American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - James Madden: Earth is Being Simulated by Non-Human Intelligence

Episode Date: April 30, 2025

Are UFOs matrix-shaping machines responsible for simulating reality itself? Do they exist outside the “cave” of our epistemological filters? Philosopher James Madden argues that the UFO mystery reveals a deeper truth: humanity is trapped inside a kind of Plato’s Cave, manipulated by “guardian” forces (possibly non-human) that use belief, disinformation, and performance to shape our reality. Drawing on Plato, Heidegger and Cold War psyops, Madden shows how the phenomenon points to a deeper truth unfathomable to those inside the cave but available to those seeking the light. House of Atlas: Get 15% off The House of Atlas Razor Kit + Before and After Set with the code [JESSE] at https://houseofatlas.com/JESSE #houseofatlaspod The Perfect Jeans: F*%k your khakis and get The Perfect Jean 15% off with the code [JESSE15] at theperfectjean.nyc/JESSE15 #theperfectjeanpod Qualia: Experience the science of feeling younger—go to https://qualialife.com/JESSE for up to 50% off your purchase and use code JESSE for an additional 15%. -------------------------- ***JOIN OUR WHOP (Exclusive Episodes & Group Calls) ➤ https://whop.com/jessemichels ***Become a Member of American Alchemy: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuG2KzrIMe3qoNcuDVpwnXw/join -------------------------- Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 02:08 Plato and the Philosophy of UFOs 05:47 Understanding Plato's Republic 08:18 The Allegory of the Cave 12:07 The Nature of Enlightenment 15:49 The Role of Technology 16:22 UFOs and Human Perception 30:11 The Intersection of UFOs and Philosophy 43:57 The Limits of Human Cognition 58:00 Technology and Human Identity 1:00:59 Exploring the Nature of UFOs 1:01:40 Conspiracy Theories and Government Disclosure 1:05:48 Placebo Effects and Credentialism 1:07:50 Testimony and Believability Spectrum 1:11:24 Disclosure and Public Skepticism 1:17:06 Consciousness and Reality 1:25:51 The Role of AI and Technology 1:32:56 The Myth of Er and Virtue 1:37:16 Language and Communication Challenges 1:42:39 Protocols for Ascension 1:50:37 The Politics of Science 1:55:33 Truth Seeking in a Complex World 2:00:47 The Unconscious and UFOlogy 2:03:38 The Challenge of Trust and Change 2:06:13 Philosophy and Esotericism -------------------------- SPOTIFY ➤ https://tinyurl.com/jessemichelsspotify INSTAGRAM ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichelsofficial TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I am here with Dr. Jim Madden. You're a professor of philosophy who has dared to reconcile some ancient philosophy with UFOs. I think a lot of people, you know, have heard Plato's Republic or the cave analogy or, you know, the myth of er. But they don't really have a ton of context as to who Plato was, why he did what he did. I think you would have to get away from thinking what we're being proposed here is actually Plato. little political program. And there's something else going on here. You know, if there's a push and a pull outside of the cave or whatever, is the UFO some

sort of pulling technology? Because you talk about this where it's this thing that it busts all of your priors. Yeah. It would seem there has to be somebody outside of the cave doing this. Like somebody has to, from the perspective of enlightenment, be pulling us through. The light itself also feels like this kind of, it's like an inflection point where it could either sort of eviscerate us or it could kind of save us. You know, it's like does something super unprecedented happen when we discover, you know,

the myth makers when we develop the perceptive apparatuses through high energy output or through some sort of ascended consciousness to like see who's like messing with us. And does that just unravel reality? I am here with Dr. Jim Madden and it's an absolute honor to have you. I've been kind of mulling over the ideas in your book for a while now. You're a professor of philosophy who has dared to reconcile some ancient philosophy, you know, Plato, Aristotle, even up until today, you know, more modern, Nietzsche, Heidegger, with UFOs.

And I think that is a very noble effort, and you've done it in a very brilliant way in this great book. Unidentified Flying Hyper Object, which I recommend everybody go out and read. And so I want to start kind of at a super baseline level because I think a lot of people, you know, have heard of Plato's Republic or the cave analogy or, you know, the myth of er, but they don't really have a ton of context as to who Plato was, why he did what he did. So why don't we just start at kind of ground zero? Who is Plato and why did he write the Republic? Sure. Well, first, thanks for having me. It's a real honor to be here. Yeah. I appreciate it. I think the only thing that's really surprised me, I should say, what surprised me the most about this whole process of getting the UFO and bringing philosophy into it is that no one had done it before in this way. So that was surprising to me. Okay, so who was Plato? So obviously, you know, probably most people know, Plato was the student of Socrates. And in most of Plato's dialogues, which is most of what we have of his rights.

writings, Socrates is the main character, though not in all of them. And it's pretty clear that Socrates does not always speak for Plato, which I think is important even in the republic. Other than that, you know, Plato was an aristocratic, you know, member of Athenian society, you know, in the period kind of coming out of the Peloponnesian War. It's a time of a great political strife. You know, so Socrates himself was a victim of capital punishment. that had a lot to do with the politics going on in Athens at the time. Okay. Plato is not probably his given birth name.

It's a nickname, like, broad or big, as in like broad-shouldered, because he was the most accomplished wrestler of his generation, apparently. Wow. Yeah, in Athens, yeah. And, yeah, there's a- So you're maintaining that tradition today, by the way, as a jujitsu master. Yeah, yeah. So I think an important thing to note about the Republic is, you know, the setting of it is in kind of a small, this is anachronistic, like a suburb of Athens.

It's not actually in the city. So it's outside the city. So it's a book about cities that's not in a city, which is interesting. And we know about when Plato is setting it because it begins by referring to a certain religious festival that classical scholars can date when that festival likely happened. So we know it's set at a time when Plato would have been like a little kid. Okay. So he obviously was not there, right?

So probably these conversations didn't happen, right? But the characters are obviously Socrates and two other characters are Glaucon and Adamantus who were Plato's half-brothers. And there's another character Thrasimachus who's sort of a foil to those three in the dialogue. And I'm not sure if I'm getting it's exactly right, but my understanding is none of those people are alive by the time Plato writes this and none of them died natural deaths. Okay. So they're actually on separate sides of this struggle. Okay.

So like Therzymachus, my understanding, was on the other side of this post-Palapenian war political struggle from Plato's family. Okay. So it's interesting. What Plato's depicting for us is this most. where everybody was kind of together behaving civilly for the last time. Okay. And then it's all going to fall apart politically after that. Okay.

Which I think is important for how we understand this book and whether or not it's like proposing to us an optimistic or pessimistic view of things, right? Okay. So the dialogue that begins with Socrates and the guys are here for this religious festival and they're invited to a party. and, you know, there's going to be torch races and it's going to be a big deal. And there's an older guy there who, you know, they're kidding about being old and isn't it terribly getting old.

And he's like, well, no, because I don't have to worry about all the pressures for sex and all this stuff anymore. And they're like, yeah, we're going to die soon. And he said, well, I'm not worried about death because I've lived a just life and the just don't have to fear their death. Okay. And when asked, well, what do you mean by justice? He leaves the scene.

Okay, so it's interesting the authority figure, the old man, is making claims, but he can't cash it. Okay. And this is, this goes on in all the botanic dialogues, is the authority figures always fail to actually deliver what they're claiming. Okay. But I think it's interesting that Plato's Republic, the actual question that initiates the dialogue is the question of death. Okay. Which then occasions the question of justice. Okay.

So I think we think of the dialogue, if we've read it, is being a question about what is justice. But that's the secondary question. That's something we're answering to address the question of death. And do note that the book ends with a myth about death. Okay. So it's bookended, as it were, with life and death, okay? Or with two stories about death. So for my money, if you ask you, what's the Republic about?

It's really about death. Okay. And in the human condition in facing death. All right. Okay, so at that point then, you know, what is justice, you know, gets raised and now philosophy breaks out. Okay. And there's a, there's a really vehement debate between Socrates and Thercemicus. Eventually Thercemicus has had enough and leaves. And then Adamantus and Glauqon take up his position as like devil devil devil advocates. And they debate with Socrates what justice is. They decide that deciding what justice is for we as human individuals, right, is too difficult. So that they switch it to a political story. Okay. So what would justice be in the city?

All right. But always it's the idea that once again, like, we're trying to find out what would it be just as individuals so we can then figure out whether or not we have anything to fear and death. It's always the background. So there's like three layers going on in the book. And maybe the most important one is the one that's mentioned the least. Yeah.

Yeah, because it's, it's, I feel like it's thought of as this, what is the ideal state, especially vis-a-vis maybe, you know, Socrates's deaths where, you know, Athens as a democracy sort of turns on him. He ends up drinking the hemlock. And then it's like, okay, if that doesn't work, you know, how can we, in some sort of parapetetic way, figure out through dialogue what the ideal state is? But you're saying that it actually maybe has more to just deal with death. And like this really important metaphysical question of what happens when you die.

Now, this is probably controversial. And as far, everything in academic philosophy is controversial. Right. So you could find bright people, brighter people than I am, who, agree with me and you could find brighter people than I am who would disagree with me. That's always a problem, yeah. I agree. I also think we are probably over-indexed on taking everything allegorically and not literally. So I'm more sympathetic to the Plato literalists, but, you know, that's my own. I'm allowed to do that because I'm a dilettante. Yeah, I envy you being dilettical. Okay, so, so, so,

and there's very interesting things that go on in the book. So basically, we're told, uh, the only only just state would be one that had a philosopher as a ruler. So ultimately the famous philosopher king. Okay. But it also, like Plato says early on that any state that occurs naturally is going to fall apart due to greed and injustice and this. Okay. So as you think of it, like any natural city is not run by a philosopher. Okay.

And we get a story of how you would cultivate philosophers sufficient to run a city. But no, you'd have to have a good city first to produce those philosophers in the first place. So there's this really difficult circular problem of founding in the Republic. Like, how could you ever get a just city? Because it would have to be built by a philosopher, right? And but a philosopher would have to be produced by a just city. So just end up in this sort of tautological loop or something. Yeah, you end up in a loop.

Okay, so I think I mentioned that because I think you have to get away from thinking what we're being proposed here is actually Plato's like political program. And there's something else going on here. There's also an important moment where it's after the allegory of the cave and the question comes up like, do we, would the philosopher have to return to the cave after leaving? And of course, in the allegory, the philosopher does go back and annoys people because he's, you know, asking him and. change our lives and things like that. And eventually it ends very, very badly for him. And it's a not so thin reference to Socrates. And interesting what Plato has Socrates say when he's asked, you know, would we have to make the philosopher go back? He says, well, in our city, meaning the ideal city that we're thinking of, the philosopher would owe his education to the city and thereby he should return.

Okay. But think of it. That's only the ideal city. And Plato has said throughout the book, that the ideal city is not going to happen here, right? So it seemed like you're saying like in any actual concrete, like, human political situation, the philosopher really should not return. It would be a futile effort. Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating.

Yeah. And so just what is the cave at a baseline for the average person? Sure. Okay. So at a certain point in the dialogue, the question of how we would educate a philosopher comes up. Okay. And basically the cave is Plato's way of explaining what the education of the philosopher would be like. Okay. So I think that's, that's important to see like that's, that's where it's proposed. And in, in the analogy that he, or allegory that he uses to make the point is he says, you know, so we have a bunch of people. They're in a cave. They're chained so they can

only look forward. And all they see are images dancing in the cave wall. Okay. Okay. And then at some point, someone, and I think if that were the case, no one could possibly know the difference, right? There's no ability to separate yourself. Yes. From this, right? So it would be what we would call today a consensus reality. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And now Plato never explains this, but voila, voila, somebody gets loose. Okay. It's interesting. We'd never get an explanation of how that initial liberation would happen. Okay. And that person is a, able to turn and look away. It's a very important thing that Plato emphasizes is that person looks away from the wall and can see back and see that what's really going on is there's a wall behind them and there's people behind it with puppets on sticks and there's a fire casting light onto the wall, right? So what the people see on the wall is not entirely wrong, right? The shadows are right-ish, but they're not fully right. Okay. And so this, this newly liberated person sees that, right?

And then goes through a process of, of maybe even literally clawing his way out of the cave. It's a difficult, arduous process, right? And what he's moving towards is towards a sort of light, right? Okay, so the fire initially that he saw, that was part of the put on, that's a kind of light, it's enlightenment. It's a sign of knowledge, right?

