienced them yourselves or you've heard such compelling tales, like I read Virgin Mary, which I didn't know, as I stress a lot, really, the history of those appearances until now, of course, I sort of study them to look at the similarities, to hear the different descriptions, see how close they were to mine. And then what's very reassuring is I see sort of so many similarities and commonalities. But the point is to your explanation. Yeah, you got to be willing to believe all kinds of manifestations, what I would call the holy meaning, things that are not of human construction, whether it's our minds or even what we call the laws of physics, they come from something else. What's the physics of that? Or where? Is that the where might even be? Not a real question, because it may not be anywhere in that sense. So we understand location. Right. Because what's location outside of distance and motion? And it's really nothing. Right. So is it over, under, or side? I'm sure it's relevant. But then you're getting closer to all the mystics, because when they get together. I've read some really cool stuff, and I'd love to be in one of those gatherings when Merton used to have them in Asia. And you had Buddhist mystics, and you had Islamic mystics and poets. Hafiz for example, one of my favorite, talking about his love of God and the heretics who were burned and things for going too far with things that were mystical. They couldn't help themselves because they were just devoted to the truth. Their crime is always was why Elijah was sawed in half. Or this is speaking truth to people. Don't want to hear it. With Venmo Stash a tag on one hand and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking cash back with Venmo stash. Get up to 5% cash flow back when you pick a bundle of your favorite brands. Earn more cash when you do more with Stash. Venmo stash terms and exclusions apply. Max $100 cash back per month. See terms of Venmo Me Stash terms or sounding enigmatic because the. Their prophecies or their. What they see in the future don't accord with the conventional wisdom of the day. That's usually the problem.
- [122:49]
Jesse
So is there some version of that you think you have some truth that from all of these mystical experiences you've come back with, with that the average person might have kind of an allergic reaction to or might not want to hear might be an uncomfortable truth?
- [123:01]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, I think, frankly, an average person is probably uncomfortable all of this.
- [123:06]
Jesse
Yeah, right.
- [123:06]
Rolf Moat Larson
I mean, let's be honest. Right. And it's the idea, well, who do you think you are? It starts with things like that. It's. And it's. The mistake, of course, is over. Over interpretation or look. Cause I've realized also this is just something I've learned because I continue to occasionally have enigmatic dreams. I haven't had anything as vivid as in the past. With age, it's fewer and fewer, which. When I was living in the Middle East, I once went to my Jesuit priest, friend, friend more than anything, more than a spiritual advisor, and said, yeah, I just don't know what my purpose is anymore. Now I'm not meeting the Virgin Mary. I said, I don't want to sound like I should be meeting Virgin Mary, but I sure miss it. And he goes, well, have you tried praying to her? I said, well, I don't really pray to the Virginia Virgin Mary. I feel her presence, but I pray to God and I pray to Jesus Christ. That's it. I don't pray to other people or other things. But he said, well, you can pray, but don't get hung up on the word. You can interact, you can talk. And so I asked, I said, well, you know, Mary, why am I here? Like, why am I In the Middle East. I have a sense, I was praying or thinking that there's a reason I'm here. And then you brought me here because why would we be here? And I was spending all my time in five years in the Middle East, 2011-16, spending all my time on the road going. I did biblical archaeology, I did, you know, went, went on tour. I went all over, everywhere, many times over. Then later on, you know, in Saudi Arabia, et cetera. And I said there's got to be a reason for this. So I just say, just, just tell me so I know what I should expect kind of thing and got back kind of a, again, nothing verbal or just an answer which was you're here to be here. And it put me at ease. It was the idea, okay, this is almost like I don't need to overthink this.
- [125:01]
Jesse
I think in other messages she says to you, don't strive, don't try, don't reach.
- [125:07]
Rolf Moat Larson
This was in, well, 1998 was when I, seven years after I met her at Mount Athos, I met her in Paris, met the Virgin Mary. So none of this discussion would be occurring if I hadn't actually met the Virgin Mary. And we call the apparition and I mean the Virgin Mary. So I was in Paris on a work trip for CIA. I was doing actually Russian things. I was heading up a lot of our CIA's Russian activity at the time, 1998. And so I'm in Paris for those discussions with one other co. Colleague and we both went, you know, we signed up at a boutique hotel, five minute walk from Arc de Triomphe, kind of, you know, place and no, not from Arc de from, from the American Embassy down in the southern part of the, that lane Arc Triomphe down there, Hotel Crillon area. And we're in the, I'm in the hotel. It's a nice little room and it had a bed with a old fashioned hotel, really old and it had a table in front of me and had a light switch on the wall but some small room, typical French style. And as I went to bed, thinking nothing in particular except maybe my last thoughts before going to sleep, was going through my notes in my mind of what we were going to raise the next day. And as I like to joke, I didn't have any weird food or anything else and went to sleep. And immediately was there like in one of those dreams again. And I knew it right away, but it was a dream. I knew I was dreaming. So I'm by a riverbank. So I'm thinking of the river dream from way back, which was a more raging river. This is a nice, gentle, almost stream type river. And I'm sitting at a riverbank of grass, lush grass. It's a beautiful day again. Balmy, nice weather. I'm sitting on the top of the little mound that goes down into the stream and there's nobody around. And I'm just thinking, just relaxing. And then an old woman comes, dressed in a brown, brown cloak with a hood up and sits almost within touching distance, but just outside my reach and sits there and stares. Looks ahead too. And I didn't want to disturb her, so I didn't like introduce myself or say anything. I just thought maybe wait for her to say hi or something. I won't do it. And so we just sitting there and then it starts sprinkling. And the sun stayed up, the sun didn't go away, so I thought it was just a little sprinkle when the sun's out and as it's hitting my skin, I remember hitting my arm and hands first. I see brown, like oozing brown dirt. And I thought, wow, this is really kind of strange. And then I looked to see what reaction the woman was having to this strange rain. And at that time she turned towards me and I felt this kind of. I felt really at ease. And I felt kind of backwards, like almost like, whoa. And into her arms. And then I realized it was the Virgin Mary. And I thought, at the moment I thought, okay, it's a dream. And I think this rain is like, I don't know, purifying me or something. I just had that weird thought. So then I wake up. So I wake up in my room and I get up to turn on the light because I need to clear my head, you know. It's very jarring. It was very jarring in a nice way, but very jarring.
- [128:47]
Jesse
How'd you know it was the Virgin Mary in the dream?
- [128:49]
Rolf Moat Larson
I just knew it.
- [128:50]
Jesse
Then you just knew?
- [128:50]
Rolf Moat Larson
I just knew that was Virgin Mary. Unlike the other things I said where I wasn't as sure, this I knew right away this was a Virgin Mary. Because I had had the one experience too, in Portugal, where I met the Virgin Mary, but not in the flesh and in the mind kind of thing. So this was like completely normal to me. Now, the dream that I would have a dream like this, it was not. No longer some. Maybe what all this was was preparation, right? Because all along the way I was getting more and more used to the idea. This wasn't strange. None of this was Strange. This was all part of a sort of a process in a way. So I get up from the chair. I hit my shin. I forget I hurt my shin bone as I got up. And that's how I kind of knew I was awake. And then I saw this. Like, we're sitting in a room here. It was in that corner, coming from the top of the corner, a light coming down like this, radiant light. And Thomas Merton described the light better than I could when I read it in one of his books, because he had some of these experiences. It was a light so bright that it bore no resemblance to visible light, if that makes sense. So it didn't shine. You'd have to look away from it. It was very bright. And it came and sat straight in front of me when I was standing up. I was still standing up where the curtains are, like, right across from me when I'm standing there. And off the ground was the full image of the Virgin Mary. Wow.
- [130:21]
Jesse
In your room.
- [130:22]
Rolf Moat Larson
In my room.
- [130:23]
Jesse
Wow. So she was in the dream, and then she comes into your room.
- [130:26]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah. And I knew as I was standing there, I specifically had the realization, clear, absolute realization, this is not a dream. In fact, I kind of pinched myself. This is reality as opposed to. And the dream must be present preparation, what happens next?
- [130:44]
Jesse
So she's in your room.
- [130:45]
Rolf Moat Larson
She's in my room. And then I don't have any conversations, but I can read her mind or she can read my mind, or vice versa. There's an exchange. There's communication going on at a nonverbal.
- [130:56]
Jesse
Level.
- [130:58]
Rolf Moat Larson
And it's very intense. I'm feeling combination. At the one time, a rushing sense, sense of grief that she's feeling at the same time, the hope of the message she's conveying, that in the end it will all come out fine. But there's this tremendous pain and suffering. And she said at one, like, said, I knew the message, clearly got the message. Write a letter to the Pope. No instructions what to write or what you've seen seeing me, but no other specific instructions what to say or what. Why. No explanation, but just write a letter to the Pope. Then I was looking for some form of greater understanding, I'd say. And she sensed that. And I think she sensed. I was, like, still shocked, in shock, but I went into a state of ecstasy. So I've never had that. Only time on my life, 71 years old, that I was in a state of ecstasy. I could. I remember my teeth chattering. I remember that. I remember the sound of them going, and my head going Back, like, it was like. And it was incredible. It was like an. I mean, I. Incredible orgasm of, like, beyond that, without a real orgasm, obviously, but it was like, more than it was. It was just an incredible feeling. The bona fides of the moment, so to speak, were right there. I just knew this is absolutely what it was. And then I sought more of a. If I'm so graced to be here in your presence, then there must be something specific you want me to do other than the letter to the Pope and that sort of thing. And then little things came out, like, for example, a stage sense of tying together. There was no numbers, but I sensed that it was all related. I just sensed that it was all related to this, plus my encounter I'd had with her in Portugal, where I hadn't met her, but I felt her mind and thoughts. She was explaining when she told me there, deliver the message. Write what you see. Whatever you do, you do in sin. That was specific. I wrote that down after Portugal, which was a few years earlier, said, keep all that in mind as you go forth on this mission or you go forth to fulfill God's will. And she made it clear everything is God's will, not her will. There was a major distinction. I wasn't doing anything for her. This was all in accordance with her serving God the same way she was asking me to or anybody else. Now, you asked earlier. At this point, I had never read anything about her encounters with the Virgin Mary, but I became, of course, a hobby student of that as well. Great detail. But the thing that you mentioned earlier, I think she sensed that I was not losing it, but needed further reassurance in some way that I could do this, because the first thing anybody has is an expectation of getting any mystical experience that's genuine is, well, why me? You know, there's no reason. But the answer to that is, there is no reason. It's you. I wasn't being singled out because I was noble or worthy or. No, no such reason. When. When Paul was on the road to Damascus and he was struck down by the light of Jesus standing over him. The light, the divine light of Jesus, saying, paul, why are you persecuting me? He turns from a person going to kill members of this Jewish section to the leader of that sect because of the mystical experience with Christ. Without that, none of that would have happened. So I'm very well aware that these aren't only real, but they're incredible, important moments in human history. Every time they happen to anybody to continue to gather them up and as you're saying, tell, relate the story. So at the very end of the encounter, it's funny time, kind of like I got lost in time. I don't remember. It was just minutes, the whole thing. I know that where she said, like encouragement again, this was the important part. Don't reach. God lies within you. Don't want, you have no needs, don't strive, There is no purpose. And it was incredibly incredible, important guidance because it reminded me of things I thought I knew, but then I got. You get lost. Right. Particularly the one of the reach. Don't go out and try. You know, it's all there, it's all inside you in the end. And even the experiences going on the mountain with the monks and going back in time, all that was a way of intensifying that it's here and being confident in that.
- [136:10]
Jesse
Did your life change after that? Did that fundamental change?
- [136:15]
Rolf Moat Larson
It was a culminating moment. It was a culmination of all the dreams, in a way, because in her, the images I associated with her presence in the room, there was the idea of war and conflict and apocalyptic things. I could sense the wars and things of prison, previous dreams all being present with her as well. So it was her great suffering, particularly of women and children in war and conflict, lives being lost, that kind of level of concern and need to have people do things to minimize it or to end it, or to be part of God's will in writing the course of human history.
- [136:59]
Jesse
She visited you every seven years? Years, three times, is that right? So 1991, 1998 and then 2005.
- [137:07]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, then she didn't visit me in 2005, but it's one of the coincidences that ties the connections together. In 2005, I didn't have an experience with the Virgin Mary, but I found myself through Chief of Europe at CIA. I was back in Paris, probably the first time since seven years. Maybe. I don't know. I didn't go there that often. But I'm back in the same hotel, Hotel Creon, which is two blocks from the one I was in. I remember thinking, this is autumn. So close to where all this happened. Because by now I'm intensely aware and thinking and looking into what all that was meant for me and what should I do more from a practical. I didn't need evidence, I just needed to know practically what to do now that I had had these experiences. So on that particular seven years, fulfillment of things was this night that John Paul II died. And it was the idea that this is related to that. The explicit Idea, of course. I had to write a letter to the Pope and I sent that letter to the Vatican and I got a response from the Vatican, actually.
- [138:13]
Jesse
What was the response?
- [138:14]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, it was that His Holiness had appreciated the gift. And I suppose they send some of these things out, but it seemed like it had a personal touch to it.
- [138:23]
Jesse
What'd you say to the Pope?
- [138:25]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, I put the letter in the book. So the letter I sent to the Pope, I put in the book. And I want everybody to read what.
- [138:34]
Jesse
I said because go check it out. Did you say just high level. Did you say the Virgin Mary told me to write to you?
- [138:40]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah. Yeah.
- [138:42]
Jesse
Wow.
- [138:43]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah. And I put the experience. I put all the numbers in it. I mean, all the numbers are in the book because again, the idea is.
- [138:49]
Jesse
The numbers from the original download you.
