Lex Fridman Podcast - #149 – Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion, and the Nature of Belief

Episode Date: December 28, 2020

Diana Walsh Pasulka is a professor of philosophy and religion at UNCW and author of American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, and Technology. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - LMNT: https://drinkLMNT.com/lex to get free shipping - Grammarly: https://grammarly.com/lex to get 20% off premium - Business Wars: https://wondery.com/business-wars/ - Cash App: https://cash.app/ and use code LexPodcast to get $10 EPISODE LINKS: Diana's Website: https://uncw.edu/par/faculty/faculty-pasulka.html American Cosmic (book): https://amzn.to/3aK2kaj PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LexFridmanPage - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (08:28) - What is real? (13:56) - Can beliefs become reality? (18:59) - Donald Hoffman (22:57) - Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (26:27) - Ayn Rand (33:25) - How do religions start? (48:38) - Religion is an evolutionary advantage (53:59) - Religion used in propaganda (58:32) - What did Nietzsche mean by "God is Dead"? (1:03:59) - American Cosmic (1:07:45) - What do aliens look like? (1:16:28) - History of space programs (1:19:30) - Jacques Vallee (1:28:55) - Artificial intelligence (1:34:25) - Ufology community (1:45:38) - Psychedelics (1:49:35) - Tic Tac UFO (1:58:09) - Roswell UFO incident (2:09:14) - Bob Lazar (2:12:50) - Monoliths in the desert (2:23:39) - Humans will co-evolve with AI (2:26:58) - Neuralink (2:31:48) - Singularity (2:41:39) - Books: Nietzsche (2:46:44) - Books: Hannah Arendt (2:51:43) - Fear of death (2:56:11) - Meaning of life

The following is a conversation with Diana Walsh Poussalca, a professor of philosophy and religion at UNCW, and author of American Cosmic, UFOs, Religion and Technology. This book is one of the most fascinating explorations of the interconnected nature of technology, belief, and the mystery of alien Intelligence. Quick mention of our sponsors, Element Electrolite Drink, Grammarly Writing Plug-In, Business Wars Podcast, and Cash App. So the choice is health, grammar, knowledge, or money. Choose wisely, my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say, as I did in the recent video on how many intelligent alien civilizations are out there, that the nature of alien life intelligence and how they might communicate with us humans is likely stranger than we imagine, and perhaps stranger than we can imagine. What is most fascinating to me is how the belief in the communication with such civilizations changes people's understanding of the world, and, as Diana argues, the technology we create. Technological innovation itself seems to manifest the mythology in our collective intelligence that turns the seemingly impossible into reality, just a matter of years, through the belief of individual humans that carry out that innovation.

The nature and power of this belief in both technology and extraterrestrial intelligence is mysterious and fascinating. Perhaps holding the Keto's humans understanding our own mind, our consciousness, and engineering versions of it in the machines we create. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it, and have a podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, and connect with me on Twitter, Alex Friedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now, and no ads in the middle.

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An organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now, here's my conversation with Diana Walsh Pousalka. You are a scholar of religious belief or belief in general. So the fascinating question, what do you think is the difference between our beliefs and objective reality? What is real, period? Sure, what is real? Easy Sure. What is real? Easy question. So first let me start with belief.

So belief is generally there are different definitions of belief just as there are different definitions of what is real. So for belief in my field, it would be attitudes toward something that dictate our actions. Okay, so we believe the sun is gonna rise tomorrow. Therefore, we act as if it will rise tomorrow. All right, beliefs can be wrong. For a long time, people believed, and actually some still do, that the earth was flat.

Okay, well, that's obviously an erroneous belief. So beliefs can be wrong. Now, the bigger question that philosopher has asked is, is this belief accurate toward what we consider to be objective reality? So now let me go to objective reality. So what is real? I don't think we can actually obtain a correct understanding

of what is real. And in that sense, I have to refer to a philosopher again, and that would be a manual Kant. So a manual Kant is one of the, he was basically in the 1750s, he wrote critiques of reason and things like that. So he's a, well, if you're a philosopher or have any kind of understanding of Western history,

you know who he is. He had this idea that we can actually never get to the thing in it in itself. And he called that the new man, the thing in itself. He said, let's take this table, for instance, that you and I are talking across. So this thing is a table. You and I both know that. We assume it's real. We believe in it because we put our water on it and in our water stays on it. Okay.

However, can we know this thing in and of itself as a table? So that would be what he then would call the phenomenal. How do we know that that phenomena exists as we know it is? Okay. How do we know? We use our faculties, so we use our senses and things like that. But again, even our senses can be wrong. So I've been on committees just recently this year, last year, for hiring professors in my department who are

philosophers and every and we're hiring metaphysicians and you know people who are thinking about the nature of reality. And basically what I've learned from them, yeah, they're very... I'd love to attend those faculty talks. I don't know, metaphysics, professors. What's funny is that for each one of them, I'm convinced each time. They all say different things, but they're so convincing. I'm like, yes, hire that one, right?

Is it like historical philosophy, like a particular talk? No, they have an actual belief. They're practicing metaphysic. Metaphysicians. Yes. So what they do is they come and they're usually excellent philosophers from Harvard or USC or whatever.

They come and they give what's called a job talk. That's what flost for. Well, every academic does a job talk in order to get it. They talk to us about a department about what they do. And so it so happens that we need a meta physician and now we're hiring again for one. And so I've learned a lot about meta physics in the last year. And this is what I've learned that they use physics as a basis for understanding what we can know about what is real. And what is real is really difficult to pin down. And so your question is what is belief?

Well belief does it correspond to reality? That's the question I would ask. And first we don't even know what is real. So the table they would say, how do we know that the table even exists? Well, how do we differentiate it from the floor, for example? So these are the questions that philosophers are asking, no one else is, of course, but philosophers are asking these

questions and they have different answers for it. So I would say that it's very difficult to know what is real and in fact what I do usually is I paraphrase my friend and colleague brother Guy Consolmanio. He's a Jesuit priest, he's also an astronomer, and he's the director of the Vatican Observatory. And so he says this, he's a very smart person. He says, well, truth is a moving target. So basically, to know what is real out there, like gravity or something like that, you've got to approximate it.

And as human beings, we have senses to tell us what, at least so we don't get hurt, we're not going to fall off building or something like that. We have eyes to see and things like that. So we can approximate what reality is, but we're never going to get to it unless we develop better senses. And I think that that is what we are in the process of doing, we're developing better senses. We have telescopes, we have microscopes,

we have extensions of ourselves, which are now called technology, and we can get to a better understanding of what reality is and what the objective world is, and therefore our beliefs can be honed, so we can get better beliefs, more accurate beliefs, but can we get beliefs that actually correspond to reality? Not in any precise way, but in approximate ways. So I hope that's not like too big an answer to your question.

What do you think beliefs are in themselves can become reality? I mean, so you've now adapted the in this little bit of a conversation, adapted the metaphysitioned view of reality, which is the physics. Yes. But, you know, we humans kind of operate in the space of ideas very much so. Like, we've kind of in the collective intelligence of human beings have come up with a set of ideas that persist in the minds of these many people. And they become quite strong

and powerful. Like in terms of like impact on our lives, they can have sometimes more impact than this table does than the physics. Yeah. And in that sense, is there some sense in which our beliefs are reality? Even if they're not connected to the physics. Yes, even if they're not real. Yeah, even if, okay, so yes, absolutely. So our beliefs are tremendously, that create social effects, absolutely. There was a belief that, I'm gonna use this example.

There was a belief back in the day, and then we're talking about, when I say back in the day, I'm a historian, so I'm talking about like a thousand years ago, right? That women had no souls. Okay, so look, I don't know if human beings have souls. I can tell you this though, that if human beings have souls, probably animals do too. That's my own personal belief. That's not a professor belief there. But there was this belief among the Catholic

magisterium, which is the runs Europe, that women had no souls. So they had to have this big meaning about it. Did women have souls? But that belief had consequences for women. I mean, women were treated and have been treated as if they didn't have souls. OK, so there's.

And the soul was really the essence of the human being. It was. It's called the animus, right? It's what is the essence of what is eternal, you know, when women were eternal. Here's another example. Okay, this is an example from my own research. All right, so there in the Catholic tradition, there's this idea of purgatory, hell, and heaven.

And these are three destinations that people can go to when they die. And if you're great, you go to heaven automatically and you're considered a saint. If you're okay, you go to purgatory, right? And you suffer for a time and then get back into heaven. If you're terrible, you go to hell, right? Okay. Well, there was a place that The Catholics determined and this this was a belief for a long time like a thousand years or more And it was called limbo, all right, and limbo comes from the Latin limbus and it means edge And it was either on the edge of hell or on the edge of heaven

No one really could determine which it was no historians are like well this person says it was on the edge of heaven, no one really could determine which it was. No historians are like, well, this person says it was on the edge of heaven. Well listen, this was a terrible, first of all, there is no limbo anymore. In 2007, Benedict, the then Pope, got rid of the idea that there was limbo. Okay, so Catholics kind of went crazy because they didn't really know. They forgot that limbo existed and they thought it was purgatory. And they said, how could you get rid of purgatory?atory but actually he just got rid of this idea of limbo. Oh so that's a distinct thing from purgatory. It was, by the way people should know that they have a book on purgatory that came before America, cosmic guess I wrote a book on purgatory. Anyway so limbo is a distinct thing

from purgatory. Yeah and the the types of people who go to limbo happen to be Virtuous pagans, okay, like Socrates or somebody like that um and Children who weren't baptized so think of this think of for like more than a thousand years mothers and fathers gave birth to babies who weren't baptized and couldn't be buried with their family in these burial. And, you know, then they couldn't be reunited with them in heaven. Think of the pain and suffering that that caused. And that was nothing.

Mimbo's nothing. Yet the belief in it caused untold suffering. And that's just a small example. And that was as real to them. It was absolutely real. As real. I mean, the effects were real. Let's put it that way. The place itself, not real. But the families themselves, do you think they really believed it?

They totally believed it. As much as the table is real. Yes. I've read, but listen, we have trigger warnings today, right? So don't read this. It's going to make you upset, OK? History, primary sources, no trigger warnings. So you're going through somebody's diary from 1,400

and you hear the suffering and pain that they went through. There were times in my research where I'd have to put my primary source down and just basically go outside and take a walk because it was so horrific. I knew it was true because they wouldn't write something. They're not going to write in their diary something that's not true and it was horrible. So yes, these people went through untold suffering for nothing, for, you know, because they had an erroneous belief. But they didn't know it was erroneous. So it was real to them. Yeah. So I don't know if you're familiar with Donald Hoffman.

So I don't know if you're familiar with Donald Hoffman, he has this idea that in terms of the distance we are from being able to know the reality, which is there, the physics reality, is where actually really, really, really, really far away from that. So I think his idea is that we're basically completely detached from it. Yes. What's your sense? How closer we to the reality? We'll talk about a bunch of ideas about our beliefs in technology and beyond, but in terms of what is actually real from a physical sense. How close are we to understanding that?

Pretty far. I'm going to use examples from what I do. Okay, so this idea that we're suspicious of what we actually think is real is not new. Of course, it goes back a long time, thousands of years, in fact. And philosophers, I'm not actually technically a philosopher, but I was one. I'm a professor technically a philosopher, but I was one. I'm a professor of religious studies. Yeah, what do you introduce yourself at a bar when the bartender asks, what do you do?

I never tell people what I do. Especially on airplanes. It's a bad idea. So generally if they push, though, I say, I'm the chair of philosophy in religion, although I stepped down last year, so I'm no longer the chair. But I have a master's degree in philosophy

and I was a philosophy major and I've studied philosophy. I still study philosophy, so I integrate it into my research. All right, so this idea that we can't know we're suspicious of what we know, it's called external world skepticism. That's the official philosophical name for it. Our faculties and our senses don't give us accurate perceptions of what is there, okay?

Especially at a quantum level or a molecular level. I mean, that's just obvious. So, yeah, so I think that you're the person you mentioned is correct in that. I think we're far away from it. is correct in that, I think we're far away from it. I think you're talking about our direct senses, but we have tools, measurement tools, from microscopes to all the tools of astronomy, cosmology, it gives us a sense of the big universe and also the sense of the very small. Do you think there's some other things that are completely sort of other dimensions or there's ideas of pan-psychism that consciousness permeates all matter, that there's like fundamental forces of physics we're not even aware of yet. Oh, absolutely.

I do think, and this is why I write about technology. And I mean, that's actually what I specialize in, is belief in technology with respect to religion. So in my opinion, thank goodness for thank for technology, because where would we be without it? I mean, frankly, I think that it's like Marshall McLoon was the person who said, technology is like an extension of our senses. And I absolutely believe that to be true. I think that we're lucky that we, you know, that Prometheus gave us technology, okay? And that we use it and we're making it better and better and better and better.

And that makes us more efficient, makes us more efficient as a species. And like my point is that I think that our instruments, I mean, I don't want to be a religious technologist, you know, but our instruments will save us. I mean, they're already making life better for us. You think it's important that they also help us understand reality more directly, more deeply? I think directly is better than deeply. I think directly, more directly is probably

a more accurate term for what you're trying to, I think, ask me, can we actually, I mean, I think you're asking me that question that Kant basically was trying to get at, was can we know the thing in itself? Can we know that? Can we have some kind of intense knowing of it? It's almost mystical.

And I would say that that's where religion comes in. Okay, that's where we talk about religion. And if I may also go back to Emmanuel Kant, this idea that he just before he died, just as he died, he was working on, he did this critique of reason where basically he believed he basically talks about, can we know what's real? He basically has this long, you know, that question, can we know what's real? And then, you know, a thousand pages later, no. I'll just give you the rundown. Okay. So, okay. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Then he does this other critique. And, okay, so he does like three critiques. Then he does this critique of judgment. Okay. Well, judgment

is this other thing altogether. And I think that that's what you're getting at. So how do we know things? How can we know things really intensely and intimately? And I think that he thought that judgment was the idea that we can actually know the thing in itself. And he was working on that as he died and then he never finished it. Hannah Arent, another philosopher of the 20th century, took it up, took up the critique of judgment and tried to finish it. Why the word judgment? Because judgment, think about it.

When you see a work of art, who judges that to be decent? Okay, so there is a group of people who come to the decision that that's rotten or you know, that's pretty good. You know, like, I noticed that you like to play guitar Well, you choose music that I happen to like to okay, so you and I both have a you know sense of judgment It's a sense. So he said there's a sense that some people have Why do certain communities have a similar sense? What what dictates that? And so he was working on that he said he thought it had something to do with the knowledge,

the intimate knowledge of the thing in itself. Yeah. So another philosopher, that philosopher is actually don't like it all. But religious studies people do is Martin Heidegger. So Martin Heidegger has some great essays. One is called What Is a Work of Art. And again, he gets to, you know, he talks about Van Gogh and Van Gogh's shoes, you know,

that picture, the painting Van Gogh's shoes. It's really a really intense picture. It's just shoes. It's, you know, it's, but it's an amazing painting of shoes. And I think everybody can agree. That's a cool picture of shoes, right? And so why, you know, the question is why is that a cool picture of shoes, right? And say, why? You know, the question is, why is that a cool picture of shoes? You know, what kind of knowledge are we accessing to determine that indeed that works, right?