But it's not full knowledge. And think of it for the Greeks, all, well, I mean, we didn't say something like this all energy all heat all fire on the earth is ultimately derived from the sun right okay so he's looking for the source of that fire right and he crawls the way out of the cave and eventually you know can get out and it's very difficult so he has to leave and come back a little bit you know it's very difficult to get out of the cave and see in the life the first time and eventually he worked his way up to glimpsing the sun okay glimpsing what plato elsewhere calls the good right um right um um But he can only glimpse it, right, right? And so then he returns to the cave. And, of course, in returning to the cave, the light has changed again. And he stumbles around as if he's blind. So he looks like a fool, right?

He presses people that there's more of the world, what you're seeing as an illusion, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, famously, it ends badly for him, just as it ended for Socrates very badly. Yeah. And it's, there seems to be sort of push and pull. Like he's, this person is ascending out of the cave. on their own sort of volition, but they're also being sort of dragged. Is that, is that right?

Or, yeah, because you think of it, like, throughout the book, it's clear, for Plato, enlightenment doesn't just happen. You have to be taught. Really, you could, you can make a case. The book is a philosophy of education, right?

It's what, what should our ruling elite be like? Like, how should they be educated, right? And it's, and he, the one thing Plato would say is you cannot just let nature take its course this way. Right? Like people are not disposed to to take themselves out of illusion, right? They're disposed to stay in illusion, right? So someone has to be pulling. Right. Yeah. So is this. And which is a problem, I think, for the book. Is the, is the implication that the guardians or the puppeteers, are they outside of the cave or are they in the cave? Or, yeah, where do they sort of exist? Yeah. Spacially in this analogy.

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So stop wasting money and time on shaving products that don't look good, aren't effective, and cost way too much. Visit houseofatlas.com today. Trust me, you'll love it as much as I do. Let me give you a spooky answer to that. Yeah, cool. So at a certain point in the Republic, Plato has Socrates and the fellows arrive at this conclusion that the guardians

will have to be told in some translations good lies about the afterlife. Okay. Meaning like they have to be told stories that will, like, let them see that there's going to be a reward for a certain type of behavior. That's like the best of the state, right? Okay. And the book ends with a myth about the afterlife. Okay.

So what do we get? We get a good lie about the afterlife. Okay. Now, my read on that is what? what Plato is doing is he's saying, look, I just dragged you through the same educative process that I was outlined in the book, right? Mm-hmm.

Do you see what I mean? So like, it's like, it would seem there has to be somebody outside of the cave doing this. Like there has, somebody has to, from the perspective of enlightenment, be pulling us through. Do you see that? Yeah. The whole book, I think, tricks you into following that very process.

And the guardians, so the guardians themselves are told a lie, and then they sort of pervade the lies. as well. They transmit the lie. That's fascinating. In their training, he says they would have to be told. Some translations call it a good myth. Some translate, I like this because I'm a contrarian, called a good lie. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. But yeah, everyone has to be lied to in this process. Yeah. And the guardians, the implication there is their guardians of this ideal city state. Is that correct? Yes. Okay.

And then do we have any understanding of who is telling them this sort of noble mythology? Yeah, and keep in mind, like, this is a problem because Plato earlier said, any natural city is going to fall apart because of natural human greed and, you know, selfishness and such. Right. So how you could ever get this off the ground doesn't seem to be within like a legitimate human possibility for Playboy. So there are all these ways you could take this. You could take this as a, yeah, total like myth or whatever. And I think the festival, right, that this was sort of told that was a, you know, a festival of myth. Is that right? Well, it was certainly a Greek, you know, religious festival, right?

So yeah, yeah, exactly. And then, and then there's a, you know, the, that's like on the one hand. And then on the other hand, it's like, this is all true. This is like a descriptor of ontological truth and reality. And I guess where do you fall on that, on that spectrum? Yeah, I don't. So the way I like to put it is I don't think Plato was a Platonist. Okay.

What I mean is, the kind of philosophy 101 that we all teach our students because you have to just, we have to tell some goodness to get things going. Be careful there. Okay. Is very much a caricature of Plato. Do you mean? Okay.

And so, but I also think there's something. So I do think there's a lot of put on going on in the book. I think we're being toyed with in certain ways. Yeah. I think a lot of it's kind of a test. Like, do you get it? Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. But I also think he's perfectly serious about some of the things in that book. Right. Okay. So, for instance, at the end, the concluding myth, the myth of er, I don't take that as a serious speculation on his part of what the afterlife is like or something like that. Okay. And it's interesting because at the end of the myth, er is getting in the weeds, but people can go read the book. At the end of the myth, Err goes back to temporal life.

But unlike everyone else, he's granted memory of where he's been. Okay. And Plato throughout his writings has Socrates defend the notion that all knowledge is actually recollection of something that we already had. Okay. And so I think what you're getting here then is a suggestion that like our relationship to the ultimate truth is going to be more like memory than it is something like a direct discovery. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he says kind of distrust your like five senses, right? And it's. It's almost like this primordial knowledge is more true in a sense. And so totally, because he, I mean, you could say that, you know, it's all mythology or whatever when it comes to him even saying that. But then in the book of Meno, you know, they literally have this slave draw a triangle. And it's, the slave is, you know, completely uneducated. And that's sort of proof that there is this kind of primordial architecture and knowledge. And I believe also in the symposium, it was, you know, a knowledge of. geometry was somehow not only emphasized, but almost like a litmus test for like admission or something. So we could teach anybody this if we just reminded them the right way. Like a something that Plato does in the phaedo, he has Socrates say in the phaedo, which interestingly, Plato goes out of his way to say he wasn't there for the conversation of phaedo. So he oddly distances himself from it, which is a change. But he, um, there, you know, the example is, is like you have a lover.

who played the harp. Now the harp doesn't resemble them at all, but the harp will remind you of them. So, like, I think what play was getting at is there are things that we encounter in this life that are utterly unlike the ultimate truth, but then still manage to remind us of it. That's so interesting.

Yeah, I mean, like, the light itself also feels like this kind of dual meaning. They're not dual meaning, but it's like an inflection. point where it could either sort of eviscerate us or it could kind of save us. And I think about technology now. And it has that sort of, you know, dual kind of inflecting, you know, mechanism where AI, for example, you know, I love the Marshall McLuhan quote, every media extension of man is an amputation. We are sort of outsourcing our agency to a lot of

these, you know, technologies that are kind of parasitizing us, especially after the advent of information technology, you know, used to be kind of augmenting us. and now it's sort of outsourcing, you know, our abilities. And then at the same time, the ability to wake up with information technology, you know, if you're trying to learn about, like, UFOs where, like, uncover all sorts of kind of real conspiracies or issues with the way that, you know, the doctrinated, the indoctrinated history has been told or whatever, you can now do that because you have the access to all of the information kind of at your fingertips. So enlightenment is also closer than ever. Yeah. There's like that two-edged sword.

The very thing, like you and I, no internet, Jim and Jesse never meet. Mm-hmm. Right. True. Jesse never reads Jim's book. Jim never, like gets enlightened by your podcast, right? Yeah. Totally.

But at the same time as like I, I think we're also being simultaneously undone. Yeah. That very same medium. It's fascinating. And so if you think, if you extrapolate that out into the future, there are like two possibilities space, like if you have a shrugendrous cat of, you know, possibility states of, you know, mankind, there's probably a whole wave function. But like on the one hand, you have this like enlightened city state where, you know, you have people like Jim Jesse, but a bunch of other people talking about virtue and like how to live a good life. And, you know, we have like access to like nuclear fusion over unity or whatever. Like it's all great, right? And then on the other hand, it's like a nuclear holocaust and like, you know. And so if that future is has somehow already arrived in some paradigm outside the cave, then I wonder.

if the cave itself is actually a test. Yeah. Like it's one, because he, there are tests to become a guardian, right? Yeah. Like that, that wouldn't be disputed, right? So is the cave itself some sort of like low level epistemic like VR headset? Yeah.

Where it's like you have to contemplate virtue in the right way, lead a good life. And if you don't, you're not going to make it out. And if you do, you level up or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Think of it.

And once again, you know, like getting way over my pay grade as a classicist, right? Okay, but like, but there, Plato, I mean, there, there were such things as prose treatise as a literary genre at the time. Okay. But yeah, Plato writes in dialogue. Like, okay, now we know Aristotle did, but they, we lost all those dialogues. But like Plato writes in dialogue. So why write in dialogue? Like, why are you doing that?

And it seems like, because it lets you play more. And it becomes this kind of like, okay, who's really paying attention? Right. Like, who's really understanding what the narrative is doing here? Totally. And there's something about, I love the word. parapetetic, like the walking and talking and the dialogue-based learning where it's like a, you know, a caterpillar into a butterfly.

Like, you need the struggle in order to, you can't circumvent the process in order to truth is not like a file you're given. You need to kind of engage. Can I circle back to the light metaphor? Yes. So I think it's important to note in the Republic, okay, and this could be, we could get interesting things with this with later philosophy too, but, but. Plato talks, like he uses the sun as this metaphor.

Of course, the sun's a pretty going metaphor already. So, like, you have the Icarus myth, you know, where if you, like, you want the knowledge of the gods and you fly too close, you're going to crash, right? So think of like, like, by Plato suggesting that we could glimpse the sun, this is very transgressive stuff for the time, right? Yep. But he says that the thing with the sun is it's the source of the light by which we see everything else. Okay. So then there's a question like, how could you see the sun? Do you see, you know, it's sort of like it's you'd have to take the glasses off that you look through and look at them without your glasses, right? And so I think that's important in that for Plato, you're never going to be able to point to the good. You're never going to be able to point to ultimate being because it's the source by which anything else can be illumined to be pointed at. Right. So in, in any kind of. kind of like temporal empirical sense, we're always going to fall short. We're always going to fall short.

Always going to fall short. Because it's sort of the horizon against which we can judge things. It's not something in front of the horizon that we can judge. Right. So it's sort of Plato, I think, is predicting in this life perpetual failure. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And it's fat. Yeah. And so, okay, I'm sure a lot of people at this point in the interview are thinking, Jesse, you have a show about UFO. Yes, right. What the hell does any of this have to do with UFOs? How did you even think to reconcile, you know, people say, you know, all philosophy is a, you know, footnote of Plato or whatever. Like, he's really the founder of Western philosophy.

How did you think to reconcile that with UFOs, this sort of modern craze of objects in the sky we can't identify? Yeah, that's an interesting question. So, I think a lot of people I got kind of, you know, triggered about the UFO in like 2017, you know, when suddenly it was okay to talk about this, you know. And then I remember in, I think it was 2021, I always tell the story, I was watching X-Files with my kids that summer. And it was right when the big first Pentagon press conference happened.

And I'm like, so I guess Moulter was right? I've never seen anything like it. They've been going out of like that for almost half an hour. There have been this like switch. Like it's something they're saying, no, maybe they're. there's something to this, which, you know, my, like, basic immuno response to everything is, like, to study, right? And to do scholarship. So I start reading on the books and all that. And I think what connected it with Plato for me is just that that metaphor of we could be

really, really wrong as a consensus about what the actual nature of being is. Right. I thought I was starting to see the UFO was a great, at least thought experiment about that, right? Does it seem at all plausible to me that there could be something, even in like our nearly empirical reality, that humans are just like systematically missed for our entire history, right? And the more I thought about it, the more I thought about things that I was already working on in philosophy of mind and cognitive science and speculative metaphysics, it seemed. Oh, hell yeah. Yeah. We really could be missing something that was, like, concretely right there all along. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, even prosaically in a modern scientific context, we see, you know, between 400 and 700 nanometers, the electromagnetic wave spectrum. Yeah. You know, our decibel range is, you know, cut off. And so, like, to say that we are measurement sensors that are limited inside of a larger reality, I don't think is too controversial. No. And then, you know, do you have? of those somehow speak to that because they seem weakly entangled with our reality. They seem to be sort of ephemeral Jacques Valet, you know, which you write about very eloquently in your book,

talks about, you know, in passport to Magonia and others books, a lot of past mythology involving, you know, the denizens of Magonia, like coming down on clouds or, you know, all sorts of craft with wheels of Ezekiel, you know, the blazing shields of Rome, you know, often. it's this sort of this proto architecture that's very true and real and then we are sort of recollecting it through the lens of sort of modern mythology right um so yeah what do you what do you make of that hey guys i want to tell you about my new favorite piece of apparel these are called the perfect jeans they're literally the perfect jeans i used to wear jeans all the time and they're kind of rough and not super stretchy or breathable these are extremely comfortable they're

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Get the perfect gene. One of the books that really turned me on in the UFO, and I think partly because it had a legitimizing, you know, to honestly say it helped legitimize the study of it, was Carl Jung's book, UFO, the modern myth, modern myth of things in the sky. And it's interesting. Young makes this point that it's not entirely surprising, like, right after the world wars

and in the middle of, you know, the really scary years of the Cold War where there's this nuclear threat, that suddenly people are having a lot of anxiety and it's being expressed in these dreams and visions of, you know, airborne technology that may or may not be, militarily threatening, and he has his whole account of it in terms of the mandala and a need to return to a new wholeness, that sort of thing. And so it makes a lot of sense to me that when we're having anxiousness collectively, that it's going to express itself in the going metaphors of our era, right, our current, like, unconscious obsessions, right? And for us, it's technology, right? But what I sound really troubling about, and it's interesting,

When you read Jung's book, it's sort of like, you get a feel when he starts out writing it. He talks about it as like a mass rumor, right? He talks, he does all the stream analysis of it. And then as the book goes on, it's like, it's getting harder from to dismiss it, though. And if you've read it like, and at the hand, he's like, and yet they're on radar. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And yet they leave tracks. Yep.

