Inquiry with Kelly Chase - [The UFO Rabbit Hole] Ep 29: Encounters & Hyperobjects: A Conversation Between Diana Walsh Pasulka & James Madden

Episode Date: November 24, 2023

Today, I bring you something truly special. In this episode we’re welcoming Diana Walsh Pasulka back to the show to discuss her groundbreaking new book, Encounters: Experiences with Non-Human Intelligences. Encounters is a worthy and deeply challenging follow-up to American Cosmic, which we’ve talked about extensively on this show. I hope you’ll all read it, because we’ll definitely return to those ideas again and again.I want to say ahead of time that this episode is going to be a little less accessible than the content I usually release here, and that is intentional. Diana has been doing the podcast circuit to support the launch of Encounters, and there have been some really phenomenal interviews going into the specifics of the book. In particular, I recommend her recent appearances on Somewhere In The Skies and That UFO Podcast—both did a great job of diving into the characters and experiences portrayed in the book, and they are worth your time.Hardcore listeners of the show will know that, over the last year, my thinking around the subject of UFOs has been deeply influenced by Plato’s Cave, and particularly by a somewhat radical read on what it has to teach us that was first introduced to me by Diana and frequent guest of the show, James Madden. It was actually in one of Diana’s classes on UFOs and the Cave where I first met Jim, and eventually struck up a friendship. And I’ve spent the last 18 months processing and integrating the things I’ve learned from them both. I’m profoundly grateful for what that process has opened up to me, not just in terms of my understanding of the phenomenon, but with regard to the meaning and possibilities inherent in human experience.On November 27th, Jim will also be releasing his first book on the UFO topic titled Unidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the World which is being published by my new publishing house, Ontocalypse Press. Back in October, I had the absolute pleasure of finishing up the edits on Jim’s book, while simultaneously reading an advance copy of Diana’s and I was fascinated by the interplay between the ideas in both. I found myself thinking that the episode that I really wanted to make with regard to both of these phenomenal books would be one that didn’t involve me, and in which Diana and Jim were given free reign to explore a conversation on their own. Luckily they agreed, and the result is the stunning conversation that I have the privilege of sharing with you today.This episode is definitely challenging, but for those of you who’ve been following along on this journey, you’re in for a real treat. I have links to both Jim and Diana’s books in the episode brief so you can get your hands on those if you haven’t already. In my opinion these are two of the best and most important books about the UFO phenomenon published in recent memory, and both are destined to be classics of the field.NEW Class from Dr. James MaddenUnidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the WorldFour-week online class via ZoomWednesdays, March 27 – April 24 (skips April 10), 20247 – 9 pm ETLearn More About the ClassSign Up Now EPISODE BRIEFMORE FROM DIANA WALSH PASULKAEncounters: Experiences with Non-Human IntelligenceAmerican Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, TechnologyTwitterMORE FROM JAMES MADDENUnidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs. Philosophy, and the End of the WorldThinking About Thinking: Mind and Meaning in the Era of Techno-NihilismSubstackTwitterGET LIVESTREAM TICKETS: An Inquiry Into Anomalous Experience & The PhenomenonDec 9, 2023Featuring: Diana Walsh Pasulka, Michael Masters, Tim Gallaudet, Paul H. Smith, Josh Cutchin, Peter Skafish, and Leslie Kean.BECOME A PATRONPatrons get lots of great perks like early and ad-free episodes, access to the private The UFO Rabbit Hole Discord server, and twice-monthly Patron Zoom calls with Kelly Chase.Memberships start at just $5/month.GET THE BOOKGet a SIGNED COPYGet it on AmazonFOLLOWWebsiteTwitterFacebookMUSICTheme: Cabinet of Curiosities by Shaun FrearsonBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ufo-rabbit-hole-podcast--5746035/support. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usaa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing.

Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Whatever your thing, it could be anything. Canva helps you make that thing a thing. Canva is a simple online tool thing.

It's a way to design with our magic AI tool things. You can social media your thing, generate images or videos of your thing, make decks for presentations to show your thing. Whatever needs to be done for your thing, Canva can make it an even better and bigger thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing. Welcome back to the UFO Rabbit Hole podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Chase. Today, I bring you something truly special. In this episode, we're welcoming Diana Walsh, Baselka, back to the show to discuss her groundbreaking new book, Encounters, experiences with non-human intelligences.

Encounters is a worthy and deeply challenging follow-up to American Cosmic, which we've talked about extensively on this show. I hope you'll all read it because we'll definitely return to these ideas again and again. I want to say ahead of time that this episode is going to be a little less accessible than the content that I usually release here. And that's intentional. Diana has been doing the podcast circuit to support the launch of encounters and there have been some really phenomenal interviews going into the specifics of the book. In particular, I recommend her recent appearances on Somewhere in the Skies and That UFO Podcast. Both did a great job of diving into the characters and experiences portrayed in the book,

and they're definitely worth your time. Heartcore listeners of the show will know that over the past year, my thinking around the subject of UFOs has been deeply influenced by Plato's Cave, and particularly by a somewhat radical read on what it has to teach us that was first introduced to me by Diana and frequent guest of the show James Madden. It was actually in one of Diana's classes on UFOs in the cave where I first met Jim and eventually struck up a friendship. And I've spent the last 18 months processing and integrating the things I've learned from them both.

I'm profoundly grateful for what that process has opened up to me, not just in terms of my understanding of the phenomenon, but with regard to the meaning and possibilities inherent in human experience. On November 27th, Jim will also be releasing his first book on the UFO topic entitled Unidentified Flying Hyper Object UFO's Philosophy and the End of the World, which is being published by my new publishing house on Tocalypse Press. Back in October, I had the absolute pleasure of finishing up the edits on Jim's book, while saying, simultaneously reading an advanced copy of Diana's, and I was fascinated by the interplay between the ideas and both. I found myself thinking that the episode that I really wanted to make with

regard to both of these phenomenal books would be one that didn't involve me, and in which Diana and Jim were given free reign to explore a conversation on their own. Luckily, they agreed, and the result is the stunning conversation that I have the privilege of sharing with you today. This episode is definitely challenging, but for those of you who've been following along on this journey, you're in for a real treat. I have links to both Jim and Diana's books in the episode brief so you can get your hands on those if you haven't already. In my opinion, these are two of the best and most important books about the UFO phenomenon, published in recent memory, and both are destined to be classics of the field. And if you'd like to hear more from Diana, she will be

speaking at the Inquiry into Anomalous Experience in the Phenomenon conference in New York City on December 9th. This conference is being hosted by J. Christopher King and James Ian Doley, alongside the legendary Leslie Kane, and will also feature Michael Masters, Tim Gallaudet, Paul H. Smith, Josh Cutchin, and Peter Scafish. In-person tickets are unfortunately sold out, but a limited number of live stream tickets are still available. The link to get those is, in the episode description, so make sure to jump on that soon if you're interested in attending remotely. All right.

