← American Alchemy with Jesse Michels
American Alchemy with Jesse Michels
James Madden: Earth is Being Simulated by Non-Human Intelligence
02:12:01
Loading summary
Transcript646 lines
- [00:00]
A
What is dadication?
- [00:01]
B
The thing that drives me every day as a dad is Dariona. We call him Dae Dae for short. Every day he's hungry for something, whether it's attention, affection, knowledge. And there's this huge responsibility in making sure that when he's no longer under my wing that he's a good person. I want him to be able to sit back one day and go, we worked together. We did a good job. That's dadication. Find out more@fatherhood.gov Brought to you by.
- [00:26]
A
The U.S. department of Health and Human.
- [00:27]
B
Services and the Ad Council.
- [00:29]
A
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?
- [00:43]
B
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 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.
- [01:08]
A
I think you have to get away from thinking what we're being proposed here is actually Plato's political program. And there's something else going on here.
- [01:17]
B
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.
- [01:29]
A
Yeah. 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.
- [01:38]
B
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?
- [02:09]
A
Different parts of the brain have different activities.
- [02:11]
B
But you know that, don't you?
- [02:17]
A
Maybe you should interview me.
- [02:27]
B
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, 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 Hyperobject, 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 have heard of Plato's Republic or the cave analogy or 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?
- [03:32]
A
Sure. Well, first, thanks for having me. It's a real honor to be here. I appreciate. 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. But okay, so who is 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 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, know, member of Athenian society, you know, in the period kind of coming out of the Peloponnesian War. It's a time of, like, 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, right? It. 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.
- [04:54]
B
So you're maintaining that tradition today?
- [04:56]
A
I'm doing my best, yeah.
- [04:58]
B
Jiu Jitsu master.
- [05:00]
A
Yeah. So I think. I think an important thing to note about the Republic is, you know, it. 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 Adeimantus, who were Plato's half brothers. And there's another character, Thrasymachus, who's sort of a foil to those three in the dialogue. And I'm not sure if I'm getting this 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 Thrasymachus, my understanding was on the other side of this post Peloponnesian War political struggle from Plato's family. Okay? So it's interesting what Plato's depicting for us is this moment 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 then begins with Socrates, and the guys are here for this religious festival, and they're. 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 him about being old and isn't it terrible 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, but you'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 goes on in all the Platonic 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. Like, 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 me, what's the republic about? It's really about death. Okay. And the human condition in facing death. All right, okay. So at that point, then, you know, what is justice? Know, gets raised and now philosophy breaks out. Okay. And there's a, there's a really vehement debate between Socrates and Thrasymachus. Eventually Thrasymachus has had enough and leaves. And then Adamantus and Glaucon take up his position as like 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 they switch it to a political story. Okay, so what would justice be in the city? All right. But always with 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 in 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, interesting.
- [09:16]
B
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 death, 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 peripatetic way, figure out through dialogue what the ideal state is? But you're saying that it actually maybe has more to just do with death and like this really important metaphysical question of what happens when you die.
- [09:46]
A
Now once this, this is probably controversial. And of course, everything in academic philosophy is controversial. Right. So you could find bright people, brighter people than, 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.
- [09:58]
B
Yeah, I agree. I also think we are probably over indexed on taking everything allegorically and not literally. And so I'm, I'm more sympathetic to the Plato literalists, but, you know, that's, that's my own. I'm allowed to do that because I'm a, I'm a dilettante.
- [10:13]
A
Yeah, I envy you being dilatan. Okay, so, so. And I think there's very interesting things that Go on in the book. So basically we're told the only just state would be one that had a philosopher as a ruler.
- [10:28]
B
Right.
- [10:29]
A
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 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 have those. 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. But a philosopher would have to be produced by a just city.
- [11:16]
B
So end up in this sort of tautological loop or something.
- [11:19]
A
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 political program and there's something else going on here. Right. 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 asking them to change their lives and things like that, and eventually it ends very, very badly for him. And it's a not so thinned reference to Socrates.
- [11:55]
B
Okay.
- [11:57]
A
And interesting what Plato has Socrates say when, 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 he's saying, like, in any actual concrete human political situation, the philosopher really should not return. It would be a futile effort. Yeah, yeah.
- [12:36]
B
Fascinating.
- [12:37]
A
Yeah.
- [12:37]
B
And so just what is the cave? At a baseline for the average person?
- [12:42]
A
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 important to see. Like, that's. That's where it's proposed. Okay. 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 on the cave wall. 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.
- [13:29]
B
Yes.
- [13:30]
A
From this. Right. So it would be what we would call today a consensus reality.
- [13:34]
B
Yeah, right. Yeah.
- [13:35]
A
And now Plato never explains this, but voila, somebody gets loose. Okay. It's interesting. We never get an explanation of how that initial liberation would happen. Okay. And that person is 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 newly liberated person sees that. Right. And then goes through a process 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.
- [14:34]
B
Right.
- [14:34]
A
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 would even 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 his 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 light for the first time. And eventually he worked his way up to glimpsing the sun. Okay. Glimpsing what Plato elsewhere calls the good. Right. 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. There's more to the world. What you're seeing is an illusion, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, famously, it ends badly for him, just as it ended for Socrates.
- [15:40]
B
Very badly.
- [15:40]
A
Yeah.
- [15:42]
B
And there seems to be sort of push and pull, like this person is ascending out of the cave on their own sort of volition, but they're also being sort of dragged. Is that right or.
- [15:53]
A
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 make a case. The book is a philosophy of education, right. It's, it's what, what, what should our ruling elite be like? Like, how should they be educated? Right. And, 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, they're disposed to stay in illusion. Right. So someone has to be pulling. Right? Yeah. So is, which is a problem, I.
- [16:30]
B
Think, for the book is the, is the implication that the guardians or the puppeteers.
- [16:35]
A
Yeah.