And in fact, we still like it. So basically, the nature of knowledge and what is it represent? It can operate in the space of, does the task from reality or can it ultimately represent reality? I guess that's the, is that the space in metaphysics? Is that the, is that the, yeah. So what can we know is actually called epistemology? Epistemology. But metaphysics is, I guess, is basically what is the nature of reality.

Right. And those intersect. Absolutely. Yeah. A lot of things intersect in philosophy. We just have fancy names for them. Another non-philosopher that may be considered a philosopher since we're talking about reality is I'm Rand and her philosophy of objectiveism.

What are your thoughts on her sense of taking this idea of reality, calling her philosophy objectivism, and kind of starting at the idea that you really could know everything, and it's pretty obvious. And then from that, you can derive an ethics about how to live life, like what is the good ethical life and all the virtue of selflessness, all that kind of stuff. So you talked a lot of academic philosophers, so I'll be curious to see from the perspective of like, is she somebody that's taken seriously at all, why she dismissed, as I see, from my distant perspective, by serious philosophers, and also like your own personal thoughts of like, is there some interesting bits

that you find inspiring in her work or not? Okay, so I'm Rand. I've had so many exceedingly intelligent students basically give me her books and basically say, please Dr. Pislok, read this book and I will tell them, yes, thank you, I've read this book before and then want to engage in, you know, let me put it this way, they're religious about ironrand. Okay, so to them, ironrand represents some type of way of life, right? Her objective ism. Now, why is she not taken seriously by philosophers in general? Well, let me put it this way. Philosophers in general tend to get pretty, I guess you could call it their Pretty I

Guess you could call it their Kind of scientists, but with words. I always call philosophy when I describe it to someone who's gonna take a philosophy class I say it's basically math problems like word math problems, okay? So that's basically what it is. So they take words very seriously and they're very formal and definitions very seriously Yeah, so they all want to get on the same page So they're not so there is no confusion so for I and ran to basically say you can know everything and you know and establish ethics from that I think philosophers Automatically say no now that doesn't mean I say no

I'm in fact We even we have at my university a wonderful business school and when you walk into the Dean of the business school's office I and Rand is everywhere. So it's So I want to say that not all academics are anti-I and Rand And in fact, I don't think philosophers are either except that they don't teach I and Rand Okay, so it is one one sense you could say that because they don't teach ironrand. Okay, so in one sense you could say that because they don't teach her, they're being exclusive in what they teach, or very particular perhaps is another way to put it.

Yeah, it's hard to know where to place people like her because, you know, do you put al-Barakhamu as a philosopher? So I guess what's the good term for that, like literary philosophers? Or whatever the term is, it's annoying to me that the academic philosophers get to own the word philosophy because like it's just like people who think deeply about life is what I think about as philosophy. And like to me it's like, all right, so I know Nietzsche is another person that's probably not respected in the philosophy circles I know Nietzsche is another person that's probably not respected in the philosophy circles because he is full of contradictions, full of... I love Nietzsche.

Nietzsche is my favorite philosopher. Oh really? Yes, I absolutely love Nietzsche. So he's deaf, you know, I love people that are full of ideas, even if they're full of contradictions in Nietzsche. Absolutely. And I and Rand is also that. I'm able to look past the obvious ego that's there on the page and The fact that she actually has in my view a lot of wrong ideas

But there's a lot of interesting tidbits to pick up and the same same goes with Nietzsche And I'm weirded out by the religious aspect here on both the people who like worship Iron Rand and people who completely dismiss her. I just kind of see is, oh, can we just read a few interesting things and get inspired by it and move on as opposed to have a dogmatic by me. Is there something you find about her work that's interesting to you or her personality or any of that? Oh, I think she's fascinating.

I don't dismiss her. She was a woman who reached a level of success with her mind at a time when that was difficult. So I mean, she's definitely worth looking at for even that reason. But also her idea, I guess part of the situation with Rand, first of all, I think that her work is, you have to, it's misinterpreted, okay? And I think that's the same with Nietzsche. Like a lot of people think that, I mean, in fact, it is the case that Nietzsche's writing before the 20th century, so he's got, you know, he's somewhat, his rhetoric is sexist and racist and, you know, of the time period, right?

He was a educated philosopher of that time period. However, his books are amazing and Nietzsche's philosophy is incredible. And I think that's what you're saying about Rand too. And I agree. I mean, I think that we get caught up. I mean, likely we should and we should contextualize these thinkers in the time period within which they are. We should not forgive there, you know, because there were people during Nietzsche's time that were, you know, feminists and not racist and things like that. And, you know, so, but each has merit. I mean, I would say Nietzsche is, and you did ask me to talk about some of the books that made the largest impact on me Yeah, and Nietzsche's gay science is one of them is one of the best books ever in my opinion. I do think Nietzsche was I don't know about exactly Sexes you certainly was sexist, but it felt like

He didn't get laid much in his life No, it felt like he didn't get laid much in his life. No. It felt like it was extra sexist. I was like, his theories on women are like, all right, he's pretty angry. He seems frustrated. Yeah.

It's like, all right, calm down, buddy. All the fate of philosophers. I just ignore everything which it says about women. So can we talk about myth and religion a little bit? Yes. I mean, can we start at the beginning, which is like myths, how are they born? There's this collective intelligence amongst us human beings and we seem to create these beautiful ideas that captivate the minds of millions.

How is such a myth born? Great question. Okay, so that brings us to terminology again. And in my field, we definitely, I think, try not to distinguish between religion, I guess is gonna be controversial. I think between religion and myth, because we call other cultures cultures religions myths, right?

And then we call our myths religions. And I guess myth has a bad connotation to it that it's not somehow real. Yeah. Now what's interesting is that people like Plato who lived thousands of years ago, 2,500 about, basically made this distinction himself within his own culture, which was Greek, right? So Plato is a very famous Greek philosopher, and he would say things like this. He would say that he would make a distinction between the reality of the one God or the

one. He would call it, he didn't use the word God, but he's referencing a divinity of, okay, and he believes in the soul, okay. So, but he would also say that the gods and goddesses of the Greeks are just myths. So even he would make that distinction again, you know, he would say, the population is not too bright so they believe in these gods and goddesses. But he himself is talking to his students and he's basically talking about forms, you know,

so, you know, that live and seem to live in these other dimensions, like this table, let's go back to this table that we're talking around right now. He would say that this table is the instantiation of the form table, and that there is this table that actually exists somewhere. It's where this place where numbers exist, like the number two. Okay, so we use the number two mathematically, therefore it exists. But have you ever seen a real one? Have you ever seen the real two? No. Okay, so, but where does it exist? So he says that tables, so he was also talking about things that You know, he says are real making a distinction between the people and by the way

He got this from Socrates his his mentor who was killed by Athens because he would say such things People don't like to be told that they what they believe in is not real, right? Yeah, by the way His idea of forms, it's just, you just make me realize how like incredible was that somebody like that was able to come up with that. I mean, that idea became a myth that, the idea of forms, right, that permeated, probably the most influential set of ideas

in the history of philosophy, in the history of ideas. Yes, I mean, Plato, we know him for a reason, right? Yeah, so let's say that we're not, it's a gray area between religious and myth and maybe not even- It is gray, yeah. So how's that idea with like little Plato start and permeate through all of society?

Oh, how does that happen? Okay, so there are different ways that religions work. So a lot of people would call the UFO narrative today, like, and this is what I talk about in my book, like a myth, right, the UFO myth, but a lot of people believe in it, okay? So how do these things work? Well, what I did was I took,

there's a, Antaves at UC Center Bar um, there's a, and Taves at, um, UC Santa Barbara. She's a pretty well-known academic who studies religion. And she has this building block definition of religion, like it builds, okay? And so she says there are, there are, there are no religious experiences or mythic experiences. There are experiences. And then they get interpreted as religious or mythic, okay? And so I use that with the UFO narrative. So I take, and I compare it to the religious narrative. So basically what happens, what happens is this, is that a person generally has a very intense experience.

It could be with something that they see in the sky, a being, you know, that they see, you know, like Moses in the Burning Bush or something like that. They tell other people, okay, and those other people believe them because they say, that guy, let's take you, okay, Alex. Okay, so you're playing, you know, some of your music, Jimmy Hendrix shows up out of the blue.

So Jimmy Hendrix, who does electric church stuff, right? The electric church movement. So he shows up. I was, sorry, for a small tangent. I was, I'm not aware of, I apologize if I should be. I'm just know how to play all of the songs. Electric church. Is this something? Oh yeah, yeah, it's Jimmy Hendrix's thing. Yeah.

That was like a philosophy of his or what? Yes, yes, yes. So he thought he was, it was like a mission for him, like a, like he was a missionary and he was like doing the electric church. It was through his mission of music that he was actually impacting people spiritually. And I think you have to agree that his music is really spiritual, yeah. Wow, that's so cool to know that there's like a philosophy there. Yeah.

I wonder if he's ever written anything. He's spoken about it many times. Interesting. Yeah. He's actually do some research here. Wow, there's another level of depth. That's awesome. OK, so.

OK, so say Lex is playing 100. Yeah, 100. One of his songs. Yeah. He shows up. What's your favorite 100 song? Oh, that's a hard one. So, okay, so say Lex is playing 100 songs. Yeah, he shows up. What's your favorite 100 song? Oh, that's a hard one. I like castles in the sand.

It's a sad one, but I like it. So I'm playing something that I show up. And I was in boom, just like Elvis does for people. Hendrix shows up, all right. And then you're amazed and they tell you something that's very, very significant. And he says, you need to tell other people this, okay? So then like, okay.

I go on social media. I eat, yes. And you start. And because people believe you, and because you are a person of credibility, people believe you. And so all of a sudden a movement starts, okay? And it's the Hendrix movement.

It's Hendrix two or something like that. You know, we call it something, the next iteration of Hendrix, right? Hendrix lives, but he lives as this vibration. And only Lex can manifest this vibration, okay? So this is how religion starts, excuse your audience, who are religions. I'm actually practicing Catholic, so.

This is how religion starts. They start with first off a contact experience. Not, I mean, not all of them, but a good portion of them. Some person has an experience that's transcendent, sacred to them, and they go and they tell other people, and then those people tell other people. And then something gets written about it, okay? And then it becomes, because it's a charismatic movement, people become affected by it. And if too many people are affected by it, an institution steps in and tries to control the narrative. So this is what you'd call the beginning of a religion

or a myth, a very powerful myth. And so it's almost like a star, right? A star is born, okay? Yeah. When you say institution, do you mean some other organization that's already powerful? Does someone to become overpowered by this new movement? Yes, absolutely.

It's usually governments. It's usually, yeah. So I have a couple of examples. I use the example of the Christian church in my book because I'm most familiar with the history of Christianity. And, you know, Christianity was started by this Jewish man, and it was a movement that, you know, he was a very powerful, charismatic person. Other people believed in him, and then his followers talked about him, and then other, then, you know, usually early Christians before the 300s were generally people who were disenfranchised because he had a pretty radical idea that, you know, humans should have dignity.

And this was pretty radical during that time. So women who didn't have dignity and, you know, slaves who didn't have dignity at the time, converted Christianity and droves. And so what happened was that all of a sudden, it became this belief system that was undercurrent and then Constantine, who was an elite, had an experience and made Christianity a state religion. By that time there were different forms of Christianity, probably hundreds of them, well, most likely,

and Constantine and the people who were powerful with him decided that their idea, this is the council of Nicaea now, decided that there was one form, and they called it universal. So the one form of Christianity and this should be it. And so they kind of took out all the other denominations of Christianity in different forms of it. So you can see that a very, very powerful set of beliefs,

put a culture on fire, right? And so how did they had to deal with that fire somehow? And so they narrativeized it. They decided how do we interpret this? And they interpreted it as they wished. But that wasn't the only interpretation of Christianity. I have another example. I'm in the Catholic church a lot of times,

and I'm gonna use the example of Faustina, I'm a she's, she's a nun and she's Polish. And I think it was in the early 20th century, if not the 1800s, that she had a very powerful, many experiences actually of Jesus. And she saw Jesus with rays coming out of his heart. And basically she called this his divine mercy, and it became a devotion in Poland and it spread. The Catholic Church was not into this at all, okay? And so they did everything they could to try to suppress Faustina's influence, which was growing and growing and growing and growing, okay?

And so they were very successful in trying to keep a quiet, and she died, okay? And so they were very successful in trying to keep her quiet. And she died, okay? Years later, John Paul II Polish, sainted her and created the Divine Mercy devotion, which is worldwide now, and millions and millions of people. But do you see how they, you know, completely controlled? So fascinating that it, uh, that it just starts with a single, like you said contact experience experiences the keyword and is your sense that those experiences are legitimate so it's not yes I think for the most part their legitimate experiences that people have why would someone want to put

themselves through what they go through like why would Jesus want to get crucified I mean that's a pretty nasty way to die you, why would someone want to put themselves through what they go through? Like, why would Jesus want to get crucified? I mean, that's a pretty nasty way to die. You know, why would Faustina bring this upon herself? The people that I meet who've said that they've seen you have, most of them don't want to be known because of the ridicule that goes along with it. So I honestly think that, you know, there are people who are maybe not stable and would like the attention, but for the most part, normal people don't want this attention. So you mentioned building blocks. You didn't mention the word God or sort of the afterlife. Are those essential to the myth?

So there's a contact experience. Is there some other aspects of myth and religion which makes them viral, which makes them spreading captivate the imagination of people? Yes, is there a pattern to them? I think that for each era, it's different. And people have, first let's talk about the definition of religion, if that's okay, because most people assume the definitions that we in the West are familiar with, which is that, you know, that of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, you know, monotheistic religions. And there are, that's not, I mean, those are just some religions. There are so many different types of religions. Some religions have no got at all. Zen Buddhism, for example, is a religion that asks you to take away your

belief structures, like to kind of like, in fact, I would call that a Kantian type religion, right? And that it's basically telling you to get rid of your concept of what you think about things so that you can actually have the experience like you were talking about earlier of the thing in itself, and they call that satore. So there are people who believe, you know, they try to, they call it meditation, zen meditation,

and it's fairly radical actually. In some monasteries, I don't know if they still do this, but they'll whack you on the head if you appear to be not focusing and that kind of thing. They do things to basically take you away from your conceptions of reality and bring you into a state of all that is, which is what they call satory. And that has nothing to do with God. I like this religion.