And so it's like in some, like, you know, I'm, I'm, you know, very into psychoanalysis. Okay. And it's easy, I think, to dismiss a lot, not dismiss the wrong word, to analyze some of this stuff psychologically. And yet, that's the thing that like I keep coming back to is and yet there do seem to be concrete effects. Yeah. That was Diana Pesolka's experience as well. She's this religious studies professor at UNC Wilmington. I don't think she expected to, you know, and she's writing about the Catholic concept of purgatory in this book, Heaven Can Wait.

And then I don't think she expected to start writing about U.S. foes in some sort of, you know, I think this is real sense. I think she wanted to write about it as some modern, you know, kind of, you know, ephemeral religious phenomena. And then, and then all of a sudden, the second half of that book is like, she goes down the rabbit hole herself. Yeah. And it's like, oh my God.

I think there's something extremely really. You can see it like in similar to young in like real time as Diana's writing this. She's like the view is changing. Yeah. It's like, yeah, go for it. And so, like, the, you know, my take on the, using going back to the cave metaphor, that's okay. Yeah. Is I subscribe to some ideas in cognitive science and philosophy of mind that would sort of like make us think that maybe the cave is not just a bug, but a feature of human cognition.

And you sort of alluded to this is that if we're, if we're faced with like a very complicated reality, right? it would seem one of the most important things that we would be able to do would be able to sort for relevance. And so, meaning, like, the mind may work, I think there's some pretty good empirical stuff on this, as much by learning what to ignore as it does by learning what to pay attention to, okay?

And so you think of it then, what are we doing? I like this metaphor, we're constantly carving a cave out. And like the stuff that we do see, it's there. Okay, I'm not an idealist, right? So the stuff that we do see, it's there. the problem is it's it there's always more there than it otherwise we couldn't cognize you see that okay so then though there's been this really thorny problem always of like how do we ever tease out like what is just our carving out and leaving something behind okay or as opposed to

illusion as opposed to what's really there etc etc i think once you admit that there is a irreducible human contribution to our perception of the world. Yes. How you ever tease those two things back out is going to be the thornyest problem possible. Yeah. Just admitting that opens your mind to a whole host of possibilities. I love early in the, you know, this three-body problem, you know, in the dark forest trilogy, this, you know, Chinese science fiction novel involving aliens, UFOs.

You know, it's like the farmer and the shooter. And you have, you know, people on a two. D plane and bullets are shot or bullet holes are shot into that 2D plane. And to them, that could just be like, you know, little, little craters. And they're probably a flatland is another good example. You know, it's 19th century, you know, a book about this stuff where to the people on the 2D plane, the holes could just be literally, you know, they're not discretionary holes made by shooters that they can't even perceive. Right. And so we are inherently sort of limited by our scope of perception. And making that argument is an a priori assertion, but denying that argument is also an a priori assertion.

And so you're at this kind of epistemic impasse vis-a-vis modern science where if you propose anything like that, they just have nothing to say. And then you point towards like these ephemeral glimpses of UFOs or people who have like near-death experiences. And you say, these things are much richer than meet the eye. And then they say, oh, this is your mind plays tricks on you, blah, blah, blah. And you end up in this sort of like impossible to resolve argument. Yeah. Andoporia is like the classic. Yeah.

Sort of like it's a puzzle. Oh, interesting. I've never heard that concept. That's awesome. And one of my favorite ways of putting this comes from William James. Yeah. He has this great analogy he uses. He thinks like humans are not unlike dogs and cats running around a library.

Or not unlike our dogs when we're in the living room having a conversation about like the most. you know, high level stuff and your dog's there thinking it's like kind of hot shit, right? It's like doing the dog thing. And, of course, all the sounds and smells and stuff encounters are really there. Yeah. But it's a carve out from something much richer. Yes. And, but he's, he's hearing what you're saying, but it can't possibly mean anything to him because it's just not relevant to his way of being. Totally. Yeah. And it would be, we think of things like cellular automata or like, you know, getting fungus to grow. in certain ways or whatever, you know, like, is, that's easy. It's predictable, right?

Yeah. We could easily be cellular automata in some larger system where, you know, you have the BF Skinner, you know, Pavlov's dog. You have all these ways to like condition humans, like extremely easily. Like that that's not that hard. Yeah. And how do we know that that's not being done to us on some sort of grand scale? And that's the Jacques-fil-A kind of control system hypothesis. That was one of the things that really turned me on. What was that. Here's example just from the last 24 hours for me.

So I live in a very small town in rural Kansas, okay? And so, you know, I'm here in Austin visiting you. And it's, it's, you walk around when you're used to be in a small town. You're in this human context that's on this incredible scale, right? And you start to notice all the ways you're being managed just by the structure of the city and the structure of the airport and all these way. And you have the sudden. sense you don't have the same feeling of control as you do say back in a small town. Right.

Okay. And then it always strikes me whenever I fly into a major metropolitan area, how small and minor it looks on the landscape as you come in, right? So it's like, here, I have a sense of I'm somehow being moved around by a larger reality just by being the city. But then if we move out our magnification a bit, we'll see the city is itself just part of this much bigger ecosystem. system of things and it's not

clear who's running that, it's et cetera, right? And so it seems like our level of magnification, right? Yes. Like, it affords different senses of what the real substance of things are. Yes. And you start to get into weird ontological reality

questions, the more microscopic you get. Like, my old colleague Eric Weinstein likes to talk about, he talks about, and you write about this in your book, the umwelt. Yeah. This sort of perceptive apparatus. He talks about science as like, you know, a continuous process of umwelt hacking. He uses

umwelt. He does. He does. Yeah, yeah. I feel vindicated. That's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah. Or yeah, maybe he should be vindicated by you. But, um, no, it's, it is, it's, it's, it's, or even, you know, uh, Feynman says there's room at the bottom, you know, and he's implying that like, the deeper your perceptive apparatus gets, the more you're able to probably understand, you know, ontological truth. There's another physicist named Ken Wilson where it's like the higher, the energy output, you know, the maybe the more ontological truth you get. And he really talks about in the case of, you know, sort of phase transitions via materials. Like you put them under like high duress. You can understand properties that you wouldn't without the duress. But I do think of like,

if we're in a cave, you know, suspend disbelief. Say we are just in this cave. Well, so I'm, we are. I mean, it just, it seems like everything. Inherently we are. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, everything we know about how cognition works. Yes, I think shows we are sorting for relevance. Right. And thereby we're ignoring more than, and we've been evolutionarily rewarded and like programmed to ignore some things. So the two ways out of the cave would be building your own perceptive apparatus, like your own working on your own kind of cognition and sort of raising your own consciousness.

These things are very hard to talk about because it's hard to, there's no formula or what. whatever, but, you know, that that would be one way. And then the second way might be sort of physics that breaks the boundaries of the cave. So it would be like lighting a firecracker in the cave or something. And so I think about that with the nuclear UFO connection. But I wonder about that. Yeah. Because it's even, let's say we get, you know, like another scientific revolution. Okay. But it's still got to come back and be translated into the basic human cognitive have set up. Like, you know, like, it's still going to have to, like, run on this hardware.

Mm-hmm. You know, so it's always going to go back to somehow traceable to, you know, modes of cognition that were developed for paleolithic ancestors. Yep. But I don't know. I mean, yes, but, like, the hardware is probably changing to. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

You know, and it's always heard to say on what time scales, things will happen. because I believe in Darwin, but I believe in him as a locally useful and incomplete theory. Yeah. And I think, you know. Hoffman's thing, yeah. Yeah, yeah, the Hoffman's thing.

Or, you know, you know, even like they're, these placeholder terms we use like punctuated equilibrium and evolution. And, you know, Carl Popper said. And you're dead right to say, though, it's not like if we go to the Darwinian route. Yeah. Okay.

Then the hardware is a moving target too. I agree. 100%. But then, But the thing of it, though, is any cognitive act that we would do to change the hardware would presuppose that prior hardware, so there's kind of a loop there. You know what you mean? So like whatever could be that change, it's almost like it can't be within our direct control.

Say that again? Let's say we're going to reset our basic cognitive apparatus somehow, but we can only do that based on principles of our current cognitive apparatus. Right? So we would never really be free of that. So it looks like they're going to have that kind of looping problem in there. Yes. Yeah.

Yes. But then also you can measure a thing. Like the Copenhagen School measures like an electron. And there's like this electron doesn't exhibit properties that like you look like normal macroscopic reality. Right. And then that like puts you into this brain scramble that like, you know, increases your evolution. Yeah. Yeah.

So it is this like positive feedback loop or something. So the way I look at it is, like, we're always opening the scope on our umwelt, okay, but it's still tethered to that original point, right? Because we, we got here through this evolutionary route, and that's always going to kind of flavor it. So I agree, like, like what science does is it opens it. And I would even say even humanities in some case. I think literature can, like, open us to new reels and things like that. Okay.

So it's opening it wider and wider, whatever, but it's still always going to come back to that same. origin point. And it's always limited then, yeah. You have all these other myths that deal with technology development and, you know, like Prometheus being kind of the archetypal one or Faust, you know, and usually it doesn't end well for those seeking the light. So how do we, how do we interpret that in sort of a platonic and UFO context? So I got really obsessed with Sophocles, Prometheus bound, the tragic play and make all my students read it now and it's interesting that okay so the start of sophically's version of the myth is Hephaestus the god of smithing is he's he's chaining up nailing down prometheus

which is ironic because like what did prometheus do is he like he provided humans with all the arts okay including smithing so basically prometheus is being bound by technology he's the god that gives us technology, but he is bound by technology. Right. And in Sophocles' version, Force, who speaks for Zeus, interesting, he's just pure blind force speaks there. And Hephaestus are kind of mocking him, like, your name and means for knowledge, you didn't see this coming.

And he's like, oh, bro, I saw it coming. I want this. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And like later in, in the myth, he even says, I hate all gods. Right. Wow.

Yeah. And he encounters ion. who, you know, I.O. probably, who, you know, was, who rejected Zeus and she's a human, he gets turned to a cow. And he predicts a child of yours in the 13th generation. So it's going to be Hercules, right, as the prediction. But in the 13th generation, a human child, like long in the future, bad generation, is going to take out Zeus. Okay. You see that. And so, like, there's this prediction of a kind of like, you know, like death of God, assertive humanism that's going to come out of this, right? From a guy, though, who is being nailed to a rock by technology itself.

So you can see, I think even Sophically, there's a sense that humans are on rails to a kind of self-assertive self-destruction. Right. Because we are these technological animals. You know how we're always diving into the edge of science and consciousness on this show? Lately, I've been thinking a lot about aging, not just in terms of years, but in how it actually feels in the body. Slow recovery, lower energy, that middle-aged fog that sneaks up on you. I feel like I can barely go out and drink alcohol anymore. That's why I started using something called qualia senolytic, and it's been a major shift for me. Let me explain. As we age, our bodies accumulate what scientists call senescent cells, also known as zombie cells. These are worn-out

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I would be lying if I were to tell you that I understand this essay. I've tried to read it a couple of times. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It's difficult. Yeah. And that's not the place to start Heidegger, but it's where everybody wants to get to you. Yeah, I don't think I understand Heidegger in general, but yeah. Okay, so, um, basically what Heidegger's arguing in an essay is the essence of technology isn't a device.