- [16:36]
B
Are they outside of the cave or are they in the cave or. Yeah, yeah. Where do they sort of exist spatially in this analogy? Hey, American alchemy fans. After years of trying pretty much every shaving product under the sun, I finally found something that I love. It's called House of Atlas. I use it every day. House of Atlas's razor kit has raised my grooming game in the biggest way. The razor leaves you with the smoothest shave you'll ever get. They have precision shave cream, calming aftershave. Seriously, I don't know what they're doing with this blade, but it leaves my skin feeling silky smooth. With its five US made stainless steel blades and that high performance serum strip, it glides through my facial hair for an incredibly close, comfortable shave. They also have one of the most luxurious feeling and precision guiding shave creams and a very calming aftershave. Their shave cream has a thick, rich special formula that gives me a clear guide for an even shave. And the aftershave leaves my skin feeling cool and refreshed without any of that old school sting that you might get from other products. Plus, and this might be the coolest thing of all, the kit comes with an epic magnetic storage hook. And now for a limited time, they're offering 15% off your first order when you purchase any razor kit in the before and after set. This includes the precision shave cream and calming aftershave Use code Jesse j e s s e@houseofatlas.com that's H O U S E O F A t l a s.com with promo code Jesse J E S S E for 15% off your new razor kit and before and after set. 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.
- [18:30]
A
Let me give you a spooky answer to that.
- [18:32]
B
Yeah.
- [18:32]
A
All right, 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, 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 Plato's doing is he's saying, look, I just dragged you through the same educative process that I was outlined in the book. Right. 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?
- [19:32]
B
Yeah.
- [19:33]
A
Whole book, I think, tricks you into following that very process.
- [19:36]
B
And the guardians. So the guardians themselves are told a lie, and then they sort of purvey the lie as well, they transmit the lie. That's fascinating.
- [19:45]
A
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, I'm a contrarian called a good lie.
- [19:53]
B
Yeah.
- [19:53]
A
Right.
- [19:54]
B
Yeah.
- [19:54]
A
But, yeah, everyone has to be lied to in, in this process. Yeah.
- [19:59]
B
And the guardians, the implication there is they're guardians of this ideal city state. Is that, Is that correct? Okay. And then do we have any understanding of who is telling them this sort of noble mythology?
- [20:12]
A
Yeah. And keep in mind, like, like this is a problem because Plato earlier said any natural city is going to fall apart because of natural human greed and, and, 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 Plato.
- [20:30]
B
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?
- [20:41]
A
Well, it was, it was certainly a Greek, you know, religious festival. Right, so. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [20:47]
B
And then, and then there's a, you know, the, the, 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?
- [21:02]
A
Yeah, I, 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. But. Okay, is. Is very much a caricature of Plato. Do you see what I 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, we're being toyed with in certain ways.
- [21:32]
B
Yeah.
- [21:32]
A
I think a lot of it's a kind of a test. Like, do you get it?
- [21:35]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [21:36]
A
Okay. But I also think he's perfectly serious about some of the things in that book.
- [21:40]
B
Right.
- [21:40]
A
Okay. So, for instance, at the end the, the, 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, this is getting in the weeds, but people can go read the book. But at the end of the myth, ER 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, what you're getting here then is this 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.
- [22:35]
B
Well, he says kind of distrust your like five senses, right? And it's almost like this primordial knowledge. 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, 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.
- [23:15]
A
So we could teach anybody this if we just reminded them the right way or like a. Something that Plato does in the phaedo. Or he has Socrates, he has Socrates say in the phaedo, which interestingly, Plato goes out of his way to say he wasn't there for the, the conversation of fatal. So he oddly distances himself from it, which is. But he 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. Okay, so like, I think what Playo's 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.
- [23:59]
B
That's so interesting. Yeah, I mean, like the light itself also feels like this kind of dual meaning there. 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, it 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 or like uncover all sorts of kind of real conspiracies or issues with the way that, you know, the Dr. Doctrine, native, the indoctrinated history has been told or whatever. You can now do that because you have the access to all the information kind of at your fingertips. So enlightenment is also closer than ever.
- [25:08]
A
Yeah, but there's like that two edged sword, very thick like you and I, no Internet. Jim and Jesse never meet. Right?
- [25:15]
B
True.
- [25:15]
A
Jesse never reads Jim's book. Jim never like gets enlightened by your podcast. Right?
- [25:20]
B
Yeah, totally.
- [25:21]
A
But at the same time as like, I, I think we're also being simultaneously undone by that very same median.
- [25:28]
B
It's fascinating. And so if you think, if you extrapolate that out into the future, there are like two possibility space. Like if you have a Schrodinger's 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.
- [26:00]
A
Exactly.
- [26:00]
B
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 of. Because he. There are tests to become a guardian. Right? Like that. That wouldn't be disputed. Right. So is the cave itself some sort of like low level epistemic, like VR headset 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.
- [26:31]
A
And if you do, you level up or something?
- [26:33]
B
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [26:35]
A
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 were such things as prose treatise as a literary genre at the time. Okay, but yet Plato writes in dialogue. Okay, now we know Aristotle did, but we, 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?
- [27:07]
B
Totally. And there's something about, I love the word peripatetic, like the walking and talking and the dialogue based learning where it's like a, you know, a caterpillar into a butterfly or what you, 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.
- [27:28]
A
Can I, can I circle back to the light metaphor?
- [27:30]
B
Yes.
- [27:30]
A
Okay. 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. And of course it's all like, the sun's a Pretty going metaphor already. So, like, you have, 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.
- [27:54]
B
Right.
- [27:54]
A
So think of like by Plato suggesting that we could glimpse the sun. This is very transgressive stuff for the time, right?
- [28:01]
B
Yep.
- [28:03]
A
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? It's sort of like you 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 illumed to be pointed at.
- [28:38]
B
Right.
- [28:38]
A
So in. In any 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. It's sort of the horizon against. We can. 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.
- [29:01]
B
It's fat. Yeah. And so. So, okay, I'm sure a lot of people at this point in the interview are thinking, jesse, you have a show about UFOs.
- [29:09]
A
That's right.