Without further ado, I'm pleased to share this incredible conversation between Diana Walsh, Baselka, and James Madden. All right. Hello, Diana. Hey, Jim. It is grand to talk to you again. It's been a while, so I'm very excited to you. Yeah, me too.

I'm excited also. Congratulations on your encounters. Thank you. Thank you. And congratulations by book, too. It's excellent. Thank you. I appreciate that. So let's do this first. Okay, let's maybe talk about why it makes sense that you and I would be talking. Okay. So I'm a professor of philosophy and all like I have no

degrees anything but philosophy. I didn't even do a minor in college. I was just, I just immersed myself in philosophy. Okay. So mainly I do philosophy with mine, but I also have interest in philosophy of religion. Okay. And so there's the source of my Venn diagram overlap with you, right? Yes. And if I characterize that you are a religious studies scholar, but you have a master's in philosophy. Is that right? Yeah. So I've been reading philosophy my whole life since I was 11. And I naturally gravitated. I was a pre-med major in university. As I asked what my parents thought would be a good idea. But I kept taking philosophy classes and realized that, yeah, this is actually what I enjoy doing. So I took a lot of philosophy classes. The problem with that was that just about many years ago. And philosophy hasn't really actually changed, but it was very non-diverse.

So there were no women philosophers and there were no people of color philosophers. And the questions in philosophy, and it was a very analytic department that I was in, the questions were really analytic philosophy questions. and I was really interested in meaning of life type of philosophy questions. So I actually, I took courses in rhetoric, which was the place where philosophers actually asked what I would consider really philosophical questions. So anyways, I did attempt to do a master's degree in philosophy and have enough philosophy classes to get that.

But during that time period, I gravitated to religious studies because that's where I met people who actually were philosophy. philosophers and were doing what I would consider to be really good philosophy, but just in different departments. They weren't in analytic philosophy programs. And analytic philosophy, as you know, is very specific. It's asking about things like paradoxes and things like that. Nothing against that. But I was interested in, like I said, meaning of life questions, things like that. So that's my relationship with philosophy. I did begin as a graduate student in philosophy and then gravitated. toward religious studies questions and did philosophy within religious studies, I am now in a

philosophy and a religion department, department of philosophy and religion. So my whole life has been spent around people who do philosophy and I still read philosophy. Yeah. As you know, I recently correspond to you mentioned. I see myself as a recovering analytic philosopher, right, that I, my view on now with philosophy is it's sort of what you know how Plato required of his students that you should you should study geometry and mathematics for for a decade before you showed up to do philosophy. Yeah. I think you have to have this really good BS detector, right? You have to be able to really be able to think rigorously and there are intrinsic truths that are revealed that way. But also I think if you never graduate

beyond that, if you're just in rigor for rigor sake and you're just in clarity for clarity's sake, which is really what analytic philosophy can become. I don't think you ever really advanced to the real questions of philosophy, right? So I found when I was in graduate school, I was at my master's program. And I'm this young, snoddy, you know, no-it-all, 24-year-old master's student in analytic philosophy. You've met that guy, right? And there's a visiting scholar who had just, he would written an incredible book on philosophy of logic, philosophy and language. And I asked him what his next book was going to be on. And he said,

oh, it's going to be on aesthetics in European philosophy and existentialism. I said, what are you doing? Why are you giving up a perfectly good thing you're doing? And he said, look, when I got in my 40s, I wanted to ask more substantive questions. And I got beyond that, right? And I found that's exactly what happened to me. So I got in my 40s. I wanted to ask the real meaning of life questions. And it changed a lot of the things I think about, including one of the things that got me into the UFO. because like now this broader swath of issues are acceptable that don't necessarily fit into the nice, neat academic categories of analogous philosophy, right? Yep. And I've recently been very impressed by the fact that the two of the academics that I have met in my life, most who wants to think to the bottom of things, who really want to do what I see is capital P philosophy, are not actually academic philosophers, but religious studies people.

And you're one of them, right? So, yeah, so if someone asked me, what is Diana really, I'd say she's philosopher. Yeah, yeah. So I was on Lex Friedman show in 2020, and he was asking me a lot of philosophical questions. And of course, we were discussing them. And that I kind of did this qualification, said, well, I'm actually not a PhD in philosophy. You know that, right? And he laughed and he said, what's this?

You know, can't people think philosophically without having a PhD in philosophy? and I thought that was pretty funny. Yeah, and I think Lex has a good point there. Yeah. Yeah. Let me do this because I kind of want to talk about, though, initially here, your discipline, okay? Yeah. And how that should help us read both American Cosmic and Encounters.

Of course, yes. Okay. And so you are a scholar of religion. Right. And I think we shouldn't forget that when we read these books, is that these books are, ultimately about religion, right? And where religion comes from and where it goes and the conditions it comes from on which it comes to being and things like that.

And I was particularly really moved by this when I read encounters. Very early on in the book, you bring up issues like redaction. You bring up how and tell me if I'm understanding your discipline wrong. But one of the things religious studies people do is you take religious texts, You take religious traditions and you say, well, they didn't just fall out of the sky as they are. They have histories. And those histories accumulate information, right? They add information.

They hide information. They add experiences. They hide experiences. And if we want to get to the actual initial experience that got a religion off the ground, right? We have to do all this excavation work, right? This archeological, I think it's a metaphor a lot of times. That's right. Yeah.

And so I think some people call it demythologizing, right? We have to get through the buildup of myth to get down to what was the experience that's been mythologized, right? We have to get behind the redactions. I hear that from people quite a bit. And the way I read American Cosmic, and please correct me, is you kind of gave us what the redaction process looks like in real time. In American time. Yes, yes, in real time. That's right.

all time, right? So here we've got this new religious experience or spiritual experience that's going on in the UFO, new to us, but it's been around a while. And now we can look at the mechanisms of mythologization, of redaction going on in real time. And that's why religious studies people should be interested in American Catholic. Because now we can see it happen live. We can't look at the New Testament or the Quran and look at mythology being created and redaction happening in time. We have to like backwards engineer it, but you gave us an occasion to see it in real time. And now what I see in encounters, and I'm interesting to see, hearing as you think I'm seeing this right, is we have now the people who are having the original experiences that are getting the UFO as a spiritual movement or a religious movement off the ground. We have them in front of us right now. So we don't have to demythalogize. We can pre-mythalogize. Yeah, we go and The original followers of Christ are not here for us to interview. Right.

Okay. But the original people having the encounter, like the name of the book, the people having the encounter are there for us to talk to, right? Yes. This is an incredible novel opportunity in the history of religions for those of us who want to understand. This is correct. Yeah. And I would suggest that, well, first, I'm not the first person to identify that this is happening.