Okay. And he's very explicit about that. So, so when He digger gets moody about technology, he's not just moody about how much like screen time we're having. But, like, you know, toward, like, like, he, for him, the essence of technology is a certain attitude towards being. Okay, like that's what technology really is. Okay. And Heidegger, you know, thinks it, like, there wasn't like a committee that met in, in the early modern period that decided we would just like change civilization. Okay.

But he also thinks something happened such that we started to ask a different kind of question about nature than we did before. Okay. And he thinks what happened is for some reason, we began to ask nature, what can we explain to ask nature, what can we extract from it rather than how we can work with it. Okay. And so he thinks like what the essence of technology is, is an attitude of extraction or accessibility. Like what the world is is simply the conditions at which it's accessible to us. Right. And he thinks now he and he thinks he can trace that back as like it's always been in the making throughout the entire Western philosophical tradition. And it just, it really bubbled up in the modern period. Right. And so for him like

he thinks there's no getting out of it because like we didn't have a committee meeting to change our attitude so we're not going to have a committee meeting to get out of it. It's like we have to ride this all the way down. Okay. But he thinks if we admit that we're stuck with this attitude, right? So like the world, like we're stuck thinking of the world simply on the terms that it's useful to us, right? If we make that admission, then we're kind of admitting we're not really running things because

we can't really decide this for ourselves. And he thinks that will. open us to maybe something else could show itself to us that would change our attitude to being again. Mm. Yeah. I, maybe this is a contrived connection, but I think about that, you know, probably very true assertion that humans look at technology as this, like, you know, locally useful thing

for, like, producing. And then they port their own value into, like, how can they work alongside technology to, like, make things more useful or more productive, which is a bit of. very narrow scope of like what it is to be human. Humans can write poetry, be self-referential, you know, like we create culture. But there's something about technology that compresses humans into, you know, this like economically productive unit. Heidegger was really worked up the first time you heard someone used the word human resources. And he says, because eventually what's going to happen is we're going to see ourselves in technological terms

of accessibility and use. And, and, and, And he's not just worried that, like, you know, Soylent Green is people. Like, literally, but I think he is for, everybody. Listen to me, Hatcher. You've got to tell him, silent breed is people. But he's worried that then we'll only have a means and attitude to ourselves. Yeah. To everything.

And what his worry is, is this will lead us to what he calls a certain kind of oblivion to being, right? Yeah. Is like an oblivion, like a forgetful. again, right, full circle of Plato here, like a forgetfulness of what being really is. Yes. Yeah. And we'll only see it as what it is to us, how we can access it. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, the Soiling Green analogy is funny. You know, like that's, that's an extreme, right? Where it's like, you know, the Charlton Heston movie that, you know. It's a great metaphor. And, you know, all the Plato where you never know if it's a metaphor or it's real. Yeah. I think he talks about five stages of technological development.

in that essay, and one of them is sacrifice. Yeah. And you think about a lot of, like, pagan scapegoating cycles and past efforts at garnering sacred knowledge or technology, and they involve, like, kind of brutal practices. And, you know, I think you could, you could go all the way back to, you know, ancient practices to the Nazis trying to, like, sort of do this at scale. Yeah. For, like, forbidden knowledge and technology.

And it's funny because, you know, I think Giochesterton actually draws, I think, a connection between, you know, sort of pre-scientific magic and technology. Yeah, and like human sacrifice and technology. The idea is that if we just had the right technique, we could force the world's hand to do what we want. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And certainly, I think Gerard would see something like that, too.

Yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah. And there's a way in which tech used to be like, you know, an augmentation of a human. It was like an extra appendage or something. And then, you know, I think post-information revolution, it's sort of become this like parasitization of humans. So Heidegger's, like one of Hedegers great examples is he compares like a hydroelectric dam to a medieval windmill, okay? Or a medieval water mill, okay?

Because on those, like saying the medieval versions, and I'm not saying we peaked in the 12th century or something like that. Like I'm, I'm glad my wife can vote, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But like with the, like the medieval windmill, you, it works when the wind blows. Okay, so you're like, you're going to like build something that makes you have to work along with nature. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, all right. Whereas the hydroelectric dam, for all its virtues, though, it's saying nature, I will take from you what I want and store it. Yep. So it's all on our terms. Yes. It's about how we access you, right? Not how can we work with you.

Yeah, it's mastery over nature in a way. Yeah, it's not just harmonizing with it, with nature. Yeah, yeah. And those two things are very distanced. I mean, there's the, there are two competing theories of the inevitability of human evolution or of existence on Earth. And there's the Gaia James Lovelock theory that, you know, the Earth is somehow like super resilient.

And so, like, we might come and go, but, you know, the Earth will always sort of come back. And then there's the Medea theory, which is, like, you know, we inevitably will, like, blow ourselves up. And, like, you know, maybe there's some evidence that that happened on Mars or something. Yeah, they're sort of competing. And definitely, modern tech seems to be in the category of just, yeah, being able, how do we control everything? And if you think about VR is, like, that to the limit where it's, like, the entire world that, like, we might be living in, like, is controllable. And so, I don't know, taking it, like, one step farther with the Plato thing, do you ever think, like, this is, like, we're in these,

like, biological skin suits, yeah, that are basically, like, VR headsets, and the contemplation of virtue or, you know, some other criteria that we don't fully understand are the means through which we ascend through these things into the light and become even worthy of that next step outside of the cave. Because I also thought, you know, the Heidegger thing might connect where it's like we're porting ourselves through these like low level economic production engines via technology. I believe that also kind of dovetails with a test that Plato puts the guardians through, like at the age of 30 or whatever.

If you fail, like you don't get to study metaphysics. You just like become the like the economic producer or whatever. So I think at this point is where like a Heidegger and Plato come apart. Okay, at least this is where Heidegger becomes a critic of Plato's. Okay, because he would look at something like that dialectical process in the Republic, whereby one, like, ascends to a kind of enlightenment as a quasi-technological attitude. Okay. And whereas for Heidegger, for him, the metaphor is more like architectural. Like, you build a temple and you hope someone shows up there.

Right. Okay. And a lot of his later work goes to this where he talks about how we need, we need artwork. Okay. But meaning we need art that does the work of art. And what is the work of art? Is it, it provides a place sort of like a theater where an actor could show up for us. Okay. So for Heidegger, it's like we're more passive in the process, okay, than say for Plato, where we'd be more active in the process. Like there would be, you know, an education. educational process that one could go through, right, that would get you there. Right. Whereas for Heidegger, it's like, well, if divinity is going to show up for us, right? If the transcendent is going to show up for us, then it cannot be our doing. Like, and he thinks what's happened in the modern world is because we only think of like what we can take and do and grab and process, right? We need to regain an ability just to build something that is sort of receptive rather than aggressively extracting. Do you see that?

And I think for me, I probably lean more towards Heidi Garne that. Yeah. Fascinating. Well, speaking of that, study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal, everything you need, to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs.

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and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Is the UFO a technology that sort of, you know, if there's a push and a pull outside of the cave or whatever, is the UFO some sort of pulling technology? because you talk about this

where it's this thing that it busts all of your priors. Yeah. You know, it's like you have all these like prior categorization techniques. I didn't want to talk about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Today I did, but like, you know, five years ago.

But you find yourself obsessed because it's inherently kind of uncategorizable. Yeah, that's kind of where I land with the, as it were, with the UFO is, um, it seems like something's knocking. Right. There's some, and maybe it's always been knocking at the door.

Right. You know, because we have different metaphors for it. history, but it seems like something's knocking, right? Mm-hmm. And whether we listen to it through a platonic, you know, process of dialectical improvement, or we listen to it through a sort of Heideggerian building a place where it could dwell, right? That it seems that something is trying to remind the human of something, right? That's just trying to jog our memories.

Like I like to use Plato's metaphor. And, and, and I'm not really, like I don't trust any of our metaphors about it, you know, is it an angel? Is it a demon? Is it, you know, is it, is it an elf or fairies? It seems that all of that gives our imagination too much of a pass, right? But it does seem there is some pressure on us from outside our umwelt, right, that we would do well to at at least strategize how we would listen to, yeah. Yeah. It's so fascinating. And so, like, how does any of this comport with, like, the way we discuss this stuff in a government context? because, you know, we have, like, we're talking at an extremely high abstract level of the kind of ontological truth.

And then there's, like, their government whistleblowers coming out of, you know, saying that they've retrieved UFOs, one of whom I've had on my show. And, like, you know, it was kind of hard to pull coals in his story. Like, you know, felt like, you know, pretty prima facie, at least, you know, very, very, you know, like an honest account. And so how do we square that circle? I don't know. I don't know that I can. Yeah, and because, see, for me, and this is not, I am not, like, calling anyone into question or anything like that. But, like, so, like, I have no special access to anything.

I'm just an average dude, right? Okay, right? And so I have to always ask myself, like, what's more likely, like, what this person's telling me is true? And they could be, they could be speaking of falsehood and not be lying. I'm not saying anyone's lying or anything like that. You always have to wait is, like, is this testimony true, right? against the probability that this someone, this person's been somehow deceived or et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, yeah.

And just taking like whether, you know, it's any of the whistleblowers, I'm, I don't know how I can really weigh that out. Yep. Do you know what I mean? So like, let's say, you know, we, we talk to whistleblower, you know, Roy, right? Okay. Sure. And, you know, we ask Roy, hey, you know, yeah, you've, you've been told this, this, this and this by all these people. Yeah.

It seems unlikely that they're all in on. something that seems unlikely yeah but then it seems really unlikely that these things they're telling you is true too right right yeah yeah of course this is an old argument from david hume about miracles and so we have to weigh that yeah and it seems to me like i can't even really make a meaningful comparison of those probabilities well i would i would say in the the world in which like forbidden knowledge is a real thing yes that there's some you know cleaving off of like black world science or knowledge you know the government would be attempting systematically to get that, you know, just from a game theory, geopolitical lens. You have to assign some plausibility.

Yep. To like maybe, well, the thing is as soon as we do that, and this gives me fits. So as soon as we, so I think no matter what now, you've got to have a pretty unlikely conspiracy theory. Mm-hmm. Because either, like, this has been covered up for 75 years, right? You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Or there's something really weird going on now.

it seems like now people want us to believe it. Right. So either way, you've got like a low, prima facie, low probability conspiracy through, you're going to have to take one or another, right? And then I always ask myself the question, like, you know, because of course you have to go back and forth. But like, I'm like, why are the, like, some of these people are like very high level in prosaically important government, military and science roles.

I'm like, if we are in some like multipolar new Cold War, why are you systematically sending all of these top guys to like sci up the American population. That seems crazy. Yeah. That seems crazier than, you know, as a null hypothesis, than the inverse, which is just like,

actually this has been going on for, you know, thousands of years. See, there's where I think you and I come apart. I don't know which is crazier. Sure, sure, sure. Well, I'm more in that, like, I'm waiting through the waters of speaking to all these people.

Yeah, but I think, I do think you have to say now that, I mean, it's been on the floor of the Congress and things like that. That it has to, that's got to pump the probability up a little bit, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, but not, I don't know if all the way. Yeah, right? Because.

Well, it's funny. Like, as I say things, like, people don't think correctly, I think. And so that's a sort of crazy thing for me to say. I know. But it's like you, you just say like New York Times, Congress, Schumer Amendment. You know, you say these things. somebody who holds a Q clearance and then all of a sudden they go oh credentials they go whatever you say next as far as what they believe yeah i now believe and then you could go into all these

sort of first principles like more interesting inquiries into like how reality works all what we're doing now yeah and it's like it's you know not even wrong or like unfalsifiable or like crazy or whatever because you need to somehow uh their receptors around like you know credentialism need to be like met at first. And then they're like, oh, let me listen, you know. It's like, that's just not the way you should inquire. You might have heard about some of the honest placebo studies. No. Okay, so apparently, I'm probably not getting all the details right, but apparently there are cases where there've been experiments where they told people, this is a placebo, this is an inert substance. And we're giving it to you. It still helped. It still helped. If the person giving it to them still had like the lab

coat. Yeah. Right. And, and the, it was in the right kind of packaging. Like, so, like, if some, you know, dude shows up the door and gives you a bag of pills, and it's probably not going to work, right? Yeah. But like, but like, if someone dresses up like a doctor, like an authority figure, all the credentials, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I think we have to really mistrust. Totally. Well, and there's certain people who have an a priori disposition towards magic and then others who do. And then that becomes their reality. Like, it's like the Plato thing or it's like everything I'm going to tell you is a lie. And I'm like, then why would you say that? And you get all confused. And you. And then he goes on to tell some, like, stuff that, like, there's clearly some truth in it.