- [29:09]
B
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. 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?
- [29:32]
A
Yeah, that's interesting question. So I think with a lot of people, I got kind of, you know, triggered about the UFO in like 2017, when, 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 Mulder was right.
- [30:01]
B
I've never seen anything like it. They've been going at it like that for almost half an hour.
- [30:06]
A
There've been this like, switch, like it's, it's suddenly they're saying, no, maybe there's something to this. Which, you know, my like, basic immuno response to everything is like, to study. Right.
- [30:16]
B
Right.
- [30:16]
A
And, and to do scholarships. So I start reading all the books and all that. And I, I think what, 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 it, and the more I thought about it, and 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.
- [31:11]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, even prosaically in a modern scientific context, we see, you know, between 400 and 700 nanometers of the electromagnetic wave spectrum.
- [31:20]
A
Yeah.
- [31:21]
B
You know, our decibel range is, you know, cut off. And so to say that we are measurement sensors that are limited inside of a larger reality I don't think is too controversial. And then do UFOs somehow speak to that because they seem weakly entangled with our reality. They seem to be sort of ephemeral. Jacques Vallee, which you write about very eloquently in your book, talks about 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 these sort of this, 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.
- [32:14]
A
Right.
- [32:16]
B
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 work in casual environments. They work in work settings. They come in six different sizes, from 26 inches to 50 inches. And they're all around just amazing. For a limited time, our listeners get 15% off your first order plus free shipping at ThePerfectGene NYC. Again, that's ThePerfectGene NYC. Or just Google the Perfect Gene. Use code Jesse15 for that. 15% off. Again, that's code Jesse15, that's 15% off for new customers at the Perfect Gene dot NYC after purchase, they'll ask where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them that we sent you your khakis. Get the Perfect Gene.
- [33:20]
A
One of the books that really turned me on in the ufo, and I think partly because it had a legitimizing, you have to honestly say it helped legitimize the study of it, was Carl Jung's book ufo the the Modern Myth. Modern Myth of Things in the Sky. And it's interesting, Jung makes this point that it's not entirely surprising, like right after the World wars and in the middle of, you know, the, the, 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 this, you know, this, his whole account of it in terms of the mandala and like a need to return to a new wholeness, that sort of thing. And so it makes a lot of sense to me that when, 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 found 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 writing it, he talks about it as like a, 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 for him to dismiss it though. And if you've read it and at the end he's like, and yet they're on radar.
- [34:51]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [34:52]
A
And yet they leave tracks.
- [34:53]
B
Yep.
- [34:54]
A
And so it's like in some, like, you know, I'm, I'm very into psychoanalysis. Okay. And it's sort of, 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 I keep coming back to is. And yet there do seem to be concrete effects.
- [35:16]
B
Yeah, that was Diana Pasulka'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 UFOs in some sort of. You know, I think this is real sense. I think she wanted to write about it and 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.
- [35:49]
A
Yeah.
- [35:49]
B
And it's like, oh, my God. I think there's something extremely real.
- [35:52]
A
You can see it, like, in. Similar to young in, like, real time. As Diana's writing. This is. She's like, the view is changing.
- [35:58]
B
Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's like. Yeah, go for it. Yeah.
- [36:01]
A
And so, like, the, you know, my take on the using. Going back to the cave metaphor, if that's okay.
- [36:10]
B
Yeah.
- [36:11]
A
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. Okay. And you sort of alluded to this, is that if we're. If we're faced with. 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. Okay. And so meaning, like, the. 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. So the stuff that we do see, it's there. The problem is 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, et cetera, et cetera. I think once you admit that there is a irreducible human contribution to our perception of the world.
- [37:31]
B
Yes.
- [37:31]
A
How you ever tease those two things back out is going to be the thorniest problem possible. Yeah.
- [37:37]
B
Just admitting that opens your mind to a whole host of possibilities. I love early in the Three Body problem, in the dark Forest Trilogy, this Chinese science fiction novel involving aliens, UFOs. You know, it's like the, the farmer and the shooter. And you have, you know, people on a 2D 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, 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.
- [38:20]
A
Right.
- [38:21]
B
And so we 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 there's, you're at this kind of epistemic impasse vis a vis modern science where if you propose anything like that.
- [38:40]
A
Yeah.
- [38:41]
B
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, your mind plays tricks on you, blah blah, blah. And you end up in this sort of like impossible to resolve argument.
- [38:58]
A
Yeah. Anaporia is like the classic. Yeah. Sort of like it's a puzzle.
- [39:04]
B
Oh, interesting. I've never heard that concept.
- [39:06]
A
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 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. Right. It's like doing the dog thing and, and of course all the sounds and smells and stuff it encounters are really there. Yeah, but it's a carve out from something much richer.
- [39:38]
B
Yes.
- [39:38]
A
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.
- [39:46]
B
Totally.
- [39:47]
A
Yeah.
- [39:47]
B
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 it that. That's easy, it's predictable. Right.
- [39:59]
A
Yeah.
- [40:00]
B
We could easily be cellular tautomata automata in some larger system where you know, you have the, you know, B.F. 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.
- [40:15]
A
Yeah.
- [40:15]
B
And how do we know that that's not being done to us on some sort of grand scale? And that's the Jacques Fillet kind of control system hypothesis.
- [40:23]
A
That was one of the things that really turned me on was, 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 being a small town and you're in this human context that's on this incredible scale. Right. And you, 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 this sudden sense you don't have the same feeling of control as you do say, back in a small town. 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, if we move out our magnification a bit, we'll see the city is itself just part of this much bigger ecosystem of things. And, and it's not clear who's running that, et cetera, et cetera. Right. And so it seems like our level of magnification, Right?
- [41:30]
B
Yes.
- [41:31]
A
Like, affords different senses of what the real substance of things are.
- [41:36]
B
Yes. And you start to get into weird ontological reality questions. The, 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 Umvelt. Yeah, this sort of perceptive apparatus. He talks about science as like, you know, a continuous process of umwelt hacking.