Carl Jung did this when he in the 1930s and 40s started to look at UFOs. And he has a book called Blind Saucers. I think it's called a myth seen in the sky or something like that. Modern myth of things in the sky or something. Thank you. So I would suggest anybody who's interested in the topic, definitely read that book because he's a brilliant mind looking at this. And it's fairly new at that time.

And he basically goes back and forth on. how he views UFOs. And some people say, well, he didn't believe in them as a real thing or then he came to believe them as a real thing. And I can't actually determine what it is because it seems like he changes his mind a lot. And he'll write letters to friends.

And I actually know a person who is the executor of his estate. And yeah, and she's actually a union analyst. And so we talked a little bit about this. And so I'm not going to make a conclusion. I'll just suggest the people read what he has to say because even in that book, he has different things to say about it. And he says, well, it's this subjective experience, but it appears to have objective reality too. So you can tell that it confounds him. Okay. And it's really interesting. And I agree with you about this reading

of American Cosmic and also encounters that what I'm doing is I'm looking at what he called, what Kuro Yun called a myth in process, right? So kind of like this religious, development happening right now, right before our eyes. I want a mass scale, not just a local thing happening, but a global thing happening. With the aid of technology, so we get to see it happen fast. It's not happening slowly over a few hundred years like Christianity happened. It's happening like exponentially. So a bunch of things are happening here that I find fascinating.

And religious studies, people have taken notice. So in my field, American Cosmic has been number one in sociology of religion and, you know, religious studies being sold like for the last two years. And I get asked to speak about it all the time to class. It's taught in graduate classes and undergraduate classes. So you talked about it in my class. That's right. Yeah, that's right.

You teach it in your class to a philosophy class. So I think a lot of scholars have no. noticed it and understand, you know, the kind of importance, not just the book, but what I'm basically pointing out. I do want to say this, though, that the idea that there's an originary experience in my field, it's called the fallacy of origins. I don't actually buy that, by the way. And so I, in a sense, American Cosmic and Encounters is critiquing the very idea that there's this kind of originary religious experience. Well, I think there is. And so in that sense, I'm critiquing that.

I just want to point that out because a lot of my colleagues will say, well, that's the fallacy of origins that we learned about in graduate school. And I'll say, yeah, well, rethink that. Because I can show you one. Yeah, yeah. Let's rethink that. So the idea there is in sort of orthodox, like standard methodology for religious scholars would be say either there really weren't original experiences or that's a black box we can't

even speculate about? Like which? Yeah, both of those. Both of those. But what I'm saying is that this is the shocking thing that happened to me when I started to study UFOs, which I had never, by the way, ever started studying. But it was almost by accident that I began to study that in 2012. I quickly saw that the people who were describing contemporary experiences, that these people

sounded exactly like the people in the 1400s, 1500s, 1600s in Castle. history talking about aerial phenomena. There was the same element of surprise when they saw something they couldn't really put into the categories that they inherited, right? Either religious categories or scientific categories, it seemed the same. They were like, whoa, what's this? And having these shocking experiences, sometimes traumatic experiences. And so what happened was that I did what seems to be a sacrilegious move, I suggested that these were real. And the thing is, is that I think a lot of the reasons why people in religious studies don't want to make that move is because we haven't made that move. That's something that in my field we don't make. We don't say, this is real.

Because if you commit to saying it's real, you commit to a lot of things that in my field, we don't want to do. We don't want to advocate for any conclusion as to what you are. It's philosophizing. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah. You know, and that's a rabbit hole. But I think that we have to make that move.

And it's a messy move, but I made it. Yeah, well done. Because I think there's so much that goes on in academia that acts as if we can transact business without ontological commitment. That's right. Yeah. And this is one of the reasons why, especially those of us in the humanities, have made ourselves irrelevant because whether or not what we're talking about is real, it matters

for how much it matters, right? Yeah, yeah. And it is dramatic, too. If you've been living your life as I had been doing this kind of historical research from a distance, right? So I'm looking at houses in the sky, flying ships, you know, things like that back in 1500, 1600, and people are talking about this back then as if it's real. And then today, what we're doing is academic scholarship as if it happened back in the day.

but no, we don't believe that anymore, right? Literally. Well, wait, we do. We do believe that still. We just call them different things. But it's happening. And people are having experiences with regard to it too. So there are not only subjective experiences that people have that, you know, as an ethnographer,

I feel happy to describe and I don't have to make any kind of conclusion about, you know, oh, these people are saying that they see these things. But wait a minute, there are objective facts too. like these things are now caught not just on radar, right? Like, you know, back in the 40s, 50s, we had a radar of these objects. So they're objective. But now we have really sophisticated detection devices that we have that we can actually say, oh, we just don't have radar.

We actually have photographs and videos. So Carl Jung's problem is even more acute now. Yeah, it is. It is. There's clearly a subjective aspect to this, but there's all the more evidence that there's a nitty-gritty physical aspect to it, too. Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad you mentioned Young because in my note, I made about that point I went to bring up.

I actually said, you know, these books give us a glimpse of the formation of archetypes. Yes, yes. Yeah, they do. Yeah, the formation of archetypes. Okay. One of the things that you mentioned are Diana, I've been wanting to talk about this for a while, is you said, you know, today we see things and people say, oh, it's a UFO. Right. And it's funny how a UFO no longer does mean something in the sky, I don't know what it is.

Right. there's a whole mythology packed in that phrase now. Huge, huge. It's almost always associated with aliens. Yes, yes. And then whereas, you know, in the 14th century, if somebody saw it, oh, it's a demon or, oh, it's an angel. Right. And there's this tendency to now make an identity claim, go to little analytic philosophy.

Like to make this identity claim to say that, oh, no, it turns out what they said were angels, those are UFOs, right? Right. Yeah. Someone might say, oh, it turns out that what we say are UFOs or, you know, some people say are UFOs, those are really angels. Yes. So you have this, there's always this problem when we make an identity claim where we say water is H2O. Okay. This is a discovery that's made, you know, relatively late in history of science, water is H2O.

Well, are we saying H2O was water or are we saying water as H2O? Right. It seems like like any kind of identity claim ultimately prioritizes one of the identity sides of the identity over the other. Right. Right. Correct. Yeah, what I mean? But the problem, though, is that, okay, we'll say water is H2O because we've got this really good chemical theory that explains a lot of broad things.

So it makes more sense to take our folks talk about water and all that goes with that and say, well, what that really is is H2O. Because chemical theory explains a lot. It's very broad. It's very well confirmed. Okay. So now, though, let me bring this foot to what we're talking about. When someone says, oh, it turns out angels are UFOs, right? Oh, it turns out that UFOs are angels.