- [138:51]
Rolf Moat Larson
Got at West Point, seven, four, seven. And all the numbers. I've seen the numbers. Yeah. So if you read the letter in two pages, two and a half pages, it's the whole story, in a way. I met her in Portugal. I met her in Mount Athos, and it's the same letter I shared with the Orthodox Church. Because it's not about me. Yeah, I mean, it is my story, but to the extent the story serves a purpose or is relevant.
- [139:15]
Jesse
So you were just relaying your experience mostly to the Vatican. So it's 2005, Pope John Paul II dies. You're in Paris that night, ironically, at the same spot that it's almost this like Nietzschean eternal recurrence or something.
- [139:28]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, that satisfies your sevens. You know, we have three sevens here.
- [139:31]
Jesse
Three sevens, exactly. So that seems significant, maybe for the numerology aspect, but. So you're there, you're in Paris, and then what happens as far as your just your third experience with the Virgin Mary?
- [139:44]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, the third experience preceded the first Paris. It was the one in Portugal, in. No, wait a minute. No, gosh, I'm losing the date on that. But yeah, it was before the Virgin Mary appearance because it was in Portugal where I encountered her. I already told you what that conversation was all about and what she relayed more guidance at that meeting. So there again, it was idea of a presence, not seeing anything. But I realized this presence is continuing. Continuing. And I'm getting more, if you will, aware of what I should and shouldn't be doing related to all this. And in between all this, there's.
- [140:27]
Jesse
But in Paris, you see her again.
- [140:28]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah.
- [140:29]
Jesse
And what's that experience like?
- [140:31]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, the only one time I've seen the Virgin Mary was in 1998 in Paris.
- [140:35]
Jesse
Yep. But in 2005, you see her again?
- [140:39]
Rolf Moat Larson
No.
- [140:39]
Jesse
Oh, you don't see her again. Okay, got it, got it.
- [140:42]
Rolf Moat Larson
No, as I got down there, there were only one. Only one. It tied everything up where she appeared in a way that you examine phenomena. Right. And I like to present this in various ways. One is as phenomena. I have to know for my own satisfaction. I want to know. I should say. I'm not supposed to want. But I do want to know the explanation of the. The physiology or the reality aspect of what was she. Where did she come from? There has to be somewhere. She came and went. When she retreated back into the. Because at the end she went back into the top corner of the wall and she was gone. So that's an event. That's a real thing. So I have talked. We talked some about it, Jesse, because you do a lot of. Of inquiry and research into these subjects. There's an explanation for it based in physics, just like there has to be an explanation of what heaven and hell are in physics.
- [141:50]
Jesse
Do you have a best explanation in physics for kind of metaphysical or spiritual?
- [141:54]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, I have one that I favor and I'm hesitant to share it, but I want to give a direct answer to a direct question because I don't know. I mean, I don't know.
- [142:02]
Jesse
Sure.
- [142:03]
Rolf Moat Larson
But to me, the most sensible explanation is that things we describe as divine or part of. Of permanent, things that aren't prone to being affected by time anymore, meaning they're not in the physical universe in motion. Because time is a function of motion and matter. Right. Mass and motion. So without those things, if you had a universe at rest, then what we call heaven and hell, God presides over everything, including our universe, including where angels might come, come to give us messages or how prophets get their insights. Because it doesn't come from our universe. It doesn't come from the Big Bang universe. It can't come. The idea, I think if the great thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and pick your favorite, pondering the theological basis of God, even someone like Leibniz, a mathematician, who said God has to create the best of all possible worlds, which is one I love because I think he's absolutely right. But that's because God isn't in our world. God to be. Be perfect, to be great, to be everything we ascribe, including indivisible, so massive we can't even contemplate, can't be rooted in the Big Bang universe, emotion, because everything in our universe is relative.
- [143:16]
Jesse
So it's like there's an alternative universe that's at rest, that's more.
- [143:22]
Rolf Moat Larson
Or a universe that. I don't know. I use the word alternative. Well, that could perfectly valid. I'd say a universe that lies beyond or above or in which our universe is just a small part.
- [143:36]
Jesse
And you're saying the Big Bang universe because that is the proverbial kind of first prime mover event that scientists now herald as definitely true. That then kind of deterministically, kind of, you get this entropy from there and then you end up with this, what a lot of scientists would now say, this happy accident of our Earth and the world and the universe as it is. And you're saying that there is something next to that or outside of that.
- [144:06]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, the only explanation I can come up with, which is I'm embarrassed almost to say these profound things when there are so many scientists and philosophers. But I mean, the simplest way I think of it, it came to me kind of as an insight, as a possibility. Was sitting in my porch with screens all around my porch and picturing the Big Bang for the first time in my life, I'm God. I'm sitting in my chair and picturing the Big Bang as being a ripple in that space time in that room in the corner of the room, just a little ripple. It starts with a little tear in the corner and just spans out and you're God. You're looking over that. But to you, it's just a ripple. Everything we take is the ultimate reality. And the accumulation of all things is just possibly a very small sideshow. Occurring in a big room.
- [144:56]
Jesse
Is the implication of the title of your book A State of Mind, that your mind can get to this universe at rest, this timeless universe.
- [145:06]
Rolf Moat Larson
So the clues, because it's not completely just a stab in the dark of the big room, as much as to say you have to have an explanation of how people can reliably. This doesn't just happen to a few people. This has happened throughout human history. Being able to see into the. The future and sometimes claim to go into the past. So there must be a way of, if you will, overcoming time, which means time can't be an absolute in our equation. And you have people like Einstein saying time is but an illusion, which Harry Hiller said to me in my book when I went to Mount Athos. And sure enough, he proved it was an illusion because I kept going back in time. So in a way, the dream was the manifestation of a very basic potential truth, which is time is just an aspect of space time that we create in The Big Bang, because we're all in motion. There's nothing not in motion. But who is to say that there's not a universe at rest? Because I don't know how you can have something called everlasting life. If Christ went somewhere, he didn't go somewhere in a Big Bang after crucifixion and resurrection action, he didn't stay in our earthly realm. Even if we extend that meaning to the whole universe, as we understand the universe, it stands to reason then that every species, intelligent species in the universe would be beholden to this rule, not just humans.
- [146:32]
Jesse
Yeah, I question a lot of people who are more fundamentalist in their beliefs on these things. If Christ is immortal, where is he now? He should be on Earth. And they often talk about an ascension body, that they exist and maybe the ascension body is where this other sort of universe lies or something. I don't know. I'm speculating here.
- [146:53]
Rolf Moat Larson
I mean, I think you got another clue that's a really fascinating one. And I don't want to overstate any of these, but they're just things that come to mind, the transfiguration of Christ, which for many people, they don't know what that is. There was a period after crucifixion where he appeared to the disciples and in a form where he wasn't yet in heaven or wasn't at earth. And that's where he had the famous doubting Thomas putting Jesus saying, if you doubt that it's me, because you're not supposed to be here, put your finger in my wounds. And he's called Doubting Thomas. But if you look at that beyond as a religious kind of story, it has to be true. Again, if they witness Christ in some form, then how would you explain that in physics? I think you can. Can. I think it's a deliberate staging before reaching the next period. I absolutely believe, as a result of my religious experiences and growth and that we don't die when we die, we just go pass. It's better word would be a passage. There's a passage from this state. I think if you believe, truly believe in Christ, and really you have to believe that, as I always say, it doesn't matter how often you go to church and how much you donate to this or that. What matters is do you really believe the heart and soul of what the faith is about, which is there's life after death. So once you posit there is life after death, you're not really trying to determine what is that like Dante's stages of hell, which Is kind of like fun to think about. People deserve the different levels of hell. That kind of explains why you're a little sinner. You go here, you're a big sinner, you go down. But it's all silly, right? It's silly. The idea of hell as a place is silly now. The idea of hell as being the absence from God, being separated from God. Ah, now we're getting somewhere. Because God doesn't exist in the Big Bang world. God exists beyond it. So the closer you get beyond the Big Bang world to a world not in motion. So maybe when we die, we pass to a world at rest. We pass to a world where time no longer exists, which then creates. Creates consequences of what you've done in your life because you're suddenly aware of them. We can't even accurately go back and recreate any moment of our time, much less replicate it again. It happens. We have memories of it, and all our memories are fading, all of them. But there is a place where all the memories are the events themselves, if that makes sense. All the events are occurring always as they occurred in what we would describe as this year, this place, this time. Because in that world, none of the time exists. That's all. It's a very simple concept. And all it presupposes is that physicists have told me where we've discussed this, and I've learned a lot from good physicists, especially young ones, I find, that were really into this subject like you are. They're really interested in constructing ways of thinking, of metaphysics in ways that aren't just traditional physics, where if you can't prove it experimentally, forget it. Yeah, no, of course not.
- [150:06]
Jesse
Yeah. That can't be true. Like, if something is phenomenologically real or experientially real, it's not fake because you can't experimentally reproduce it in a lab. That's an absolutely ridiculous thing to say. That is the epitome of the hubris of an enlightenment. But time in physics is also extremely weird. General relativity is a theory of gravity. But even in general relativity, you have time dilation, you have time moves based on the speed of the observer, which is really weird. Gravity itself is really weird on a macroscopic scale. You basically are justifying the weakness of gravity with dark matter, which seems like this undetectable mathematical placeholder. And time and gravity are kind of super linked. The more you get closer to kind of a dense gravitational source like a black hole, time seems to slow. And so if gravity is kind of weird and then Gravity is obviously weird on a. It's irreconcilable with the other forces. On a quantum level, then time is also on a quantum level. It's taken as this sort of classical aspect axiom and something like Schrodinger's equation. So it's just time seems like this not super well understood thing. At most maybe you can think of it vis a vis the movement of bodies on a macroscopic scale and on a microscopic scale, maybe the oscillations of an electromagnetic wave or something. But it's the most commonly used noun in the English language. But it always has to be defined with respect to other things.
- [151:44]
Rolf Moat Larson
Things.
- [151:45]
Jesse
And so it seems a little bit like the eye seeing the eye or like that David Foster Wallace Kenyan commencement speech where he's, this is water. And it's like if you're a fish talking to another fish and you're in water, we're all in Zeno's arrow of time. You can't really get out of that sort of epistemological framework. But simultaneous to that you have all these interesting thinkers in physics like Iker Aronoff or Kramer, where the present is a handshake between the future and the past. That's a legitimate interpretation of kind of quantum mechanics. And you have ideas of retro causality and the future sort of causing the past or the present being constricted and there being probable futures and probable past. Schrodinger talked about if you measure a particle in its present, you might affect its past. It's this, it's way trippier than sort of meets the eye. I even think, you know, even position, momentum, superpositionality, spooky action at a distance, which Einstein grappled with till the end of his life, you have spooky action over time as well, where, you know, looks if a double slit experiment is performed in the future, it looks like the measurement of that double slit experiment is affecting one that's done the present or the past, which is crazy, right? And so, you know, it's almost like quantum mechanics and implies, people say it implies there's an issue with position and momentum measurements. That's Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. But there's also level of energy and time quantum indeterminacy as well. And what if the Schrodinger's equation, which is more position and momentum based, what if time superpositionality is causing the position and momentum superpositionality? And just like, you know, you can place Newton within Einstein, but Einstein better describes Newton than Newton. What if you could place Schrodinger within some time. Agnostic modality equation that describes Schrodinger better than Schrodinger. You know, we don't know the answer to these questions.
- [153:52]
Rolf Moat Larson
No. And the hard, hardest part of exploring them is separating the influence of self scale from the actual reality. So because we are at the scale we are, everything we measure is measured proportional to our scale. And that's not. We can obviously go beyond visual and we have lots of ways to measure things other than our senses. But what we can avoid is our scale. So if you go up in scale the cosmic level or down to subatomic levels, you've got the same problem. Your ability to measure anything gets less and less. And then your worst ability to measure anything is when time changes on you. You get into black hole physics or whatever where suddenly you realize mass goes infinite and time stops. But that's a clue. That's another clue. The idea again of time being a variable that we take is in a way an absolute reality, even though it changes. But the existence of time I'm talking about, about isn't necessarily real. It's real for us in the Big bang world. But if you stop everything, which we don't contemplate because we can't, at least in science, contemplate a world at rest.
- [155:14]
Jesse
So why don't we. We'll kind of take a page from the book, so to speak, and can weave in and out of some of these more mystical experiences and your more prosaic life. What were some of your early missions?
- [155:26]
Rolf Moat Larson
So I would say in the early years. Years there was no mission there other than basic conclusions I drew. Like, okay, I'm drawn to Russia because it's the action. There's no better place to be in the CIA than in the belly of the beast. So I had those kinds of connotations early on, but nothing explicitly linked to religion or faith or apocalypse or nuclear weapons or any of that. It was very. Just a kind of basic career until the things I described that happened later.
- [155:59]
Jesse
Yeah. And so. And you talk, you have a lot of story. I mean, you, you were almost overrun, right. In the Yeltsin coup. So there's this attempted coup against Boris Yelton.
- [156:08]
Rolf Moat Larson
1993.
- [156:09]
Jesse
Correct, 1993.
- [156:10]
Rolf Moat Larson
And you came back and. Yeah.
- [156:11]
Jesse
You're the Moscow station chief for the CIA. And it seems like you're kind of, you know, in this very dire situation. They end up having. They end up helping you. Right. Is that, is that right?