- [41:58]
A
He uses umvel.
- [41:59]
B
He does.
- [41:59]
A
Awesome.
- [42:00]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [42:00]
A
I feel vindicated. That's pretty cool.
- [42:02]
B
Yeah, yeah. Or, yeah, maybe he should be vindicated by you. But no, it's, it is, it's, it's. Or even, you know, 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. There's another physicist named, named Ken Wilson where it's like the higher the energy output, you know, 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, just, you know, suspend disbelief, say, we are just in this cave.
- [42:46]
A
Well, so I, I, I'm, we are. I mean, it just, it seems like everything inherently.
- [42:50]
B
We are.
- [42:51]
A
Yeah, yes.
- [42:51]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [42:52]
A
Like, everything we know about how cognition works, I think shows.
- [42:56]
B
I agree.
- [42:57]
A
We are sorting for relevance.
- [42:58]
B
Right.
- [42:58]
A
Thereby we're ignoring more than. And, and we've been evolutionarily rewarded and, like, programmed to ignore some things.
- [43:05]
B
So, so the two ways out of the cave would be your own 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 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 U action.
- [43:35]
A
But I, I wonder about that even. 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 setup. Like, you know, like, like it's still going to have to, like, run on this hardware, you know, so it's always going to go back to somehow traceable to, you know, modes of cognition that were developed for our Paleolithic ancestors.
- [44:05]
B
Yep. But I don't know. I mean. Yes, but like, are. The hardware is probably changing too.
- [44:12]
A
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
- [44:13]
B
You know, and, and it's always hard to say on what time scales things will happen because I'm, you know, I believe in Darwin, but I believe in him as a locally useful and incomplete theory.
- [44:24]
A
Yeah.
- [44:24]
B
And I think, you know, Hoffman's thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Hoffman's thing. Or, or, you know, you know, even, like, they're these placeholder terms we use, like punctuated equilibria and evolution. And, you know, Karl Popper said.
- [44:36]
A
And you're dead right to say, though, it's not like if we, if we go the Darwinian route.
- [44:41]
B
Yeah.
- [44:41]
A
Okay. Then the hardware is a moving target too. I agree 100%. But then, but think 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 I mean? So like, whatever. Whatever could be to be that change. It's almost like it can't be within our direct control.
- [45:03]
B
Say that again.
- [45:04]
A
Like, if we're. Let's say we're going to re. 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. Right. So it looks like it. There's. You're going to have that kind of looping problem in there.
- [45:23]
B
Yes, yeah. Yes. But then also you can measure a thing like the Copenhagen school, like, measures like an electron, and it's like this electron doesn't exhibit properties that like, you look like normal macroscopic reality.
- [45:36]
A
Right.
- [45:36]
B
And then that, like, puts you into this brain scramble that, like, you know, increases your evolution. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it is this like, positive feedback loop or something.
- [45:45]
A
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. Because we, we. We got here this. Through this evolutionary route, and that's always going to kind of flavor it. Right. So I agree. Like, like what science does is it opens it. Right. And I would even say even humanities in some cases. I think literature can like, open us to new reels and things like that. Okay. So it's opening it wider and wider and wider, but it's still always going to come back to that same origin point. And it's always limited then.
- [46:18]
B
Yeah, you have all these other myths that deal with technology development and, you know, like Prometheus being kind of the archetypal one or, or Faust, you know, and. And usually it doesn't end well for those seeking the light.
- [46:31]
A
Yeah.
- [46:32]
B
So how do we, how do we interpret that in sort of a Platonic and UFO context?
- [46:36]
A
So I got, I got really obsessed with Sophocles, Prometheus bound, the. The tragic play. And to the point, like, I make all my students read it now. And it's interesting that. Okay, so the, the start of Sophocles version of the myth is Hephaestus, the. The God of Smithing is. He's. He's chaining up, nailing down Prometheus. Okay. Which is ironic because, like, what did Prometheus do? Is he, like, he provided humans with all the arts. Okay. Like, including smithing. So basically, Prometheus is being bound by technology. He's the God that gives us technology, but he is bound by technology.
- [47:14]
B
Right.
- [47:15]
A
And in Sophocles version, force, who speaks for Zeus. Interesting. He's just pure blind Force speaks. There's and Hephaestus are kind of, they're kind of mocking him. Like your name means foreknowledge and 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?
- [47:39]
B
Wow.
- [47:39]
A
Yeah. And he encounters Ian, who, you know, IO pardon me, who you know, was who rejected Zeus and she's a human. It 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 a 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, 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, I think even Sophocles, there's a sense that humans are on rails to a kind of self assertive self destruction. Right. Because we are these technological animals.
- [48:30]
B
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 cells that stop dividing but don't die. They hang around in your body, draining your energy, clogging up your recovery and generally making you feel older than you are. Qualia Senolytic is a first of its kind supplement formulated with nine plant based compounds designed to help your body naturally eliminate these zombie cells. It's not something you take every day, just two days a month, but it supports your body in aging better at the cellular level. Since I've started taking it, I've felt sharper, lighter and like my body's resilience has come back online. It's vegan, non GMO and grounded in serious research experience. The science of feeling younger. Go to QualiAlife do for up to 50% off your purchase and use code Jesse Again, that's J E S S e for an additional 15 off. That's Q-U-A-L-I-A L I F E dot com. Jesse. J E S S E for an extra 15 off your purchase. Thanks so much to Qualia for sponsoring this episode. What does that mean as far as our relationship to technology? One essay that you write about in your great book and Diana Pasulka also talks about is the question concerning technology, which is this, this Heidegger essay. 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.
- [50:30]
A
It's difficult. Yeah. And it's. That's not the place to start, Heidegger. But it's like, if it's where everybody wants to get to.
- [50:35]
B
Yeah. I don't think I understand Heidegger in general, but yeah. Yeah.