We're going to prioritize. Well, we have to talk about which of those theories if either of them actually broadly explains them. Right. Right. And it might be that neither of them really broadly explains things. Okay. We just know we're talking about an identity maybe, but we can't prioritize either side of it or maybe maybe one of the theories does broadly. things. Okay. What I'm saying is, is that before we can like start seeing whether angels are

UFOs or UFOs or angels, we need to do a lot of work, right? Theoretically, philosophically, to ask which of these theories is the better theory or is there some third thing that would be a better theory than both of them that we're going to collapse them both into, right? And so I think a lot is we need better philosophy of science to be applied to this issue. I think we do. And personally, I'm working with some people who are known. People know who these people are, but they're scientists, and they don't actually conclude. Yeah. So if we say, and you know, lots of people do on either side, and people get really upset, by the way, if you say, oh, what we're seeing today, people are saying are UFOs, but they're actually demons and angels, or what they saw in 1400, those were actually

UFOs. Okay, so let's take each of those declarations. Well, there's a lot of baggage with respect to each of them. They're both theories. Yeah, exactly. And so what comes along with saying that they're demons and angels? Well, you've got a whole history of Judaism and Christianity bound up with what is an angel and what is a demon, okay? And perhaps some of those don't apply to what people are experiencing today. But what if we move then into saying that, okay, they're extraterrestrial UFOs. All right. Well, because of entertainment media that we all have been brought up with, like either Star Wars, Star Trek, X-Files, you know, we all have a generation is inundated with what it means to be something extraterrestrial. All of that unconscious bias or just overt

bias is now put into this interpretation. We have that too. What do we have? Well, we actually have a lot of data. Okay. So a lot of people ask me, well, are these things malign or benign? You know, are they bad or good? Well, that depends. Do people get hurt when they have some of these experiences? Well, actually, yes, they do.

A battle speaks good or evil. Right. Exactly. You know, so I was talking to Ryan Sprague about this, right? So he said, well, you know, are they bad? Well, that depends, you know. It is bad to be, to receive burns from this thing that you seen in the sky and those burns turn out to be pretty nasty, okay? I would consider that bad,

but was it intentionally done, you know, or was it collateral? Was it like collateral damage? So, you know, this is data that we still are trying to figure out. And so I think that we're still in the data collection stage. And what I did with American Cosmic was basically I just was like, okay, wow, my brain has been blown. And I really need to write to. this book as if I don't know, you know, the tools I inherited from graduate school to explain this, they are not going to work. So I'm going to try something new here. And that's what I did with American Cosmic. In encounters, I was over the shock finally. And I was like, okay, what can we say about this? Well, we can say that there's an objective experience that people have subjective experiences about.

So let's dive into both of those. So I took real experiences that you could confirm through data, right? So objective data, many people saw these things. We have instruments that have identified them. But we also have these people, all of whom have seen the same thing, but have different experiences of it. Let's delve into what they experience. You know, the way I read what you've done in encounters in many ways now is

you're performing the phenomenological reduction. to say, okay, so the very technical term for the Luskerbs, but the phlemonological reduction is this proposal originally by Edmund Husserl is that we just leave aside our theories. Okay, just put our theorizations, our mythologies aside, and let's try to take a very, very disciplined look at what the real subjective experience is, not our after-the-fact interpretation, not our before-the-fact expectations. Let's just try to like, through a kind of meditative act, really, is what he has in mind there.

We actually look at what is the subjective experience of someone in these objective situations, right? Because our only clue to what's going on there because we are subjective animals. Like, the only way we're going to get to the objective is through the subjective. But then we have to, like, right? We have to, and something I very well are very well from Muriel Ponte,

is we have to then set aside as more, much of the unnecessary or the optional inner subjectivity so we can actually talk about what do we really see there and then speculate about what that tells us what might be going on outside of it. But we have to do that reduction first. We have to set all that aside. And what I felt like was happening to my right encounters is you were challenging me to make the phenomenological reduction about the experience. And I think that's what has to be done. And this This is a lesson for a lot of other phenomena that we academic study. Yes.

And a lot of this has to do with the superposition stuff, the spookiest science that we know. It breaks our brains to think about, right? So, okay, like this spooky action at a distance. So what I found was in case after case, people would see something that, say, is on radar. So we know that there's something there. But they would see different things. They would reply to things that they see. And the people's reaction to those things, too, here's an example.

I go over the Brockport UFO in the 1960s, late 1960s in upstate New York. Which I'd never heard of, by the way. Yeah, it's a great UFO flap. And a lot of people, lots of credible witnesses, police officers, teachers, you know, all kinds of people saw the various UFOs that happened over the course of a day and a half. And what's really interesting is the first person who reported it was this night watchman. who reported that he saw a craft basically parked with little men coming out of it, right? And then after that, all these other people reported, you know, miles away, didn't know this man, reported almost like a Steven Spielberg type UFO, okay?

So Nykat was called in order to, you know, was the most credible reporting agency at the time to weigh in. And they discounted the first report because it had the appearance of Little Ben, right? Well, what was described as little beings or little men. Whereas the other ones, they readily... So our myth has ruled that out ahead of time. Yeah, exactly. Just because it sounds ridiculous.

So I agree it sounds ridiculous. Believe me, when I wrote it, I did have, you know, a couple of people who were helping me read it and telling me what their thoughts were. And they said, no, you can't put this in because it sounds so ridiculous. And I said, if I don't put it in there, I'm not doing actual scholarship because, yes, it does look ridiculous, but indeed, this guy reported it and there were these subsequent sightings. And we already know already that, you know, I think Jacques Valet was one of the first to point out that people are seeing different things. They might be seen similar things, but they're different. And by the way, you do see this in religious, mystical religious experiences, too, like the Virgin Mary apparitions. A lot of people will see something at the same time, but they will report different things that they see.

And by the way, those of us who are in religious traditions, we're committed to some pretty absurd sightings ourselves, right? We sure are. We should not be shaking our fingers. And this is something I had to really press with my own students about this. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, this dovetails with some of my own attempts to theorize. the UFO is if we admit that our subjectivity, though aimed at achieving a kind of objectivity, given our evolutionary history, giving our cultural histories, we construct this environment for

ourselves, this umwelt for ourselves. If we start bumping into things that we are not evolved to deal with, it would then seem it's going to be all bets are off for how we actually package those things to ourselves. So if like you're, you're my share. evolutionary history, shared cognitive equipment, would not evolve to deal with a certain kind of organism and then Diana bumps into it and Jim bumps into it. Maybe Diana sees it as a tin ship with little green men. Jim sees it as the dinosaur, the infamous dino beaver now that we hear about, right? I see it as that.

Well, that's, of course, because neither of us were evolved to deal with. And so we hit this thing. It doesn't make sense to us. It can't make sense to us. So then the imagination is going to take. take over to put it into some kind of framework, right? Yeah, yeah. So it seems to be like if we admit that there might be things in the world that humans were not set up to the encounter,

then I think this is what we would expect what happened when we start to bump into these. We'll be right back after this quick break. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

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Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.m.m.m.m. 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 back. Yeah, that gets to the incommensurability element of alien life that NASA historian Stephen Dick has written about. He's a historian and a astronomer. He's been doing this work for like 50 years.