And anything that involves sticks and whacking in order for you to focus better, I'm gonna have to join a monastery. So, okay, so digging into definitions religion, so like what is, what do you think is the scope that defines a religion? Oh, okay, so in my field, we have a few different definitions of religion, as you can imagine,

just like philosophers have different definitions of what is real. So I take this definition and it comes from John Livingston and it's religion is that set of beliefs and practices that is inspired by a transformative What is perceived actually to be a transformative and sacred power? Can you say that again? Yeah, so religion is a set of it's not just belief It's also practices is both belief and practices because you won't have the practices without the belief

So you have those together, okay, and it's inspired by what is perceived because we don't know if it's real or not, what is perceived to be of sacred and transforming power. So perceived by the followers versus connected to the original sort of experience? No, no, well, it's perceived by the followers. That's a really good definition. So, and that's the governing idea is that there's something of great power. Yes. Perceived to be of great power, which you can connect yourself either emotionally or intellectually somehow in order to explore the world that is beyond your own capabilities. Yes. And is there communication also involved?

Or generally. Yeah. That's a great definition. OK, so within that falls everything that we've talked about so far, including technology and alien life and so on. Do you think ultimately religion is good for human civilization. Let me maybe phrase it differently is, what's religion good for? Okay, yeah, that's a great question. Thanks for asking that. Most people

don't ask that. And I think it's the question to ask, why do we still have religion? That's the question, right? Because scientists and others, scholars, humanists even thought that there's this thing called the secularization thesis, and it's this idea that the more we progress rationally and we have better instruments for understanding our reality, the less religious we will be, but that's been found to be untrue. We're still very religious, okay? So why? Why is it around?

Well, it's adaptive in some way, in my opinion. Many people would not agree with me, but I kind of see it as an evolutionary adaptation. Now, think about religions, okay? Think about Christianity again for one. Here comes this idea, when you have this ruthless empire called the Roman Empire, Now, think about religions, okay? Think about Christianity again for one. Here comes this idea, when you have this ruthless empire called the Roman Empire, which litters its roads with crucified bodies to let you know, don't mess with us, okay?

All right, here all of a sudden you have this guy saying, God is love, okay? All right, well that's weird, okay? So why, why does this take off? Well, it takes off because we're becoming a colonial power. That means we're going into other countries, we're conquering them. We are, you know, how do we survive together as cultures that don't clash. Well, we have to have a belief structure

that allows us to, and I think religion's function that way, frankly. So religions help us from, so Richard Dawkins meme idea, it allows us to explore a space of ideas and that in itself is the, it's like evolution of ideas. And it is just a powerful tool for us.

It is, yes. Because, you know, if I believe that men have souls, do they? Yes, they do, okay. Wow. So, trying to figure that out. Why still in terms of souls do believe cats don't have souls, but we'll never be able to confirm that.

Maybe if we get better instruments, you know the soul instrument, you need to come up with that one please. For cats? Yeah, not just for cats, but for all animals and people in general. You can put them in like a little soul machine and find out what's the status of their soul? That's funny. I hope we'll become a scientific discipline of consciousness and consciousnesses in some

sense connected to maybe what the meaning of the word soul used to be. And I think it's a fascinating open question, like what is consciousness and so on, that maybe we'll touch on in a little bit. But yeah, anyway, back to our... Religions being adaptive. I think that Christianity probably helped us become better people to each other

as we moved into a more global society. And also, it goes along with my book, which is basically making the argument that belief in non-human intelligence or ET's or UFO's, UAP's, whatever you want to call them, is a new form of religion. And how does that work with the scientific method? Do you think there's always this role of religion as being in his broad definition religion, as being a complement to our sort of very rigorous empirical pursuit of understanding reality, where there's always going to be this coupling, will always

define, redefine new errors of civilization of what that religion actually looks like. So you talk about technology and so on, being the modern set of religious beliefs around that. So is that always going to, is religion always going to kind of cover the space of things we can't quite understand with science yet, but we still want to be thinking about. Oh, I see what you're saying. That's a great question. When you say religion, I would use the word religiosity because I think that we're moving

out of the dogmatic types of religions into more of a, I hate to put it this way, but an exfiles type religion where we can say, I want to believe or the truth is out there. Right. But we don't know that it's out there or we don't know yet what it is, but we know it's out there. So there's this kind of built-in capacity for belief in something that we don't have evidence for yet, and that's a sort of faith. So I would say yes to that question, absolutely. I think it's adaptive in that way. We're moving into a new, I mean, heck, we've already moved into this culture. Most people have not caught up with it yet. I see that in the school systems, you know,

and I think that I'm hoping we can catch up fast because really it's moving faster than we are. So I mentioned to you offline that I'm finishing up on the rise and fall of the third Reich. I'm not sure if you have anything in your exploration, interesting to say, but the use of religion by dictators or the lack of the use of religion by dictators, whether we're talking about Stalin, which is most of the secular, I apologize if I'm historically incorrect on this, but I believe it's secular. And Hitler, I think there's some controversy about how much religion played a role in

his own personal life and in general, in terms of influencing the, using it to manipulate the public, but definitely the church played a role. Do you have a sense of the use religion by governments to control the populations by dictators, for example, or is that outside of your little explorations as a religious scholar. It's not outside of my framework, absolutely not. I think that it's done routinely. Propaganda is done routinely, especially there's nothing more powerful than religion to get people to act. I think I have my mother's Jewish and my father's was Roman Catholic, okay, from Irish

extraction. And so both members, both great grandparents came here under duress because they were being, what would you call it, there was an active genocide on both sides being dead by other cultures. Okay, so on the one hand obviously we know about the Holocaust. Okay, so they came, the great grandparents came here to avoid that and they made it. On the other hand, there was an English genocide. We just have to say it. The Irish, it was called a famine, but it wasn't one. It was a staged thing. And so millions of Irish left Ireland on Coffin ships is what they called them because they usually wouldn't get here. Why not get here? Okay, so those, that's the context that I'm coming from. So in each case, for one thing,

Irish weren't considered, you know, there was, Catholics weren't considered, they were considered to be terrible. And there was a lot of anti-Catholic, rhetoric here in the United States, which is kind of strange because one of the, in fact, the most wealthy colonial family were the carols in Maryland and they were Catholic. So when you look at the United States at our history and you see the separation of church and state, do you wanna know where that came from? That came from those guys. They convinced George Washington and Thomas Jefferson,

I mean, they couldn't vote, yet they had, they had, they have their names on the Constitution. Is that not a strange contradiction? So here you can see how propaganda works. There was anti-Catholic propaganda. There was anti-Jewish propaganda. And a lot of it was that these people weren't human. They weren't human beings. Another thing I'd like to say is that when the Irish did come here, a lot of times indentured servants, but that's terminology.

What is an indentured servant? Pretty much. So, in that sense, religion can be used as a... Derogatory? Yeah, derogatory as a useful grouping mechanism of saying this is the other. And you know, it's powerful too because behind it is a force of, you know, what people can tend to be sacred, a sacred force, right? So, you know, it's up to God to, you know, decide who's, you know, so you have to go along with what God says, of course. Well, that's basically,

that's not the contact event. The contact event is usually some type of very specific legitimate event that a person has with something that is non-human or considered divine. But when religions become narrativeized, I would call it by different institutions, that's when you're in danger of getting propaganda. You said Nietzsche, one of your favorite philosophers, he said famously, one of the many famous things he said is that God is dead. Yes. What do you think he meant?

Do you think he was right? Okay, good. I love this question. No one asks me about Nietzsche. And I love Nietzsche. Okay, so first actually, I do think, and I could be corrected and probably will be in all the comments. Yeah. Well, first Nietzsche, it's true.

Wasn't the first to say God is dead. I think Hagel said it. Okay, no one reads Hagel. He's like so difficult to read that is impossible. Saying with Heidegger, as you mentioned. He, yeah, I love him, but yeah, he's a really hard to read. So Nietzsche basically said God is dead.

And let me give you the context for him saying that. He also said this. He said there was only one Christian and he died on the cross. Okay. So he despised Christianity. And he said that and the people who practiced it. Absolutely. Yeah. But again, he believed in Jesus. And he believed Jesus was, he didn't believe he was a divinity. He believed Jesus was a

good man. And he died on the cross. Okay. So he believed in the morality. Yeah, he absolutely did. Yeah, he did. And Nietzsche basically was making a historical statement about God is dead. He said, and he was right. He was basically saying that in this, in the century in which he lived, and he died, I think, in 1900. Again, I could be wrong about that. So I just want to say that. I believe he died in 1900. Okay. So, so he's writing in the 1800s. And he's basically saying, God is dead and we killed him. Okay, so he's making a historical statement that at that point in time with science

just kind of getting better and industrialization happening, the idea of this thing beyond what we know as material reality is dead. So the substrate of Western civilization is dead. That's what Nietzsche is saying. If that makes sense. And he basically says, with that comes the uber, okay, which is the superhuman. And he says, there aren't many of them. He says, but they're gonna come. And he also talks about the philosophers of the future. And he's speaking and writing to them is my belief.

So he's basically telling you and me, because we're now the philosophers of his future. Yeah, he's basically telling us, this is what's happening now. And look what it has done. He says, now everything is possible, all manner of terrible evil, because no one has the belief in God anymore, the belief that there is, that there is an afterlife, you asked about an afterlife. So with this kind of belief in a morality comes this belief, you know, you can have morals without God, okay, people do. But what Christianity is this idea that you will reap what you sow. So if people don't believe that anymore, what will happen?

And so that's what he's basically saying is that the basic anchor for Western society is now gone. Do you think he was right? Absolutely, absolutely right. But then again, what do you think if we brought him back to life and he read American Cosmic, your book, and he wrote, he tweeted about it, right?

Right. Writing a review maybe for the, I don't know what they post, for New York Times, he'd be an editorial writer with a blue check mark on Twitter. What do you think he would say about this idea that you present? That's a grander idea of religion. And you know, like religiosity, like this uniform. Yeah. Yeah. Wouldn't that kind of reverse the idea that God is dead? Yeah, because it would bring up this idea of external intelligences that are not human, which is basically a lot of religions talk about that, right?

There are bodhisattvas. There are Angels, there are demons. You know, there are all these types of non-human intelligences that religion makes space for. So what I'm basically saying in American Cosmic is these new things are within the realm of UFOs and UIPs. So we do, no, I think that, well, I think Nietzsche would say that that's a progressive adaptation of religion is what I would hope he would say.

Nietzsche, however, is unpredictable, I think. I couldn't predict him. So I would say that it would be my hope that he would say this is an accurate representation of a move into a new type of religion. And it's adaptive, therefore progressive. He would probably be uncomfortable reading a book by a brilliant female professor. Who happens also to be short? I don't know if you read that. No.

Yeah, he said some pretty nasty things about short women. Oh my God. Yeah. Oh, Nietzsche, he should be canceled. No, no, please don't cancel Nietzsche. You have to take people in the context of their time. Although I'm pretty sure in his time he was also a nasshole. He was. But assholes are people too. Okay, just bad ones. You wrote the book American Cosmic your foes religion technology

What was the goal of writing this book? What maybe we'll mention it we have already mentioned it many times, but in this little Space of a conversation Can you say maybe what is the key insight that you found that lingers with you to this day from the process, the long process of putting this book together? Sure. Just like with my book on Pragetory, I went into the research thinking that it would be something

that it was entirely not. It ended up being something completely different. And I think that's good. I think that people who do research need to, are very excited actually when their research surprises them. So I was happily surprised by my purgatory book to learn that it was a place you know and and so I went into American cosmic being a non-believer in UFOs entirely. And I came out being agnostic, okay? Kind of believer. Yeah.

So, uh... But agnostic sort of open to the mysteries of the world. Yes. And I didn't think that, first of all, I knew that the government was part of the situation. I just didn't know how much. And so I learned that quickly and acclimated to it, accepted it and noted that indeed, Horatio, the world is much more mysterious than we think it is. It's more mysterious. There are more mysteries in this life than your philosophy provides for. So, as a sense, American cosmic is about the mysteries of the modern life is encapsulated by the realm

of technology and the realm of alien intelligences. Yes, I think that I mean, I'd have to go off record as a professor and talk personally. As a person, I do think that there are mysteries of which we have an inkling. And if it's something as powerful as non-human intelligence, whether or not it's from another planet extraterrestrial, or it happens to be from like another dimension or something else. I think that this is going to get the attention of institutions of power. Indeed, I think that's what has happened. Although, probably, people have had interactions with these things, it appears to me historically for a long time, as long as humans have existed, I would imagine that indeed, this is something that's quite powerful

and could change the belief structures of our entire societies, our civilization, basically. So it's the same way that you talk them, the belief structures were strongly affected by religious beliefs throughout history. In the same way, this has the potential. It serves as a source of concern for the powerful because it can have very significant effects on the populace.

Yes. Is there some broader understanding powerful because it can have very significant effects on the populace. Is there some broader understanding of how we should think about alien intelligences than like little green men that you can maybe elaborate on to talk about? Yes. This comes directly out of my research in Catholic history. What I found was that let's take, for instance, this idea of an angel. Okay, so we all think we know what an angel looks like. Why? Well, we've been told what an angel looks like. We see what an angel looks like throughout history, people

have painted angels, and they all look pretty much the same. But actually, if you go to the primary primary sources on either in Hebrew or in Greek or in whatever language and in Latin. And you look at experiences that people have talked about where they've written down their experiences about angels. Angels don't at all look like what we think they don't look like little cherubs with wings. They don't look like tall, strong anthropomorphic human-looking things they don't. They look really weird. And sometimes they don't look at all a humanoid. They look like strange spinning things, right, with like eyes and things like that. They communicate

telepathically with us. Okay, so what does that mean for the idea of extraterrestrials or what we consider to be aliens? Like, do you think that they're first, if we are, if listen, it's, I'm not the first to say this, if we're in contact with non-human intelligence, we're most likely in contact with its technology. Because think about us. Do we send human beings to Mars yet? Some people would say yes, but let's put that aside. So no, we don't.

We use our technology. We send our rovers to Mars, okay? Okay. Okay. So, if there's an extraterrestrial civilization, is it sending, are they coming by themselves? Are they coming to a CS, or are they sending their technology? Most likely, they either are technology, or they are sending their technology.