- [50:40]
A
Okay. So basically what, what Heidegger is arguing in that essay is the essence of technology isn't a device. Okay? He's very explicit about that. So, so when Heidegger gets moody about technology, he's not just moody about how much, like, screen time we're having. Like, he wouldn't be a fan, but, like, you know, 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, 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, what happened is, for some reason, we began 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. He'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.
- [52:41]
B
Yeah, I, 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 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.
- [53:21]
A
Yeah, Heidegger was, Heidegger was really worked up the first time he heard someone use the word human resources. Right. 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 he's not just worried that like, you know, Soylent Green is people. Like, but I think he is for.
- [53:39]
B
Yeah, everybody listen to me.
- [53:42]
A
Hatcher, you got to tell him Silent Green is people. But he's, he's worried that then we'll, we'll only have a means end attitude to ourselves. Yeah, to everything. And, and what his worry is is this will lead us to what he calls a certain kind of oblivion to being. Right.
- [54:02]
B
Yeah.
- [54:02]
A
Is like an oblivion, like a forgetfulness again. Right. Full circle to Plato here. Like a forgetfulness of what being really is.
- [54:10]
B
Yes.
- [54:11]
A
Yeah. And we'll only see it as what it is to us, how we can access it.
- [54:15]
B
Yeah, yeah. Well, the soil and 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, metaphor though, it's a great metaphor. And you know, Allah, the Plato, where you never know if it's a metaphor or it's real. I think he talks about five stages of technological development in that essay, and one of them is sacrifice. 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.
- [55:00]
A
Yeah.
- [55:01]
B
For, like, forbidden knowledge and technology. And I, I, it's funny because, you know, I think. Yeah.
- [55:07]
A
Chesterton actually draws, I think, a connection between, you know, sort of pre. Scientific magic and technology. Yeah. And like, human sacrifice and technology idea is that we, if we just had the right technique, we could force the world's hand to do what we want.
- [55:25]
B
Right, yeah. Right. Yeah.
- [55:28]
A
And there's. I think Gerard would see something like that too. Yeah.
- [55:30]
B
Oh. 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, you know, extra appendage or something. And then, you know, I think post information revolution, it's sort of become this, like, parisitization of humans.
- [55:50]
A
So Heidegger's like, one, Heidegger's great examples is he compares, like, a hydroelectric dam to a medieval windmill. Okay. Or a medieval water mill. Okay. Because on those, like, say in 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. Okay.
- [56:10]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [56:12]
A
But like, with the wind, like the medieval windmill, you, it works when the wind blows. Okay. So you're like, you're going to, like, like, build something that makes you have to work along with nature.
- [56:23]
B
Yes.
- [56:24]
A
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.
- [56:31]
B
Yep.
- [56:32]
A
So it's all on our terms.
- [56:34]
B
Right.
- [56:34]
A
It's about how we access you. Right. And not how can we work with you.
- [56:39]
B
Yeah. It's mastery over nature in a way. Yeah. It's not just harmonizing with it with nature.
- [56:45]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [56:46]
B
And those two things are very distant. 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, that 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, that 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 being able. How do we control everything? If you think about VR is like that to the limit, where it's like the entire world that we might be living in is controllable. And so I don't know, taking it one step farther with the Plato thing, do you ever think this is. We're in these biological skin suits there that are basically like VR headsets and the contemplation of virtue or 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, if you fail, like, you don't get to study metaphysics, you just like, become the, like the economic producer or whatever.
- [58:25]
A
So I think at this point is where like a Heidegger and Plato come apart, okay? Or 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 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, we're more passive in the process, okay, Than, than say for Plato, where we'd be more active in the process. Like there, there would be, you know, an 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 transcendence 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, 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 Heidegger than that. Yeah.
- [60:05]
B
Fascinating. Well, speaking. Speaking of that, 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. Is the UFO some sort of pulling technology? Because you. You talk about this where it's this thing that it busts all of your priors.
- [60:26]
A
Yeah.
- [60:26]
B
You know, it's like you have all these, like, prior categorization techniques.
- [60:29]
A
I didn't want to. About this. Right. Yeah, I did, but, like early, you know, five years ago.
- [60:34]
B
But you find yourself obsessed.
- [60:35]
A
Yeah.
- [60:35]
B
Because it's. It's. It's inherently kind of uncategorizable.
- [60:39]
A
Yeah. That's kind of where I land with the. As it were, with the ufo is 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. Throughout history, but it seems like something's knocking. Right. And whether we listen to it. It through a Platonic 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. I like to use Plato's metaphor, 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 an elf or a fairy? 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 least strategize how we would listen to. Yeah.
- [61:37]
B
Yeah. It's so fascinating. And so, like, how does. 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 an extremely high abstract level of the kind of ontological truth. And then there's like. Like their government whistleblowers coming out of 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 park. Poke holes 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?
- [62:14]
A
I don't know. I know that I can.
- [62:15]
B
Yeah.
- [62:16]
A
And because, see, for me, and this is not. I Am not, 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 a falsehood and not be lying. I'm not saying anyone's lying or anything like that. You always have to wait. It's like, is this testimony true? Right. Against the probability that this someone, this person's been somehow deceived or et cetera, et cetera. You know what I mean?
- [62:50]
B
Yeah.
- [62:51]
A
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.
- [62:59]
B
Yep.
- [63:00]
A
You know what I mean? So like, let's say, you know, we, we talk to whistleblower, you know, Roy. Right.
- [63:06]
B
Okay, sure.
- [63:07]
A
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.
- [63:13]
B
Yeah.
- [63:13]
A
It seems unlikely that they're all in on something. That seems unlikely. But then it seems really unlikely that these things they're telling you is true too.
- [63:23]
B
Right, Right. Of course.
- [63:25]
A
This is an old argument from David Hume about miracles. And so we have to weigh that. And it seems to me like I can't even really make a meaningful comparison of those probabilities.
- [63:33]
B
Well, I would say in the world in which like forbidden knowledge is a real thing.
- [63:39]
A
Yes.
- [63:39]
B
That there's some cleaving off of like black world science or knowledge. You know, the government would be attempting systematic to get that, you know, just from a game theory, geopolitical.