But early on, he said, you know, look, it's going to be so alien to us that we just aren't equipped to understand it. So it's going to look really weird. Yeah, exactly. And the weird may be provided on our side of it. Exactly, exactly. Because we're here, we encounter this thing and we're just trying to make something up to give us some kind of cognitive grasp on it. Right.

And then we get weird on our side and the contradictory weird all over the place too. You know, another thing, Jim, is that it could very well be that, I mean, I do talk a lot about dreams in the book because most people have these experiences, is they also experience almost like lucid dreams. And, okay, so, you know, think about dreams. Think about how ridiculous dreams can be, but they actually have a logic of their own, right? So once you start to look at the symbols in dreams, you're like,

oh, whoa, that actually makes a lot of sense, even though it's ridiculous. So it could be that this is more akin to the language of the unconscious, like a dream logic. I recently read an essay by William James. it was, does consciousness exist? I think I'm going to write some stuff about this because I think it should play a role in our understanding of this. But one of the many interesting things that James does in that essay is he argues that

if an experience has a logic to it and it's something that allows us to like work with it practically, he challenges you to say, well, what greater criterion is there to say that its ontology is something legitimate now? And he's very open to many things. And I think this is much of like what you're doing. And I think this is maybe some of like what Jeff Kreppel is doing is if we can start to see a logic to these experiences, okay? And we can see it playing a role in helping us get around the world. Well, then it seems like that's about all we need to say it's real.

It's real, right? Yeah, yeah. I like William James. I've discovered him too late, but I've got a few years left. So I can have time to learn him. And that's the thing about my book encounters was I honestly really felt that I needed to address the information management aspect of UFOs. Since we not only have this weird experience of UFOs, but then we have our government basically like making it weird by, you know, Project Blue Book and these programs of information management. So, I mean, it's really difficult to study and understand.

And for those reasons, not just the thing itself is hard to study, but the government, you know, you try to study it and you get discredited or stigmatized. And then a lot of these things happen. So that's where you and I actually met was I had been looking for a philosopher who could basically, but this sounds so funny, agree with me about my reading of Plato's Republic and Allegory the Cave. And I was looking and I looked through my department, no, you know, friends of mine, no. And then you reached out to me. And, you know, I hadn't solicited anything. You just reached out to me. I didn't know who you were. And you said, hey, I just saw you on theories of everything. And he talked about Plato's Cave and I believe this too.

And I couldn't believe it. I was like, wow. So I binge-watched everything that you had said. You've got these great lectures on Allegory of the Cave and Plato's Republic. and that's where we begin to have our correspondence. This is too much great. That was a weird synchronicity moment for me because I think I've told you this. I finished reading American Cosmic that morning.

Like my morning reading that day, I got up and I had one more chapter in American Cosmic. I read it and I was kind of swirling around because you're giving me that Heidegary and Mike drop at the end. That's right. That's right. I didn't make sense of it since. Right. But I've tried since, right? And so I go out for my workout and I pull up theories everything to listen to.

And there you are talking about American Cosmic. And then there's all these interesting things that you talk about that overlap of what I was doing. So yeah, I think there was some weird synchronistic that happened to me there. So I'm glad that worked out. Yeah. Here I am. I'm thinking there is no philosopher out there is.

Am I wrong to think this way? And boom, your email came in like, okay. Yeah. I'm not going. No, I mean, I read Plato's Republic as it is, he is politically skeptical. Yes. What is saying? He's saying there cannot be a just society in this world. We would have to be dead for it to happen. Philosophy's preparation for death. We would have to be dead for it to happen. That is my read on Plato.

And I think, although I'm not a classicist, I don't really agree, but I think I can back it up. Right. And there's a problem. he raises early in the Republic, people miss as he says, well, in order to have a good, a just society, we'd have to be run by philosophers, but we would need a just society to produce philosophers in the first place. So there's this logical incoherence to any human founding at all. I think he's saying anything we do, we would have to be guided by something else. Yeah. And I think that he gives us a clue in the allegory in the very end where, you know,

they're talking about escaping the cave, you know, the allegory of the cave, I'm sure. Kelly's listeners are definitely going to are going to know this because they've listened to her, you know, I've done it on the show too. Oh, okay, great. Yeah. So, all right. So what happens here is that he does provide an out. And the out is this, this mystical adoption of philosophy as dialectic.

And that, I think, is it. That's what produces the synchronities that we experience. it's actually living and doing philosophy in that way, in a mystical way. And then in the Western tradition, you get really Jesus coming along and basically doing the same thing. We're saying to people, look, my way is not for everyone. That's what Plato's saying is that this way is not for everyone. You might even get killed if you tell people about how they're looking at shadows and not

going to make Athens great again with this one. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And so Jesus is speaking in parables. It's kind of speaking in code. I think that in allegory, the allegory of the caves is code for those who know and who can listen and pay attention. So I guess this is what I came to. I needed to talk about this because I felt that the people who were presenting the most information about UFOs were basically misinforming people. And so I thought, well, nobody's going to listen to me. Nobody's actually going to believe me, but that's not going to stop me from actually talking about it because I do have an ethical obligation.

Because, you know, Plato says, if you have to go back into the cave and at least try and, you know, say they're, you know, they come at you, go away. But at least you give it an ethical obligation. Of course, Jesus says this too. We do have this obligation to say, this is happening. You don't have to say it. You just have to say it once, right? and then carry on with your sanga, you know, carry on with your, I'm mixing religious traditions here, but carry on with your school of Athens. So my take on this, okay, is if you look at book seven very closely, Glaucon asks Socrates, well, we can't ask the philosopher to go back in the cave now.

And Socrates says, well, in our city, we could because, but he's talking about the ideal city. But then he says, but our city doesn't exist. So it seems like part of him is saying you're going to, no, you should just get out of the cave and stay out of the cave. Okay. But what did Socrates actually do? He went back in, right? That's right. Okay.

And if you look at some of the earlier dialogues, when Socrates could have left the cave, right? He could have escaped prison and gone off somewhere else and philosophized and lived his days out. Because no one really wanted to kill this guy. Okay. Right. He chose to stay in prison. And when asked why, because he says it would be like betraying my parents if I left Athens. Okay. So he loves. There's something he loves here. Like he cares about people here. He loves them. Right. So in the end, Socrates can't just transcend his body. He can't just transcend the world because he's bound by love. You know what I mean? And so I think Plato would say, yeah, if you're an ideal philosopher, you would leave. But guess what? You're not going to do that because you're not in that. Neo-Flosser because you love people. And so you are going to take the risk of going back in the cave and trying to educate as best you can.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. And I think that's where I see kind of the implicit Christianity going on there. Yeah. And once you see, once you read it like this, it seems to me that you can see, at least in religious studies, once you're trained in, as a journalist, really, in all the different world traditions, you basically see that same move.