- [156:22]
Rolf Moat Larson
That's correct. I mean, it's one of those things where the Idea of a liaison relate, we call liaison relationship when we cooperate with other intelligence. On the face of it, there was nothing really to cooperate between the CIA and the kgb. You read all the stories, they're all true. As we say, there's a lot of blood in the water. We kill, you know, not kill, but their agents. Our agents end up dead, killed, executed, sometimes imprisoned. So it's a very ugly history, and we weren't going to be friends. But the idea was when I laid out the first CIA directors that ever went to Moscow to visit, or even visit Moscow, much less deal with the Russians as partners, it was Bob Gates was the first when he was CIA director, and I'll never forget that trip in fall of 1992. He came there and laid the groundwork by giving a great toast. We had a dinner. Russians love toast. They love dinners. And you gotta win. You gotta be good at the whole art of toasting. And so I learned a lot about that. But his essentially was around the theme of we're not friends. We're not here because we're ever gonna love each other and be real partners. We're here because our country's demand that we put aside some of our differences and cooperating in meaningful ways for the security of our countries. That was when Yeltsin had just emerged. There was the hope then, right? But it was a realism he attached to it that was very important, needed to make it real, because otherwise you would have been pretending and playing games, which there's no point to play games if you're arch enemies. You just do what you need to do. So a year later, it all culminated in this coup in Moscow when hardliners tried to overthrow Yeltsin. But the one thing it showed is that at a time of extreme need, we could work with the Russians because we had a common interest to keep Yeltsin in power. Russian intelligence decided they weren't ready to overthrow Yeltsin through force and violence. They ended up doing that. This is 93. It was eight years later, of course, when Vladimir Putin came to power legally. The rich right way, if you want to call it that. And the Russians don't like coups and violence any more than we would like in our own country. So we worked together. And it was astonishing. I didn't know when I first called Russian intelligence chief and said, hey, we need help. We need you to protect us. It looks like we're going to be taken hostage. When I was leading a detachment of people outside the embassy and coming under fire from coup plotters, Cyprs and things. I called them for help, and I didn't expect any help. In fact, it was the ambassador at the time, Ambassador Tom Pickering, he's the one who. I called him in desperation, saying, there's no way you can help us, is there? Because the embassy, everybody in the embassy was underground in the embassy compound except for us. We're out doing reporting and things like that to tell Washington what was going on, otherwise they wouldn't have known anything going on at the time. All the news networks had shut down.
- [159:22]
Jesse
And you end up holed up in an abandoned building or something.
- [159:24]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, we holed up, everything was abandoned. But we were in the ambassador's room residents, which we opened up and used just as a command post. I think that started as five of us. I think we ended up with seven or eight. I put the whole, like, all the details in that. I was a little surprised again. It was nice to see they had no problem with telling that story, because I think it's important. The purpose of the story and the purpose of me describing it is that intelligence is almost always unexpected and its greatest value is proven in the most difficult times, pro and con. And you can't fear or avoid the difficult circumstances. You have to kind of run into them and embrace the difficulties. So they ended up sending a team to protect us from being taken hostage. And the only rules we had. I'll never forget the phone call, the director, he said, okay, Ralph, there's very extraordinary circumstances. We're going to send you a team of heavily armed guys to try to keep you from getting captured. But here's the deal. One is, do not co mingle. Our guys and your guys are separate. We'll do our work outside your perimeter or whatever, so don't mix. And he goes, if you are stormed or they get in a firefight or whatever happens, die in your separate fire foxholes. And he didn't have to explain why, because, however that day turned out in Russian history, didn't want to leave any evidence of who would work with whom along the way, because it was in doubt. The one thing I learned personally, in a way that helped me, even with the spiritual stuff, later, mystical experiences, is history is not inevitable. History comes together because of the decisions people make. And when you're experiencing it live, like in a war or in a coup or in a change of government, you realize it could go that way if these things are done, and goes that way if another thing is done.
- [161:28]
Jesse
You've been in the room with Vladimir Putin. What's your impression of Him.
- [161:33]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, it wasn't as extensive as so many of the people, you know, obviously in the US Government who have had a lot of interaction with them. So I don't want to put it on. So I just happen to have a fairly unique one time thing where we met in his first foreign trip. I was in Norway. I'm Norwegian American, as I said. So it was a great honor for me to go back to Norway and I happened to be there again, one of these things, I thank God a little bit for the privilege of to be there during the last meeting of what was called the Oslo Peace Accord process, which started in Oslo, Norway and now was culminating. So this was in the November 1993. 93. No, no, 1998.
- [162:15]
Jesse
1998.
- [162:15]
Rolf Moat Larson
The last meeting.
- [162:16]
Jesse
Oh, okay.
- [162:18]
Rolf Moat Larson
And the last meeting was one amazing. I had no role of any appreciable nothing. I was there as literally a appreciation gift. I knew the Prime Minister and other people in the Norwegian government. They said, invite me and my wife to the dinner. But at the dinner was President Clinton came, of course, Vladimir Putin's first foreign trip as Prime Minister. And then of course, the main ones, Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak, who was the Prime Minister of Israel at the time. Now, I had never met Arafat, Ehud Barak. I had met Clinton just kind of like formalistically and Putin. And I got to see them all in this kind of as an observer vantage point where if anything anybody would say, who's this guy? Because everybody there was more important than me, literally everybody at the dinner. But that was great. There was no pressure. I could literally just observe Putin and others, and it was just amazing. There was a moment when after dinner when everybody got up and mingled, went to the king's library to visit the castle in his library to have cognac and chocolates. And everybody's walking there and I'm going to catch everything on the way. And I see Clinton literally grab after Arafat in the middle of the room. And Clinton was. Whatever one thinks of him politically. That's not what I'm talking about here. He had a presence, right?
- [163:45]
Jesse
Oh, well, everybody says that. Everybody says the most charismatic guy, he.
- [163:49]
Rolf Moat Larson
Just had a natural charisma. He didn't have to do anything, just stands there, right?
- [163:52]
Jesse
Sure.
- [163:53]
Rolf Moat Larson
So he grabs Arafat, who also, in his weird way had a charisma too. A presence, right. Because he's the iconic head wrap and etc. And he says to Arifit Arafat, take the deal, Yasser, take the deal. It's your last best chance. For peace. And I remember listening to that thing. Wow. So, like, important. But I just heard. I thought it was very important.
- [164:16]
Jesse
Yeah.
- [164:17]
Rolf Moat Larson
And I just felt so depressed. It's like I knew it was no, you know, foreshadowing or future. I just, like, instinctively my gut was, oh, this is not going to turn out well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course, it's turned out terribly.
- [164:28]
Jesse
Well, it's turned out terribly. I mean, partially. Yasser Arafat would speak out of both sides of his mouth, and he would speak to his own population, say certain things and then speak to the west and say other things. But also Yitzhak Rabin also, you know, taken out by, by his own, you know, people and Haredi, you know, Jews who are just really extremists and wanted, you know, to cede nothing at all costs. And, you know, I think in many ways that whole the Middle east conundrum quagmire has been so stuck for so long. And maybe we, you know, maybe we've made a little bit of progress in the last year, but it's been so, so stuck because of kind of extremists on, on both sides and because in many ways the incentives of the leaders are to, like, actually maintain the conflict. Yeah. So unfortunate.
- [165:18]
Rolf Moat Larson
It is, it is.
- [165:19]
Jesse
It's a factory of. Yeah.
- [165:21]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, my watching Putin, just to the point of your question was I already had the impression that he would be more consequential than I thought he might at the time, by any standard of reasoning or what I knew about him. But he had the presence, too. He was boring, the gray man on the corner. But that in itself impressed me because he wasn't trying to fit in. He wasn't trying to speak loudly to be heard. He was way too self assured for that kind of a reaction to the situation. And I respected that. I thought, okay, this guy could end up being way more of his own man than we think he might be going into that time period. One last thing, because it ties to Russia and the Middle east again, five years earlier, 1993, again after the coup and all that, I was meeting with the Russians. Yevgeny Primakov is his name. He was the head of Russian intelligence. I got to know him very, very well. We'd meet almost every week and had all kinds of discussions about everything. We talked almost like we are, Jesse, about all kinds of big subjects. And he was a guy who felt very comfortable. I thought he was a brilliant, brilliant man, actually. And he probably would have been a prime minister before instead of Putin in the mid-90s. After Yeltsin left, had he not passed away from health problems and old age, et cetera. But at the time, he. He was always musing with me about what can we do to be serious people. There's a Russian expression, serozhny chilovak. That's the most important thing to a Russian. It can love you or hate you, but you gotta be a serious nichole, a serious person, serious professional, serious about what you do. Don't give me bullshit. And he says, you know, we gotta do something. But I can think of one thing that would be unbelievable if we could find a way to do it. I said, we? What's that? He said, well, you have your means, meaning CIA. We have our means, meaning the svr, which is the foreign intelligence component of Russian intelligence, and we have them in the Middle East. So let's apply all our efforts in the Middle east, where we really need something to happen to break this longstanding stalemate problem. Our goal will be to keep Arafat alive. Alive. Your goal will be to keep Rabin alive. And I thought it was genius. Of course, I sent it in. Everybody thought I was insane, and I never got a good explanation as to why. It really wasn't even considered. Maybe you just offered it.
- [167:57]
Jesse
Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, it's tough. I mean. I mean, we've talked about this too, in our last interview, you, where people always talk about a deep state. And I think, clearly there is no sort of cabal in a back room smoking cigars or something. But there is. I don't think there's conspiracy to say that there are all sorts of misaligned incentives when it comes to big bureaucracies, and that's any institution. And so, yeah, no, just going back to, why would somebody senselessly say no to a thing like that? Or I am sympathetic to a lot of the John Mearsheimer arguments as well, that we've totally reneged on Putin a million different times, and we've encroached a lot on their territory, and not to at all apologize for a lot of his wrongdoings, which are very real, but, yeah, the incentives are often wrong in these organizations.
- [168:54]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, when you talk about people like Mearsheimer or others who try to express a different way of thinking, thinking of our policies and their impact, I mean, there's utility in those points of views. I don't agree with him on a lot of things, but I think he should be saying some of the things he's saying, and it's helpful. The biggest thing we habitually do wrong in terms of follow through on policy. Some of our policy ideas aren't so bad, but it's usually the huge flaws in the implementation, usually. And it's not so much the underlining motives that line up with as much as people think they do with sort of deep state agendas. It's just either a mixture of incompetence or I'd say more the idea that we mirror image too much. So our biggest problem in understanding, for example, the Russians. Now, what I'm saying is not acceptable. It's not accepted thinking, but it's widely accepted. But some people understand it is. Our biggest mistake is not seeing things through their eyes. Eyes. And it doesn't justify what they're doing or thinking, but it's understanding it. And if you want to know why we are where we are with the Russians, you have to understand, see the world through their eyes. It doesn't mean you accept that view or more importantly, what they do as a consequence of what they feel, but at least understand why you're there and don't be surprised about it.
- [170:14]
Jesse
Isn't there a Kennan quote about understanding the Russians or something? It's like once you ascend to the top of the mountain and, you know, you, you end up equally confused as to the Russian motive, motivation or something. I'm totally paraphrasing and botching this, but there's something like that.
- [170:31]
Rolf Moat Larson
I don't remember that, but I, I.
- [170:32]
Jesse
Suspect, yeah, it's like they're always mystical, confusing. There's no way to ultimately understand what they're up to or something.
- [170:39]
Podcast Host
Which feels somewhat right.
- [170:40]
Jesse
You like, you know, the, the idea of a politburo is like this, you know, concealed, sealed off, hermetically, you know, enclosed sort of organization that, you know, know you can never fully sort of understand. And Putin's always keeping the people around him on their toes. So it's this really hard kind of hermeneutic game of reading the tea leaves at all times. With governments like that, I think you.
- [171:06]
Rolf Moat Larson
Read tea leaves and see everything as being inscrutable when you don't have any real depth in either living in the country or having enough experience with the people of the country where you can understand where they're coming from. One of the biggest mistake we make with Russia or Xi Jinping in China or anybody for that matter, all the leaders, even some of our friendly countries, is not understanding that the country's not the leader. So the thing I'll never do is think of Russia as Vladimir Putin. I've read too much Russian history, philosophy, Gotten into Russia. I've known too many Russians. I lived in Russia for enough years, years where I think of Russia first as the people, and then you can assess what Putin's doing. And the most important way you need to assess it is not what impact it has on the US but what impact is what he's doing having on the Russian people. Now, I would make an argument that what's happening now is very damaging to the future interests of ordinary Russians. The same way I might assess what different pressure President's impact has on America. I don't care so much about how the President's policies affect the stock market as I do how the President's policies affect ordinary Americans. So I think we have to look at foreign countries the same way. If you look at China's meteoric rise in the 20th century, you're not compelled to think of China as an enemy or deep rival. And everything that's progress in China is being antithetical to our interests. Look what they've done for the Chinese people in a remarkable period of time. That's not all good, obviously, but start from a more solid basis to understand why the leaders do what they do in their own history, traditions, culture, environments, and religion. If you look at the reason, I've always said, now a lot of Russia experts disagree with me on this. I've always said Russia can't embrace, cannot be a democracy like the United States. The Yeltsin years were a mirage. They weren't a missed opportunity. There was never an opportunity for Russia to go West. Even when famously, Peter the Great talked about Western orientation, it had nothing to do in the context we would like to ascribe it to. Like he wanted to be more connected culturally, et cetera, with the U.S. russia is what Russia is, which is a deeply orthodox, homogeneous country with a very rich history and very rich. They're very smart people, they're very educated people, and they want what they want. They don't want what we want.
- [173:48]
Jesse
Yeah.
- [173:49]
Rolf Moat Larson
And I think that's a big mistake of what we try to impose. Not so much any way of controlling countries, but our idea of imposing our culture.