Yeah, there might be a gray area between what is technology and what the aliens are. Yeah. So, but put your saying like basically a robotic probe that would be the equivalent of us our human civilization created technology. Way more advanced than what we could believe to be a probe, all right? It's kind of funny to think about like if whatever sort of extraterrestrial creations have visited Earth that we're interacting with some like dumb crappy drone. Yeah, it's true. And we're like, like, we're like building these like myths and so on from like an experience with some like crappy drone made

But some crappy start-up somewhere When the actual intelligence is like something much grander Yeah, that's that's the more likely Situation I like to tell people I'm like no, it's probably a lot weird than you think. Yeah. Oh boy. So, but what forms can it possibly take? So, yeah, okay, I really love this idea that I tend to be humble in the face of all that we don't know. And I tend to believe that the form alien life forms would take. And the way that would communicate is much more likely

to be of a form that we can't even comprehend or perhaps can't even perceive directly. So it could be in the space of, we don't understand most of how our mind works. It could be in the space of whatever the heck consciousness is. Like, maybe consciousness itself is communication with aliens. Or like, I don't know, it could be just our own thoughts is actually the alien life forms communicating. Like, I don't know all of that sounds crazy, but I'm saying like,

I'm just trying to come up with the craziest possible thing that doesn't make any sense. That could very well be true and you can't say it's not true because we don't understand basically anything about our mind. So it can be all of those things, everything from hallucinations, all the things that are explored through

through the different drugs that we've talked about in this podcast in general, Joe Rogan, lots of talk about DMT and all those kinds of hallucinogenic drugs, all of it, including love and fear, all those things that could be aliens communicating with us, memes on the internet that could be pretty sure humor is alien communication. No, I don't know, but is there some Way that's helpful for you to think about beyond the little green men. Oh, absolutely It it of course exactly with how I think actually so I'll explain and I liked in American Cosmic, I attained the status of full professor. So I was like, okay, I can pretty much write this book like I want to do it.

And I did. So I used a lot of quotes from cool artists like David Bowie. Okay. So David Bowie opens the book. Okay. And he basically says, and so does Nietzsche, by the way, David Bowie and Nietzsche, boom, two awesome quotes right together. That's how you open it. No better opener. Yeah.

Do you remember the course? Yeah, of course. So the first, the quote by David Bowie, and that's what I'm going to concentrate on in response to what you just said, which I think is absolutely correct. David Bowie said the internet is an alien life form. Okay. And if you've not seen David Bowie's interview where he says that, I highly recommend it. He's so brilliant. Okay, so David Bowie is actually quite brilliant about the idea of UFOs. He's also brilliant about the idea of technology. Okay, and most people wouldn't think that, but I mean, he's pretty darn smart. Okay, so all right, so I started to think about it and I also early on in my research met Jacques Valet Okay, so he's a technologist He has a PhD in information technology from computer science basically from Northwestern and you got that back in the day You know when I say back in the day. I'm not talking to thousands of years ago. I'm talking like in the 60s

Okay, so he's back when computer science wasn't really even the fear that you can get a degree Yeah, he has a PhD in it. And he's French, he's from France, but he lives in Silicon Valley. And he worked on ARPANET, which is the proto-internet. He mapped Mars, he's also an astronomer. I mean, he's just this all-around brilliant guy, right? And he's also interested in UFOs. And most people take those two interests of his as separate interests.

And I remember being at a very small conference and listening to him, of being in awe, of course, because he's an awe-inspiring person. And then thinking, wait a minute, why do people compartmentalize those two things about him? They're one and the same, okay? So when we talk about UFOs and UAPs and stuff, we have to talk about digital technology and things like that. Now, if we were going back to what I, so if I were to say what, if I were to believe

in, and I, like I said earlier, I was agnostic, bordering on belief, most likely a believer in these, this extraterrestrial or not extraterrestrial, let me put it another way, non-human intelligence that's communicating with us. I'm gonna tell you how I think they communicate with us. And I go back to the Greeks again, okay? And the Greeks had this idea of muses, you know, the muses. So, okay, so there are these things called muses, and we tend to think of them as metaphors, right?

But what if they're not? What if they're actually non-human intelligence trying to communicate with us, but we're so stupid, we can't like understand. So only people with like, you know, super amazing capacities, like poetic, creative, you know, intelligent, mathematical, whatever, you know, because they tend to do this symbolically, they tend to communicate with us in symbols form. And so, music symbols, we've got math that are, you know, it's a symbolic language. And so, okay, so muses are probably a good idea for me

of what this would be. Now, would muses have spaceships, or those things that we call physical counterparts to what they are? That's another question altogether. But, you know, I, I, now, why would I think this? Because if you look at the history of our space programs, both Russian and American, you're going to find some pretty weird stuff, pretty, pretty weird history

there, Lex. So you want to get it an idea, go back to Jekalski and read a little bit about what he has to say. If you look back at the history of our space programs, the viable space programs are both Russian and American and each has an amazingly strange history because the founders of the calculations that got us up into space, the rocket scientists basically, were doing some pretty weird rituals and doing religious things, right? They weren't necessarily like Jack Parsons on our side. It was out in the desert with people like Eloran Hubbard and doing really intense rituals, believing that they were opening stargates and things like that, okay? That's awesome. And they were really doing that, okay? So then you go to

the Russian side and they had a very specific non-dogmatic according to Catholics or Orthodox Christianity idea of what Christianity was and they believed that they were interacting with angels, okay? non-human intelligences. So if you look back and you see muses, you know, you can contextualize them within this tradition and so when I started to talk to people who were actually in the space program and who were in these programs that now the government has said, oh yeah, we do have these programs. And they have the same belief structures. They believe that they were also in contact with these non-human intelligences and they

were getting what they called downloads of information and creating sometimes with Tyler D in my book, creating technologies that were real and they were selling them on NASDAQ for a lot of money, like, say, $100 million or something like that, undisclosed amounts. But a lot. And these things are viable technologies that we use now and they make our lives better, and we progress as a species because of them. Now, that has nothing to do with the scientific method. As much as I know, as much as anybody's going to get angry at me for saying that, but, you know,

sorry, there's were strange encounters that created our ability to go into space. I don't know if they're real or not, but these people believe they were real. Right, so they have a power in actually having an impact in this world, in inspiring humans to create technology which enables us to do things we haven't been able to do before. Yeah. And these, I like how we were putting like angels, alien life forms, aliens and technology all in the non-human intelligence camp, which I really like that because that's very true.

It's this other source of wisdom, intelligence, maybe a connection to the mysterious. Yes. I was really surprised by it. Can you speak a little bit more to the connection between aliens and technology that Jacques Vallet had in his own one individual mind that's very tempting to kind of separate as two separate endeavors. Why did you come to believe that they are one and the same, or at least part of the same intellectual journey? Thanks for asking that again because nobody asks me that question and it's central to my project. So Jacques was a huge influence, is a huge influence on me. He taught me a lot. I had, he gave me access to some of his information that's that he keeps.

access to some of his information that he keeps. But a lot of his information is actually there out there for everyone to read. He has an academia.edu page. And he just, so he didn't have this. Unfortunately, when I was doing my research in 2012 and 2013, so I had to go back and do microfiche type stuff, you know, what I did was I began to read everything that he wrote. And he actually gave me a lot of his books too. And he told me, I remember, he dropped me off from, this is actually quite interesting if you allow me to tell you a little story. Okay, and it also includes Ayahuasca. So, great. Every story includes Ayahuasca is a great story. Okay, so I was at a conference and it was a small conference of very interesting people in California on the Pacific Ocean and Jacques was there.

And this is actually, I opened my book. This is the, I go, I suprifus to my book. I go on this ride. He takes me through Silicon Valley. I've lived there. My grandparents grew up in the same place that he raised his children in Belmont. And so, um, but we are there. Robbie Graham, who's a great u-fologist in his own right and, um, in film theorist. I highly recommend his work. Um, so we were together and he was taking us to San Francisco where I was going to meet my brother,

who was going to take me home. And so he took us on this long journey and he talked to us to San Francisco where I was going to meet my brother who was going to take me home. And so he took us on this long journey and he talked to us. And as we got out of the car, he gave me several of his books. And one in particular, he gave me, he said, read this first. That was like, okay, I definitely will read that first. Okay, so this is how the ayahuasca figures in. So I didn't take it nor have I taken it. Okay, so we were at this place and in California,

and Alex Gray and his wife were there, and they were talking about their experiences with psychedelics, he's an amazing visionary artist. Okay, so he believes that there's this place that you can enter, and he and his wife would enter this space with either you know, Ayahuasca or LSD or something like that. And they would not talk to each other, but they would be having the same exact experience. So they would, it was almost like having the same dream, right? Okay. So somehow that whole event with Jacques there,

So somehow that whole event with Jacques there and them talking about their Experiences in these realms of which religious studies people are quite familiar by the way because visionary experiences are what we study So all of this seems super familiar to me and I recognize that immediately that Jacques That it hit me like, you know very obvious that UFOs and these experiences and technology all seemed, they were all meshed together. And I knew that I had to take them. I knew I had to read everything Jacques ever wrote. And the best stuff he's written, by the way, is the stuff, his little essays that he wrote in the 1970s and there were pure, you essays about the beginning is the, his little essays that he wrote in the 1970s and there are

pure, you essays about the beginning of the internet and how a lot of it was based on, basically, like, neural connection with the internet, like somehow psychic connection through the internet with others and things like that. So the brain is a biological neural network. There's this connection between vision neurons and so on and. So the brain is a biological neural network. There's this connection between vision neurons and so on. And that's what ultimately is able to have memories and has cognitive ability and is able to perceive the world and generate ideas. And those ideas are then spread on the internet, even from the very early days to other humans. So it gets injected or travels into the brains of other humans

and that goes around in there and then spits out other stuff and it goes back and forth. So it's nice to think of the network that's in our mind, individual mind, as, I mean, very much even deeply connected to the network that is the connection between humans through the internet. And so in that sense, Jacques saw the internet as this powerful, as a source of power and wisdom that is beyond our own.

Exactly. That's external to us. If you could call it autonomous AI, right? It's non-human intelligence in a sense, even though humans are a part of it. Yes, or were invaded by it or you know whatever you want to call it, okay? Yeah, whoever, right, it's the chicken and egg, right? So if I can go on, I want to experience this. Oh yes, yes. I'm not done with that. Yeah.

So this is where I come to this idea that we are in this space. We're in now a new space of religion of religiosity. So what happens is then, and it's like a biosphere, and I'll talk about that in a minute. So Jacques takes us back. We get to San Francisco and my brother who is your straight lace person, you know, army guy and everything like that.

My get into his car and the first thing he tells me is, I took Ayahuasca and I was like, what? He goes, it's gonna save humanity. That's great. Yeah. That's how I mentioned to you off line, I talked to Matthew Johnson, he's a Hopkins professor and he's a really a scholar of most. He's, he's, he's certainly most drugs. He's also a really a scholar of most. He's starting most drugs.

He's also a really deeply studied cocaine, all those stuff on negative effects. And he's focused on a lot of positive effects of the different psychedelics. It's kind of fascinating. So I'm very much interested in exploring the science of what these things do to the human mind and also personally exploring it. Although it's like this weird gray area which he's masterful at which is he's a professor

at Johns Hopkins one of the most prestigious universities in the world and and doing large-scale studies of the stuff. And until until he got a lot of money for these studies, even in Hopkins itself, there's not much respect. Not even respect. It was like people just didn't want to talk about it as a legitimate field of inquiry. It's kind of fascinating how hesitant we are as a little human civilization to legitimize the exploration of the mysterious of whatever the definition of the mysterious is for that particular period of time. So for us now, there's like little groups of things like I would say consciousness in the space of like computer science research is something that's still like, I don't know, maybe let philosophers kick it

around for a little longer. And then certainly extraterrestrial life forms from in most formulations of that problem space is still the other. It's still the source of the mysterious, except maybe like Ceti, which is like, how can we detect signals from far away alien intelligences

that would be able to perceive? Yeah, it's, and psychedelics is another one of those that's like, we're starting to see, okay, well, can we try to see if there's some medical applications of like helping you get like he does studies of help you quit smoking or help you in some kind of treatment of some disease and he's sneaking into that I mean it's like openly sneaking into it. It's doing studies on it of like how can you expand the mind with these tools and what can

the mind discover through psychedelics and so on. And we're like slowly creeping into the space of being able to explore these mysterious questions. But it's like, it sucks that sometimes a lot of people have to die, meaning, sorry, they have to age out. Like it's like faculty have and people have a fixed set of ideas and they stick by them in order for new ideas to come in, then the young folks have to be born with the, with an open mind, the possibility of those ideas and then they have to become old enough and get A's in school and whatever to to then care those ideas forward. So, you know, the acceptance of the exploration and the mysterious takes time.

It's kind of sad. It is sad. I agree. Maybe to go into my source of passion, which is artificial intelligence. of passion, which is artificial intelligence. What's your sense about the possibility, like Pamela McCordick has this quote that I like a talk to a couple of years ago, I guess already in this podcast, that artificial intelligence began with the ancient wish to forge the gods. So, do you think artificial intelligence may become the very kind of gods that were at the center of the religions of most of our history? Yeah, there's a lot there, so I'm going to start by addressing this idea of artificial intelligence being separate from human beings. Okay, so I don't think that's actually, that might happen. Okay, I mean, it's already happened, but let's put it this way.

Like you're talking about super artificial intelligence, like autonomous conscious artificial intelligence. Okay, yeah. Something with artificial consciousness. First of all, I think she's correct. Okay, but also there's an awesome quote. I'd also like to bring up this writer of fiction, actually, Ted Chang. And one of his essays, he writes short essays. One of them was the basis for the movie Arrival, which if you haven't seen it, it's a really great movie about UFOs. And it has a very creative way of proposing an idea of how they might be able to communicate,

first of all, how they appear to us, second of all, how they may to us, second of all, how they may be communicating with us humans. Exactly. The author Ted Chang has a lot, I recommend his writings, his short stories. One is very short and it appeared as, it appeared in nature about 20 years ago and it is called I think it's called Getting eating the crumbs from the table or something like that and it's basically This short essay and I hate to do you know to do a spoiler here But if you don't want to know what it's about don't listen right now. Yeah, spoiler. Yeah, okay

So this is what it's about so basically it's about human beings Okay, so this is what it's about. So basically it's about human beings becoming two different species, okay? And one of them is created, they're called metahumans, and they start biohacking themselves with tech, okay? Sound familiar? So they do this and they become metahumans and another species, right?

And you know, just kind of another fork. Such that humans can barely understand them because they're so far removed. So, in a sense, are they gods, right? No, they're metahumas, they're superhumas, they're enhanced humans, okay? I see that, hopefully, on the horizon, frankly. I hope so.

Not that we have two species, but that we can use our technology or we can become so integrated with our technology that we can survive. We can survive the radiation in space. We can't go places now because of the radiation in space. Perhaps we can develop our bodies such that we can survive the radiation in space. So there's this idea of these metahumans. Now there's also this idea that technology is just another form of humans. We've created it, right? And so maybe it is bent on surviving. They're by using us, you know, kind of as a meme or a team, some people are calling them teams now, these self-generating, they're replicating themselves through us.