You know, you see the same move. You see people going out as forming monistic communities and helping each other keep to what they believe to be a living truth. And then those who can accept it and want it come along. And that's when you get what Tyson Yucoporta, he wrote this great book called Sand Talk. He talks about these things that we call them synchronicities. He calls them extra cognitive events. because he says, you know, in Western culture, we just don't have the vocabulary to talk about

these incredibly meaningful coincidences that we call synchronicities that you can't make up. I mean, they just happen. And once you begin to engage in this type of life, these things happen all the time. And, you know, I kind of like call it big mind. Like once you control your little mind and get that under control, you allow this big mind to work. and it's quite beautiful. And which I think is Heidegger's meditative thinking. That's right.

Meditative thinking. Yeah, you see it in Heidegger too, which is why I end there with Heidegger. Because, you know, he was also somewhat depressed about it, right? But in fact, he was so stigmatized by what he learned about philosophy that he would not allow that last interview, which I quoted at the end of American Cosmic. He would not allow that to be published while he was alive. Yeah. Well, think of even St. Thomas Aquinas, right?

You know, once he goes mystical near the end of his life, he says all of his rationales like straw, right? That's right. That's right. It was a ladder to be kicked away. Yeah. Even Aquinas, kind of the arch theological rationalist, right? Right. So, okay, on this point about the cave, because I thought the most troubling in like the scary moment in encounters.

Okay. Now, of course, the gray man has some scary stories to tell. She can you're right. So close second place was what you mentioned is people that you've met from, you know, intelligence communities, et cetera, et cetera, they are happy with the cave arrangement. Yeah. And people, hey, people like their caves and just keep them in there, right? And we're going to actively try to create caves for people.

Yeah, they're good at it, June. Where they're good at it. Yeah. Well, and Plato knew they were good at. Like Plato already in the algorithm of the cave, it's like other people are holding up the puppets that are providing the images. Plato already knows the puppet masters are very good at. Right.

And then I think in American Cosmic, you know, my take on it there is like, this is the thing that's missed is like you're being, like you're showing us the cave mechanism throughout, like how the cave just created, like all the cognitive. Then it encounters I actually meet them. And you meet them. Yeah. And how that happens.

And I think this is like the thing that like, the UFOology hasn't heard well enough on these hook. is beware of the cave mechanism, right? Like beware that you're being put on, right? Like you're being separated from your own experiences. And yeah, like I think that is like the great cautionary note that should be taken from these books. Not just that you might get burnt by a UFO.

That's okay, I'm not minimizing that, right? But what most of us will not be, right? I hope. Okay. Right, right. We won't be, yeah. Until the great invasion begins, whatever. But like most of us will not be burnt by UFOs.

Most of us will we have to. worry about in this is how are we going to have our archetypes formed, our subconscious formed in a way that's going to put us in a cave? We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right. So I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points. Never fly during a Scorpio full moon.

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While supplies last, selection varies by location. See associate or Lowe's.com for details. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Yes, that is originally my intent was, I mean, I said it in the first paragraph.

I said everything you think you know about UFOs has been presented and curated. Yeah. And so, you know, I tell people like, look, Diana isn't brave just because she's telling us about, you know, what she engaged. Gary Nolan did in New Mexico, right? Okay, that's brave. But she's brave because she's telling us

you're being caved. Yeah. That's the brave part, if I may. Yeah. Okay. So after American Cosmic was published, a lot of things happened. But one of the things that I found was interesting was I got a correspondence from Richard Doty. Okay. Did you reflect? Yeah. And he basically said, I read American Cosmic and it's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very good. You should use that as a blurb. Yeah, I know. I thought about it.

Can we quote you on this? So, yeah, as you know, that's one of my stock, even in my own writing, that's one of my stalking works is that we have to pay attention to that in the... Oh, for sure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and so chapter eight is called the Children of the Invisibles. And the Invisibles, I guess, is my word for the puppet masters, right? because they don't really want to be known.

It was really a struggle for me first to get a grip on how I was going to explain this. And that's why it went to the allegory of the cave. So it took me about a year and a half. And I asked a lot of people. I asked so many people, you know, a friend of mine, to reread the allegory and pay attention this time. And none of them.

I said, what about the ones who tie us up? And they're like, ah, it's just an allegory. That's just a trope. And I said, I don't think so. I said, he actually means it. And so I got a lot of, you would call it, people telling me, no, don't even look at it that way. Like bad, you know, bad on you for doing that. But it was actually my literal experience through doing American cosmic and encounters.

So during encounters then, the public masters, they were like, they basically, you know, they were trying to explain to me, that I was an idiot for even trying to tell people about the K and the mechanisms because the people don't actually care. And they said, what are you doing? You know, they would even use the language of Christianity like you're throwing your pearls before swine. Like people aren't going to care. In fact, you're going to lose your academic reputation. You're going to, you know, any kind of goodness that has come from, at least the first book, is going to be washed away. You know, don't be an idiot kind of thing is what they were telling me. So I was trying to tell the story.

Doctors being invited. Just leave prison, man. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, there was an invitation to join them, I guess. Right. No, but the thing is, this is the pedagogical mission, is, you know, to tell whoever can,

and most people won't hear it. And most people do like their cave, right? But if there's one or two that maybe don't want to be in a cave, you can speak to them. I think we could still enjoy things because life is beautiful and it offers so many wonderful gifts and still understand what the conditions are, which truthfully, they do seem pretty grim. I mean, what's he's thinking about it? I've come to see also certain things like, so let's take Plato's Republic in the allegory

as a way of looking at, it's almost like a template for human life, maybe not for a certain Aboriginal and indigenous Australians, you know, it seems like it wouldn't apply to the way that they live because they don't live that way, but we do. We live this way. To say it's like a template for human life and society in our society, how do we think then about other ruminations of life, like 1984 or Brave New World? Both of books, which by the way, I've taught in classes, but I won't teach them again. Because after I had these experiences and after I wrote these books, I recognized that those were actually probably puppet master books. Those were books. Oh, really? Yeah. Because they're not giving us an out, Jim. They're basically telling us how it's going to be. Yeah. Just accept it.

Yeah. Yeah. Enjoy your Soma. Enjoy your Soma. Pete. Yeah. Because, you know, I'm sorry, but there isn't out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, we're not condemned. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We're not condemned. And so those books kind of condemn us in a sense. That's really well. That's really well. That's really well put. Thanks on that. That's cool. Now I have to go back and really look at those books. Yeah. Yeah, it's sad. But that's the conclusion I came to. Very good. So let me, this is kind of a radical switch. It's kind of going more metaphysical. Okay. than less, you know, what's managing the phenomenon, maybe talking more directly about the phenomena. Are you okay with that?