- [173:59]
Jesse
For sure. Well, they had, under Gorbachev, last leader of the USSR that disbanded it. You had glasnost and you had perestroka, perestroika, and you had open minds, make open markets or whatever, and. Or open markets, make open minds. Right. And I think what a lot of neoliberals sort of like, miscalculated is that you'd inevitably, you'd get this, like, opening up of markets. And then, you know, you'd end up with all of the amazing things about liberal democracy in the west, you know, in both China and Russia, and that's just not happened at all. And, like, it took us a long time to, I think, update on that. You know, you're right. There's this neoconservative sort of hubris of, like, you know, this would just happen on its own. And that's just not. You also have things like, with Putin, I think there's this guy, Vladislav Surkov, who I think is this advisor who wrote this book, Almost Zero, and it's all about performance art and how that has to play into how you do politics. And so I just find it so fascinating. That whole world, it's just so different. Or even, like, I think this is too, you know, Alexander Dugan, who. I don't think he's. I don't think he's that close with Putin, actually. Like, I think people think he is, but, I mean, it's.
- [175:21]
Rolf Moat Larson
Putin is.
- [175:21]
Jesse
I mean, that whole world is definitely trippier than we. Than we, you know, realize. Like, some of these guys are like, they're more esoteric than, you know, we might realize. And so it's like, how do you really understand how they make decisions at all?
- [175:34]
Rolf Moat Larson
Right. Right.
- [175:36]
Jesse
Yeah.
- [175:36]
Rolf Moat Larson
No, I think it's a little like our previous discussions on faith and mysticism and analyzing other countries and understanding what, more importantly than analyzing it, is understanding what's happening, what track are they on, what road are they on? Especially in a world where our notions of individual identity are changing through, of course, social media and the Internet, our ideas of technology, or it's blowing up around us in ways we don't really understand now. That's affecting all of us. The cultural reaction to it is different everywhere. The thing it's testing most, in my view, is the idea of individuality and identity. So in a country like ours, which started at the point of our creation as a nation, the idea of very unique, historically completely unique ideas of individual freedom and the role of individual, Individual liberty, identity in a collective society where the collective part was put way down. I mean, the idea of a right, an intrinsic right to life, liberty, and not property, like John Locke wrote in his Second Treatise of government, but pursuit of happiness. Yeah, what a weird idea. Franklin came up with that. I understand when they were drafting the Declaration of Independence, it was a change made edit to Jefferson original. That's only something Americans can come up with.
- [177:01]
Jesse
It's a very Western concept.
- [177:03]
Rolf Moat Larson
It's not Even European, Western. So when we're decrying and criticizing all the Europeans for being socialists, I would maintain we have no idea what we're talking about. I've lived in most of those countries. Whatever I call that socialism. I want those pensions. We make fun of the French because they got a four day work week. Okay, well, I like the idea of universal healthcare. Okay, you gotta wait first thing. Always American will say about, talk about Danish healthcare or Norwegian. And I've, you know, he's, oh, you gotta wait in line. Well, you got some healthcare, right? We're striving to try to create some normalcy around the idea that citizens also have a right to maybe some form of universal healthcare. We can't even agree on that really. So that's there. Then you go further, you go to the Russians or the Chinese or pretty much anywhere in Asia. Just the notion of the individual's place in society is far more complicated. Collective, they're part of something. The idea of the culture, of the societal framework is that your individual rights only go so far and then you're part. And most people feel that. And it's not a religious based thing where they're members of the same church, because particularly in Europe or Asia, those organized religions don't hold as much a hold, have much a hold on people as even they might in the United States today. But it's the idea that society itself was constructed with this idea of collective responsibility. So when the Russians drew up the philosophers, the great Russian philosophers, I call the religious philosophers, working with the political scientists after the breakup of the Russian Empire, the Tsar, which first yielded the Soviet Union and the Bolshevism, they were drawing up a system of government that would resolve the question of how can you help have a true democracy that wouldn't be corrupted by special interests and foolish leaders who would be not up for it. You need more of a Plato's Republic, A republic that was based on people having roles, which we all have collective responsibilities. And you have distinct classes like Plato's guardian class that manage the government, et cetera. Responsibility is conferred to individuals within their collective obligations. And we really strongly struggle with that. We've struggled that for decades. But it's really coming to a head, I think in a way where every country is sorting through that. But the bias in most countries is much more towards limiting individual freedom for the collective good.
- [179:35]
Jesse
Yeah, yeah.
- [179:36]
Rolf Moat Larson
Does that make sense?
- [179:37]
Jesse
No, it makes total sense. Well, if you look at like Marxist dialectical materialism, the individual has very little place at all. It's very, you know, the individual can go through a meat grinder. And as long as the body byproduct is social progress on the other side, whether it's Mao's Great Leap Forward or any of Stalin's initiatives to send people to the Gulag, that's okay in their model. And so I think human suffering is inevitable in that model. And there are no individual rights. And it's all about this sort of collective sense of progress. And I think that is very interesting, alien and foreign to somebody thinking about Western liberal democracy. I also you brought up Plato, Plato himself, you could think of him as, you know, he's really obviously deep, interesting thinker. I think he had all these kind of interesting ideas about ontological truth and metaphysics, which maybe modern scholars would disagree with me on or something. But also, if you read the Republic, it's sort of like this proto fascist book. It's like you're separating the kids from the adults and like they have this guardian class that's like pretty hierarchical and stratified and it's not at all like a non violent egalitarian book at all. But 40 was one of the numbers that you got in your download as well. And something very interesting happened to you at the age of 40, another sort of metaphysical experience. Do you want to talk about what happened to you on the train?
- [181:08]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah. So I've been. This is between some of the Virgin Mary things and of course many years after the introduction to not only mystical experiences, but what they might mean in terms of my work, my role in life and trying to reconcile the sacred. So I was just on a normal, I'd say everyday espionage travel trip in Europe from Zurich to Vienna on the night train. And I'm sitting on the train, I carried my Bible with me, which was engraved in glossy, my name, full name on the COVID We all got this Bible when we were in our first year at West Point. And I'd kept it over the years, but I have a superstition, I have to carry it with me everywhere I travel. So I stick it in my box. Well, then I have to have a cover story for it because many of the times I traveled over the years. I'm an alias, you know, alias person. I've got a cover story, I've got even phony passports and things for my that the agency provided. Right. So I may have to explain who this wrong. Dolph Malt Larson, friend of mine. It's almost a little bit like the Odius Maximus story, you know, I have to come up with A reason why I'd have this guy's Bible with me. So I opened the Bible and I had a pencil there that I just used to mark something. And I just. Usually just pick out something random read. Most times 10, 15 minutes. I wasn't someone who spent pouring. I don't pour over biblical texts or Bibles or things and never did then and now. Plus, I'm very distracted by my niche. I'm going to Vienna, exchange documents and going on the next day. And so I look up at the clock. There are very few people on this particular train in my car, so I'm not paying attention to them. And I look up at the clock that's in center Swiss train, right? Everything's clockwork. And I look at the clock and the second hand is starting to get heavy. And I'm feeling like a weight, My body feeling heavier and heavier. I feel like something's overwhelming me, almost like I'm experiencing some sort of thing. But it's like space and time are slowing down around me. And I remember thinking that even. But I didn't say, wow, this is very strange. Is it like having an epileptic fit or something? I mean, I was really kind of worried for a minute. And then, you know, as it slowed down, my pencil I was holding, I dropped it and it just crashed onto the Bible. Like, then I read, whoa. And then I just. And then it was okay. I had always said I was aware of God's presence, but I didn't really know what. Not in this way. God was like there, didn't see anything. You know, like I said, it's not a visual thing. I just was aware God was that close.
- [184:06]
Jesse
Get a message.
- [184:07]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, it was, yes. But the thing about the presence that time that was different from just being aware is it was scary. It was really scary because it was like the Almighty Creator, who's also personal. I mean, great minds like Thomas Jefferson could never reconcile that he had to be one or the other. I wasn't going to reconcile it on the train, but it was the idea that it was not good to be in God presence. That was my reaction to the intrusion was, whoa. I already knew he could hear, understand, interpret everything I'm thinking or will do or might do because he's way ahead of me. But this was kind of different, right? So then I did hear. It was a very definite short. This was all very short. But this started with I am have. The verb was interesting. I never known it was one church. One church. So I grained that in my mind. Do not criticize my church. The old and the new are one. Just old and new. I interpreted that to be a testament. But old and the new are 1. Swallow them whole and finally read it as a child. So I know that's exactly what it was because I wrote it down exactly like that. I still have that original note somewhere. Exactly that way. I said, that's it and that was it.
- [185:41]
Jesse
What does that mean to you?
- [185:42]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, I think it's pretty obvious. I didn't think it was obvious. And it really has taken years to just kind of like, in a way, it's my Sunday school, in a way, because I never left as a child, because I learned more from this, what I think it is. But the one church means. Don't think of a church as the various churches. Protestant, Catholic, even Buddhist. My church is the church of believers. Whatever they call themselves, even people consider themselves atheists or agnostic. I mean, labels are labels. Even what you label yourself. What does God see? God sees way beyond that. So that's how I interpret that. Do not criticize my church is make a distinction between criticizing the sins or the crime of a organized religion, which we have every right to do, from dating from the Inquisition to the Crusades to anything you want to take your hand on. And you can get so obsessed by it. I know so many people do. That you're incapable of loving God anymore, being part of this community of believers. Because you associate everything with the fallen angel, right? And then the really cool ones for me, because I immediately reread the whole Bible cover to cover, after I heard about the old and the new newer one. The inspiration that gave me was to. For the first time in my life, I was 40 years old on the train was to go reread the Bible from COVID to cover just as a history. No longer. Is Jonah's whale really a whale. Is it a metaphor? Red Sea parting? No, just read the damn thing. But read it as a child, meaning have that same receptivity to. I had the most my own grandkids. Like I said, I got nine of them. But they have asked me the hardest questions on religion because they just asked the most important obvious ones. Where is God? Why did Jesus die for our sins? My daughter said that the first time she went to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and watched Jesus's cross. And she was just standing there for a long time. She was like 9 years old. I said, honey, what are you thinking? She says, why did Jesus have to die for us? That's a kid reaction. But that you need to kind of like recharge completely on the Bible that way. To think of it in that kind of a room we're given this document is what it is. There's nothing holy about the thing itself and there are things in there undoubtedly that are wrong. And it's a language. As soon as you got a language you get misinterpretations, reinterpretations as everything else. But don't think about all that. It's like a lot of the other things we've talked about, Jesse. Don't overanalyze it, just let it go and think, read it. And so I did.
- [188:27]
Jesse
And do you think it's a coincidence that this happened at the age of 40 and that you received 40 in your dream and that it was 40 days of Jesus?
- [188:37]
Rolf Moat Larson
I don't think it is. I don't think it's a coincidence I'm.
- [188:41]
Jesse
40 days in the desert or 40 years in the desert for the Israelites as well. It's almost 40 years of being awake from God before you experience a communion with God. And in your case, 40 years of maybe more nihilistic, less believing youth or something. And then you experience this gnostic direct connection or something.
- [189:02]
Rolf Moat Larson
Right, That's a good explanation. I can't say it's definitive, but I mean, I love your fascination with numbers. I think the really interesting thing you do is not just my numbers, but the idea of tying numbers into a deeper understanding of reality itself and how that can help us tie together disparate kind of fields that we think of as separate. And one of the problems we have as human beings is when you get too deep into the specialization of different faculties, you tend to think of them all as standing alone and needing to justify themselves. So the number of people I've run into to who can speak across various disciplines in that way, to tie them together in a meaningful way, that's pretty unusual itself.
- [189:51]
Jesse
You have another dream, final dream we'll talk about, but you have a dream about the Order of the Broken Cross, which is this apocalyptic cult in Jerusalem. And you have to sort of fly in there behind enemy lines, be a CIA case off officer and recruit some spy. And then you kind of infiltrate this order and systematically, you know, figure out what's going on with them. And then you, you give their information coordinates or something to the, to the west, and then they end up getting, getting bombed and they, you know, the, the apocalypse is sort of saved or whatever. Is that symbolic? Like now after having led a, a long way life of Trying to being anti proliferation of WMDs and going after people like Zarqawi and stuff. So do you think that in some ways you are this almost biblical prophet like character who is your mandate or your mission in life is to stave off the apocalypse and that the instantiation of the apocalypse in the modern day is in fact just the proliferation of biological weapons and WMDs and that sort of thing and that's your kind of divine purpose, if you will.
- [191:11]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah, I think I can say this in a way that doesn't sound too grandiose, but certainly not a personal mission that I feel I'm on, that if I don't do this, somehow we fail as a species. I'm just very aware that all the work I've done, particularly in nuclear and proliferation, I've gotten into trying to stop networks from trafficking and nuclear materials and doing which by the way, a lot of people do. And that's a lot of my solace or I take comfort. In fact, there are a lot of really great people working on this with or without a sense of divine purpose. And I never expressed or carried into my work the divine notion of purpose that I feel because I do keep that separated. I'm a very strong believer in separation of church and state. And not just as a way we think of ourselves as a country and society, but as a principle of keeping that separate. I have to unite them in my mind though. I have to reconcile them when there's conflict. I learned at West Point, duty, honor, country, which is a very high minded principle and difficult to. I say it's the greatest thing West Point gave me was a sense of principle, of having honor, doing your duty and doing it with integrity and understanding. Country not being the president, but country being the people and our history and what we represent. So that's almost religious right to do it right. And so there's not that big of a gap. But when it comes to the apocalypse and those ideas, yeah, I'm very aware of, I became very aware of it. I didn't start aware of it except through my dreams. Typically all my dreams and the sequence of things I've described here today, Jesse, are ways of saying I was conditioned, preconditioned, prepared for both my work and my spiritual growth and growth and faith the same way. They were assets to me to have some ideas what this was all about. And I had to connect it still. And I was sometimes reluctant to do that. It took me a long time to write the letter to the Pope that Virgin Mary told me to Write and it should have done a it the next day. And there's a whole story there that I think could guide a lot of people. We're always reluctant maybe to do the things we know we should do. I'm no different. I'm certainly no warrior that's out in the lead of everybody and stopping the world from being destroyed by nuclear weapons and proliferation. But I'm one of them. I'm there. And fortunately there are a lot of people like me. And I think people should take great comfort that I have found that most, most people in public service, which is a counterintuitive conclusion to come to in today's world, are amazing people and do great things. And the best people, including a lot of the scientists in the Department of Energy and our nuclear labs, things like that, could get a lot more money not working for the government or working on the outside. So for them it's like. For me, it was nice. Never about money or fame or recognition, reward.