Okay, I see that also and I don't think that's terribly bad. Maybe it's just the way that we are evolving. It doesn't mean that the, you know, we're evolving all the time. Like we're taller than we used to be, you know, we have different skills and, you know, so I don't see that as a bad thing. I think a lot of people see it as if we're not how we are now it's a tragedy, but it's not a tragedy. How we are now is actually a tragedy for most people alive. Yeah, and that we might be evolving ways we can't possibly proceed. Like you said, that the humans have created Twitter and Twitter may be changing us in ways

that we can't even understand now currently. Like from a perspective, if you look at the entirety of the network of Twitter, that might be an organism that this, the organism understands what's happening from its level of perception. But we humans are just like the cells of the human body. We're interacting individually, but we're not actually aware of the big picture that's happening.

And we naturally somehow, whatever the force that's creating the entirety of this, whatever one version of it is the evolutionary process, like biological evolution. Whatever force that is is just creating these greater and greater level of complexity. And maybe somehow not other kinds of non-human intelligence are involved that we're calling alien intelligence. Yes. So just a step back and we'll come back to AI because I got to, I love the topic. But through American Cosmic and in general, you've interacted with much of the UFO community.

You mentioned uphologists. By the way, is it uphologists? Or is it uphologists? It's uphologists. Uphologists, yeah. So first of all, what is a uphologist? And second of all, what have you learned about this community of uphologists? Or also, as you refer to them as the invisibles or the members of the invisible college, or just

in general, people who study UFOs from the different, all the different kinds of groups that study UFOs? Sure. Generally, what I found is that they are, okay, so people who are interested in UFOs from like being a kid, you know, and seeing some cool movie like Star Wars or something, and then they become interested and then they study it as best they can, UFOs or UAPs. They're generally an honest group of people who are using their tools. And there are generally two types of them. There are those who believe in nuts and bolts, like the physical craft, and they believe

in that these are things from other planets. Okay, so that's like the ETH hypothesis. You know, I'm sorry, ET hypothesis, ETH is what we call it. Yeah, sorry about that. So this is like there's an actual spaceship like a physical like something akin, but much more advanced than the rockets we use now. Yeah, and they have advanced. Yeah. Yeah, not necessarily biological, but something like biological organisms that travel on these spaceships. Yes. So this would be like what to the stars academy is trying to decipher like how, you know, how do they do it?

You know, maybe we could use that technology, the propulsion and things like that. They look at the rocket technology. Okay. So there are those. And then there are people who believe that it's more consciousness-based. Okay. So these are your two types of euphologist who are known and these are people who we know about then I found that there are people who are Quotten Quote I call them the invisibles because Jacques Vellig in the in the 70s

He and I think actually Alan Hynek his colleague Quoted this is a Francis Bacon thing by the way it goes back to the early modern time period when scientists could be killed for basically trying to go outside with the church or the government institution determined was dogma. And so they had to be really careful. So he called it the invisible college. So Hainik took that term and reused it or what do you call it, repurposed it.

So he repurposed it. So he repurposed it. So that, they were still talking to each other though. So what I found to be the case was that there was a group of people who were scientists, but were not on the internet. You know, to people today and students of mine in particular, and my own kids actually, they think that you only exist if you're on the internet, or something only exist if you're on the internet or something that only exists if it's on the internet.

That's of course untrue. And so what I found was that there are most people who are the most powerful people of our society and are doing things are not on the internet. You're not going to find any trace of them. So a lot of these people are what I call invisible. People who are studying at least their work is invisible. You might find them on the internet, but you're going to find that they're part of the bowling league or something like that, right?

You will not find that they are actually engaged in research about this topic, okay? And so I called them the invisibles because I was surprised to find them. And I thought, well, this is no longer the invisible college because these people are not even talking to each other. And that's why I reference this movie Fight Club in it. You have an invisible, okay? And his name is Tyler Dernan, and he's incredible. He does incredible things. He's like a person he should not exist, right? Because he does so many things that are amazing. And so I found a person like that, and he's a real person.

He's partially on the internet, but nothing that he does around that topic of UFOs is on the internet. So I decided to call him Tyler D after Tyler Durdon. And so these people, I've turned the UFO fight club because they work together, but they don't know, in fact his boss doesn't know what he does. They don't talk to each other because you know the first rule of fight club.

Same as the second, yeah. Exactly, yeah. You don't talk about football. No, you don't do it. Why do you have a sense that there's such a, I don't want to say fear, but a principle of staying out of the limelight? I think there's something real. And I think that the use of it could be dangerous for people.

Oh, sorry, you mean something real like there's actual technology. I don't know what's the right terminology here to use it. Alien technology, ideas about technology that are being explored that are dangerous, have made public, that may be become dangerous. Yes. So, I wouldn't call it, you don't have to call it alien technology. You can call it ideas about alien technology because I don't know if it's actual alien technology

or not. I honestly don't know. But I do know for a fact, because it's a historical fact, that Jack Parsons and Constantine Chikosky, who's Russian, believed in these things and believed that they were downloading this information, whether or not they were, I mean, they definitely created the rocket technologies. That's true. How they did and whether their process was exactly what they said it was, I don't know.

So this is the same thing today. So we've got some powerful technologies going on here. And, you know, of course we have a military, and we have a military for a reason. Every, almost every government, if you need a military has one. And so they're going to keep these, the way they should be kept in my interpretation. I mean, think about it. Everybody accepts the fact that we have a military, almost everybody does. Why are they so upset then that the military keeps secrets?

Yeah, that's the nature of things. We can get into that whole thing. I've spoken with the CTO Lockheed Martin on this. I obviously read and think about war a lot. It's such a difficult question because this particular space of technology, there's a gray area that I think is evolving over time. I think nuclear weapons change the game in terms of what shouldn't shouldn't be secret. I think there's already technology that will enable us to destroy each other. And so there's some sense in which some technology should be made public. This

is the same discussion of, you know, between companies, which part of your technology should you make public through like, for example, academic publications and all that kind of stuff. Like how the Google search engine works, Patreon, Calgary, the more, how the different deep learning, like there's pretty vibrant machine learning research

communities within Google, Facebook, and so on. And they release a lot of different ideas. And it's an interesting question, like how dangerous is it to release some of the ideas? I think it's a gray area that's constantly changing. I do also think it's super interesting. I wonder if you could elaborate on a little bit that there's this gray area between what's actually real in terms of alien technology and the belief of it when held in the minds of really

brilliant people that they ultimately produce the same kind of result in terms of being able to create new technologies that are human usable. Like, is there in your your mind, there one in the same is like believing in alien craft and actually being a possession of an alien craft? I don't think they're the same now. Belief is powerful, okay? In new age communities, you know, people think thoughts are things. Okay. That's been said. You know, thoughts are things. You can make them happen kind of thing, believing them enough. It is true that if I believe I can run a 540 mile, I'll do it. Okay. And I probably will do it. And I've done it before actually. Much younger, but I did it.

and I've done it before actually. Much younger, but I did it. So, but my coach is the one that instilled that belief in me, right? Yeah. And so, but can I run like a one minute while? No. Okay. So I guess, does that answer your question? Like, there's only so far belief goes in generating reality.

Well, yeah, I mean, I guess that's what just having listed to Jacques Relay that it seemed like Reality is not was not as important for the scientific exploration of the concept of the alien technology I could be wrong, but this is what I think Jacques's getting at there are other ways to access Places in reality other than what we consider to be physical. Right. That's this consciousness. Okay. So in, like I said, so religious studies is among other things.

It's looking at visionary experiences. All right. So people do have visionary experiences. They did without drugs, you know, they did with drugs. They do with drugs. They do many have them without drugs today. And oftentimes those visionary experiences correspond to each other. Now how do we make sense of that?

So you know, do these places actually exist? In a sense, I think they do. And so I think that, you know, let's take that very famous case of a Virgin Mary apparition in Fatima, where I think there was a lot of people, thousands and thousands, if not like, I think, 50,000 or something like that, a lot of people, a gather to see what's now called the miracle of Fatima, which was the spinning of the sun. Well a lot of people saw different things, but they all saw some kind of thing.

So they all saw different things, but it was something happened. So I guess the question is, what are these places where we access what I call non-physical realities? Where we actually do get information. Who could say that Jack Parsons didn't get information from doing these rituals and accessing these We have to say that he actually did Because we see the results of physical results the same thing with Tyler and that's why I put Tyler in this camp with this tradition with Jack Parsons I say that Tyler is getting these,

what he calls downloads, and you can see the results of them physically. He sells them on the NASDAQ, he makes millions of dollars from them. They help people. I've seen people who they've helped, okay? So. Do you think psychedelics that I just mentioned earlier

have a possibility of going to these kind of same kind of places of exploring ideas that are outside of our more commonplace understanding of the world. In my, yeah, I think so. Absolutely. However, I think we have to be really careful about those because young people or people in general, I should say absolutely can get hurt by them. I mean, but we get hurt by alcohol, you know, we drive our cars and we get kill each other. Um, but psychedelics are really interesting because I know that within the history of, of our country,

we have used psychedelics and various capacities for our military in order to try to stimulate ideas and access places and information that can't be accessed normally. This is all fact. Yeah, I talked to Matt for like four hours, so we ran out of time being able to talk, well, I wanted to Matt for like four hours. So we ran out of time being able to talk about I wanted to talk to about

MK alternate and Tech Kaczynski there's so many mysterious things there. There's like layers of What's known or what's not known as fascinating, but I think what is interesting is psychedelics were used or were attempted to be used as tools of different kinds That's the point. So like time to be used as tools of different kinds. That's the point. So like we think of technology as tools to enable us to do things in that same way that psychedelics, like many drugs could be used as tools, some more effective than others.

Absolutely. I don't think what you, I'm not sure where you can do effectively with alcohol. Although somebody, I think somebody commented somewhere on social media that, I don't know why everyone gives, it's so negative about alcohol because, I think the person said that it's given me some of the most incredible, it enabled me to let go and have some of the most incredible experiences with friends in my life. And it's true, we kind of sometimes say,

alcohol is dangerous, it can make you do whore, but the reality is it's also a fascinating tool for letting go of trying to be somebody maybe that you're not and allowing you to be yourself fully in whatever crazy form that is and allow you to have really deep and interesting experiences with those you love. So yeah, even alcohol can be used as an effective tool for exploring experiences and becoming expanding your mind and becoming a better person. So what the hell was I talking about? So yeah,

so psychedelics and oh yeah, and MK Ultra, is there something interesting to say in our historically use of psychedelics? I mean, think about it. When did we start doing that? When did we start using those? That's true. It's quite a long time ago, right? But, okay, but true. But when did our government start experimenting with them with us? Okay. Our government is the United States government, right? Yeah. Okay, so that happened in around the 1950s. Okay. After, quote unquote, the 1940s, where we have 47, and we this, you know, this, you know, this Roswell type stuff going on, okay, like crash sites and things like that. So I think that, um, I think there might be a correlation there.

I don't know what it is, okay. But I do think that's the thing actually. Yeah, there's a lot of interesting things started around that time. Yeah. Yeah. And so, Eldis Huxley would say we opened the doors of perception. Okay, and what flew in? Man, that was beautifully put. It'd be interesting to get your opinions on certain more concrete three sightings that are sort of monumental sightings with alien intelligences in the

history, in the recent history. I'm aware of, I'm not very much aware of this history, but the most recent one I've spoken with David Fraver on this podcast, I really like him as a person. He's a fun guy, but also he's gotten a chance to, he's described as the count of having experience with what he and others now term the Tic-Tac EOFO. What do you think of that particular siding, which is captivated the imagination? Many in particular, because there's been videos released of it. Yes of these Your thoughts, but I find the videos to be way too blurry and grainy to be of interest to me the personally to me the most fascinating thing is the

first person to come from David and others I bought that experience, but what are your thoughts? Those videos have been out for a while actually actually much, I think, in the mid-2000s they were out. But what you have is you have kind of like this corroboration from a group, and also the New York Times involvement in 2017. My opinion about the Tic Tacs is that, first, I believe the people who have had the experiences, I know some of them,

like some of the radar people and things like that, they'd saw them and they're not, I don't believe they're making it up, okay. I do think that this is being used as a spin, okay, and I'm just gonna say that. And the reason I think that is this is because at the time, it was released, I was still in touch with many people who were Among the UFFFI Club and so they had intimate knowledge of these things and the first thing they said was We have satellites that can read the news on your phone when you're reading it So we've got better footage than this and this is not good footage at all Therefore they believe that it was

authentic footage that had been doctored up. Now, why? I don't know why. So, I honestly don't know if it's accurate or not. I mean, I believe the people absolutely, but was this something out there to fool these people? Perhaps, I don't know. Is it spun? The people who I know who are part of the UFO fight club believed it was real, okay, and said, this is badly done, but real, okay. I see. But so there's some kind of, when you say spinning, there's some parties involved that are trying to leverage it for funds, probably. For funds, for financial interest. Yeah, I think so. Nevertheless, it has inspired a conversation and just a lot of people in the world that there's something mysterious out there that we're not fully informed about. And I was certainly grateful that the New York Times ran the story right before my book came

out. Well, see, but there's the financial interest that to me as a person who doesn't give a damn about money, actually, I don't like money is except for when it's used in the context of a company to build cool things, but like personally, I don't know, I find the financial interest side of putting, especially when we're talking about the exploration of some of the most, like money is a silly creation of human beings. I agree. And it's used to provide temporary, like the unfortunate thing with money is that it helps you buy things

that too easily allow you to forget the important things in life and also to forget the difficult aspects of life, to do the difficult intellectual work of being cognizant of your mortality of like fully engaging in life, in life of reason to of thinking deeply about the world, all those kinds of things. If you get like a nice car or something like that and just like, I don't know, all the different things you can do with money is, it can make you forget that. Anyway, as a, there's a long way to say that, yes, yes, it's very nice that doing CoSide and Nicely would have booked. But also it, I think it, I mean, like I said, I think it inspired quite a lot of people that, you know, maybe there's a lot of things out there that were, like it reminded a lot of people. There's things out

there we don't know about. Lex, I can agree with you on that, but can I push back on two things? Mm-hmm. Okay. Let's do it. All right. The first one is that I was happy to receive money from the book because of the New York Times article. That's absolutely false. So I published my book with Oxford, which is an academic press, and you don't get paid with an academic press. Okay, so money was not it for me. What it was was recognition that my research was being validated. So, you know, because then people called me and said, well, maybe it's more than interesting. Okay. And they did. Okay. The other thing about money is just as you say that,

now I agree with you, they're, I'm upset about money too. I think there should be universal healthcare, a universal income. All, you know, I don't think there should be universal healthcare, a universal income. I don't think people should be in poverty, especially because we are so wealthy as a species, frankly. Okay, that said, think about this. If you don't have money, you can't have a life of the mind either, right? 100% so I'm not espousing that money is the devil. I just think that there is money can be a drug or I would compare it to like food or something like that where like you really should have enough to nourish yourself. Yes. Right. And too much could and too much can be a huge problem.