- [63:51]
A
You have to assign some plausibility.
- [63:54]
B
Yep.
- [63:54]
A
To like maybe. Well, the thing is, 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 because either like this has been covered up for 75 years, you know what I mean? Or there's something really weird going on now where it seems like now people want us to believe it. Right. So either way you've got like a low pro prima facie low probability conspiracy theory you're going to have to take.
- [64:22]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [64:23]
A
Or another. Right.
- [64:23]
B
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 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, psyop the American population? That. That seems crazy.
- [64:51]
A
Yeah.
- [64:52]
B
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.
- [64:59]
A
Yeah.
- [65:00]
B
Thousands of years.
- [65:00]
A
See, there's where I think you and I come apart. I don't know which is crazier.
- [65:03]
B
Sure, sure. Well, I'm more in that, like, you know, I'm waiting through the waters of speaking to all these people.
- [65:09]
A
Yeah. And. But. But I think I. I do think you have to say now that. I mean, I. It's been on the floor of the Congress and things like that. That has to. That's got to pump the probability up a little bit, right?
- [65:23]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [65:24]
A
You know, but not. I don't know if all the way. Right. Because.
- [65:27]
B
Well, it's funny, like, as I say, things like, people don't think correctly, I think. And so that's a crazy thing for me to say. I know, but it's like, you could just say, like. 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, I now believe. And then you could go into all these sort of first principles, like, more interesting inquiries into, like, how reality works a la what we're doing now. And it's like, it's, you know, not even wrong or, like, unfalsifiable or, like, crazy or whatever, because you need to. Somehow their receptors around credentialism need to be met at first, and then they're like, oh, let me listen. It's like, that's just not the way you should inquire.
- [66:18]
A
You might have heard about some of the honest placebo studies.
- [66:23]
B
No.
- [66:23]
A
Okay. So apparently I'm probably not getting all the details right, but apparently there are cases where there've been experiments where they, like, told people, this is a placebo. This is an inert substance.
- [66:33]
B
Yep.
- [66:34]
A
And we're giving it to you.
- [66:35]
B
It still helped.
- [66:36]
A
Still helped if the person giving it to them still had, like, the lab coat.
- [66:42]
B
Yeah.
- [66:43]
A
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 gonna work. Right.
- [66:50]
B
Yeah, but, like.
- [66:51]
A
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. To really mistrust Totally.
- [66:58]
B
Well, and there's certain people who have an a priori disposition towards magic and then others who don't and then that becomes their reality. Like it's, it's like the Plato thing where it's like everything I'm going to tell you is a lie. And like then why would you say that? And you get all confused and then he goes on to tell some like stuff that like there's clearly some truth in it.
- [67:15]
A
Exactly.
- [67:16]
B
And then, you know, maybe there's some lies but like you're extremely intrigued. There, there are layers to. This is like Leo Strauss, this you know, you know, 20th century philosopher. He was a big, big, you know, Platonist too. And.
- [67:30]
A
But he also thought those books were fullized.
- [67:33]
B
Totally. But then you never 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. So it's this never ending thing. And you could say the exoteric is implying meaning that doesn't exist.
- [67:50]
A
Right.
- [67:50]
B
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. Or you could say the exoteric is throwing people off the trail and this. And the more you like talk about that, then you're going and you, you've created this cult.
- [68:07]
A
Yes.
- [68:07]
B
And it's.
- [68:08]
A
Yeah. And. And so I actually do this in the book where I say okay, using the example of the Tic Tac. Okay, so what's my evidence of the Tic Tac? Well, this, you know, seemingly very reliable Air Force pilot.
- [68:24]
B
It.
- [68:24]
A
And you know say. And Alex Dietrich and David Fraver, they said these things. Right.
- [68:30]
B
Raytheon Clear systems.
- [68:31]
A
Yeah. Okay. And so. So I have like testimony from seemingly reliable people. Right. Okay. And if you say yeah, but it like how can you buy that? But yet like I only know Bin Laden was shot.
- [68:44]
B
Yep.
- [68:45]
A
Because of testimony.
- [68:47]
B
Media.
- [68:47]
A
Yeah. From that came through the media through reliable like Pentagon officials. I only know. And now of course maybe some of that stuff we shouldn't. Wouldn't be so quick to believe too. Do you mean? But it seems to me you've got to put it on the spectrum of believability now.
- [69:02]
B
Of course.
- [69:03]
A
Yeah.
- [69:03]
B
But it's like. Yeah. If you say like we detected a cork or whatever through like some particle accelerator.
- [69:08]
A
I take Eric's word for that.
- [69:10]
B
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.
- [69:23]
A
Yeah. And I think, I mean, that has been known since Plato.
- [69:30]
B
Yeah.
- [69:31]
A
You know what I mean? I agree. And so what do I do with, like, say, disclosure movement, stuff like that? And the UFO is. I'll admit, I now am, like, self consciously aloof to it.
- [69:43]
B
That's cool. I like that. I'm starting to be like that too. 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 that. 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. I've loved all of the people who I've been lucky enough to have access to on the show. But. 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 go to the deeper stuff. And some of them are going through their own processes and journeys. You talk to Jake Barber, David Grush, or any of these people, like, they're it. 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 red.
- [70:54]
A
And right now, let's say, you know, you said, you know, we're off the air jam, and I'm gonna show you. Yeah, here's what they showed me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got the real stuff. Yeah, I would have to say. Okay, but then why would I believe Jesse?
- [71:04]
B
Yeah, totally.
- [71:05]
A
Do you already?
- [71:06]
B
And why are you showing me?
- [71:07]
A
Yeah, why are you showing me? You know what I mean? So it seems like, like. And this is like, one of the frustrations, but even if you found out, you haven't found out.
- [71:13]
B
Right, Right, right, right.
- [71:14]
A
Yeah.
- [71:15]
B
Well, that's why, you know, my. 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.
- [71:46]
A
Yeah.