Exactly. And then, you know, maybe there's some lies, but, like, you're extremely intrigued. There are layers to, like, Leo Strauss, this, you know, 20th century philosopher. He was a big, big, you know, platonist, too. But he also thought those books were full-lized. Totally. But then you'd ever know if he was writing in a coded fashion himself. And so it was like, and then, like, the people around him, like, had these, like, weird communication techniques.

And so it's this never-ending thing. And you could say the exoteric is implying meaning that doesn't exist. Right. And the esoteric is like the room and, you know, is actually empty when you get to it. And it's like it's all some coordination mechanism. Yeah. Or you could say the exoteric is throwing people off the trail and this isn't. And the more you like talk about that than we're going.

Then we're going. Then you're going. And you've created this cult. Yes. And it's. Yeah. And so I actually do this. in the book where I say, okay, using the example of the TikTok, okay, so what's my evidence of the TikTok?

Well, this, you know, seemingly very reliable Air Force pilot and, you know, said, Alex Dietrich and David Frazier, they said these things, right? Raytheon clear systems. Yeah, okay. And so I have, like, testimony from seemingly reliable people, right? Okay. And if you say, yeah, but it's like, how can you buy that? But yet, like, I only know bin Laden was shot.

Yep. Because of testimony. Media. Yeah, from the came through the media through reliable, like, Pentagon officials. I only know. And now, of course, maybe some of that stuff we shouldn't be so quick to believe, too. Do you know what I mean? But it seems to me, you've got to put it on the spectrum of believability now.

Of course. Yeah. But it's like, yeah, if you say, like, we detected a cork. whatever through like some particle accelerator i'd like take eric's word for that yeah me too yeah and eric is taking other people's word for that because he's a theoretical guy and he's not doing the experiments and so it's the consensus reality if you really get down to it can just be totally managed yeah i and i i i think i mean that that has been known since plato yeah yeah i agree and so what do i do with like say disclosure

movement stuff like that. Yeah. And the UFO is, is I'll admit, I, I now am like self-consciously aloof to it. That's cool. I like that. I'm starting to be like that too. Yeah. I had a friend tell me yesterday or two days ago, Chris Ramsey has a great channel called Area 52. He goes, I'm not really into disclosure. He's like, I'm into UFOs. And I was like, I like, I like that. Yeah. That's pretty awesome. Yeah. This whole like, dramatic process of like these people and the blah, blah, blah. And it's like, it's fascinating. And I find. some of the people very heroic and courageous and I've loved all of the people who I've been lucky to have access to on the show. But ultimately it's like, does that get you closer to some

primordial truth? Is there, you know, there are plenty of things can be true, little T, true, or whatever, and there can be ulterior motives involved as well. And it's totally, to me, it's a lens through which you can, you know, go to the deeper stuff. And some of them have, are going through their own processes and journeys. You talk to Jake Barber, David Grush, or any of these people, like, they're, it's opened up their worldview. And they're, like, you know, they're diving into, like, what they want to know about, like, reality as well. But, yeah, some of the contemporary kind of, you know, drama is not, you know, always the best in route. And right now, let's say, you know, you said, you know, we're off the air jam and I'm going to show you.

Yeah. Here's what they showed me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got the real stuff. Yeah. I would have to say, okay, but then why would I believe Jesse? Yeah, totally. Do you, you know, why are you showing me?

Yeah, why are you showing me? So it seems like, and this is like one of the frustrations, but even if you found out, you haven't found out. Right, right, right, right. Yeah. Well, that's why, you know, if I had to make a prediction, I think contact or like true, like more disclosure, you know, disclosure will be inherently this sort of jagged process. Well, you'll maybe you'll have 20% of the population still holding out saying, like, you know, this is just impossible or whatever. But, you know, say there's some big event in the next few years. my strong bias would be that that event does not come through some like power structure on down disseminated message from like government officials it's like some weird surprising thing yeah um and if it's if it's not that it won't hit people epistemically in the right way yeah because think because they'll be skeptical forever so think of it like right now evolution has been taught in public schools at least in most private schools for generations right

Right. But how many Americans believe it? Yeah, right. Not everyone. Yeah. Like the Big Bang's been taught. Yeah. How many Americans believe it? Yeah. Not everyone. You know what? So it's like you could, you could even have something become like educational orthodox. Yeah. And it doesn't necessarily move the needle for everyone. Yeah. So like what would even like disclosure look like in a way that actually had grip on people's daily lives? Totally. And then you, yeah. And then it's like, okay, you see a saucer and a hanger. The hangers at an official site. You see. some government official who you know you trust because they're cabinet level or the president unveiling the thing you have all these questions then you step inside the thing you have all these questions the scientists probably working on this stuff don't know exactly what they're looking at and have all these questions and so it becomes this never ending quest yeah um and yeah so yeah the the

philosophical question of like what is disclosure and meanwhile what you could be doing is just working on your own perceptive filter or apparatus. If you treat yourself like an, you know, an umwelt, you know, lens or whatever, work on the lens. Yeah. And so for me, you know, it becomes, you know, less, you know, what are we going to, like, not that you really ever was, like, what are we going to get the government to tell us? It's more, can I, can I come up with a philosophical, metaphysical, cognitive model?

Yep. Where it makes sense. Yeah. That, like, the, where we would expect the unexpected to happen. And I think, yeah, we can't. I think that does make perfectly good sense, right? Yeah. And so then the question now is just, okay, how do we digest that, right?

Do you know, for ourselves in our friendships, in our classrooms, all that becomes it, right? You know, I'm not looking for authorities to tell me what to do, right? Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, no, that you become limited in your ability to derive truth, if you inherently, if you do that. And I think, I don't know, I'm curious to get your take, but I think we are literally in Plato's cave. And not only all the stuff we talked about around like decibel ranges or electromagnetic wave spectrums, but look at like physics itself. There's, you know, the weak anthropic principle and there's a strong anthropic principle.

And the strong anthropic principle is like, well, you know, eventually like you'll have enough iterations that like, you know, like the universe will foster life. And then the weak anthropic principle is like the limits of our perceptive, you know, capabilities like make physics comport with our perceptive capability. Yeah, yeah. Which is so obviously true. Like, I think the idea that Plank's constant, if you were to change it slightly, like you wouldn't have a habitable earth doesn't point towards like, oh, you had like a million tries. And this was like the right try. To me, it's like physics itself is comporting to our perceptive limitations. And again, that's like an unanswerable question.

You can endlessly sort of debate that. How are we ever going to tease out the human from the non-human? Well, once we admit there's a human contribution to any of our teasing out, we're always going to be like loop it. Yes. But then the second you admit that the human, that the observer observed distinction breaks down, which like Jung would say about a bunch of people would say. Like, you then have to like look inwards.

And you don't have to look inwards. If you are this like, you know, and just a, this biochemical like meat suit, you know, happy accident, then it's like you feel sad like take an SSRI. Like you, you know, you're, you're confused about something like, you know, just learn the trite information. There's there's very little aesthetic sense as to how to decode yourself. And I do think like this to the limit ends up in this sort of endless interiority kind of self-indulgence thing. But I think a lot of people miss that today as to how to sort of grow your own abilities to perceive. That's a really good point, Jesse. I think there's a difference between this sort of really like kind of facile work on yourself thing, right?

And as opposed to like what would it be to cultivate real interiority? Yeah. And I think it's a really great distinction. Yeah. Do you think like the next epistemological or scientific paradigm involves, uh, bringing the observer into, you know, the observed, or there's something about working on us that coincides with what we perceive. I mean, this would go back to, like, alchemy itself, which a lot of the early scientists were. In a lot of ways, although we could talk about how it's gone off the rails,

right? Like, this has been, you know, one of the central philosophical paradigms since Kant, you know, where, like, once we try to tease out the numinal from the phenomenal, right, you know, that for us, as opposed to that which things are in themselves, Kant's like you'll get nowhere except ethically. Right. He thinks we can know things in themselves in terms of like moral matters, right? But that's it. And so I think much of Western philosophy since Kant has been dealing with that.

Now, it's gone off the rails really badly in many ways. Okay. But I think, and then we can look at the sciences, you know, the heart sciences, the same thing. Like, like, you know, like this idea that we're ever going to like tease out the observer from the observed. Yeah. Right. In a lot of ways, this already is the paradigm in a lot of, like, serious thought.

It's just the word just never gets out. Yes. Yeah. It's also interesting how science itself might be converging on more of a platonic worldview, where you have an increasing popularity, the work of, like, Rupert Sheldrake, you know, these morphic fields or Michael Levin, where there's this interaction between biological forms in their local information fields that dictate their morphology or function in the case of like inherited learnings that seem to transcend pure kind of genetic inheritance. And often

comports with, I mean, you even, who knows if this like theory of consciousness is correct with microtubules with, you know, Roger Penrose has, has this orchestrated objective reduction thing. But that involves these like, you know, pyramidal tubulin structures in the brain. You know, But maybe we end up just back to like Hellenic times, like talking about these like, you know, sacred geometry and stuff. Yeah. Well, you know, you know, a little off that, but, like, overlapping, you know, Sheldrick has this really interesting paper. Is the Sun Conscious? I love that. Which he answers affirmatively.

Right. And you can see similar work. I'm forgetting his name now, but an American analytic philosopher in the last few years published a paper arguing that the United States is probably a conscious entity. And both Sheldrake and this other paper are making the point that, well, if we know that a certain kind of organization causes the emergence of consciousness in us, and I think whatever you think consciousness is, it's hard to deny that this or where these organizational structures show up, you get consciousness. Well, Sheldrake makes the point, well, it looks like we can see those kinds of organizations in other places. And he makes a case maybe the sun, et cetera, et cetera, right? And so then I think what you're doing is you're getting a universe suffused with consciousness, right? But in a way that isn't like irresponsibly spooky either.

Yeah. I think that's very important. Yeah. Well, it's like sort of fractals of consciousness on up. And there's a sort of cybernetic village or something. And then there's the individual nodes. Yeah. And even, you know, if you think of us as like individual nodes, that totally comports with Shell Drake's stuff around.

You know, if you grow an organic crystal structure, you can then grow that crystal structure much faster on an ongoing basis. Or, like, look at athletic accomplishments, which is similar to as morphicresidents. The one guy breaks a four minute mile than a bunch of years. Exactly, the banister effect. And if you think about how computers work in, you know, kind of node systems, download times are much faster than upload times. So the first time you do a thing, it's going to be really hard and it's going to be, you know, really painful. And then the second time anybody even related to you in your node network does it because they're, you know, querying it from some central monad repository of information, that download is going to be much faster. I did not know that with a download upload.

Yeah. It's interesting, right? Like literally like the way and what and then you get in all sorts of interesting stuff around, you know, what is DNA? It looks like binary code. And what you're moving to there is then like a fundamentally networked world. Yes. Yeah. Yes.

Yeah. And but in a way that comports with literal observable side. I mean, I'm buddies with this guy, Jim Keller, who's this legendary chip maker, like the iPhones and, you know, sorry, the chips in many of our iPhones, like literally are based off of his architecture. He worked at Tesla. And he's like, it is remarkable how much, you know, a human, the human looks like a semiconductor in many ways. And he goes through all these, like, you know, specifics around that. And like how, you know, we're like conductive. And then he goes through, you know, the DNA and like, you know, it's like binary codes, like transistors.

And then, and then this, you have this burgeoning field of quantum biology. And so you have to wonder, are we getting information from, like, non-local, you know, like William James would say, like, there's some sort of transmission going on. Yeah. And if you're put a person in a fair day cage, uh, it's time to refresh your yard during spring backyard days at the Home Depot. Get low prices guaranteed on propane grills starting at $179, like the next grill three-burner gas grill, or get $50 off a select Weber Spirit grill and bring big flavor to your backyard. Then set the scene with Hampton Bay string lights that bring it all together. Shop spring backyard days for seven days at the Home Depot.