So that's where I come from with money and I'm just aware I'm fortunate enough to have the skills and the health to be able to earn a living in whatever way like I wish of having been in the United States and being able to speak English. So the very least I could work with McDonald's and my standards are I told you I mean mistake. I told you Rogan that I've always had aU money and people are like oh Lexus always raised no No, I was always broke what I mean by I've always had FU money I mean my standard what it takes to have a few is those very little. I'm just happy with it with very little But yes, it's true that money for many people,

and including for myself, it's just a different level for different people, is freedom. Yeah, so I'm really... Freedom to think, freedom to do, put your pursue your passions. It just so happens, I am very fortunate that many of my passions often come with a salary,

if I wished. Right. So everything, like me, I love programming. So even just like working as a like basic level software engineer will be a source of a lot of joy for me. And that happens in this modern, modern world to come with a salary. So yeah, it is definitely true. I just mean that it can be become a dangerous drug. So I'm glad you are in this pursuit that you are in for the love of knowledge. And it's true.

Yeah, so people should definitely buy your book. I won't be making money off of it. Oh, yeah, it's rocks. Yeah, absolutely. Maybe my next book. Yes. Yeah, your sense is there's something as there's some groups of people that maybe try to leverage this for financial gains. And you know, probably good financial. I mean, they may have good reasons for this too. Like, okay, let's take the study of UFOs, okay? Maybe many people in government that decide who dull out the money. Let's put it that way. They think UFOs aren't real.

So they're not going to give these programs money. So how do these programs make money? They're going to have to find a way to do it. So maybe that's how they do it, okay? So I- That's fascinating. This is a way to raise money for for doing the research. Yeah, I think so. So let's take a step back to

Roswell. We talked about a little bit. What's your sense about that whole time of Roswell on just area 51 and the sightings and also the follow on mythology around those sightings. That's what that's today. All right. So...

Where do I get started? Well, I mean, it is a mythology here, right? The mythology of Roswell. It's very religious like in the sense that there's a pilgrimage to Roswell people make. And they go to... There's a festival there as well, like a religious festival. You can get little kitschy stuff,

like you can get at a religious festival there. So it's very much like a place of pilgrimage where a heraphony occurred, and a heraphony is basically contact with non-human intelligence, okay? So non-human intelligence is thought to have contacted humans or crashed at this place in Rizewal, New Mexico.

Now what's fascinating is that I begin my book by going out to a crash site in New Mexico. I have to get blindfolded with my, well, to tell you the truth, the story is that I'm with Tyler who's an invisible and he wants to show me a place in New Mexico where a crash happened. And he says that he thinks that I need to see physical evidence because I don't believe. And so I said, I'll go, but I'm going to bring a friend of mine. And he said, no, you have to go alone. He goes, it's a place that is on government-owned property and it's a no fly zone.

And when you go go you'll be blindfolded and I said I definitely need to bring a friend. So he said well who do you want to bring? I just had met this university scientist who's very well known and I call him James in my book and I asked and I had a feeling James would definitely want to do this and I asked James and I had a feeling James would definitely want to do this. And I asked James and he said, I'll go tomorrow. Okay. So I suggested this to Tyler and Tyler say, absolutely not, you know, and I thought, I know he's going to look up James and he's going to say yes, because if anybody can figure out what this material is that you're going to go look for, it's going to be

James. Here's the instruments. And so Tyler did, in fact, look him up and finally said, okay, I got, you can go. So we both head out there and we get blindfolded and Tyler takes this out there. Takes about 40 minutes outside of a certain place in New Mexico. So in terms of Roswell, this is what I can say, is that according to Tyler, there were about seven crashes out in the 1940s in New Mexico in various places. We went to one of them, according to Tyler. At the time, I was completely an atheist with regard to anything that had to do with

the UFOs. So we were out there. We had specially configured metal detectors for these metals. And we did find these, okay. And they've since been studied by very scientist, material scientist, so forth. And I believe Jacques talked about not those particular ones,

but others on the Joe Rogan show. They're anomalies. so there are scientists, I'm not a scientist, so I can't weigh in on whether, I just believe the people, these people I believe, because they're well-known scientists. What do you mean they're not anomalies? So the... No, they are anomalous.

They are anomalous. Oh, anomalous in terms of the materials that are naturally occurring on Earth. Yes. Okay. So, there's some kind of inclinings of evidence that something happened in Roswell in terms of crashes of alien technology. Now, what else is there to the mythology? So there's some crashes, right?

Yeah. I mean, that's kind of epic. Yeah. It's pretty epic. Yeah. And what else? Like, what, what are we supposed to take away from this? Right.

Yeah. So it's weird. OK, so there's this. OK, so in religious studies, like I said, we call it a herophony, which is the meeting of a non-human intelligent thing, whatever it is an angel, a god, whatever a goddess with or an alien, with humans. And that's the place. Okay. So the place is New Mexico. So we so New Mexico becomes folded into the mythology of this new religion, is what I call a new type of religion, of the UFO, and it becomes ground zero for this new mythology, just like

Mecca is the place where Muslims go, they have to go, right, at least once in their lives. It's a pilgrimage place now. So in my book, that's how I tell it. Now, what about Roswell and the public imagination? Obviously, according to Annie Jacobson, who's good, she's a great author, investigative journalist, she's written about Roswell too.

I don't agree with all of what she comes up with, but part of it is that there's a lot of military stuff going on there that is classified, and there's a reason why you can't get in and nor would you want to, right? So, so there's a lot of experimentation going on there. I don't believe that it has to do with ETs, frankly, but in the imaginations of Americans, Roswell is that place, but I went to a different place. And apparently there are several places in New Mexico. Now, strangely enough, I traveled back to New Mexico

at the very end chapter of my book, but it's not, I don't go there physically. I go there through the story of a Catholic nun who actually believes that she by located to New Mexico, uh, in the, gosh, in the 1600s. So she, yeah, it was very strange. And I was at the Vatican at the space observatory when I made that connection that she probably went to the very, well, she believed she went to this very place that I had gone. Can you elaborate on a little bit? What does it mean to go to that place?

For her? Yeah, for her. I mean, we're kind of breaking down the barrier between what it means to be at a place at a time. Right. I agree with you. This is the field of religious studies. And again, I don't say it's true in my book. I just say it's a very strange coincidence

that I'm at the Vatican Observatory. In fact, I'd finished my book, but while I was at the Vatican Observatory, I was there with Tyler. And we were looking at the records, they're called the trial records, but they're the canonization records of these two saints. Each was said to have done amazing things.

One was Joseph of Cupertino who levitated, okay? Or is said to have levitated. The other was Maria of Agrida from Spain, their contemporaries in the 1600s, who was said to have been able to buy Locate, which is to be in two places at once, Okay. So this is a belief in Catholicism that certain very holy people can do these kinds of things like levitate, which by the way is also associated with UFO abductions, you know, people get levitated out of their beds and things like that. So we were sent there by a billionaire who was interested in levitation and by location. And since I could get in to the Vatican and I knew the director of the Vatican Observatory,

both Tyler and I were able to go to the secret archives and look at the canonization records and then go to Castle Gandalfo, which is about an hour from the Vatican where the first observatory, the space observatory of the Vatican is. The second one is in Arizona and it has a much larger telescope. So we went and we and brother guy gave me the keys to the archive. I said, look at anything you want. I got to see a lot of stuff by Carl Sagan, by the way. I know you talked about, yeah, it was awesome. So they have a whole section on extraterrestrial, the search for extraterrestrial life. And they don't, by the way. I know you talked about, yeah, it was awesome. So they have a whole section on extraterrestrial,

the search for extraterrestrial life. And they don't, by the way. How awesome is that? It was awesome, yeah. So we got to stay there. They have a scholars' quarters. And so they had two. And so Tyler stayed in one and I stayed in the other.

And brother guy, probably shouldn't have been so nice to me and given me the keys. Because when I got home, we were me the keys because I when I got home we were there for two weeks when I got home I got this frantic phone call from him and he basically said Diana, he goes do you remember where you put the the original Kepler and so I had this Kepler right and so I misplaced it Luckily I remembered where it went. I was like, oh gosh, thank goodness I found it. But he'll probably change the rules of the Vatican Observatory after my visit. So Maria is, she's actually in the history of our country in that she first wrote a

cause, a biography of what she said was the spinning earth. And this was in the 1600s. and she, that's her first book, and she wrote that, and then she said that she was transported on the wings of angels to the new world, and she said that she met a culture of people, and she basically told them about the faith of Catholicism. Okay. And then what happened was that the people that she and she described the fauna, she described the people and everything like that. And so there were actually missionaries there.

And when they went to try to convert some of the people who already lived there,, they already knew a bunch of stuff and they said, how did you know all this stuff? And they said, this lady in blue came and told us and they said, did it look like this? And they showed them, they obviously didn't have a photograph, but they had a picture of a sister, a nun. And they said, yeah, she wore a similar clothes, but she was much younger, right?

And these guys were, you know, I thought that was weird, but when they went back to Spain, they found that this woman had been doing that in her mind, had been traveling. I mean, I don't know what to make of it. There's so many things that are sort of forcing you to kind of go outside of, you know, I'm of many minds. I have very most of my days spent with very rigorous scientific kind of things and even engineering kind of things. And then I'm also open-minded and just the entirety of the idea of extraterrestrial life forces you to think outside of conventional boundaries of thought, scientific, current scientific thought.

Let's put it that way. And your story right now is with... So it's freaking you out. That's okay. That's a nice way to put it. What do you, just another person that seems to be a key figure in this, in the mythology of this, as Bob Lazar, it'd be interesting, maybe there's others you can tell me about, but Bob, who's also been

on Joe Rogan, but his story has been told quite a bit. And he's got, I think he said that he witnessed some of the work being done on the space craft that was, of the work being done on the space craft that was captured. And so in order to try to reverse engineer some of the technology in terms of the propulsion. So what are your thoughts about his story, how it fits into the mythology of this whole thing, and broader you, a phologist, you phologist community. Okay, so regarding Bolasar, with respect to his claims, again, I have no way to adjudicate whether or not he actually, you know, encountered this. I do have friends who are.

this. I do have friends who are. And the people that I know who know his story, some know him, believe him. And they have said to me that the most important thing that they think he has said, in fact, one of them, I think, made a meme out of it or something like that was basically he said, maybe the public, you know, I regret making it public, maybe the public isn't ready for this kind of information. And basically, they've emphasized that to me and they emphasized it so much that they wanted me to know, right? So that is somewhat creepy to me. So I think, okay, this poor guy, Bob Lazar, so many people, you know, this is what happens

to people who have experiences like this. Their question, their reputations are put on the line. And some instances, their reputations are manipulated on purpose to make them look incredible. To me as a scientist, it's just inspiring that it kind of gives this kind of, I'm not even thinking of it, is there an actual spacecraft being hidden somewhere and studied and so on. I'm thinking of it like, I don't know, it's a thing that gives you a spark of a dream, you know, to as a reminder that we don't understand most of how this world works and then we can build

technologies that aren't here today that will allow us to understand much more. And it's kind of like almost like a feeling that it provides, and it inspires and makes you dream. That's the way I see the Bob was our story. I don't miss it. Like people ask me because I might have my tea. People ask me like, the Bob was our actually good at my tea and so on. I don't know, and I personally don't care. Like it's, that's not what's interesting to me about.

That story to me. The myth is more interesting, not interesting actually, but inspiring. Yes, because inspiring, you're suggesting that the myth inspires you to create reality. Yes. Yeah. I think that's true. So even if it's like not real, it doesn't. In some sense, just like you said, it doesn't. In some sense, it doesn't. Mm-hmm. So a lot of people know how much I love 2001 Space Odyssey. So I got all of these emails asking like,

uh, Hey, bro. Do you know what's up with the monoliths in like the middle of the desert or whatever it was? I don't I haven't been actually paying attention. I apologize, but You kind of mentioned offline that this was kind of cool and interesting. What would he make of these monoliths? And in general, are you Are you a fan of 2001 space? Honestly, where monoliths showed up? Do you have any thoughts about either the science fiction, the mythology of it or the reality of it? Yes. Okay. No, okay. And please say more.

Right. So first of all, Kubrick's films are not ever easy for me because they're so weird, right? And I don't actually enjoy watching them. But that is, yeah, it doesn't take away from their incredible brilliance, though, and their visionary merit. So a 2001 space Odyssey is incredibly visionary. And of course, all those things that people say, I don't have to restate them. In terms of what I, it's a subtext to my book by the way, I didn't mean it to be, but it's almost a character in my book, 2001 Space Odyssey. And when the monoliths started to appear again, everything went crazy with my, everything internet, social media, phone. What's up? What's going on, right? Is this disclosure? And I thought, well, you know, I'll tell you one thing, is it's, it's, it's like at the timing of it. It's a cool,

it's an art, you know, and then copy art and things like that. It's actually happening at a really interesting time when all of us are forced to go online, when all of us are for because of COVID, right? We're completely now invaded by the screen, or we're invading the screen. Like we're living our infrastructure now is completely changed. So the monolith, basically, if art is supposed to show us life, it certainly has. If that's an art project, somebody did an awesome job with it. But apparently that monolith was there for a long time, right? I mean, that's the thing.

It's been there for a couple of years, so they said, okay, all right. That said, if your audience is interested, I think the best theory about the meaning of the monolith is Robert Ager, I think it's Robert Ager. He's got a website where he does analyses of films and it's called Collative Learning or Collative Learning and he does the meaning of the monolith. Everyone should go look at that because I fully agree with him. When I studied different meanings of the monolith in 2001, a space Odyssey, I was fascinated. Okay, so what is this about? His, I accepted as soon as I listened to it and watched it.

So basically, he says that the monolith is, okay, can you pick up your phone here? What does that look like? It looks awfully a lot like a monolith. Yeah. Okay, so basically that's what he was saying was that Kubrick was basically the monolith was technology or the screen in particular. And he basically was saying that the cinema screen, we were being, you know, completely.