- [71:48]
B
And if it's not that, it won't hit people epistemically in the right way.
- [71:53]
A
Yeah. Because think of it.
- [71:53]
B
Because they'll be skeptical forever.
- [71:55]
A
So think of it like right now. Evolution has been taught in public schools, at least in most private schools, for generations. Right. But how many Americans believe it? Yeah.
- [72:07]
B
Right.
- [72:08]
A
Not everyone. Yeah. Like the big Bang's been taught.
- [72:10]
B
Yeah.
- [72:10]
A
How many Americans believe it?
- [72:12]
B
Yeah.
- [72:12]
A
Not everyone. You know, so it's like you could, you could even have something become like educational orthodoxy and it doesn't necessarily move the needle for everyone.
- [72:20]
B
Yeah.
- [72:20]
A
So like what, what would even like disclosure look like in a way that actually had grip on people's daily lives? Right.
- [72:28]
B
Totally. And, and then you. Yeah. And then it's like, okay, you see a saucer and a hanger. The hanger's official site. You see some government official who you know, you trust because they're cabinet level or they're 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. And. Yeah. So, yeah, 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 umvelt lens or whatever. Work on the lens.
- [73:11]
A
Yeah. And so for me, you know, it, it becomes, you know, less. You know, what are we gonna like, not that even really ever was like, what are we gonna get the government to tell us? It's more. Can I, can I come up with a philosophical metaphysical cognitive model.
- [73:27]
B
Yeah.
- [73:28]
A
Y. Where it makes sense.
- [73:29]
B
Yeah.
- [73:30]
A
That like the un, where we would expect the unexpected to happen. And I think. Yeah, we can, I think, I think that does make perfectly good sense. Right.
- [73:36]
B
Yeah.
- [73:36]
A
And so then the question now is just, okay, how do we digest that? Right. Do you know, for ourselves, in, in, in our friendships, in our classrooms, all that. Yes. Becomes it. Right. You know, I'm not looking for authorities to tell me what to do. Right. Yeah.
- [73:53]
B
Absolutely. Yeah. No, that's. You become limited in your ability to derive truth 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 decibel ranges or electromagnetic wave spectrums, but look at physics itself. There's the weak anthropic principle, and there's a strong anthropic principle. And the strong anthropic principle is like, like, well, you know, eventually like you, you'll have enough iterations that like, you know, like the universe will foster life. And then the weakanthropic principle is like the limits of our perceptive, you know, capabilities like make physics comport with our perceptive capability, which is so obviously true. Like, I think the idea that Planck'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, 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 how.
- [75:05]
A
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.
- [75:12]
B
Yes.
- [75:13]
A
We're always going to be like, yes, but.
- [75:15]
B
And then the second you admit that the human, that the observer observed distinction breaks down.
- [75:20]
A
Yeah.
- [75:21]
B
Which like Jung would say, I don't know, 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, in, in 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, 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 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.
- [76:04]
A
That's a really good point, Jesse. I think there's a difference between this sort of really kind of facile work on yourself thing. Right. As opposed to like, what would it be to cultivate real interiority. Right. Yeah. And I think it's A really great distinction. Yeah.
- [76:21]
B
Do you think, like, the next epistemological or scientific paradigm involves bringing the observer into, you know, the, the observed. Or there's. 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.
- [76:44]
A
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 where, like, once we try to tease out the noumenal from the phenomenal. Right. You know, that for us, as opposed to that which things are in themselves, you'll get nowhere except ethically. Right. He thinks we can know things in themselves in terms of like, like moral matters. Right. But that's it. And so, so I think in much of Western philosophy since Kant has, like, been dealing with that now. It's gone off the rails really badly in many ways. Okay. But I think. And then you. We can look in the sciences, you know, hard sciences, the same thing. Like, like the, 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.
- [77:36]
B
Yes, right. Yes.
- [77:37]
A
Yeah.
- [77:37]
B
It's also interesting how science itself might be converging on more of a Platonic worldview where you have in increasing popularity the work of, like, Rupert Sheldrake, you know, these morphic fields, or Michael Levin, where there's this interaction between biological forms and 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, in. In the brain, you know, it all. Maybe, maybe we end up just back to like, Hellenic times, like talking about these, like, you know, sacred geometry and stuff.
- [78:33]
A
Well, you know, you don't know, a little off that, but like, overlapping, you know. You know, Sheldrake has this really interesting paper. Is the Sun Conscious?
- [78:41]
B
I love that.
- [78:42]
A
Which. Which he answers affirmatively. Right. And you can see similar work. I'm. I'm forgetting his name now. An American analytic philosopher in the last few years published a paper arguing that the United States is Probably a conscious entity. And, and both Sheldrake and this other paper are, are making the point that, well, if we know that a certain kind of organization causes the emergence of consciousness in us and it's. 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.
- [79:14]
B
Right.
- [79:15]
A
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, a universe suffused with consciousness. Right. But in a way that isn't like irresponsibly spooky either. Yeah, I think that's very important.
- [79:36]
B
Yeah. 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.
- [79:45]
A
Yeah.
- [79:46]
B
And even, you know, if you think of us as like individual nodes, that totally comports with Sheldrake's stuff around. And if you grow an organic crystal structure, you can then grow that crystal structure much faster on an ongoing basis. Or look at athletic accomplishments, which is similar to ismorphic guy breaks the 4 minute mile.
- [80:05]
A
Then a bunch of.
- [80:06]
B
Exactly the banister effect. And if you think about how computers work in 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 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.
- [80:33]
A
I did not know that. With a download upload.
- [80:34]
B
Yeah, it's, it's interesting, right? Like literally like the way. And then, and then you get into all sorts of interesting stuff around. You know, what is DNA looks like binary code.
- [80:44]
A
And what you're into there is then like a fundamental networked world. Yes, yeah.
- [80:49]
B
Yes.
- [80:49]
A
Yeah.