Now through May 6th, Exclusion supplies to homedipo.com slash price match for details. The fact that they can think points against that theory, because if you're getting it from a traditional RF signal, the Faraday cage would kill the RF signal. But if you get into these weird, spooky new science called, extended electrodynamics where you have these sort of scalar, you know, field wave types or whatever, which a lot of people seemingly, you know, high up in government,

seem to get behind, then maybe the sun is, it is a scalar wave generator. And then maybe we're getting information from the sun and getting information from all sorts of places. maybe the Aristotelian model of the sun, you know, being the source of like knowledge is just, it's just true. Yeah. And I think on a lot of that stuff, too, is like, okay, without getting hung up on, like,

the Aristotelian science. Because I think as soon as we say that, like, are we, are we geocentrist? No, no, that's not the point, right? The point, though, is, is the world a set of interlocking conscious hierarchies? Right. I think that's the question. Yeah. And that seems, Aristotle seems to be, I mean, you write about it that, that, um, uh, the existence of non-human intelligence or aliens totally comports with, uh, an Aristotelian worldview.

I mean, they're not for Aristotle, you know, I mean, literally the planets are intelligences, right? So they're not flying ships or something like that. But the idea that things are in a way affected or managed by non-human intelligence for Aristotle is apparent in his view, yeah. Do you think that, you know, AI is like all the rage right now that maybe our world is being sort of managed by an AI system that knows how did, you know, the Jacques-Villet control system thing. It knows how to nip at the herd. So like a nuke, you know, is about to go off. It shows up. You know, a human node like reaches a certain state of consciousness. It shows up. And it's like this sort of like earth sustenance kit. And we're not seeing the aliens. We're seeing like the envoys that they the von Neumann replicators that they sent out to like manage us. So there's a film that I mean I saw in high school, right? That like it's been with me since then, right? And there's, it's based on a novel. Failsafe.

Okay. And I think it was originally made in like 1963, 64. Okay. So it's a Cold War film about a nuclear war that gets started by accident. Okay. And throughout the film, like really what we're being shown is how humans have become utterly irrelevant to the process. Okay. Like, like, it's, it's in like there's, before, early in the film, there's like, people are regretting that we have to use humans.

Okay. All right. So the human is becoming irrelevant. And it's very clear in the film. And this is before in the popular imagination, artificial intelligence is a thing. That's not a proposal of the film at all. Mm-hmm. But already just.

based on regular mechanical operations, the film was proposing that we are being run. We are being run by things that we put into play. Okay. And in the kind of rationality this is lending us to is like, it's sort of like, I think in a lot of ways, AI is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Like the more, the more we think in terms of certain kinds of mechanical intelligence, right, by machines. Do you see that? Yeah. And so I already in the 1950s and 60s people were worried that we're putting technological balls into play that will come back to us as if gods. Do you should do? Yeah. Yeah. Right. Um, there's a some I refer to in the book is a very underappreciated 20th century philosopher, Gunther Anders. Um, this is definitely something he's worried about that we're like, like, like, he thinks we're kind of, we're, we're creating Prometheus. Yeah. We're letting

Prometheus loose. Yes. And then in these technologies and then those things will come back and run us. Yeah. It's like creating a gallum or summoning a demon or something. And then you sort of obsolete yourself in the process. And you can, already in the 50s and 60s, before there was any hint of AI in the popular imagination. Yep. This notion of human obsolescence was already in play. Totally. That we are going to make ourselves irrelevant to the world that we're making. The best you can do at that point, is let the program run and probably try to think about what makes you unique from the machine. Yeah, exactly. And then try to ascend out of, you know, whatever paradigm you were existing in.

But I do, yeah, this is obsession with AI, VR, whatever. It's like if we're in a cave, why would you port yourself into like a lower level, more bit compressed cave? We're like demoting ourselves. You're demoting yourself. And like we're willfully doing that when like this whole thing could be a test. Yeah. And so I always found that so fascinating with this sort of obsession with like, we need to build like higher fidelity world.

Like if you watch Ready Player One, that's not like a good world. Like the guy's living in a shanty town. And then like the AI VR thing is like an escape. Yeah. So a lot of times people ask me so, you know, am I worried about AI, et cetera, et cetera. And my replies, I think the game was done 80 years ago. Right. I think like I would even look at things like the Manhattan Project where you had this thing, this, this,

technological hyper object took off. And like nobody really knew what was going on. Yeah. Like think of like, you know, if you watch the film Oppenheimer, like you get three different answers from Oppenheimer why he wants to do this. Yeah. So like it's who's running this now? Yeah.

The technology is running this. Prometheus is running it. Completely. Yeah. And it's such a fascinating time where it was like clearly this big inflection point. He had such interesting philosophical kind of objections. around what he was doing. He was sort of reluctantly doing it,

but he, like, you know, he needed to do it on some level. Because it's just going to happen. It was just going to happen or something. And then he kind of decamped from that. And it was like, Teller was more in that sort of, it's going to happen. So we might as well sort of build it ourselves.

And it is this very Promethean, Faustian sort of story. And it's ultimately kind of tragic. And then it also, you have to wonder at that time, because that's when all the UFOs pop up. Exactly. in our visible reality, you know, at least according to all the lore and there's a lot of lore. We're under this new interpretation, like appearing as technology, right? Yeah.

Yes. Well, it's also like maybe, you know, to the extent the guardians want to keep the test going or something. Yeah, yeah. If we build like, you know, a firecracker in the cave or we build a bomb in the cave, they're like, they're trying to like defuse like, you know, some of these things. Keep the test going or whatever. And, you know, it's like, does something super unprecedented happen when we discover, you know, the myth makers? When we develop the perceptive apparatuses through high energy output or through some sort of ascended consciousness to, like, see who's, like, messing with us. Yeah. And does that just unravel reality? And think of, like, the cosmic meaning of, like, humanity discovering that we could take ourselves out.

Do you see, you know what I mean? Like, it has to change us in ways that none of us have probably really dealt with. Yes. In our unconscious, right? Yes. That we now know collective suicide is a possibility through humanity. Yes. Which was not an option until the 1940s.

Yeah. And so what, like, how does that, how is that a firecracker going off in our own belt? Yes. Like, how is that going to change our ability to see what's there or, or miss. what's there, et cetera, et cetera. It has to have an effect. This is part of Young's point, yeah. Totally.

And so what role does religion play in all of this? Because I love you talk about this, like Janus, you know, the two-sided face or whatever, that religion plays a dual role of sort of sending you down the wrong path at times, but also pointing you to the sacred. Yeah. And so, yeah, well, how do you view religion? There's this really interesting passage from Aristotle that I use in the book where he's just gotten to the end of his natural theology. So he's just given his argument for an unmoved mover. And along with that comes his whole kind of romantic cosmology, you know, of his. And I mean that in a dismissive way, right?

But like where everything's revolving, trying to get to the unmoved mover and all this. Okay. And then he says this shows that our ancestors, our most ancient ancestors were not. wrong when they posited that there was a divinity surrounding nature and things happen according to the means of divinity or something like that. But then he says, however, that got co-opted into stories that were told for legal purposes. Okay. So it kind of gives you a Nietzschean genealogy right there of the going Greek religion, right? And then he ends the passage by saying, but we can be interested in these more primordial tales because they now fit with what we're discovering philosophically.

So it seems for Aristotle, religion can go two ways, right? It can be co-opted into these legal political things, right? Or it can be a way of sort of, I think what he's saying here is like a kind of intuitive revelation can be out in front of what we can prove scientifically, philosophically, and kind of guide the inquiry in a way. Yeah. So he's worried about how the religious interpretation of this stuff. can be co-opted, right? But it doesn't have to be either. And you have, you know, speaking of true knowledge as some sort of sense memory.

Yeah. That is not, you know, the five sort of lower senses. Yeah. And, you know, we should probably talk about the myth of error, which, you know, the end of the Plato's Republic, which you talked about. That is such a fascinating myth. Also kind of, I think, dogmatically taken as allegory by, you know, modern scholars. Yeah. What do you, what do you make of that story?

And maybe rehash the story for the audience. Yeah. So in the in the Republic, Err was a virtuous person. He dies in battle for the city that does all the Greek good stuff, right? And he goes, he goes, you know, and then it's all wound up with fairly conventional, you know, Athenian views about, about the afterlife. So he crosses the river sticks and, you know, all the right gods are there. and but then it comes to a point where, um, there's kind of a drawing of lots, you know,

for where you're going to go in the next life. Okay. And what's interesting is one of the great rewards of the virtuous is they don't care what lot they get. Because they know no matter what, they'll be okay. Because they're, they're going to have the, the, the, the excellences that carried them through, they'll have it, right? Okay. So that's interesting. All right. And so, you know, we, everyone gets their assigned position. for the next life. And then they return. And interestingly, we mentioned this earlier,

they all have to sleep next to the river of forgetfulness before they return. But the only one who doesn't drink is er. Okay. So the virtuous person remembers. Right. And now, no, one, the virtuous person is indifferent to their lot in temporal life. Okay. Why?

Because they remember, right? Because they know there's something else. Do you see that? So I know people will make something of it. Is this a recollect? of a near-death experience for Plato or maybe like the Illusian mysteries. Maybe. Like I'm perfectly open to that, right?

I don't really have the classical scholarship to weigh in on that, right? But I do think what we're being told there is there's a kind of confidence, right, in the virtuous person, right? And I kind of in touch with, right? I just put it in touch with being with the good that the virtuous person has. Yes. Yeah. You know what I mean? So that is to take it allegorically, but it's in a way that would make a concrete difference for conduct.

Yes. Do you think that played it? Because, you know, I do, I look at the L. Eucinian mysteries. And I know, you know, it's probably hard to say historically, whether these, you know, what exactly happened here. Brian Moore Rescue, it's a great book. They were definitely up to something. You have this place 13 miles northwest of Athens, this, you know, considered the spiritual capital. That, you know, you had Greek leaders and.

Roman emperors saying this sort of held together, the fabric of society. And you'd have these sort of, you know, guardians back then, if you will. Plato, Socrates, Sophocles. Alcibiades was famously in trouble for talking about the mysteries when he wasn't, you know, he was at a festival. First of a fight club, right? Yeah. Exactly. Don't talk about it. And they all undergo these sort of, they drink the Keckian, which is maybe as speculated by Brian Murrescu, this sort of ergot that contains LSD, this sort of fungal derivative. What was wine in the ancient world, right? And could it have been spiked with mushrooms or other visionary plants, hallucinogenic herbs, toxins?

I think that is a really interesting question. And that unveils this sort of greater ontological reality, or maybe they experience noesis, you know, kind of primordial knowledge or something. Do you think that was real and informed Plato? I have no reason to rule that out. Does that make sense? You know what I mean? Yeah.

Like, in a lot of ways, it's not like, you know, it's, it's not like we discovered, you know, like peyote at Woodstock. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, this stuff has been around, right? You don't even. I think there's, you know what I would be surprised if that wasn't. And we know it's been around religion and all that, right, right? Okay.

I mean, in like various pagan religion, et cetera, such. Sure. So, so I'd be surprised if there wasn't something like that going on. Does that make sense? It does. It does. It's just so funny how we, in the modern. an age of disenchantment paint,

Plato over with this broad brush of like, it's all allegory, he is the father of Western civilization, it's the birth of rationalism. Yeah. And it's like, well, I don't know. I think the guy was going to elusis and drinking some weird shit. Especially when you read some of the dialogues like, Phadris and the symposium, desire and love are running a lot.

Right. Okay. And I think that's important to note, right? Yeah. And I think whatever the mystery, were, right? It does seem like it worked like this is like you, you got like a cheat code to the goal line, right? And then you, then you go back and spend the rest of your life trying to think you're way back to it. Do you see what I do? Yeah. Yeah, you, you immediately, like,

can't fully recollect what you saw with the light. It's almost like, I was actually talking to David Grush about this in my interview with him and he was like, it's almost like the symbol rate is too slow. Like, you literally can't even communicate it in modern words. How do you show the light by which we see other things? Right? Right. So you end up, you know, maybe Jesus was one of these people, maybe not, but like prophets famously speak in riddles and allegories and parables. And it's, you have to parse their work. I mean, you get the sense, you know, we were talking before the show, Jacques Valet, you know, was just on Joe Rogan. And, you know,

And, you know, when I speak to Jacques, I get the sense that he knows a lot more than he can even communicate with this stuff. Yeah. And he speaks in these sort of riddled, coded parables. And not just because of like security clearance. Like it's not articulable. It's inarticulable. And like, well, the message will, you know, it's like the people with ears to hear. Like the message will reach the right.