Of course, absolutely, yeah. And I don't, and I'm bringing this, I'm going to quote you here not to like proof text to you to hold you again something, but this is, this was one of the most intriguing moments for me in encounters, and it dovetails a lot with things that I've been working on. Okay. But it's, I believe I'm on page 99 in encounters, right?

It's in the Graham Man chapter. Right. And I'm going to just quote you a little bit here, if you don't mind. First, he used burgeoning models of information technology as an interpretive framework to study religious events and the impact that supernatural characters, deities, angels, and demons, and in the modern era, UFOs have in populations. This allowed him to identify how the phenomena work in a meta-mythological level. By doing so, he postulated the existence of something that appears to act as a meta-intelligence that regulates human behavior on the individual micro and cultural macro level. And I believe the he here is valet, right?

Yeah, Jacques. Skipping head a little bit, you say, but deities in supernatural characters do not exist in the ways in which we assumed they existed. I don't know that I think of the very end of that section to say, the question scholars asked in the 20th century about how and why religions persist or how deities could possibly be real to believers has given way to questions about how information exists as it appears that deities at the very least exist as information. Okay. Yes.

Okay. Yes. All right. Because it seems to me we're getting a view there of deities, spiritual entities, whatever we like to call them, as a kind of information. hyper object. Yes. Yes. And that's exactly what you get at in the amazing book that you wrote. Thank you. Thank you. Because here's a, okay, what more do you need to say that something's real, then it manages us? Yes, yes. It's moving us around. Okay. Right. Right. And so can we create mythologies and information? I think DeLuze calls them or someone called them subtening entities,

okay that are then they began as our ideas they began as our information but then they can take off and now they are running us right okay so are deities real yes okay whatever we want like more metaphically robust views about deities and god met that but are there intelligences that have effects on our lives right that manage us that are non-human i think that question is settled right yeah Yeah, yeah. So what I found very interesting, especially in this, this came in conversations with people who are in AI communities, you know, where I noticed that a lot of their language, they'd refer to like emergence or they would talk about the fundamental base of reality, right, which is not material. And they would reference like, oh, and then magic happens, right? We do this and then like a magic happens. And I'm like, well, wait a minute, what do you mean by that? What does that mean? And they can't say. And so I think that, but we let them get away with it. And we let them get away with it because they produce things that are real, right? So I think that this is a point.

I tried to make an American Cosmic, but didn't, but I make it here. So Tyler in American Cosmic, he's doing the same thing. So he's using these, you know, downloads that he's getting to create these biotechnologies that he's then selling on NASDAF, right, for lots and lots of money and they're helping people. And they're real, okay? Well, it seems like in the 20th century, people like to dismiss religion because they couldn't actually quantify it. They couldn't put it under a microscope and say, oh, see, here it is. You know, we've got this angel or deity.

But we don't ever use the same criteria for gravity or for things that we know, you know, we see the effects of these things. But they're, we call them scientific. So, you know, we don't actually require that they have the same. kinds of material reality. But we insisted that these other kinds of things. And I think we just need to point that out. Just to go on your example, when Isaac Newton is pressed, like, well, what is gravity?

He just said, well, I think it's just what God does. I don't know. There's something moving this, right? So this, you are someone who's like spent your life on college campuses has seen this. So you notice now a lot of times you get a new building built on a campus. they don't put the sidewalks in initially. They just see where the kids walk, right? And like trails get made.

I think that. Pretty? Yeah. Yeah. Because that they figured, like a lot of people, like planners have come to realize, like, humans will just naturally gravitate to the most efficient route. And you, and let's say like you build a new rec center on campus. And well, can we know up front are most of the students becoming from the cafeteria to the rec center?

or are they going to be coming from the academic building to the rec center? So we have to make all these assumptions with human behavior that we probably can't make up front. So now what a lot of campuses do is they build a building and they just see where the kids wear the path in the grass. And then they put a sidewalk on top of that. That's so great. Isn't that so great? Yeah. And so Andy Clark in his book being there, the book that got extended mind off the ground, he uses this example.

He says, so what we're saying is a lot of people, without making a conscious cognitive choice about what the most efficient route is, they'll just do their thing, but what do we get out of that? We get the proper conceptual understanding of the best way to build the sidewalks. So it's sort of you're seeing emergence.

That's right. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. But now that we have that, it's going to have a downward effect because now the sidewalks are going to go in that place and we're all going to walk through the most part on the sidewalk.

Okay. Well, what would we call that on a grand scale, but I kind of did? Yeah. And so much of what I wrote was, I don't mean a gap, but like you did something wrong, but was to sort of fill this gap in American coffee. That's right. Of how that would work. Yeah.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So when I read that page in the counter site, I was, I got up and like, I was like very excited. Oh, great. Great. Great. I'm glad.

Yeah. And I know you and I are both interested in Premier. Yes. Yes. In fact, I'm going to be talking at this conference, Soul Conference, at Stanford, Gary Nolan's organization. And I'm going to be calling my talk, rewriting Prometheus. Interesting. Yeah. Because I think now we should ask ourselves, is Prometheus real? Right. Yeah, because who is Prometheus in mythology? I prefer Iskos' telling of the myth. Okay. So in Prometheus bound. Prometheus is the creator of humanity in this myth. That's right. Right.

And he creates us and distinguishes us primarily from the other animals by giving us technological abilities. That's right. Right. Okay. But he's a trickster too. And it's clear he's going to liberate us only to capture us. Seems to be what's going on with Prometheus.

And so now what's happened is, you know, we have loose information technology. Right. that is going to capture us or has captured us. And that seems to me exactly what Iscalis is talking about in his version of Peretius. So it seemed that Iscalis has predicted the emergence of a deity very well. Yeah. Yeah. So tell me about this.

I know that you actually came to our university and talked about this and you talked about this in your book and also more in your new book, the Hyper Object. And it seems to me, I know that you read the chapter on Simone in my book. And that, you know, that kind of dovetails into the questions that you raise about technology and dystopian, utopian. You know, so tell me about that. Have you had any changes with respect to your idea of technology and say we've, that say Prometheus is, you know, becoming, making himself very present. to us through this you know, religiosity experiencing. So talk about that. So Moongirl blew me away.

Like Moon Girl, yeah, really blew me away. In the best way, and she blew me away in her reason to, I think, disagreement with. Yeah. So she does not necessarily see Prometheus as a threat to humanity, right? but as like a God that we can, this isn't her vocally for it, but a God that we can negotiate with, right? A God that could better us, right?