And if you think about it, look at all this, we live in a screen culture. We have computer screens, iPhone screens, you know, phone screens, we have TV screens, everything is something, you know, and now that COVID has come, we're forced to go into these screens and we're forced to live a different material existence than we have lived before. So in my sense, I think that if it's an art project, it's a really good one for that. So I like that, that meaning of it, it's a screen, the screen could take all kinds of forms. I mean, our perception system in a sense is a screen between reality and our mind. The screen of the computer is a screen. The virtual reality world that we might be one day living in,

there will be an interface. I mean, ultimately mean ultimately is about the interface. That's interesting It's an interface to another another world of ideas It's also a material change It's a change in our material. I mean when people talk about augmented reality I say we already live in augmented reality Yeah, don't we because this isn't the this isn't our grandparents existence Yeah, don't we? Because this isn't the this isn't our grandparents existence. Yeah, I sometimes, you know, you have to pause and remind yourself how weirdly different this reality is than just even like, I mean, 30 years ago,

the internet changed so much and social media has changed so much about actually just the space of our thinking Wikipedia changed so much about actually just the space of our thinking. Wikipedia changed so much about the offloading of our knowledge, the way we interact with knowledge. I mean, it all floated our long-term memory about facts onto a digital format, so in the sense that expanded our mind. It's kind of interesting. I'd be curious to see if he has just one interpretation. I wonder if there's a part. Of course, wanted with him. Yes, so over the years he and I have corresponded

and I told him, I said, look, I'm going to be using this in my book, so I think you should read what I say. And he was, he of course wanted to see it. So. What do you think about your book? There you get it. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So he is a non-believer in alien intelligence and UFOs,

but he, and that's fine, but I, I still agree with him that the meaning of the monolith was the screen, but that doesn't mean the screen isn't like what David Bowie said, right? So it's not exclusive. So I can still use this theory, but differ from the conclusions. In terms of non-believer and believer, there's, when you say believer, you also are kind of implying this,

that the idea that aliens have visited or had made direct contact with humans in some form. There's also the exploration and the idea of just alien intelligence is out there in the universe. The Drake equation, estimating how many intelligence civilizations may be out there, how many have ever existed, how many able to communicate with us. I mean, when you just zoom out from our own little selfish perspective of Earth and look at the entirety, let's say the Milky Way galaxy, but maybe even the universe, this is the idea that their intelligence civilizations out there, something that you're excited about,

or something that you're terrified about. That's a good question. So, basically, I would say I'm not so keen on it. I think that our relationship with technology as it is and as it, as I hope it will go, will help us survive. Okay. I don't think we're equipped to do it as we stand now. But I think that if we can up our game or let's just put it this way, if technology is an extension of ourselves, which it actually is, it will help us, because it'll probably be smarter than us, okay? It'll help us survive in the ways in which it determines best. That said, if there are non-human intelligences out there and they have more advanced, you know, obviously, technologies than than us and they actually come. The history of human engagement with other cultures

has not gone well for cultures that are less aggressive. So you see what I'm saying? It's not a good idea. Well, I wonder where we stand and where humans stand on the, where humans stand in the full spectrum of aggression. Well, heck, where are we now, Lex? I mean, we're not too great here.

We're still addressing against each other. No, I know, but that will give us a benefit, right? Like, oh, or you're saying, I thought, okay, I see. I just have a sense that there may be a lot of intelligence is out there that are less aggressive because they've evolved past it. We can't assume that. No, I know we can't assume that.

If we can't assume it, then I'm gonna assume the worst. Well, that's despite the fact that I am Russian and think that life is suffering. I tend to assume not the best, but I tend to assume that there is a best core to creatures, to people and to creatures that ultimately wins out. I think there's an evolutionary advantage to being good to other living creatures. And so ultimately, I think that if there's intelligence, civilizations out there that prosper sufficiently to be able to travel across the great spans of space that they've evolved past silly aggression that it's more likely in my mind to be a deeply cooperative

So like growth over destruction like growth does not require destruction. I think but If you see the universe as a ultimately a place where it's highly constrained in resources that are necessary for traveling across space and time, then perhaps aggression is necessary in order to aggress against others that are desiring to get access to those resources. I don't know. I tend to try to be optimistic on that front.

I think I'm emotionally optimistic and intellectually non-optimistic. Yeah, I guess I'm there with you. I tend to believe that the happiness and deep fulfillment in life is found in that emotional place. The intellectual place is really useful for building cool new technologies and ideas and so on, but happiness is in the emotional place. And there it pays off to be optimistic, I think. You said that technology might be able to save us. I know, that's also kind of optimistic too.

It might kill us. There's a talking to you offline a little bit. There was a sense that, you know, that we humans are facing existential risks, that it's not obvious that we will survive for long. Do you have, is there things that you worry about in terms of ways we may destroy ourselves or deeply damage the fabric of human civilization

that technology may allow us to avoid or alleviate? Yeah, so I think that any, you can choose anything actually and it could destroy us. Okay, so, you know, pollution, you know, here we're in a pandemic, okay? A meteor, okay. So we can use technology or the thing is, is that we say we use technology, but actually that's not a correct way of putting it, in my opinion. So there is a term used by others,

coined by somebody I don't know, and I'm sorry to not give credit or credits to, but it's called Technogenesis. And it's this idea, I actually had this idea, but he didn't use that term. And it's this idea that we co-evol had this idea, but he didn't use that term. And it's this idea that we co-evolve with technology that we don't actually use it. Most people think it's like a tool we use, okay? Let's use technology to do this.

Well, actually, when we engage with technology, we actually engage with it. And it engages back with us and we engage with it. So it's this co-evolution that's happening. And in that sense, I think that as we create more autonomous intelligent AI, it will help us survive because if we co-evolve with it, it will need us as much as we need it, is my opinion. How that happens, or if that bears out to be true, we'll see. But I don't think the idea that we use technology is a correct way to put it.

I think that technology is something so strange, the way it is today, like digital technology. I'm not talking about hammers or things like that. Those kinds of tools. Technology is so far removed from that. In our environment, it's so now conditioned by our't think it's going to be a Frankenstein. I think it's actually going, you know, like a Mary Shelley type idea of technology. I think it's actually going to be more prometian in the sense of, you know, think about it. We create children and then we get old and we rely upon our children to help us. Okay. Well, I feel like that about technology.

We've created, well, we've created it, right? And so it's kind of growing up now. Okay. Or maybe it's in its teenage years. And we'll see. What do you think about in terms of this co-evolution of the work around brain computer interfaces and maybe neural link and Elon, seeing neural link in particular as its long term mission as a symbiosis

with artificial intelligence. So like giving a greater bandwidth channel of communication between technology, AI systems and the biological neural networks of our human mind. What do you think about this idea of connecting directly to the brain in AI systems. I mean, okay, I've listened to your podcast with Ilman. I've listened to Ilman before, very, obviously, Super Smart Guy. I think this is already, I mean, not in the specific ways that he is doing it,

but I think we are already doing that, okay? And I can give you some examples. And there are really trivial examples but they do make the point. And this is one of them. So before he started this research on UFOs and UAPs and technology, I actually was looking at the effects of technology

and in particular media on religion. And what I did was I was lucky to be asked to be a consultant for various movies and one in particular, I learned a lot from and that was the conjuring. So I was a history consultant for the conjuring. It happens to be my field. It's Catholic studies, right?

And you've got these people who are real people and they're you know exercising demons and things like that Okay, so I thought wow this is a great example for me. You know, I didn't do it for the money I it doesn't pay well, but I did it to learn right yeah, so I work closely with the screenwriters who I work with now all the time with I work with them all the time now and what I found was this, I found that as the most interesting part of the creation of this movie was the editing process because they would use, it would go through editing and they would use test audiences.

And a lot of the test audiences would be, you know, there's like these things where they test their flicker rates and things like that the eye flicker rates and So and they're and when it goes really intense they did go to UC Irvine and they do this thing called cognitive consumption which is basically Or I'm sorry cognitive consumerism where they basically hook test audiences up to EKGs and they read their brains.

Yeah. And they figure out which scenes create the most arousal. Yeah. And so they cut out all the other scenes. Okay. So what we're getting is we're getting like this drug when we go to the movies or when we do video games or watch. We're literally physiologically responding to our technologies. So we're already there. We're already interfacing with them physiologically responding to our technologies. So we're already there. We're already interfacing with them physiologically. So that's my example. Now, the kind of thing that he's doing, Musk, is doing with Neuralink, I say, go for it.

That's awesome. I hope he does it. I'm fascinated. I want it to happen. Why do I want it to happen? Because I think that, well, first, it's inevitable that it's going to happen. Why do I want it to happen? Because I think that, well, first, it's inevitable that it's going to happen. I also want to point out that Jacques Vellet was trying to get this done back in the 60s and the 70s. He was writing papers about, in fact,

the ARPANET, the proto-internet, was called Augmentation of the Human Intellect. So we've been doing this for a while, okay? So props to a lot of musk, but we've been thinking about this for a good time. We've even been visioning it, okay? So there was a really interesting Jesuit priest, he was French, tell your day shardon. I don't know if you know who he is,

if not, he's fascinating. He was a he was actually a soldier before he became a priest. And so he believed he also saw what he called a biosphere. Now this guy is talking in like the early 20th century, like the 1917, 19, you know, that time period. And so basically he he said and wrote about this thing called the Neosphere. And he basically said there will be a point when we merge with our technology and it's going to be somewhat like some kind of a biosphere. We have this atmosphere and then we have the stratosphere and this going to be this biosphere. And we're all going to be hooked into it mentally. So we'll be able to

communicate in a way in which we don't communicate now. So, you know, that sounds so similar to the singularity. So, after I read him many, many years ago, but when I read the Kurzweil's book about the singularity, to me it read just like religious language, like it read like, you know, because he, in fact fact it's so much like revelation to me when I read it that I even assigned it to my students in my classes. I'm like this is this is it you know this is like a really great book of the singularity you know the coming singularity and this religious event because it seems like it when he writes about it. He says I felt it before I even understood it, you know, he mean curse Well, curse while yeah, Chris. So what I mean, what are your feelings about?

feelings thoughts feelings too about The idea of the singularity do you think it's ultimately the thing that echoes throughout the history of ideas is this like moment of revelation, this almost mythological religious moment, or is there something more physical to this idea of concrete about the idea of,

they'll come up point where our technology there'll be like a phase shift between the the basic fabric of like humanity of how we interact, you know, how evolution brought us to be, these biological interaction, then our technology crosses some kind of line of capability that the world would be more technology than human to where it'll leave us behind. Sort of. Oh, yeah. I don't think it's going to leave us behind.

I think it's going to take us along. But it will be, I mean, I guess the idea of the singularity. First of all, isn't the idea of the singularity is like we can't possibly predict what's on the other side of the singularity. These are the senses like this is like the world will be fundamentally transformed. Yes, I, okay. So, right. And then it was, you know, this was characterized in various movies like Lucy and stuff like that. You know, Lucy being the first human that, right? We, so kind of replicating. And this is going to be the next iteration of humans is the singularity. I actually don't believe that, frankly.

However, and the reason I don't believe it is because we're material beings and technology has to have a host. So we're not going to, you know, become something super abstract. Like there's, it's just impossible to do. There's nothing like that. Well, people would be listening to this podcast a hundred years from now and laughing at it because they'll be all interested in it. possible to do. There's nothing like that. What people would be listening to this podcast a hundred years from now and laughing at it because they'll be all.

Yes, the entire reality will be all information as opposed to material meeting connected to some kind of concept of physical physical reality. I don't even know the right words to use. You see, that's because there are none. Because there's no place from, there's no view from nowhere. There's no non-material like we have thoughts, but they're connected to us, right? They're in our, you know, they're somehow okay. As far as, as far as you know. Listen, platonic forms, I think, is about as, is about as close to what we're talking about as possible. Like this place where these things exist, and then there's like a physical instantiation

of it. No, but see, the question is, from the perspective of the Platonic form, what does our physical world look like? You know what I'm saying? Like, you know, if say you're a creature existing in a virtual reality, like if you grew up your whole life in a virtual reality game Like what is it and somebody in that virtual reality world tells you that there actually exists this physical world and in fact your own, you think you're in this virtual world, but it's actually you're in a body and this is just your mind putting yourself in there's a piece of technology. Like, how will they be able

to think of that physical world? Would they sound exactly like you just sounded a minute ago saying like, well that's silly. Who cares if there's a physical world? It's the the entirety of the perception and my memories and all of that is in this other realm of like information. It's just all just information. Why do I need some kind of weird meat bag to contain? So there's a great again, I was you know, return to something for your audience to read or you There's a great very short article online for free by David Chalmers. Do you know him? Mm-hmm. He's the philosopher of consciousness. Yeah, you don't mind this podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he's cool I He's the philosopher of consciousness. Yeah, you have you don't mind this podcast. Yeah, yeah, he's cool. I used to, I was friends with his best friend for a while when I was in grad school. He probably has some weird friends. He does.

He's a philosopher, okay? So I like his fashion choice in his style too. I'm going to hang out with him a little bit. It's a great gift. Okay. So he wrote this article which I use a lot. I love it because it's accessible to undergraduates. And it's called Matrix as Metaphysics. And basically it's an answer to external world skepticism,

which is basically, how do we know there's an external world? Right? How do we know that we're not in a matrix right now? And so basically, he's using, he's also, he even references, he uses a religious reference even, he says, you could think of the matrix of the movie as a new, as the new book of Genesis for our new world, right? And I thought, yeah, that's absolutely correct because, you know, we don't know. And we don't, we won't know for sure or for certain. Therefore, what we know is what is real to us. And so he goes through these scenarios. And within philosophy is called, there's a, this is different from that, but it's like

this brain in a vat, right? If you're a brain in a vat, and some not-so-kind scientist is like recreating this world for you just to see, you know, and you think, you're this awesome rock star, right? And you're living this awesome existence, but you're actually just this brain in this vat. Okay, but there's still a brain in a VAT. Okay, so his idea in the matrix as metaphysics kind of takes out the brain in a VAT like this.

I don't know if this is possible. So I've read critiques of this that, you know, what you're talking about is a non-dualism like there's like, you know, or it's not necessarily not dualism. I just, I mean, information in and of itself has to have some kind of material component to it. I mean, I, it's that that when taking it outside the realm of human beings, because dualism is kind of talking about humans in a sense, it's just possible to me that there could be creatures that exist

in a very different form, perhaps rely on a very different set of materials that may perhaps not even look like materials to us. Yes, I agree. Which is why like information, it could be even in computers, the information that's traveling inside a computer is connected to actual material movement. Right. So like, it is ultimately connected to material movement,

but it's less and less about the material and more and more about the information. So I just mean that there's, it's possible that, you think the singularity is basically like, sloughing off our material existence? Because I can tell you that. This has been the hope of philosophers and theologians forever. Yeah. Well, I don't, I think we're living in a, uh, through a single area. I don't think, I think this world, just, just like, as you've said already, um, it has been already transformed significantly and keeps continually being transformed. Yes.