Yeah. People. But it's not like this thing where it's like, this happened at this time. You get it now? This is it. That's it. You know, it's like, no, if you kind of knew, if you knew that, you'd ask. more questions and it's all it's it's just the whatever the truth is is like inherently yeah hard to

you know i've i've been reading uh a lot of uh hp lovecraft's horror stories lately yeah right right maybe more than i should but um it's interesting like like so lovecraft has this like really pessimistic dark view of the world yeah okay yeah but yet there's always this other thing that's operating that's inarticable. Do you know, and so it seems like, like, even someone like Lovecraft, who has this just dark, dark view of the universe and it's hopeless. There's still this like Schopenhauerian will operating, but you can't, he can't articulate it for you, the characters can't articulate it.

It's always, it was there, right? Yeah. And I think, I think, although I don't think Plato has that dark sense, but you still have a similar thing in Plato, right? Yeah. And I think a lot of us have this sense that there's another factor. Yeah, totally. Or like when I was speaking to Diana Pesolka, she said, like, Christians are not of this world.

And it was both this very hopeful statement, you know, where it's like there's other stuff out there. You know, and like maybe the kingdom of heaven is real. But it was this extremely on the flip side of that. It was almost not nihilistic because you have that other thing there. Yeah. But it was like, this world sucks. And it isn't going anywhere super positive. And at most, you can, like, save yourself and then, like, hope to tip off the initiation

of, like, a few other people or whatever. And that's it. You know, it's like the idea of saving this world is that's tough. And I always find it true to me, too, when, I don't know, when somebody has some super virtue signally, like, I'm going to save a world. Think about, like, the 20th century is sort of the age of, ideology and utopian sort of, you know, like visions. And they all ended up in like mass death. Yeah. And like extremely dysfunctional. So like that, the technocratic solutions don't

really work. So, uh, ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At first citizens bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for citizens bank. At a certain point in the republic, um, I forget whether it's GlauConnor, Adam. You know, it says, well, they've just got through, you know, some of the absurdities, you know, like, we're going to have to share wives and we're going to take your kids, you want to raise your own kids. And like, well, like sex went, sex will only happen once a year, like a rigged lottery at spring break kind of thing. Right. Okay, all this stuff. And one of the guys says, I don't want to, this is terrible. No one's going to do this. Like, this is unworkable, right. And Socrates replies by saying, oh, yeah, you're right. But it's the ideal. Okay. And he says, if I paint. you a picture of the most beautiful human form. And you said, well, no one looks like that. That still wouldn't mean it wasn't the most. And I don't think Plato's necessarily saying, like, the rig spring break lottery for

mating is like the way. That's not the point. But the point is, like, you are not going to find the ideal here. Yeah. Yeah. It's not here. And so whatever your expectations for it are, they're off. Yeah.

Right. Okay. And think of how in the Republic, right, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, what we talked about earlier, the problem of founding. Like, we're not going to make. an ideal happen here. It's always going to collapse on itself. And in the Temaeus, which is sort of a sequel to the Republic, right? It's like the day after the party. And Socrates says, hey, I, I'm troubled that we couldn't see the ideal in the real, right? We never got to a concrete instance of it, right?

So you assemble some, some politicians to say, you know, tell me what the ideal city would be. And the closest he gets to an answer is from Crichtius, who tells him a myth, another another good lie about this great war between ancient Athens and in Atlantis, right? And when, but, but once again, it's like, it's, it's sketchy, you know, like, it was heard by Solon in Egypt at a children's party from a priest whose name means deception and all this. Okay, so it's like, Plato's saying, we don't really ever get to see the ideal in, in the concrete world, right? And then, and then you get this creation myth, again, right, in the Tamaas, where this world is just a symbol of this other thing. It's a symbol of another thing. And think of it, symbols, again, don't really represent.

They help you recollect something. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, we're like a simulacra or like a fallen version of the thing. Yeah. That's so, yeah, it's fascinating. Right. But also, though, I think it's a fair perennial criticism with Plato that, like, there are consequences to saying this world is worthless. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's why, I mean, and maybe I'm wrong in interpreting him this way, but I think the postmodern simulation theory is extremely nihilistic. It's like, okay, you know, we're all on a simulation, play Grand Theft Auto. Like, that's, that's bad. And then I, my sense is that in Plato's case, it's more meaningful. Yeah, I could think of no better metaphor to prepare

people to have bad lives. Right. Than, like, the simulation. Simulation theory, right. So you're like, oh, you're playing a video game, nothing matters, you know? But then there's this other thing where it's like you're, you might be in somewhat of a kind of video game. Like, yeah, physics might be like tuned to your, you know, your perceptive apparatus and like, yeah, you're being sort of tested and, you know, that you're seeing these simulacra. Like you're not seeing the ideal forms or whatever. But there's another level. And the other level involves goodness. And, you know, and so I don't know.

I mean, I would hope that that interpretation of Plato is correct. and then I don't know if I'm correct and, you know, believing that, but... You would not get trouble for me. Okay, well, thanks. Awesome. So Glau Kohn also says, when speaking about the cave, he says, are there protocols that allow us to ascend outside of the cave? And I asked Jacques Valais this. I said, are there protocols?

And he said, he's like, yes, there are. And then, I don't know. He went on to, you know, again, speaking, you know, typically kind of coded. fashion. Do you think there are protocols? I mean, I mean, I don't know that there's anything fancier than what you have in like your basic Greek ethics, right? You know what I mean? Like, don't, don't allow a rational passion around your life, right? Know thyself, right? Do you know what mean? Like those are the protocols? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, it's certainly in the Republic in Aristotle's nicomacian ethics, those are the protocols. Right. Right. Right. Yeah.

It's so funny because in modern UFO world, lots of junk food is probably not good for that. I agree. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's like, yeah, like maybe it's often I find when I speak to people who are like really into like theurgy or like, you know, like celestial ascent or whatever. Yeah. It's like they've got to just fix a bunch of local things in their life. Yeah. And they say the ascent thing is just this escape thing. I've fallen prey to this in the past where I'm like, it would be really cool to like shoot up on a UFO into like some other realm or whatever, like, you know, Enoch style or, you know, whatever. But like, I do think reality is probably, the cave is probably constructed super deliberately. Yeah. Whereby, you know, whatever issues you're facing have to be solved carmically in this world in like a very just banal local sense.

Yeah. So I'm not trying to set myself up to be some model or something like that, okay? but I was talking to, I was at a conference several years ago, and I was talking to some, like, very, very, you know, high achieving scientists, neuroscientists who were looking at the psychedelic questions. Okay. And they were talking about, like, all the benefits for, like, marriage

and things that were being found out around some of these things and, like, overall stuff. And one of them was a very good friend of mine, I asked him afterwards, I said, so, it's just a lot of what you're talking about there just sounds like what I've come to just thinking about stuff for like 20 years. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he was like, yeah, exactly.

It was like, yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah, you know. Yeah. And it seems like, it seems like the original protocol was a kind of life. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. I have a friend who says like life is like surfing. Psychedelics are like snowboarding. Yeah. Snowboarding, you get really hurt. Yeah. And you have to start at the top of the mountain and you got to go down. You got to make it all the way down.

Yeah. Surfing's just this sort of well-earned thing. where you have to like catch each and every wave or whatever. And it does feel like there's so much missed in like modern psychedelic conversation where it's clearly this non-specific amplifier of good and bad. Yeah. And I believe in not stigmatizing it. I believe in it in the context of like desperate, you know, PTSD-ridden veterans and stuff. And then simultaneous to both of those things, there are no shortcuts. And I don't really believe in like it in its most escapist for. where it's like I'm having issues.

I need to stamp stamp it out with ayahuasca. Like no, yeah, just go through the pain. Even going around the, not just the second, I'm just looking for a protocol in general, right? It seems like, you know what I mean? Like there's a way, there's, there's something besides any sort of cheat code too. I don't mean to like,

do something by calling it a cheat code. And I think there is this, you know, this program of living. that has been in the conversation for thousands of years, right, that maybe we were too quick to walk away from. Yes. Right. Yeah.

And it's almost like some of the people that I feel like perform best in the cave, like, are the most aware of how shitty the world is. And they just, they just, you know, make the changes necessary to, like, succeed in the, you know, whatever operating system we're, like living in. Yeah. And if you, if you make a commitment to. you know, live a kind of contemplative life. Like you're worried, you're more worried about what's true.

Yeah. Do you what I mean? And that's going to help you cut through your own BS in ways. And it's going to maybe remove a lot of the static in the background. Yes. You can hear some things. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Kind of increasing the signal to noise ratio, which, you know, that's a very hard thing to do. To let's say, I guess, like discernment. That's what that is. Yeah. And seeing low-level things. that you're encountering as simulacra of higher things, I think helps.

And then there's sort of this Silla in Carybdis where, you know, Carl Jung talks about this in his book on synchronicities, where it's like, if you put all faith in synchronicities, like at some point, you're probably just going to like be in this solipsistic, like, getting what you want from like your reality will just like wholesale conform to your own beliefs. You'll think you're living in some hologram or whatever. And then on the flip side, if you don't, if you don't, if you don't, you know,

impugned any sort of meaning, you know, then there's like, that's like an issue, you know, too. So it's like there's this silly proibbdis.

It's narcissism versus paranoia. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And so it's, it's clearly this like, you know,

it's an art. It's not a science. It's a sort of aesthetic thing. And so I guess my point is, is like, if you ask about protocols, it's like, you know,

the Greeks were not, they didn't hide this, right? Here's, you know, here's what we're recommending to you. Like, like, live in a,

moderate way, right? Like, like, like value truth over other things, such, et cetera. And then that's like the path of insight. Do you have anything to say? I won't ask this if you don't, but on the monolith as like a symbol, I thought of maybe asking that. Because like it's brought up in the Pesolka book. It's brought up in Girard, actually, in the sacred and the, sacred and the violence and the sacred. It is. It is. Yeah. I don't have any sense of how to interpret it. Okay. But it does seem to be a symbol of like really humane importance. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting.

It represents like in 2001 Space Odyssey, you have the monolith, which is like, it's like, yeah, it inspires tech innovation. But then there's this idea, there's this like kind of hermeneutic reading of 2001 where it's actually a screen. Yeah, the two thousand, you know, proportions all line up.

The proportions all. It's actually like the, the cinematic, like the movie age is the monolith. And so the monolith is somehow the noble mythology of the future. And that's the Pesolka's book starts out about how like media shapes our understanding of what we see. And maybe even literally like Jacques Valle talks about, you know, maybe these aren't space aliens. But if we start to believe that enough, you know, they'll appear. Like this sort of egregore model of consensus reality where reality is actually just a consensus collapsing from. It's not this sort of objective.

I mean, I think we can, not in a magical way, but we can pretend things into existence. I agree. Yeah. So like, you know, you walk in the room and say, hey, Jim, how are you doing today? And I'm going to say, I'm doing fine, whether I feel fine or not. Yeah. It's like some contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers, you know, talk about like we're always performing for this big other that's in the room. Yeah.

But big other is something we've pretended into existence. Yes. Right. But now it's here. And like to act like I wouldn't feel a little weird if you didn't say, I'm doing fine, Jim. When I ask how you're doing, I'd be lying. So big others here, even though we know it's just something we pretended to existence. Totally.