- [194:21]
Jesse
You mentioned the Department of Energy. What was your exact title there?
- [194:25]
Rolf Moat Larson
I was the Director of Intelligence and Counterintelligence at the Department of Energy.
- [194:30]
Jesse
And you gave me this. What is it? Department of Energy, Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. And it says we keep the real secrets. And it's a little gray alien. Now, as you know, know, and we've spoken about this. You know, I've run into all these connections between UFOs and, and, and, and, and, and aliens and, or I don't know if they're aliens, but some sort of like non human presence and the doe. And you, you mentioned actually like in your book, that there was some sort of like hazing ritual brief that you got. Is that right?
- [195:09]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah, because it's such an obvious thing to pull a thread on. We like to do a thing which I was introduced to, I didn't create it, which we took a director level. So Deputy Secretary of Energy was involved and several other bigwigs, and me as the Director of Intelligence. And we take a newbie. The newbie would be a political appointee, very high level, maybe Deputy Secretary or Assistant Secretary or some level who had just signed up and gotten their clearances and were taking their jobs. And we bring them down to the bowels of the Department of Energy where some of the, the most secretive things are guarded. And you know where those are kind of everybody whispers when they come by, and you pull them into this back room like Maxwell Smart in the old TV shows, going back through layer and layers of secrets back into the vault, and you get back into the deepest vault in the DOE and you bring them back. So the person's back there and they're already. And you have a briefer and you have about six, seven people, seniors sitting around a table looking very grim. And the hazing ritual is to explain to them that we really did have. Have aliens. We covered aliens. One was injured, one was not. We got the alien space technology through Roswell, et cetera. And it was a real thing. And the briefing is so good. It's got all the real DOE, what you call tickets, we call secret access programs. SAPs they're called. And things on this to make it seem as real as possible. And then the briefer goes through and has a very convincing story that he's now this person that's come in the is being brought into this ultimate Secret Access Program SAP Ultimate 1 as a member of a very rare team that transcends all the different presidencies and parties. Because you can't obviously brief every president coming in on this. You gotta be very discerning and only bring in people when they can contribute. And you're gonna be part of the expedition that goes to we hired you. In fact you were hired for this job. But you're really gonna go on this expedition to this planet. They've helped us develop the technology to travel their location and greet us when we get there. So it's got all this excitement and there's, you know, obviously there's corpses on tables and stuff to make this all look.
- [197:20]
Jesse
At what point do you tell them it's a joke?
- [197:22]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, somebody cracks up and it somebody can't keep it in any longer, we betray our own.
- [197:29]
Jesse
And the Secretary of Energy.
- [197:30]
Rolf Moat Larson
We're not that good actor.
- [197:31]
Jesse
The Secretary of Energy is literally in on this.
- [197:33]
Rolf Moat Larson
It's a deputy secretary who in my case was in the room.
- [197:37]
Jesse
Oh my God.
- [197:38]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah. So we raise him it to the highest level. And what's funny is there is a serious side to that chapter I put in the book. I wanted to first take a look. I wanted to take a break from some of the subjects. There was a writing technique involved. But part of it also was to raise a bigger point. That is something you are doing a lot of inquiries into and others I don't know what secret that I don't know myself. I don't know everything. Obviously I used to know in CIA. We got so paranoid at one point. Got so paranoid I couldn't pass a polygraph anymore. They actually let me publish a chapter on that. Which I was really surprised when I was Failing the polys because I knew too much. And I was one of the few people that knew everything about a certain subject that I couldn't even tell the polygrapher. I didn't trust a polygrapher, let's put it that way. So you get to this wilderness of mirrors. It's a famous poem, but there's a famous book on it too, about espionage, where you start looking at everything, everybody and everybody being knowing something you don't. And the fact is, I used to marvel at people walking around the halls of CIA that thought they were so smart on everything. They used to talk smack and I. They don't know what I know. And then I thought, well, there's probably stuff that this guy over there knows that I don't know. So you start looking that way. And doe's even worse because I tease my CIA colleagues and friends. I said, you know, I learned some of this nation's most important secrets at doe. Not CIA. Doe does stuff that man.
- [199:14]
Jesse
Do you feel like that is true?
- [199:15]
Rolf Moat Larson
Oh, I know it's true.
- [199:16]
Jesse
You know it's true.
- [199:17]
Rolf Moat Larson
I know it's true.
- [199:18]
Jesse
What years were you Doe?
- [199:19]
Rolf Moat Larson
2005 to 2008.
- [199:21]
Jesse
2005 to 8.
- [199:21]
Rolf Moat Larson
And now the point in the story, though, is it's a valid thing to wonder, does the president know this has come up a lot in UFO history. It started with, really, Reagan and Gorbachev musing about they need to get together, so when the aliens come, the US and the Russian. Reagan mentioned that he was joking, but it was on his mind, right? And then later it was President Clinton, I know, was interviewed by somebody and said, do you believe that we have signs of alien life and we're hiding or there's a program or something? And he basically said, I don't think they tell me, even though I'm the President, he said that. So it speaks. Speaks to both the dangers of secrecy, really, because you can't get to that point. You can't get to the point that you don't want to share secrets because they're secret. Or you're thinking, you've got to withhold this from the President. I don't think you can go there and have a small group of people. That's when you could get into your deep state. If groups form around subgroups, form around the real government and start to do things to create real government's not aware of. Well, that's kind of the textbook. I don't believe in the deep state I've been since I was 17 years old, and I'm 71 now and I'm still very connected. If there's a deep state, I want to know who's in it and where it's operating from and what they're doing because I have no idea. But when you get to something like this, somebody would say, and I told you it would be me, if I knew that we had evidence of extra, extraterrestrial visits to Earth, I'd go to the press.
- [200:59]
Jesse
What about if we just had evidence of some sort of anomalous phenomenon around our nuclear site that we.
- [201:05]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well see, that's intriguing. You've talked a little with me about that and that's the first I heard of it.
- [201:10]
Jesse
Yeah. Interesting, because if you Google or even ChatGPT like UFO incursions to around national labs and nuclear sites, even in that time range 2005 to 2008, you'll see stuff, you'll see. I believe you fe Warren. You'll see Malmstrom Base and you'll see literally people, missile security officers who've signed affidavits saying that they've seen incursions. And there's a great journalist who's a friend of mine named Robert Hastings and he's written a book called UFOs and Nukes and it, it is ubiquitous. He has 167 TS secret cleared missile security officers, radar operators, guys on the PRP program which I'm sure you're familiar with, where you have to report if you're on ibuprofen because you're guarding the crown jewel secrets of American defense. And they just see saucers, Tic Tacs orbs everywhere around our nuclear sites and in some cases these sites are getting shut down. There's a 2010 case in Fe Warren where literally Obama gets briefed because it was down for, they say it was 59 minutes, but I think. So this Bob Hastings back channeled with this retired missile technician and he was in touch with some missile technicians on site and they attribute it to this cigar shaped object that literally this sort of tick tick attack thing that shut down the base and so did you not hear of anything like that?
- [202:44]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, I can say completely openly and transparently when I was in DOE and I was the Director of Intelligence, I never was briefed on any of that. So it doesn't mean it didn't occur. And I take very seriously what you said. I think in all likelihood a lot of those reports are true or at least being truthfully reported. And I don't know if it's because they're handled some somewhere else which gets to kind of some of the big questions, or whether because they're individual things that never get resolved, they don't go anywhere, but we can never resolve it because we don't know what's going on.
- [203:21]
Jesse
I would believe that. Because I guess I worry if the head of intelligence and counterintelligence for the DOE isn't hearing about these incursions that seems so fundamental to the safety of. And maybe, maybe that's why it's impossible to talk about on the kind of the civil side, on the open side or something. Because how can you say these things are flying with impunity over our sights? But I don't know. I wish there was some better way to talk about.
- [203:49]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, I think, obviously I'm not the President or anybody who would be in that decision making, but I think it would be a strategic mistake of historical proportions for a body of government at any given time to conceal that truth from the American people thinking we can't handle it, or somehow it compromises if our security is being. Or national security is being compromised that way. I can't think of a scenario where it's better that the people don't know it than if they do know it. Because if there's a problem, we need everyone to know, kind of have some things to go, go on. And I don't believe in, like, the mass panic sort of things and stuff like that. So it's really a question of trust. And when you get to trust, the government has very little trust. The whole deep state phenomena is rooted in mistrust of government.
- [204:41]
Jesse
Right.
- [204:41]
Rolf Moat Larson
And the assumption that if we don't know what the government's going on, we don't believe what we're being told. There must be something really bad going on. My experience is really kind of the polar opposite. It's been. You'd be very disappointed at times if you knew what we're doing doing. Because it's not always very good. Sometimes it's malicious and just bad, wrong, illegal. Because if you're doing a certain amount of things, some people are going to do illegal things. Like, it's just inevitable.
- [205:11]
Jesse
I think the public on this issue is probably so confused by the government's messaging because you have people like James Clapper, Jim Semivan, guys who are like, you know, James Clapper's dni.
- [205:23]
Rolf Moat Larson
I know them all.
- [205:23]
Jesse
Yeah, you know them exactly. Yeah. Jim Semivan, very high up at the CIA. So, like, have you. If you. If you know them, you know, they're out in this movie Age of Disclosure, saying, you Know this is non human intelligence is real. We're in an arms race with China and Russia on this stuff. We have a reverse engineering program. UFOs like have you called them up? Hey guys, like what are you talking about? Like this isn't like.
- [205:48]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well it. No, I haven't called him up specifically but I certainly. And you've helped not only whet my appetite but give me some things to work with in terms of broadening my. I'm open minded on it, I truly am. I'm not dismissing it at all. I think that's a big mistake. I was more going to the idea that we got in our hazing ritual is how do we handle these things and are we actually prepared for the reality that could come to us at any time? You talk about your ultimate intelligence. The thing we worry about about most as intelligence community is the fear of surprise. Strategic surprise. 9, 11, collapse of the Soviet Union, Arab Spring, aliens coming to Earth and we not being having clue. I mean every time there's an interstellar object coming now and you've got this astronomer saying it's nothing and this one's saying I don't know, not so fast. I mean I pay a lot of attention to that I as a just reader because I think one day one of those things won't be just a comet.
- [206:54]
Jesse
Do you think nothing happened at Roswell or do you have a take?
- [206:58]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, what we know has happened at Roswell, maybe then or certainly over the years is I suspect something happened. Right. And so the question is, is it something we created and contain like experimental flights or development of new aircraft? I mean the whole history of which is a lot of CIA's history is on the techn side of the SR71 and all these different aircraft, secret aircraft. The whole, the key to that is secret, you know, to be to be ahead of everything on that so we can fly them around the world and not be seen. So the idea that we're doing exotic testing and there are accidents and crashes and things that much I'd be surprised if there's not more of than any of us know. But and again I wouldn't know that at CIA because I wasn't in those, you know, those saps or whatever you call them. The thing that did surprise me at DOE for all the incredible secrets, some of which were nuclear related things is just how few of them related to this. So again that could suggest two explanations. One is it's done somewhere else and even I was hazed by or there's less to it for the more banal reason, or I'd call it that. No one's pulling it together. You talk to someone like Jim Semi Van Goodkill. By the way, the people you mentioned, I have immense respect for.
- [208:24]
Jesse
Yeah. So why would they? Because, yeah, I, I, I wouldn't imagine they would want to lie about this.
- [208:29]
Rolf Moat Larson
No, no, I don't think, I don't think they're lying.
- [208:31]
Jesse
Okay.
- [208:32]
Rolf Moat Larson
They don't, they have no motivation to lie about it.
- [208:34]
Jesse
Yeah.
- [208:34]
Rolf Moat Larson
So I think it's, well, I think it's sincere and, and well intended statements.
- [208:39]
Jesse
You take it, but you wouldn't put your money on them being right.
- [208:44]
Rolf Moat Larson
I don't know what being right is. See, one thing I haven't been able to get from we had congressional testimony. We've had this movie which I haven't seen yet, so I'll defer judgment on the movie. But one thing we haven't heard from any of them and the question I would ask Jim Clapper or Jim Samivan or anybody if I called them up as old friends is to say, okay, you say this and that. I've never heard that before. You say that before. Why don't you then say exactly what you mean if you have that as a statement, you've say a summary of what you think. You're not going to provide any specifics of what you mean by that. When, where, how, where is it now? What does it migrate? I understand it might be deeply classified.
- [209:28]
Jesse
They provide some specifics. They talk about Roswell was a real event. There were beings that came out of, I think they say four beings that came out of this craft. I think they even mentioned one surviving or something. So they do mention some specific demons, details.
- [209:43]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah.
- [209:43]
Jesse
So you know, I don't know. Those are real claims.