An emergent thing, an emergent consciousness that we could negotiate with that could better us, right? Yes. I have to admit, and this is my kind of Catholic nostalgia, right? Is that where this will take us will be different. It will de-world us, right, in a way. It will undo the world that we're used to. But that doesn't mean that this isn't what's best for us to, right?

And there aren't great opportunities there. So Simone has assured me that I have to write something else now. Right. Because I do think there is this, without going all the way to the kind of blindly optimistic will-to-power transhumanism that I tend to associate with optimism about technology. Without doing that, I think Simone's, optimism has really moved me and show me things I've missed in this, right? That's right.

Yeah. And I think what you do with bringing Tehard de Ché de Chene in into it too is very, is very helpful to me in a way that, but in a challenging way. Yeah. I think it is really challenging. It appears to be inevitable, of course, this, the technological change that we're all experiencing at the moment. Simone makes it clear that she does not like, and Simone is a chapter in the book.

She's an early adopter of AI for many, many, many years. And so she challenged me, too, in terms of thinking, you know, basically she hates the idea of artificial technology. She doesn't like to call it that because she says, you know, we don't call language or writing artificial, but it's technological. These are technologies that humans developed in order to create better societies. And so she said, so we're just, you know, up in the game here. And she also points out that the banks have been using AI for now 20 years to make trillions of dollars.

And, you know, so she sees it as almost like a French Revolution moment where the people are given the keys to their autonomy through technological progress, reading the books that they weren't able to read before doing these kinds of things. And so she sees it that way. So she is a techno optimist, obviously. but she's also quite aware. She has the same education that you and I have in terms of knowing the Greek philosophers, doing a lot of work in religious traditions, learning about religious traditions.

So she's also a person who engages in the dialectic, right, in the way in which your first book, or the book that I read. Thank you, yeah. Yeah, it was such a great book. So she does. does that. She engages in that, thinking about thinking, basically. And so she brought me around to thinking in a way that was less dystopic, I guess you could call it, about Prometheus.

So in my worries about technology are not that this is, you know this, but not this for the listener, right? It's not so much as AI going to get out of hand and like, you know, attack us. Okay. It's not bad. I don't know one way or another. I'm out of computer scientists. I'll take Simone's word on that, right? But my, my worry is, like, one is, I think these emergent hyper objects, these emergent deities can come to run us. And so we can lose control of our sense of responsibility for our own lives and our sense of responsibility for our own cultural moments and things like that. So I do worry about, is Prometheus so jealous that we can't really maintain our agency, while he has his agency.

I worry about that. And I do worry about how the conditions of human cognition are so rooted in bodily ways, in emotional ways, in historical ways. That's why I call it my kind of Catholic nostalgia, right? In traditions and things like that. So when we start talking about these kinds of radical breaks,

and I think it's coming. There's no if. There's a radical break coming with that. Right? Yeah. Can I look hopeful, to something that I might not even be able to recognize as a human life. Right?

And I think for me, my answer to that question has been in the past, no, and therefore I should fear it. Okay. I think what Simone might be saying is no, but why are you so afraid of it? Is it just your nostalgia, right? And that's where I find her challenging. Yeah. And I think that she understands that a great many people are going to be.

that there will be a divide with respect to the use of technology for those who are used by it. So Prometheus wins there. Hence my discussion about rewriting the myth of Prometheus, right? So we're not condemned by this myth. In fact, we're obligated by it. We're obligated to change it. Yeah. Because we're in it.

We like it or not. Yeah, yeah. We are in it. Yeah. So how did Moongirl change you? Because I know you have some Heideggerian moodiness, your own Catholic, well, Gertrude, like, yeah. Yeah. So I'm very, at the point where I meet her, I'm very depressed about what I learned about the puppet masters, right?

Okay. And because, you know, before they were just figments of the Matrix or something like that, they were all always portrayed in either books or movies. And you could always have a distance. But when you actually meet them as human beings and you see what they do and you see how committed they are to doing it, you know, that this is like a religion for them. You know, this is what their, in fact, it is their religion. Well, you're so not like it. Yeah.

Yeah, it is. It is their religion. And they're incredibly charismatic in that sense, right? Because when people are fully committed to a way of life that is beyond them, and they're very charismatic, right? And so this hit me in really a hard way. And I became, I will just admit it, I was very depressed. And I remember doing some podcasts and people were like, oh, is there no hope?

And I'm thinking, how can I even say that there is? So then I meet her and she comes along. She knows all the things that I know and learn bad. She's engaged with these people too. She knows who they are. And then she's like, no, Diana, it does not have to be this bad. And in fact, you're creating it to, you're. you know, actively in the making it worse, right, by by not seeing that there's an out.

By being Orwell or Huxley. Exactly. Exactly. Thank you. Thank you. Yep. So yes, she turned me around in that respect. But it's something that we actually have to, we're obligated to say. We're obligated to be positive. We're obligated to basically say, no, I will not scroll for. through TikTok my whole day. You know, we can't do that, people. You stop that, right? Listen to UFO rabbit hole, but don't scroll through TikTok.

Right. Well, UFO never fuller. It's definitely not scrolling. It's not scrolling. Yeah. No, I agree. And I do think we need moody middle-aged philosophers like me to be a little friction against, you know, the optimists like Simone a little bit.

Yeah. Oh, for sure. Sure, they're, you're mostly, it's dialectic. It's dialectic. Yeah. I will say I'm challenged by it. I look forward to somebody like chatting with her, right? Because I am telling.

Yeah, no, that'll be fun. Yeah. Cool. So do you have, no, we wanted to, I think we wanted to talk about philosophy as a living tradition. Do you think we should hit that? Oh, I think we did that with, I mean, when we're talking about the dialectic, your book thinking about thinking is absolutely about that.

And so, yeah, I think that we've, so what you learn about philosophy. philosophy of school friends, do it's, do, read the book itself and do some questioning of it. Yes. Unless you need Dr. Jim's class. Yeah. Well, I'm so torn about all that because I don't think what really got me to make philosophical progress had a whole lot to do with what I did in school. No, I know that. I know that.

Yeah. Yeah. That's what I try to say is like, you know, because I read those texts. in school and they were taught to me, but I surely did not think about them the same ways until after I did UFO research. Yeah. And I think partly is in the UFO research kind of made the stakes higher, right? Yep. Yep. Like, okay, there's a challenge to my view now. I have to decide this. Yeah. Yes. Good. So, yeah, that covers my agenda. But thank you for encounters, Diana. Absolutely. Yeah.

So people should. We have only like barely scratched the search of that book. So please, people should read that book. Yeah. Thanks for speaking with me. And thanks to Kelly for having us on our show. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items, then review your list and carefully choose each one. Then we pack it all up and deliver it in as little as 30 minutes so you can feel confident it's what you ordered. Fresh groceries, your way with Ralph's delivery and pickup. And right now, you can save 20, $20 on your first delivery or pickup order. Ralph's, fresh for everyone.

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