And we're just riding this big, beautiful wave of, uh, transformation. And, uh, that's why it's both exciting and terrifying from a scientific perspective that like we're so better predicting the future and the future is always so amazing in terms of the things that has brought us. I mean I don't know if it's always will be this exciting in terms of the rate of innovation, but it seems to be increasing still. It's really exciting. It's exciting to. It's terrifying because obviously we're building better and better tools for destroying ourselves,

but I on the optimistic side believe that we're also can build better and better tools to defend against all the ways we could destroy ourselves. And it's kind of this interesting race of innovation. Yeah. Books are great, of course, the greatest book of all time, to the greatest books of all time are yours. But besides those, what books, technical, fiction, or philosophical had an impact in your life or possibly you think others might want to read and get some insights from?

And what ideas did you pick up from them? Great. Okay. I really enjoy Nietzsche. Okay. So anything by Nietzsche, Frederick Nietzsche, he's a philosopher. I actually hated him when I first read him in my early 20s. That's like the opposite of most people's experience, right? They usually love them.

Uh-huh. And they're 20s and then they throw them to the curb. Later. Yeah. I think he's totally misrepresented and misinterpreted. He grew on you. Well, it happened in one night. So let me just describe it, because it's kind of funny. It happened on New Year's. So I had friends when I was in my 20s, and they kept telling me,

you have to read Nietzsche, you have to read Nietzsche. And I tried, okay, but again, you know, no, I didn't like who was not into how he described the philosophical concepts He was trying to get across so but they would they weren't giving up a very Persistent friends so one of them gave me the gay science and I had it on my book stand and It was New Year's Eve and I'm actually not a big part, I'm actually an introvert, I'm a geeky introvert okay, so I don't go out and party a lot, it was New Year's Eve even that couldn't get me out to go party, so I just wanted to go to bed. Yeah. And New Year's Eve hit

and everybody went out and I was asleep and they woke me up and I was like darn, they woke me up, eh, might as well read this book by Nietzsche Okay, so I picked it up and lo and behold, I turned to a page that was exactly about, it was called Sanctus Januaryus, which is basically Saint January, and it was about New Year's Eve. And I thought, what a weird coincidence. And it was a really, it was also super Catholic. And it was a really beautiful little aphorism, it's actually a book of aphorisms, which are kind of religious, right? And so it's religious, the genre is religious.

Let's put it that way, but he's not. So basically, he says, today is the day when people are supposed to make these resolutions, right? And he says, from here on out, I will never say no. I will only say yes, okay, I look away. If something's horrible, I'll just look away from it. I won't get angry at it. And then he also says, I will be like Saint January

and Saint January is actually the Saint. Whose blood is in this place in Italy, I think it's in Italy, and every year, it turns to blood again. So it's like desic's desiccated. So it's this miracle. It says, my blood is now, it flows again. And I was like, wow, that's really beautiful.

And I said, and a strange coincidence because it just turned, you know, 12. So it's like near Zeeve. I pick up the book, I read this aphorism. I said, strange coincidence that. And then then I turned the page and the page is about coincidences and I was like I shed it and I thought this is weird And I felt like there was a live. I felt like the book was alive and each was speaking to me I had a like experience and engagement with Nietzsche

And so after that I couldn't put his stuff down. It was engaging, fascinating, everything. So yeah, so that's one book, The Gay Science. Why did you pick up from the gay science or from Nietzsche and Jenner? So there's some ideas that's kind of... The idea is basically that truth. He's got awesome one-liners. So truth is a woman.

So, okay, what is... What does he mean by that? Truth is a woman. So okay, what does, what does he mean by that? Truth is a woman. Basically, she's going to lie to you. She looks real attractive, but she's not going to tell you the truth. Oh, you shit. So okay, so basically, I'm not saying that. That's true about women. I'm obviously a woman.

So he's, so basically, what he's saying is that that truth is not is like what I said, brother guy said, it's a moving target. Okay, we started this whole conversation with what's real, right? So I should have just gone straight to Nietzsche. Have not you heard truth as a woman, you know, okay, so truth is a woman. All right, say that and also, and you know, Foucault, this other floss for a French floss, actually takes up this idea and creates his own framework called genealogy from it. So the genealogy of morals, so that we only believe certain things and we sediment them them into truth. So we say, you know, a truth told, who said that?

Was it Lenin or Stalin? A truth told enough times, I mean, a lie told enough times becomes the truth. So that's basically Nietzschean right there, okay? So that's Nietzsche. So Nietzsche also is a huge critic of Christianity, which I'm actually Catholic, I'm a practicing Catholic. So I appreciated his critique.

I thought it was actually quite accurate. He's a critique of religion in general and he's fascinating. And also, I find that his, he talks about altered states of consciousness and he calls them elevated states. And he, I think through his book, you can actually experience elevated states. So, yeah, Nietzsche. Thumbs up. So what what other book? Yeah, okay. So Hannah rent. She is a philosopher that not a lot of people know about, but she was a Jewish woman during the Holocaust and she was in turn in turn at Bergen-Belsen, which was basically Auschwitz for women, and she escaped. She came to the United States and she had worked with Heidegger, even though he's supposed to be

anti-Semitic and an Nazi and everything, but they were lovers, okay? So she comes out and she's at Columbia University and she teaches philosophy there, and she writes two books, which I'll recommend. One is called Ikemen in Jerusalem, where she attends the Nuremberg trials. And she basically makes this really a stew observation about evil. And she says, Ikemen is one of the people who sent the Jews to the concentration camps

who ran the trains, okay. And she said, the thing about Ikemen was that he didn't seem particularly evil. Actually, he seemed to be quite a nice guy. She said what was interesting about him was he seemed incredibly thoughtless and stupid. And she said, and he used a lot of stereotypes like memes. So she actually wrote about memes before we had them. And now people just use memes and they're actually used against us even.

There's even a segment of warfare called memetic warfare. Alright? So memes are something that can sway a whole population of people. So she wrote about memes before they were even in existence and that's Ikeman and Jerusalem. And I think she also has some really amazing things to say about evil is that when people remain thoughtless, she has another book called The Life of the Mind, which is gigantic and I don't think anybody will read it. But frankly, it's one of the best books I've ever read and I've read it many times.

And basically, The Life of the Mind, and The Life of the Mind, she asks a very simple question. She says, why do people do bad things? Why are they evil? And what she says is she wonders if it's, she says that bad people sleep well at night contrary to, you know how the saying, how do you sleep at night? Well, that's only because you're a good person that you're asking that question

because you actually have a conscience. And a conscience is this dual kind of you fight with yourself about the consequences of your actions. And she says bad people don't seem to have a conscience. So they actually sleep well at night. And so she goes through a whole history of philosophy about evil. And that's really a good one too. But I also have to recommend this one too. There's one more. So I know I recommended two, but just from the same philosopher. My friend Jeffrey Criple, he's at Rice University and he's in my fields, religious studies. He's written several books, I mean, he's written a heck of a lot of books, let's put it that way. But he's, I think his best book, or the one that impacted me the most

is called Authors of the Impossible. And his book is, his writing is very much like Nietzsche's writing in the sense that he, it's almost as if he reaches out of the pages and he grabs you and he kind of slaps you around and says, think about this, you know, and you can't help but be changed after you've read it. And he's got a great chapter in there about Jacques Ville.

Oh, so he colors a bunch of different thinkers and authors that are out that somehow are what is it? Renegade a semester to revolution a semester. They're thinking the impossible. There's a great one. He's written, called Mutants and Mystics, where he talks about the comic strips, the, gosh, why can't I remember the name of the person. He just died of Stanley. He talks about the history of the comics by Stanley, and they're all paranormal. They all start off super paranormal and it's fascinating. On the topic of honor, or rent. Yeah, honor, or rent.

So I haven't read her work, but I've vaguely touched upon sort of like commentary of her work and it seems like some people think her work is dangerous in some aspect. I don't know if you can comment on why that is. It feels like similar with iron, or something like that. We're like, this is, I should say not dangerous, but controversial. Yes, it is. Yes, they think it's controversial.

This is the reason, I believe. I've heard of the controversy. The controversy is that she didn't, first of all, she is Jewish and she did escape a concentration camp. And yet she's called, she's been called anti-Jewish. And I think part of that was that she basically was saying something that I believe that a lot of normal people are like Ikemen and evil things are done by people who just follow the rules and they don't think about what they're doing. And that's one of the most pernicious forms of evil of our time. So we talk quite a bit about the definitions of religion

and what are the different building blocks of religion. So one of the, I don't think we touched on, did a little bit with afterlife, but in the sense, I don't know if you're familiar with the Ernest Becker work and all the philosophies around there, about the fear of death and all the philosophies around there about the fear of death and how the fear of our own mortality, awareness of our own mortality and its fear is in case of Ernest Becker, is a significant component in the psychology, in the way we humans develop our understanding of the world. So what are your thoughts in the context of religion, or maybe in the context of your own mind about the role of death in life, or fear of death in life?

And are you afraid of death? We cover everything in this. Every single topic is covered. Wow. OK. I so happened to have benefited perhaps from living with an older brother who seemingly had no fear of death while growing up.

And he did everything. OK. He seemingly had no fear of death while growing up and He did everything, okay, so he was he climbed mountains He was a rock climber. He jumped out of airplanes of course He had to be a green beret and go into the special forces where that type of thing is a requirement right and so because of that I did a lot of things outside of my comfort zone. And which probably I should have done and hope to goodness my kids don't do them. Okay. Okay. So do I fear death? I think about death a lot actually. You may not know this about me, but in my field, I was the head, I was the co-chair of the death panel. It's called the death panel. There was like, it's the panel to think about death in religious studies.

And I was that for many years. So you've thought about it a bit. A bit. Let's see, I think that people are a little too confident, I think, about life in general that they're going to kind of live all the time and not die. I mean, I hate to say it. I'm super positive and most people would consider me to be too happy almost, right? And so it's odd that I spend a lot of time thinking about death, but I wonder if there's a connection there. I'm happy to be alive.

Right. That's kind of what the thinking about death does is it makes you appreciate the days that you do have. Yeah. It's a weird controversy. I tend to believe that the fact that this life ends gives each day a significant amount of meaning. So I don't know. It seems like an important feature of life.

It's not like a bug. It seems like a feature that it ends, but it's a strange feature because I wish it, I call the good stuff you wish it wouldn't end. Well, you know what's interesting, Lex, and I do point this out to my students because we cover in a lot of the basic studies courses

I teach, we cover all religions or as many as we can, like the major religions. And so take Hinduism for example. Now this is an ancient religion, okay? So you and I are here talking about how we enjoy living and life and things like that. Well, the goal of Hinduism is basically never to get reincarnated again. It's basically to not live, okay? And to get off samsara, which is the wheel of life and death.

So, escape the whole thing. Yeah, exactly. Can think of that. Conditions are so different that you and I and my students are happy to be alive. But they're back in the day, you know, thousands of years ago when they wrote, when they actually didn't write it, they spoke the Vedas, which were the sacred traditions of India, they wanted off. They didn't want to come back. Life was terrible.

That's what people don't have the adequate understanding of history that for the majority of people, life is really hard, right? And you and I are, and your audience, among the lucky. Yeah. Now we actually like life. We wanna live. Ha ha ha. Most of the time.

Yeah, most of the time. What do you think the biggest sense we're covering every single possible topic? Let me ask the biggest one, the unanswerable one, from the perspective of alien intelligence or from the perspective of religious studies or from the perspective of religious studies or from the perspective of just Diana What do you think is the meaning of this existence of

this life of ours? Yes, okay, so all right Well, of course I have to my philosophical training as undergrad always makes me think about like what's the assumption in your your question the quote there's an assumption there it's like there is a meaning okay that's the assumption. What do you mean by meaning what do you mean by life? Yeah. You define the terms. No, no, but listen, okay I'll answer your question I'm just gonna say that there's this assumption that

we should have meaning to life okay. Well maybe shouldn't. Maybe it's just all random, okay? However, I believe that it's not. And in my opinion, on the meaning of life, in my opinion is intrinsic. I enjoy living. I want to live. Sometimes I don't enjoy living. And when I don't enjoy living, I change my circumstances. So it's intrinsic. And I think that certain things are intrinsic. And like love, love of your children is kind of, well, it's actually physiological, but it's also intrinsic. It's beautiful. You know, there's something about it that is intrinsically desirable. So I think the meaning of life is like that intrinsically desirable. desirable. So it's something that just is born inside you based on what makes you feel good?

No, that's hedonism. That's about what a wordy place love love love of your children. Yeah, so basically love is your children by the way is not always easy because they do things that they shouldn't do. You have to discipline them. That's one of the worst things about parenthood to me is disciplining my children. I don't like to do that. I love them. So, a lot of things that I do that I feel are good are not easy.

So, there's an intrinsic sense that, like, okay, let's take animals. So we have dogs and cats. So you might not, but I do. I told you about them. Can you share their names? If I share their names, I will share their names. So we have a cat and it has red fluffy hair. And so we called it Trump.

Well, when we got our dog, we figured that it needed a companion. So we called it Putin. So we have Trump and Putin. That's the greatest pet names of all time. I'm sorry. This. And maybe you'll be able to share a picture of your cat. Because this is awesome.

It is really cute. Yeah. Very photogenic. This is awesome. It is really cute. Yeah. Very photogenic. I mean, is this something that's whether or not what whether we're talking about love or the intrinsic meaning?

Do you think that's something that's really special to humans or if there is intelligent alien civilizations out there? Do you think that's something that they possess as well? Maybe in different forms? Like, whatever this thing that meaning is, this intrinsic drive that we have, do you think that's just a property of life, of some level of complexity, that we will see that everywhere in this universe. In my opinion, and this is just my opinion, I do think that it is, but I also think that it can take different forms.

So if there is like a think of gravity, right, gravity kind of like makes stuff stick to it, right? I can track stuff. Well, what is love to you? That does that too, right? So people who are, we call them charismatic, carism, it means love, carism means light and love. So a carous mad, a person is a person who attracts people to them like the sun does, right? Like, you know, so, so I think that whatever this property is that that's intrinsic, is a gravity, and most likely takes different forms in different types of life forms.

Yeah, I can't wait until like an albaryne-stine type of figure in the future will discover that love is in fact one of the fundamental forces of physics. That would be cool. Dana, and this is one of the favorite conversations I've ever had. It's truly an honor to talk to you and Thank you so much for spending all this time with me. Absolutely. It's been fun. Thank you Thanks for listening to this conversation with Diana wash basalca and thank you to our sponsors element Electrolike drink Grammily Writing Plugin, Business Wars

Podcast, and Cash App. So the choice is health, grammar, knowledge, or money. Choose wisely, my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount at the support of this podcast. And now, let me leave you some words from Carl Sagan. Somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Thank you.