- [209:47]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah, I mean I, like I said, I see no reason to discount the people you mentioned among some of the other people I've heard are in it just because they don't have the proof. Again, I'd implore the government to think hard about what they're trying to do here. What's the, the purpose of not disclosing of non disclosure secrecy? One of the things I've always felt strongly about is there's too much secrecy in the government and it's this kind of insidious secrecy that's disruptive, it's corrosive to democracy and this is coming from me and my community. There's too much, there are damn good reasons not to talk about certain nuclear data data or who's a spy. And when you have evidence you know, you're starting to pick up evidence of a spy in your ranks or you're going to compromise the thing and lose it. But other things we just keep secret way beyond its time for no reason. I won't even say apparent, which is a qualifier. I just say I could state categorically we just can't.
- [210:56]
Jesse
Do you think the UFO thing could be an example of that?
- [210:59]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, I think it is not by virtue. Virtue that it wouldn't be revelatory. Therefore somebody would say keep it secret because it's like Q's going to change our whole impression of life in the universe. Okay, yeah, but that's the reason I would say they got to declassify it. You can't keep something like that secret. You can't. You got to share that. Everybody in this country ought to know if the US government has concluded that there's life on other planets. Because we have evidence, not because we've seen Tic Tacs or. I get all that. And there's still the big joke, of course, which you know this better than I is, why are all these images always fuzzy? But it's the idea that.
- [211:44]
Jesse
But they even have explanations for that. They say there's like gravitational lensing and blue shifts and redshift. The guy who talks about that is this guy, Hal Puthoff, who's at University of Institute of Advanced Study, Austin. And he is, I think, a longtime CIA guy as well. And he talks about Stephen Hadley in the Bush administration as going through this whole exercise of should we disclose or should we not disclose? And them reading the three body problem as part of this exercise to figure out whether this is this Chinese science fiction novel that, that involves this tri Solarian alien race or whatever, and the aliens having a lot to do with frontier physics as well, clamping down on our physics because that's our tip of the spear ability to defend ourselves as the human race. And he said, they go through this whole exercise and they come out saying it's not worth it to disclose. And Hal put off, said this on Joe Rogan on the biggest podcast in the world. And I'm like, what's going on? You like, you have on the one, you have this indetectable, undetectable dark matter. You have on the one hand people like Elon Musk like yourself, who like, you know, super, like amazing bonafides, extremely respectable, like highly intelligent, you know, know a lot of stuff. And then you have Jim Semi Van Hel put off Jim Clapper, and they're all like, so pro UFO and they have, like, discrete stories of these things. And I'm like, what? Like, how do I make sense of this? You know?
- [213:16]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [213:17]
Jesse
It's so confusing.
- [213:18]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, I think the way you make sense of it is to keep. Keep pushing it and keep interviewing and. And keep.
- [213:26]
Jesse
Do you think Hadley ever went through an exercise like that?
- [213:29]
Rolf Moat Larson
I mean, there's really no. I'd put no value in my. In my judgment, except to say, you know, I know Steve Hadley and I respect him, too.
- [213:39]
Jesse
Yeah.
- [213:39]
Rolf Moat Larson
I've never heard anything like that.
- [213:41]
Jesse
Never heard anything.
- [213:42]
Rolf Moat Larson
No. I mean, I said, you know, I just want you to know one thing. I don't know. And if I knew, I probably would. I can't say categorically. I know I would, but I can't see why I would keep that a secret, even at risk to myself of being punished in some way. I just. I feel that fervently.
- [213:59]
Jesse
No, I appreciate that. And I also, you know, I think if that weren't the case, you probably wouldn't come on the show, because I could throw. I mean, like. I mean, I. And I. And I. You know, I'm not. I won't belabor this too long, but, like, there's so much. It's like a whole ontology that has basically, you can. You can create around the DOE being, like, holding the crown jewels of UFO stuff. There's transclassified foreign material and, you know, special nuclear material from the, you know, 1954 Atomic Energy act, where you have restricted data. Anything that could be radiological in nature is immediately born secret upon sort of retrieving it.
- [214:38]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yes, I know. I know that. Yeah.
- [214:39]
Jesse
Yeah, I'm sure you're familiar. So, like, there's this idea that that is sort of this Trojan horse for UFO material and that, you know, nest Nuclear Emergency Support teams, like, you know, I spoke to my buddies, uap, gerb, and then this other guy, David Grush, who's this whistleblower before this, and they were talking, you know, about those two things. And so there's nothing that you know about any of that stuff?
- [215:03]
Rolf Moat Larson
No. And I hasten to add, when I think back to myself, in all modesty, some guy coming in from CIA to head up intelligence for three years. Obviously, the intelligence shop is not the place to go for this information or having access to it. Now, there might be one person they trust with it there. And it is an organization, Dewey, that you could easily imagine, because I described going in through the multiple vaults back, deeper and deeper into the recesses of the building to the point where there's not a sound coming in out of there other than the people talking in the room. So you have a culture where this is all very possible.
- [215:47]
Jesse
Yeah.
- [215:49]
Rolf Moat Larson
And I have known other subjects, a few that I've got roped into, where there was a very exclusive group of people looking at it. And to the point where this was even at CIA, where we didn't put anything. Well, specific. Very specific thing not generally done, and very highly unusual, irregular, I'd call it, where nothing pertaining to that was even put into any kind of a record.
- [216:16]
Jesse
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [216:18]
Rolf Moat Larson
So anything's imaginable.
- [216:20]
Jesse
Yeah, it's possible. Yeah. I mean, at the Soul foundation, there's just a Stanford organization that's dedicated to UFO research. These NNSA guys, National Nuclear Security Administration guys showed up. And so it's like, why are you interested in this stuff? And then there's this news nation which just covers UFOs a lot. There's this slide that was like advanced gravity propulsion research. And it was a guy who had incurred some sort of Havana Syndrome, like, you know, biological effects. But it was, you know, it was like, that was his title. And so I'm like, okay, doe's doing this exotic gravity well.
- [217:00]
Rolf Moat Larson
That doesn't surprise at all. Okay, no, no.
- [217:03]
Jesse
But the UFO stuff surprises.
- [217:05]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, there's a major distinction here, you know, looking into, I would call all forms of materials and advanced propulsion techniques and energy related. When people think of Department of Energy, just for a very quick, very quick explanation of what it is, which most people don't know is. Department of Energy consists of really three main components that are. It's a hybrid that shouldn't exist together, but it's a product of a lot of politics that created doe. The one side, there's the energy part, which contrary to a lot of common belief, is not just gas and oil and fossil fuels. It's also advanced form of renewables. It's for nuclear power. And of course it's for looking into advanced energy forms, some of which we don't. Gravity magnets. So all that's in the Energy Department. And there's an overwhelming thought. It's just Jimmy Carter created it during the crisis with the Middle east over gas and oil. So that's. No, but it's all this other stuff that's strengthened by the second major component of doe, which is the science part of doe, which a lot of which does pure science. So the pure science part of DOE is some of its research for ongoing needs of the US government. Some of it's just advanced things. I've met some of the most fascinating people who have do things like chaos theory and look for numbers. They're looking for the equation, you know, the equation of chaos. Or it got me on a whole track of thinking of my philosophy and my beloved philosophy in a totally different way, which is wow, what if every human decision like in history is just permutations of choices we make freely but no matter what we do, it's determined outcome because all those choices inevitably because they're driven by equation of human nature. So they all drive you to the same result. Well, I got some of those ideas from DOE scientists so who are doing. And some of them are into that esoteric, those esoteric kind of aspects of their work. And again wonderful people to talk to. Some of them very eccentric or whatever you want to call it. And then the third part is the National Nuclear Security Administration which is almost like I describe as an autonomous Republican within the doe because it's got some independent status. Because for a time the NNSA was seen as not getting it the attention and freedom of action it needed within a dysfunctional DOE. It's not dysfunctional anymore. DOE's quite functional. But there was a period, that's why I refer to the politics. So you had those three many ways complementaries, but in some ways independent. And then the National Nuclear Security, Security National Laboratory complex serves those three things. Energy, nukes and pure science. Yeah, and they, they're, they're proportioned in their work and what's required, what the basic priorities are.
- [220:07]
Jesse
Have you ever seen a one of one material like the, a super unique material that's never, you've never seen elsewhere?
- [220:17]
Rolf Moat Larson
No. Okay, I would remember that. The other common attribute is you realize how vast what I just described is. So the probability that I know a lot of it is small, but it's prescribed. So by that I mean, I'll be kind of vague, but everything that's exceptional typically you get read into individually, it's not just yours as a result of the, the job you hold. If it's important enough, then you get like someone will tap you on the shoulder and you have special things happen, things happen that are different. So it's entirely possible that there are very few people that know a lot about all the most important things, if that makes sense because they're divided. And I could easily see things like we're talking about being in a separate category which is even curtailed further by people who really need to know. Because the ultimate, the need of the chapter that I have in my book for this is called need to know. So the other I'm trying to also illustrate a principle I've never been entirely comfortable about. Intelligence and government secrecy is the idea that need to know governs it all. Well that's fine if need to know is perfectly interpreted.
- [221:34]
Jesse
Well I think the public has a need to know for the ontological truth, the basic, you know, it's just like nuclear science is taught at every university but nuclear technology trade secrets should be classified. I think that should be applied to this if it's at all real. And to me, when people ask about my conviction in UFOs I always say you have to view everything probabilistically. The idea that we're in some reverse engineering arms race I would probability weight much lower than I am sure that there are these objects showing up around nuclear assets all over the world. Not even there's a town in. In Japan we have our American alchemy Japanese shirts here. There's a town in Japan next to the Fukushima prefecture which is their civilian energy grid that has a. It's this mountain Sengan Mori. They have a whole museum dedicated to UFOs and all these geomagnetic anomalies and they're obsessed with UFOs. So I do, I do think that is this ubiquitous, you know, commonality and that is the thing I think you can be most high conviction in the UFO world. But.
- [222:39]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well then I can also see that there's just such an obvious tie in with other than worldly life forms or intelligence. And our highest forms of intelligence are most destructive things like nuclear. I mean because there again the whole idea of I've tried to get accustomed or adapted to the reality of nuclear weapons and nuclear secrets my whole life even having spent by accident as I unfolded it unfolded as a big accident. But when I look back on it, yeah it's like nuclear here, nuclear here. And it's a little bit like your appearances are all the nuclear sites. It's like it keeps coming to me. And you could even make a case if you wanted to write that script that some of these appearances were a divine awareness in in sense of messages and of the need to warn. Because the essence of the Ezekiel warning as a watchman, the watchman is a specific type of. It's not a messenger, it's not a prophet, it's a watchman. Only responsibility is to warn. So specifically in biblical terms the idea of the watchman warning the people will be held accountable not for if it's true or stops whatever's going to happen from happening. That's not the. The accountability, the explicit accountability of being a watchman is to warn. Your job is to warn. So when you ask me did you prevent or you have to banish that idea from your mind that you are going to prevent the apocalypse or shape it in some form, because I don't think any human being is going to have that responsibility. But it's pretty hard just to do the warning part because like you said, if people genuinely believe that this is part of it and maybe you're a watchman for shining a light so much on this factor, particularly depending how things turn out.
- [224:37]
Jesse
Yeah, yeah, we'll see. I'm curious to see where this whole topic goes in this kind of hazing ritual brief that you had on UFOs. Do you remember the date of Roswell that they gave you?
- [224:51]
Rolf Moat Larson
No, not off the top of my head. I think. I think I wrote it in the book.
- [224:55]
Jesse
It is in the book and it's July 7th, 1947. Do you think that connects with your download 747?
- [225:03]
Rolf Moat Larson
Oh my goodness. Good. You know, that's the first time I've ever thought that. That it might.
- [225:10]
Jesse
Are you trying to tell the audience in coded fashion that you might know a thing?
- [225:15]
Rolf Moat Larson
I'm being as what I've tried to be throughout the. And it's even better in complete honesty with the. It didn't even cross my mind. So I couldn't possibly have fabricated that to make it more compelling. There's one other one that's really interesting. There was a. This will fit your. You need to look this up if you don't already know it.
- [225:34]
Jesse
Yeah.
- [225:34]
Rolf Moat Larson
So one of the scientists at DOE kind of knew my. My stuff with numbers and this may have even read. Explain to me the famous Vela. Have you heard the Vela incident? Nuclear explosion. It's. It's called the Seven. They labeled it at the Seven Four. 1947 incident.
- [225:49]
Jesse
Whoa.
- [225:50]
Rolf Moat Larson
As a nuclear test that South Africa made.
- [225:55]
Jesse
Right.
- [225:56]
Rolf Moat Larson
But the suspicion is they did it on behalf of the Israelis. So. Suspicion. I'm not saying to your viewers, but this is into the murky secrets of the development of the Israeli bomb, which of course the US kind of gave the big thumbs up handshake deal to know you need this kind of thing. At least that's what I've heard. So the point being there is. Boy, that's a very. Vela 747. Look it up.
- [226:21]
Jesse
Fascinating. Yeah. I don't know. I think there's something very ontologically interesting about Nuclear and it's some sort of energy unlock that if I were some sort of concurrent civilization, whether it's extraterrestrial, which the people who deny UFOs at the highest levels often say extraterrestrial because I think it's a, we don't have evidence that's extraterrestrial. You know, I think it could be like, you know, some sort of non human or even ultra terrestrial, some past civilization on Earth or something. But it seems like they would want to monitor nuclear. Like that just seems like this really important unlock and that seems to be corroborated by all the evidence. But as to what that means, I.
- [227:08]
Rolf Moat Larson
Just don't know that now you're thinking of other people looking as maybe way past this point, there's some secret we may bump into. I don't know that they're as worried about us blowing ourselves up as we, you know, they probably have no reason to worry too much about that. But what if they're worried we're going to cross a threshold of knowledge that they're already aware of and that has grave implications for them?