We can pretend things into existence that then have a downward effect on us, right? Not unlike our technologies. If I have some fake smile I put on for the next three hours, I think statistically, like, I'm going to be like a little happier or whatever if I, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So and then again, and then you're like, okay, if that's true. science is actually like the most political because science is sort of the modern mythology of today it's the thing we it's the thing we hold most sacred yeah it involves a founding myth you know the big being it involves rituals you know people with lab coats or whatever and they sort of priestly citadel or whatever remember the honest possebo's those those symbols yes of science work they really work and that's something we've pretended into does you think we see a shift um into kind of you know there's talks of a re-enchantment and You know, this is from the Max Weber, German sociologists, the age of disenchantment,

which we seem to, I think, be coming out of, like, Richard Dawkins and all these guys, who were, like, you know, hardcore, like, atheist materialists. That does seem to be kind of ending. And you have Christians, like Rod Dreher writing about this, and, like, you have a lot of people talking about this sort of re-enchant. I mean, I did not expect in starting this channel. I started it, actually. It wasn't even originally about you. UFOs and then I started to cover UFOs. I didn't think it would get this big on the UFO thing, but people are so fascinated by. So, I mean, I think you're right. There is, I mean, this is bad arm share sociology, right? I think you're right. There's an openness that wasn't there, you know, say in like the early 2000s. Like when when the big trend then was, you know, the new atheists and all that, right? Okay. So I think that that's, there's going to be a difference between the, the Gen Zers from the millennials there.

you know right because like the millennials kind of were coming on line in the middle of the of the the richard dockins craze now like the gen zers are coming on line in the middle of this right so i do agree with you and i think it's i think there's a healthy openness to enchantment but i also worry though too that it could become an unhealthy openness to mystification too you know what i mean we're like just any enchantment's going to do now anything goes anything goes yeah or or even um an openness to maybe the most unhealthy versions of religion and things like that. Yep. So I worry that like, you know, the much abused pendulum swing metaphor, right? But I do worry that the swing could go to the irrational. Yep. Right. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah. Yeah. I do as well. Yeah. And look, you can, you can see in the UFO world, like some people will go for anything pro UFO, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And they get super defensive where they're like, this is, this is, this is, real. UFOs are real. Yeah. I'm like go on the sort of press circuit thing and that's all they want. It's like, it's more of like a political campaign. Yeah. And it's not this sort of egoless search for truth. So I do worry, you know, that our like our recovery from materialism could could slip into a kind of anti-enlightment irrationalism too. Yes. Yes. Yeah, definitely could. What do you think if Plato were here today? And he saw the UFO thing, the AI thing. Like, he saw all this sort of like these really intense movements. Yeah. That involved secret technology. They involve, you know, kind of asymmetric tail risk.

Yeah, yeah. But they also involve the saving of humanity. Yeah. What do you think he would say? I think he would mistrust the whole deal. I love it. I think he would. That's awesome.

Hey, welcome to your cave, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he would say, yeah, because it's probably like a lot of these things point chariastically at the truth, but they're all being used politically. They're all sort of political footballs or whatever, so it's like. And I think, so I read the Republic as this is a manual for political skepticism. Mm, I love that. And I think he would look at all this and say, you know, the, we've seen this movie before, guys.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, there are very few people, I think, who truly search for truth in a sort of transpolitical way, where it's like it transcends self-gain or, you know, desire for, you know, dominion over others or the world or whatever. And, yeah, I think that's like the, that's the least commoditized thing in the world. Yeah, it's probably the one thing you can't commodify. Yeah. You can't do it. You can't do it.

And it's tough because it's not reward. to, you know, in this world. We were talking earlier, like, before getting here and you were, like, asking me about, like, the show. And I was like, I don't know, man, like, existential crisis. Like, you know, the more it becomes this economically self-sustaining thing or whatever, it's sort of impossible to unbound it from that. And then, and then all of a sudden that, like, leaks into, like, just the pure truth-seeking. Right.

And it's a standard that no podcast ever holds itself, too. or whatever, where it's like this intellectual entertainment circuit or whatever. But somehow on the UFO topic, I want to hold myself to this standard. And I think we should be held to this standard where if you're not providing incremental evidence every single show or whatever, you're kind of not really, then you're just like, you're talking to these talking heads. And they're just saying the same shit. And they're inserting themselves into the conversation.

The whole thing's kind of lame. So, yeah, I'm sort of actively, like, trying to think. think like how do how do you do what I'm trying to do in a in a like in a capitalist world and context or whatever I don't know prior to the revolution right how do you do this yeah yeah so I mean okay for for me this is going to sound maybe paradoxical I trust myself because I have changed my mind on very big ticket stuff yeah certain points in my life okay what and now you might think know that would mean you mistrust yourself because you've been wrong before.

What makes you think you're right this time? But it makes me trust myself more because it's like, well, I think I could admit to myself that I was wrong in ways that might even be embarrassing to me in certain circles. Do you see that? Yeah. And so I think, you know, you can trust, well, I mean, let's remember there's a cave, so you really can't trust anything on a screen. Right.

Okay. But like, implicitly, right? But like, I think you can trust people more the degree to which they have actually changed their mind. I agree. And admitted it publicly and said, I was wrong, et cetera, et cetera. Do you know what I mean? And I think as long as you were truly open to changing your mind.

Yeah. Right. And, of course, and only you will know that, right? Like in your, you know, as you lie awake at night worrying, right? Yeah. Only you will know that. Yeah. Could I change my mind?

And have I changed my mind. Yeah. I think that's that, I think that maintaining that openness to being like utterly debased by the truth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's the most important intellectual virtue. Well, I think it's not only important to do in a proxy for how intellectually honest somebody is, but it's probably any search for like Big T truth sort of ends up. It's like the bridge over the river Kwai or whatever where you spend your whole time

trying to build this bridge and then you realize, you know, it's like the alchemist. You realize it was within or, you know, it's this sort of, you've been extremely ignorant of like these core truths. Because all truth seeking, everything. in life is leveraged by somebody's internal psychology. Everything. Everything. And it's all, so it's like the UFO thing is so, it's so, it's often very escapist. It's often the people are interested in sort of left hand path, kind of a cult stuff, you know, and it's like, it's not, it's not always like great, like the impetus for behind a lot of these things. And so I think the earnest

inquiry into this stuff is if that's, you know, part of your path is fine. And then there's some sort of coming to terms with, you know, often, let's like the, you know, St. Francis of Assisi, where it's like this forcing function towards good. Yeah. And, yeah, I don't know. It's fascinating. So, um, I think one of the most profound moments in philosophy is the,

the very first line of the preface of Nietzsche's genealogy of morals, where he says, we knowers are least well known to ourselves. Okay. And it's direct kind of, you know, F you to Socrates, you know, the know thyself, right? you know the unexamined life's worth on is not worth living to say well have you really inquired like have you really looked into your own like irrational biases right you like your own needs that might be fulfilled by all this right do you know what I mean and I think and especially something like with the UFO is I think you really need to be open to like to like how my own unconscious could be gaming this for me

100% it's the the young line like uh you know uh you call it you call it your you know, you call it fate until you reconcile with your subconscious or whatever. Exactly. You know, it's a good line. And yeah. And it's, uh, it pre-leverages everything. And if you don't admit that, it's definitely doing it to you. If you do admit that, then maybe it loses a little bit of power and you have some sort of objectivity around it.

But I do find that as the dirty little secret in all of UFOology is like everybody, and I mean everybody has some sort of autobiographical thing in their past or reason for being into it. and the ones that I find often the most honest actors, and certain people maybe can't talk about these things publicly because they do come from, you know, specific positions. Yeah. But everybody's got a little bit of that. And it's probably true of our political views, our religious views, et cetera, et cetera.

And that doesn't mean these things need to be abandoned, but it does mean we have to like be aware of where our cognitive weak spots are. Totally. And make sure we're not being exploited. Yeah. I flipped from being pretty diehard liberal growing up. up and I still am I guess anti neo conservatism or whatever um so that was you know where I think the macro shifted what's that mom fewer people there was a bomb fewer people yeah yeah bomb fewer people

I was always you know I'm still consistent on that yeah exactly um and so maybe there's some sort of like neo conservative conservative neoliberal alliance or something and I'm sort of anti that or whatever but like I also shifted I've also become like more a little more right wing and um you know I I often trust people who have had shifts like that because I'm like oh you're willing to like just kind of throw out your own ego question yourself because you probably had to eat a lot of crow with some friends oh yeah I still do I have friends who like went to college with me and they're like what's wrong with you dude like yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and you look I have to eat a lot of crow on the right wing is a lot of crick you know there's yeah there are issues but both sides I can't remember if

he's still alive or not but it was a very important contemporary philosopher named Hillary Putnam and Putnam was famous for changing his mind. Yeah. Yeah. And at one point, I believe there was an interview or something with him where he said, look, I thought the point was to be right not to be consistent. Yeah. Yeah.

Totally. Yeah. And it should, like, I think the best way to get to truth is this dialectical thing. Yes. Where you play with falsity. You're like, you don't know. Like, you, but you assume a belief that you think is kind of too radical or beyond the pale or ridiculous.

And in many cases, like the Pesulke, or the Carl Jung thing, you're like, actually, I think there's something real here. Yes. And then in other cases, you play with it, and you're like, oh, that doesn't make sense. Like, I'm going to discard that. But a priori concealing yourself from, quote, unquote,

misinformation as deemed by some authority figure is grounds for, like, horrible critical thinking and being manipulated. Yeah. Hegel, like, conscious, like, he's really dismissive of the fear of being wrong. Mm. Yeah. And there's like, there's kind of a risk. like there's like we have to be willing to like go on what he calls the highway of despair

anywhere like like to constantly have our views like wrecked yeah right to make any progress i love that yeah do you think some of these philosophers i always go back and forth this is me being pre-leveraged by my own biases here so i'll admit and the whole show is but like that is your show yeah it is totally yeah yeah you can't get around that yeah yeah yeah exactly but um like Hagel, I think of, you know, I think there's a book called like Hegel in the Hermetic tradition. Yeah, yeah. And he was like friends with like Jacob Baum or like, you know, sort of contemporaries. And like, you read bomb stuff. You read like, you know, the Aurora and stuff. And it's like, it's like really trippy, interesting stuff. And you hear like rumors. He might have been like a rosicrucian and like part of, you know, secret societies and stuff. Do you, how much do you think some of these philosophers like maybe Hegel being a good example dabbled in like the, you know, more sotot. Eric. Look, I think they all had private lives. Yeah. You know what I mean? And, and, you know, if you found out that some prominent, you know, philosopher at, I have no one in mind here, okay, some prominent philosopher at, at prestigious University Z, let's say, right, today, you know, was like a 33 degree Mason or something like that, that wouldn't be entirely surprising to you. No, totally. Yeah. So I don't doubt that you could find, and it's certainly like those sorts of groups.

are all over, you know, the Enlightenment and things like that. Yeah. So I would not be surprised if, like, Hegel had some dablings of that sort. Yeah. Yeah. And it's fascinating. You have Jacques Vlake, you know, calling his working group on UFO, Uofology, studying UFOs with Jalen Heinek and a bunch of these guys in the 70s, the Invisible College.

He even named his book, The Invisible College, which is homage to, you know, Robert Boyle. But originally these were... A less than subtle hint, right? Yeah, less than subtle hint. These are originally Rosicrucian ideas. Now, with, using Hegel as an example. And so, yeah, maybe he was involved in some esoteric stuff.

You know, and he had, you know, it was in the hermetic stuff, right? I don't know if that need change how we read the texts, though. Sure. Yeah, yeah. I'm happy to take his public presentation of the text at face value, right? Even though there may be significant things to learn of other things that he might have been up to.

Yeah. I never know how to read, you know, some of these people. It's like, are they really into it? Or is it some sort of like tactic or something, you know. I mean, he's also like on paper a Lutheran too, but that would not really. Like there's some pretty, he comes apart with that too. Right. Right.

Yeah. Well, it's all so fascinating. I mean, talk about a philosopher who's had just an outsized impact on modernity. Yeah. And Hegel has to be, you know, at the top. Definitely. But this has been an honor. I really appreciate it.

I've had a good time, man. Yeah, this is a blast. And I'd love to do it again. Is there anything else we've missed or anything? No, that's what I'm aware of, yeah. Okay. Yeah, feel free to drag me back down. I would love to do it.

I would love to do it, man. Maybe I'll come out to you. I'd love to see Kansas and hang out. And come during tornado season. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, why not? Yeah, man, this is a blast.

Go out and buy an unidentified flying hyper object. working on anything else or do you want to promote anything or Twitter or anything? Yeah, I have a mostly dormant Twitter account. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So I have a substack. Maybe check that out. Okay. Awesome. But if you're interested, have a look at the book. Cool. And is it on substack, it's just Jim Madden or? Yeah. It's, you know, it's hard to change your substack name. Yeah. And I like accidentally made it. I think it's just literally Jim Madden's newsletter. Okay. Hey, why not? Literally. People know what they're getting. I do. I do have a web page, J.D. Madden.com. Okay.

A bunch of papers and podcasts and stuff. Okay, awesome. Well, really appreciate it. This is a blast. You bet. Thank you. Yeah. Own it all.

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