- [227:30]
Jesse
That's really interesting. I mean it's like the building blocks of life or if life is, if you think about the universe as like information theoretic, like maybe you're getting into the root act access or something.
- [227:40]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, you know, but it adds another element to this that isn't, I don't think well enough understood or absorbed by the public is we take for granted the kind of the expression of this incredible God's secrets, we call it, as manifested in our discoveries of those secrets. And yet in every domain, whether it's AI or nuclear or biological life sciences, in every one of those domains, our knowledge is, is so limited of what we're dealing with. And if you go to. We think a little about the implications of AI and I've heard some, in various places, I've heard talks and even by some of the top guys on this and it scares the hell out of me.
- [228:24]
Jesse
Well then it does. And so they don't know what they're doing. Well, you could call it a process of like umvelt hacking or something. So like umvelt is like this is. My old colleague Eric Weinstein talks about, about this where it's like you get to deeper layers of ontological truth, the better your measurement instruments are. Or there's even a physicist who's at CERN for a while, Ken Wilson talks about phase transitions in materials. And the more you put them under duress, you get these whole New properties as you put them under duress. And so I wonder if it's kind of what we were talking about before forth quantum indeterminacy between level of energy and time. If you have particle accelerators or nuclear blasts, you might get ontological weirdness around those events.
- [229:18]
Rolf Moat Larson
Particularly as little as we know the physics and especially since the people at the top of those fields are guiding all of us. And it's the same with these other fields. Right. And that's the. I mean cloning.
- [229:33]
Jesse
Yeah.
- [229:34]
Rolf Moat Larson
What stunning. I never thought I had a dream once on cloning long before clones and I thought that's never going to happen in my lifetime. Well, you know, pets are being cloned, brought back to life. And that in itself we're playing God. So we're at the point where we're in a way we've earned this as the only in biblical terms again, we're recreated in the image of God.
- [229:58]
Jesse
Yes.
- [229:59]
Rolf Moat Larson
I was always seized by that at an early age even I recognized this is special image of God means really it's a two way thing. Means God has a responsibility for us in a way that I'm sure God will fulfill. And that's been the essence of everything we've talked about. God's going to send messengers, God's going to send his own son. God's going to do X and Y, send a prophet Muhammad. But all the things that with the typical characters behind them, always the same people. Angel Gabriel and they're always the same people, always the same entities right behind all. And then all that's going to be his way of guiding us, making sure we don't screw up entirely before in the end, okay, I'm going to give some reassurance which sounds awful, but judgment day and Apocalypse that things are going to turn out because that's really what it's about. It's not about punishing us, we punish ourselves. It's about reconciliation. It's about judgment, meaning there is a reward and a penalty for what you do in your life. You're not here anonymously. Like that was the thing on the train. It was like God's aware he's there right now. He's like standing there. That's why that's in the book. Because I'd never had that feeling before or after. It was the one time it was that deep. And so the same thing applies with handling God's gift. So we're entitled, we're given access to things that we in a way have no right to have access to. But we're not. There's no point to give us freedom in the whole Garden of Eden story unless it's full freedom, which because of the way we're wired, we're going to screw that up for the most part. So that's all known. You could write your equations now. God is God knows it'll play out. How many Hegelian dialectical histories you want to write. They all might be different, but guess what? They're all going to end the same way. But when it comes to how the hands handling of the power of God turns out, that's the unique test. And that's what. So I never get into prophecy. I don't prophesize anything but predict. When's the apocalypse? When's it start? One of the things about my dream was that I specifically remember was 2060 in the Chameleon dream of the future where I was trying UFOs and going out and trying. I was already in an apocalypse of going back and forth. Part of the world had been destroyed with the great nuclear war of 2034. And I was going back and forth trying to find people, trying to make bombs. This is way before I did the terrorist bomb stuff, by the way.
- [232:23]
Jesse
Whoa.
- [232:24]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah.
- [232:24]
Jesse
You had a dream about this.
- [232:26]
Rolf Moat Larson
This is the dream that I hadn't. That you talked to, you asked me.
- [232:29]
Jesse
About in 1981 and you said you were flying on what the DOE would call UFOs.
- [232:34]
Rolf Moat Larson
UFOs. Yeah. And it was. I had the dream in 1982 and.
- [232:37]
Jesse
And but this was. These were our like crafts, like American crafts.
- [232:41]
Rolf Moat Larson
Our craft sent from CIA.
- [232:43]
Jesse
Yeah.
- [232:44]
Rolf Moat Larson
From all managed and all connected to a massive supercomputer we call a quantum. I didn't know that back then. In the bowels of CIA underground.
- [232:56]
Jesse
Do you think that we have propulsion modalities that transcend chemical combustion?
- [233:01]
Rolf Moat Larson
I don't know. No idea. But in the dream certainly. Yeah, in the dream certainly I didn't know what it was. I just was flying around like it was all known. But my dream didn't revealed to me how. But it was a manifestation of Reagan's Star wars thing, which before Star Wars. So he gave the great Star wars speech I think in 84. And my dream was in 82. So I was already anticipating, I'll call it that this idea of a shield. So my dream was basically the world had been divided in two. The world in the shield, the world out of the shield. And the whole point was to keep of the UFOs and intelligence. Intelligence was a global intelligence service that would keep out, keep out the people trying to break through the shield.
- [233:45]
Jesse
Well, yeah, that's fascinating.
- [233:47]
Rolf Moat Larson
So now we're into what. We're into exactly what you're talking about.
- [233:50]
Jesse
Yeah. And in fact, the Bluegill Triple prime thing was it was a high altitude nuclear test, but it was a defense against Russian ICBMs, Soviet ICBMs, and there's even a RAND Corporation paper a couple years before it was pulled off around speculating as to how that would be done. And Malm was at the Institute for Defense Analysis at the time and they've been involved in every missile defense system since then. And he directly ties Bluegill Triple prime to Star wars and to a Strategic Defense Initiative. And so then again there's this weird question of like, is there some dual use around UFOs for that or something? And like, I don't know. And you have the gold golden dome now, you know.
- [234:39]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, I think one of the questions I know people are asking but just like when you're hearing us talk muse about this is we're sort of due for another big transformational change. I mean we've had of course, the industrial age and then we had now more recently the Internet age. And it just strikes me that we're due for something like this idea of something propelling us into a future we really haven't anticipated as over in a way overwritten on everything, every possible permutation of our future, something that's going to change all that. We're going to say, well, it's not that future after all.
- [235:19]
Jesse
It feels like we're on the verge of a paradigm shift.
- [235:22]
Rolf Moat Larson
For sure it does.
- [235:23]
Jesse
And it feels like, at least for the stuff I'm investigating, feels like the dam is going to break because there are, if the kind of incumbent current paradigm is inside of the, the dam or whatever, there are like 15 different vectors of like holes in the dam and that thing is just, it's about to burst. Like it really.
- [235:47]
Rolf Moat Larson
When I hear you, you know, talk about all these different things that you're working on too, that's the immediate reaction I had is what we just said there with one another. It says we're ready for a big paradigm shift. It's probably going to be something we've never anticipated based on something we didn't see coming. And the most important, important thing of that is it's happening at a time. And I think very few people understand this. I don't want to talk be condescending, but I just, I myself struggle with this a lot where time and scale is time is rapidly shrinking on us. Everything is more accessible so fast we can't process it. Much like make good back in the day when you mailed things and you set cables and you imagine how easier you could contemplate things you could make. And even then, it was rough making good decisions. At a certain point, we reached a happy medium where speed increased to the point where you can better decisions faster. But now we're at the point, I'm sure of this, in government or even maybe the private sector, I think, where the amount of things we have to decide at the speed we have to decide in is overwhelming us at the scale it applies because of population growth and how everything's interacted and the way the Internet has tied everything together.
- [237:06]
Jesse
Well, that's what that movie Age of Disclosure felt like. It felt like the government trying to get in front of all these kind of truths coming out and figuring out a way to frame it or something, you know, I hope so. Proactively would be good. Sure. Yeah. And. But, you know, it feels. It does feel like that is inevitable. Like this stuff is. Is sort of coming out. And I wonder, in some ways, like, you believe in angels, right?
- [237:33]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yes, I do. Yeah, of course.
- [237:34]
Jesse
So these. All these things have literally happened to you. And I wonder if, like, it's like the Age of Disclosure has their veneer of, like, extraterrestrials. Your veneer might be angels, demons, eschatology, the Bible. If I were like, would you believe that angels might show up around nuclear sites? That might seem more plausible to you?
- [237:55]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, in a way. In a way. And I'm. You know, I told you, I'm so hesitant to link UFOs to faith and mysticism. So with that gigantic caveat.
- [238:05]
Jesse
Yeah, I'm sorry.
- [238:06]
Rolf Moat Larson
No, no, no, no.
- [238:07]
Jesse
Don't apologize.
- [238:08]
Rolf Moat Larson
It's fun. It's. It's fun. Right. I don't think it discredits religion or faith or in any way, insults.
- [238:13]
Jesse
Well, it's trying to figure out some underlying truth between the way you're describing what's happened to you personally and then all these other intelligence officials who are saying we are not alone.
- [238:25]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, I think where it ties, I was getting to my big, however, is if you believe the one. Like you said, I'm utterly. There's not even any doubt in my mind about all these things. And also the existence of angels like Abraham. Now, how you describe that or what that reality is, obviously the wing figure coming from is, I think, symbolic of a messenger from a different state of reality. But now we're getting very close to being visited by life forms in our own universe. That technically shouldn't be much intersection with us. I've never really doubted the sort of actuarial realities that intelligent life must exist in the universe. I've really never questioned that. What I want to see is the evidence of it and begin to understand what that means for us. But I've also wanted to understand how space time makes that work because everything is so distant from us that even with advanced forms of Star Trek, forms of travel, which I loved that show when I was growing up, it's hard to imagine we're going to intersect at precisely that moment of advanced development of our civilization, civilizations in this place, in our place. That would be a very low odds, not impossible. But then when you introduce something that we just talked about as being some breakthrough of truth somewhere, that changes entirely our notions of reality. We already know we haven't unified physics. Well, that's a big one right there. There's a reason for that. And I don't think Einstein just got lazy after his earliest part of his, his life when he was at his greatest. I will sort of reinforce. One idea though, is I have a much greater belief in younger people like you and others pushing us into the future than I do my generation. And not so much because we've done, achieved what we want to do. But your mind's changed. I don't deserve to be the person I was getting all the insights and things to guide my life and my work now that I had then. So if I want them now, it's more for my own satisfaction and that's not good enough. But the idea behind this is that we need people who don't consider themselves experienced or informed through advanced degrees and all this to think like you and others think and to push us. That's where the inspiration is going to come. I mean, Einstein was a clerk when he was doing his greatest work. And there's so many scientists who were like that now. Yeah, maybe he's a genius, but.
- [241:09]
Jesse
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens. It feels like there are all these kind of heterodox threads of science that weren't taken seriously at all for the last 30, 40 years. And increasingly they're kind of in vogue and being taken, taken seriously. And in certain cases, I think they've been behind, you know, walls of secrecy or stigma. You know, things like documented is, you know, the, the CIA's efforts in remote viewing and parapsychology and, you know, that's I think a well respected intelligence modality and you know, at Langley, but you.
- [241:47]
Podcast Host
Know, only until the last few years.
- [241:50]
Jesse
You know, that was, that was kind of wrested out of the government with the Freedom of Information act request in 2017. And only in the last few years, years are people saying there's something clearly here. And I think the problem I have with the super anti UFO people are like, they, you know, say, oh, this can't be possible. This observable thing that you've seen a million different times with all these credible people coming out and saying it can't be real because of the physical, this physical, because of our current physical model of the universe. But if you were to bet on the anomaly historically and against the physical model of the universe, universe, you would always be right, you're always wrong if you bet on the physical model of the universe. So I do think we're on the precipice of something exciting.
- [242:32]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah, I agree with you totally and I hope it's very positive. I worry on one aspect that I think as we learn more about the reality we're creating rather than the reality that exists, we need to make sure we continue to make that distinction. And that can take the smallest form of knowing. When you're a virtual reality figure in an app you're playing on your iPad or if you're a kid, making sure the kids don't lose their minds in a fantasy reality. And this is coming from someone who's had these very vexing, disturbing, disorienting dreams that I've had on who am I to talk. But it was a problem for me in some respects too that I've outlined. And then it goes up one level from that where you have people, you know, relying on ChatGPT to be their girlfriend or boyfriend or give them life advice, I'm saying, wow, this is more than dangerous. People are, you know, the idea I said at one point we talked about identity a little bit and how culturally that was different from people who are more individualistic societies versus say common bond societies that depend on one another have a perception they're more involved with one another. But think about it from the standpoint of how that changes. When you can create a reality that doesn't exist and replace your reality because it's not a very good life you're leading right now. You might go buy opiates or do something because you see no hope in your future and you don't have good healthcare, you don't have a good job, you don't really have Any hope you're going to break out of this terrible cycle? We put we. I think that's a we thing, personally. Yeah, some people bring it on themselves but we as a country owe more to people than we've given them. This isn't a now problem that we've created. This has been a growing problem for decades. And into that environment comes the temptation to create alternative lives and realities. I wouldn't watch Zuckerberg and Mark Zuckerberg and others trying to create this idea of having people. Why do they want to do this? They want people to come on these virtual realities so they can buy imagination, imaginary plots of land so they can make money off it. I mean, wow.
- [244:48]
Jesse
Yeah. No, it's dystopian.
- [244:50]
Podcast Host
That's part of the reason I'm into.
- [244:51]
Jesse
The UFO thing because I think it's. If our life is. If this is somewhat of a simulation, I think there's a life affirming version of the simulation where we're in a platonic cave and you can ascend outside and see the light that's lighter than light and witness great things in this reality. And so why would you go into this sort of bitcoin impressed reality? And so that's what motivates me when I'm trying to close this gap between super well respected people like yourself and then these other people like Chris Mellon, deputy Assistant Director of Intelligence under Bush and Clinton. He just said, he was like, we want to put the CIA's director of science and Technology. I think it was one of the last ones. He was like, we need to figure out what she knows about UFOs. And so I'm like, it's maddening to me. How would you advise that I figure out what's going on?
- [245:50]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, I think you're doing a good job of the best thing you can do is what you're doing is interview credible witnesses, avoid drawing conclusions until you have to. But by the same token, I think most of the mind shut phenomena, whether it's just UFOs are frankly a lot of traditional things. There's a whole massive number of people, I can name any, but I won't embarrass people who just flat won't deal with terrorists having nukes or big biological weapons simply because they want to think that men wearing rags, you can't do it. But it's the idea though that you just miss something because you underestimate them and that's what you're not doing. And you can't underestimate. And the people who tend to do that and dismissive people. On anything I've ever dealt with, there's a group of dismissive people because you're usually placing your bet on probability basis.
- [246:43]
Jesse
Yes.
- [246:43]
Rolf Moat Larson
Not impact basis. And the real risk equation for any good national security person or someone doing what you're doing is to assess risk as intent times capability times consequences. So we sometimes assume intent. That's typical. That's done a lot assume intent. They can, they don't want part of our failure on 911 for frankly as an intelligence community was we didn't assume they had the intent to do that. And then the capability you don't even really look into. You don't see it because you haven't really ascribed that intent to them that they do something that audacious. And then of course the consequences all they're really looking for. So you multiply those things out. But it's the same thing with UFOs. It's like your best bet as an observer trying to maintain something, some credibility, like astronomers who cast judgment on every new visitor to our solar system is to dismiss it as anything. And then if the day comes at some point when it's a real thing, oh, they, they're, they're nowhere to be found.
- [247:47]
Jesse
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. No, exactly. Yeah. Did, did you know Glenn Gaffney at all? Do you know?
- [247:55]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah, I did.
- [247:56]
Jesse
Because he, this guy, I, I like him a lot. He's a nice, He's a good guy. He, he was, He's, I think currently on the board of Arrow, the All Domain Anomalies Research Resolution Office.
- [248:08]
Rolf Moat Larson
He was the Director of Science and.
- [248:09]
Jesse
Technology Technology at the CIA. And there's a couple of people, one of which was under oath in front of Congress, said he blocked the transfer of UFO material from Lockheed Martin to Bigelow Aerospace. Do you know anything about that?
- [248:26]
Rolf Moat Larson
No, but it's pretty specific.
- [248:28]
Jesse
It is specific.
- [248:29]
Rolf Moat Larson
It's.
- [248:29]
Jesse
It's a specific. Yeah. Anyways. Well, okay. Well, I appreciate you indulging my crazy questions.
- [248:35]
Rolf Moat Larson
No, I'm not indulging. I'm learning and it's fascinating. I will say one more thing about. Wasn't when Glenn was the head of Director of Science Technology. But I've had a lot of interactions with them over the decades and one thing I did learn from the interactions is that most of what they do, most of what they do I wasn't privy to. I had no reason to be brought into from a need to know perspective. So there's all kinds of things I probably don't know.
- [249:01]
Jesse
And you swear To God. You know nothing about ufo.
- [249:03]
Rolf Moat Larson
Oh, yeah, yeah. I swear. I swear to God.
- [249:04]
Jesse
Okay. Wow.
- [249:07]
Rolf Moat Larson
I'd hedge.
- [249:08]
Jesse
And I know that means a lot.
- [249:09]
Rolf Moat Larson
To you because you're, you know, it's a whole different conversation. But I try never to be deceptive or lie. That's what it would be. Even when I'd have a reason, like you're given an alibi because, oh, yeah, you're told not to tell, so you can lie. No, I'll find a different way to not say it than lie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I've learned that, actually it's extremely important being in a manipulative business, which you can't deny intelligence can be. It's even more important to maintain your personal integrity and ability to be credible with people. So if I'm dealing with the Russians, we've had some stories about that, or actually, there's a chapter in my book where I'm dealing with Syrian intelligence or any other intelligence service in the world or country. My credibility lies in not lying to them because then what I tell them is suspect. So then I've contaminated whatever CIA has to offer. So I make it not only a habit, but my personal integrity. I also believe, and I've given lectures on this, there's no contradiction or conflict between recruiting agents and running them. And we obviously use agents, aliases and things. That's not deceptive. If your goal is to protect the agent, the agent. Knowing your real name is bad for the agent.
- [250:31]
Jesse
Sure, yeah, yeah.
- [250:32]
Rolf Moat Larson
Those kinds of things.
- [250:33]
Jesse
Yeah, of course.
- [250:33]
Rolf Moat Larson
But when it comes down to a real litmus test, how far am I willing to go for the agent versus what the agency tells me to do with the agent? I will defer to the agent's welfare because this is a human being.
- [250:49]
Jesse
So.
- [250:50]
Rolf Moat Larson
So ultimately, I'll find a way to reconcile the two. I don't like to flat out defy headquarters if I can help it, but I have done it. And then the test is a different test when I flat out say no or defy them and don't do what I've been told to do, which I don't recommend to everybody out there, but in those cases, I'll own up to it. Usually before I'll say no, I'm not going to do what you just told me to do. Then there'll be a discussion. And this is again, a test of the integrity of your organization, whether it's CIA or any other in the US Government. How does an organization react when you've done something you think is either you're Told to do something that it's either illegal or immoral or both, how do you handle it? And it's a test of the organization which, whether you're asked to do that. Now, what I personally, I've said to myself personally over all my careers and I've never had to go to the mat on it, to the point I quit. But I would have. If I can't reconcile that, I will do what I know is the right thing to do. Yeah, so we did some bad things, but I understood the reasons for it and we did it for not doing the wrong thing. But just because things. Sometimes you're faced with a terrible choice and you don't have an option. But I just wanted to. To stress that because it's come up again in recent times, you just be very careful about work through the whole. For example, forgetting his name, Edward Snowden defected to China and the Russians. And he's been described by people as a whistleblower. And there was a whistleblowing aspect to his motivations, intentions and actions, but it was far exceeded by the damage he set out to cause to the US Government for no whistleblowing reason. So you have all this.
- [252:44]
Jesse
It's complicated with him because on the one hand, I do think it's important that the public know that the NSA is a backdoor. And every big tech company, they have these programs like Prism and Bull Run and they can just spy on you through your smart TV and your phone. And like that's a. That's messed up. That's.
- [253:02]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, it's not that simple.
- [253:03]
Jesse
Okay.
- [253:04]
Rolf Moat Larson
No, it's not that simple.
- [253:05]
Jesse
Okay.
- [253:05]
Rolf Moat Larson
But the other part of the answer to that question is the government should in fact have done maybe some things different than he alleged. And so he had. There was a certain. But he went far.
- [253:18]
Jesse
Well, he definitely, you know, compromised far beyond that. Sure, sure.
- [253:22]
Rolf Moat Larson
And things that had nothing to just pure immense damage to national security with no whistleblower benefit. So he knew exactly what he's doing. And then you look into the whole background. Now why do I single him out? I'm not trying to make him a particular target of my wrath or ire is that this is the problem in a nutshell is citizens, individual officers, integrity. Everybody comes together on trying to maintain the integrity of what we're doing. And the more it's secret, the more it's dark and deep, the more we have to do it and the more disclosure is necessary at the right level. And we've talked so many ways, ways about how we limit it where we Limit it, you know, this kind of thing.
- [254:03]
Jesse
Do you think anything's gonna happen further on the UFO front? Do you think more is gonna come out or.
- [254:10]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah, I can't imagine. It's the end of the story. Right. It's just almost, in a way, feels like it's just beginning.
- [254:15]
Jesse
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, Yeah, that would be my expectation as well. I mean, I Like in the world in which we have reverse engineering programs, material, all that stuff, it is actually a serious national security issue. If the left hand's not talking to the right, you have these bigoted special access programs that are unqueryable, not answering to any sort of civilian organization. There's zero congressional oversight. And then you're competing against Russia and China who have these central bases where they can just pluck scientists from wherever and place them there and get them to work on whatever they want. Like if in the world where that's real, it's. It would seem like a dire issue just for the. And like I always say that as a dog whistle to the national security people, all I care about is the truth. I care about the truth coming. I care about the truth. But like the watchman. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [255:10]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, one, one, one, you know, more thing on that. I, I think it's. Can't reach a conclusion. But when you start thinking Area 51 and the, the crash, and you've, you've said this, I haven't done that research and I. And looked into, aside from.
- [255:25]
Jesse
And you've been to Area 51, right? Yeah. And you've never seen any UFO, alien, UFO type stuff?
- [255:30]
Rolf Moat Larson
No, no, I'm sure that. Yeah, but I mean, there are kind of two explanations. One is it's our testing crash and we're covering that up. And two is intelligent life was there watching what we're doing. And that's an area which you would be in at that point with all the nuclear tests.
- [255:47]
Jesse
I think it's that. Yeah, because they're over. You think maybe it was that?
- [255:51]
Rolf Moat Larson
No, it's plausible.
- [255:52]
Podcast Host
I don't dismiss it because in 1945.
- [255:55]
Jesse
Over Hanford plutonium Base, you have this guy, this pilot, Bud Clem, following this like, you know, ball of light around. You had stuff happening super early in 47. I mean, Robert Goddard, who was a rocket pioneer in the US had just been testing V2 rockets right, at Roswell. So it's like, I don't think we were testing super advanced propulsion. There was some interesting stuff happening in Nazi Germany to that effect. But you had Kamler Staub and You had these interesting scientists doing some stuff in that world. But I think what happened at Roswell was otherworldly. I do, yeah.
- [256:37]
Rolf Moat Larson
That's why I wanted to reinforce the possibility. I don't see how you can dismiss it unless you know, it's not. In other words, if someone. This is another reason to declassify. Because if there was an internal experiment or something, maybe it's the problem with that. Even if you then declassify and put it out there, then there's this possibility. We've continued over the decades to work on whatever we were working on, and it was an early miserable failure. There's always that explanation why we won't release.
- [257:11]
Jesse
Yeah, well, that's also maybe my take. I don't think we've done much with what we've recovered. I think it's like, you know, caveman with a USB drive. Caveman doesn't understand, you know, information theory. They have nothing to plug it into. There's no interface. It's not like an iPhone, you know, that would be my guess, so.
- [257:31]
Rolf Moat Larson
Well, when you consider the fact that probably one of the most at least plausible continuations of our species over the next hundred years is that we evolved to the point where the AI crew we create doesn't want to us around anymore, per all the movie. But that seems so plausible. The problem with being so clever as we are on artificial intelligence is it's easy to imagine us out programming the reality of our lives in ways the old lose control aspect of is just one thing. But I could easily see humans deciding that the perpetuation of the species and the continued evolution of human beings will no longer follow the script of what might have started as a biblical kind of idea and to the point where the one thing God would have wanted to preserve in the evolution of not just human species, but all life on Earth, if it's a God plan, is the idea of mutation and the idea of the weak moving on to take over the earth as it goes, in a definition we wouldn't think of as the stronger and the superior. And even the idea Darwin laid out of the survival the fittest, I kind of, because of my faith, look entirely the opposite now, which is really that it's the idea of sacrifice drives everything. And certainly if there's truth to the idea behind Christ, it's the idea he came to sacrifice. And therefore. Therefore the way forward is sacrifice. And then all the truly great people, almost all of them, we would call great people who we don't emulate, by the way. Nobody emulates Christ, mainly, but also people like Gandhi or Mandela or people we admire, you know, who took the path. Tolstoy was one of the greatest pacifists in of world history. The way he wrote and thought. We don't really follow that lead. We kind of respect, expect it, but we're on a completely different path.
- [259:34]
Jesse
Yeah. On that note, yeah, I think it should, you know, everybody out there should try to imitate sacrifice and be Christlike and. Yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating model of human evolution is, you know, your upward path through natural selection is actually selflessness. And it's not the Richard Dawkins selfish gene, it's the selfless gene or something.
- [259:59]
Rolf Moat Larson
Yeah, well. Well, I mean, you think about it. Human beings are at this point at the apex of global domination on the basis of what's really our conquering aspects, our animalistic side. And we have this other side we're aware of that's more charitable and sacrificial. But we have a choice whether to obey one or the other. And the way forward looks like it's domination, looks like it's control. And in fact, I've always felt, but even more so as faith developed, that I don't look at world history as sort of Marxist Leninism versus capitalism and all the rest of that at all anymore. I look at it as even people whose life's committed and dedicated to making money is for control. It's all about control. And the opposite of what God gave us all was to let control go go and allow us to explore creation on our terms. And we spend human endeavors to enslave everybody again. That's it. That's an upshot. It's almost like that's my sermon on the Mount.
- [261:03]
Jesse
Right? Well, that's a beautiful note to end on, Ralph Mouth Larson, thank you for taking the time and sharing your remarkable mystical experiences and indulging my UFO questions and for being here. Really appreciate you.
- [261:18]
Rolf Moat Larson
Thank you, Jesse. It's been a great, great session for me. I appreciate it.
- [261:21]
Jesse
It's been an honor.
- [261:42]
Rolf Moat Larson
Sam.