- [80:50]
B
And. But in a way that comports with literal observable size. 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, human. The human looks like a semiconductor in many ways. And he goes through all these like, you Know. Yeah, 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 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, like William James would say, like there's some sort of transmission going on.
- [81:37]
A
Yeah.
- [81:37]
B
And if you're put a person in a Faraday cage, the fact that they can think points against that theory because if you were getting it from a traditional RF signal, the Faraday cage would kill the RF signal. But if you get into these like weird spooky new science called, you know, extended electrodynamics, where you have these sort of scalar, you know, field, you know, 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 or something.
- [82:25]
A
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, oh, are we geocentrist now? 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.
- [82:45]
B
And that seems, Aristotle seems to be, I mean you write about it that the existence of non human intelligence or aliens totally comports with an Aristotelian worldview.
- [82:56]
A
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, that. But the idea that things are in a way affected or managed by non human intelligence for Aristotle is, is apparent in his view. Yeah.
- [83:13]
B
Do you think that, you know, AI is like all the, 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, the Jacques Valet control system thing. It knows how to nip at the herd. So like a new, 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, the envoys that they, the von Neumann replicators that they sent out to like manage us.
- [83:50]
A
So there's a, 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, like people are regretting that we have to use humans. Okay. All right. So the human is becoming irrelevant. And, and it's very clear in the film. And this is, this is before in the popular imagination, artificial intelligence is a thing like, that's not a proposal to film at all. But already just based on regular mechanical operations. The film is 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, the more we think in terms of certain kinds of mechanical intelligence. Right. The more we make ourselves easier to mimic by machines. Do you see that?
- [85:14]
B
Yeah.
- [85:15]
A
And so 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.
- [85:27]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [85:28]
A
Right. There's some I refer to in the book is A very underappreciated 20th century philosopher, Gunther Anders. This is definitely something he's worried about. That we're like, like he thinks we're, we're kind of. We're. We're creating Prometheus.
- [85:42]
B
Yeah.
- [85:42]
A
We're letting Prometheus loose.
- [85:44]
B
Yes.
- [85:45]
A
And then in these technologies. And then those things will come back and run us.
- [85:48]
B
Yeah. It's like creating a golem or, or summoning a demon or something. And then. And then you sort of obsolete yourself.
- [85:55]
A
Yeah.
- [85:55]
B
In the process.
- [85:56]
A
And you can already, in the 50s and 60s, before there was any hint of AI in the popular imagination. Yeah. This notion of human obsolescence was already in play.
- [86:05]
B
Totally.
- [86:06]
A
That we are going to make ourselves irrelevant to the world that we're making.
- [86:11]
B
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.
- [86:20]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [86:21]
B
And then try to ascend out of, you know, whatever paradigm you're existing in. But I do. Yeah. This 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?
- [86:35]
A
We're, like, demoting ourselves.
- [86:36]
B
You're demoting yourself. And, like, we're willfully doing that when, like, this whole thing could be a test.
- [86:42]
A
Yeah.
- [86:42]
B
And so I always found that so fascinating with this sort of obsession with, like, we need to build, like, higher fidelity worlds. 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. The AI VR thing is like an escape.
- [86:57]
A
Yeah. So a lot of times people ask me, so, you know, am I worried about AI, et cetera, et cetera? And my reply is, I think the game was done 80 years ago.
- [87:06]
B
Right.
- [87:07]
A
I think, like, I would even look at things like the Manhattan Project, where you had this thing, this, like, technological hyper object, like, took off and, like, nobody really knew what was going on.
- [87:17]
B
Yeah.
- [87:17]
A
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. It's like, it's. Who's running this now? The technology is running this.
- [87:28]
B
Prometheus is running it completely. Yeah. And it's such a fascinating time where it was like, clearly this big inflection point. He had 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.
- [87:49]
A
It'S just gonna happen.
- [87:50]
B
It was just gonna happen or something. And then he. And then he kind of decamped from that. And it was like Teller was more in that sort of it's gonna happen, so we might as well sort of build it ourselves. And it is this very Promethean, Faustian sort of story. And it's. It's ultimately kind of. Kind of tragic. And then it also. You have to wonder at that time because that's when all the UFOs pop up.
- [88:11]
A
Exactly.
- [88:12]
B
In our visible reality. You know, at least according to all the lore. And there's a lot of lore under.
- [88:17]
A
This new interpretation, like appearing as technology. Right. Yeah.
- [88:22]
B
Yes. Well, it's also like, maybe, you know, to the extent the guardians want to keep the test going or something, 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, you know, diffuse. Like you know, some of these things keep, keep the test going or whatever. And you know, it's like, does something super unprecedented happen when we discover, you know, the, the myth makers, when we, when we have, when we develop the perceptive apparatuses through high energy output or through some sort of ascended consciousness to like, like see who's like messing with us?
- [88:58]
A
Yeah.
- [88:59]
B
And does that just unravel reality and.
- [89:01]
A
Think of like the, the cosmic meaning of like humanity discovering that we could take ourselves out? Do you see? You know what I mean? Like, like it has to change us in ways that none of us have probably really dealt with.
- [89:15]
B
Yes.
- [89:15]
A
In our unconscious. Right, yeah. That we now know collective suicide is a possibility through humanity.
- [89:22]
B
Yes.
- [89:22]
A
Which was not, not an option until the 1940s, you know.
- [89:27]
B
Yeah.
- [89:27]
A
And. And so what, what, like how does that, how is that a firecracker going off in our own belt?
- [89:33]
B
Yes.
- [89:34]
A
Like how is that going to change our ability to see what's there or, or miss what's there, etc. Etc. Like it has to have an effect. Right. This is part of Jung's point.
- [89:43]
B
Yeah, totally. And so what do you, what role does religion play in all of this? Because I love you talk about this like Janus, you know, the, the two, the two sided face or whatever, that, that religion plays a dual role of sort of sending you down the wrong path at times, but also pointing you to the sacred.
- [90:04]
A
Yeah.
- [90:05]
B
And so. Yeah. Well, how do you, how do you view religion?
- [90:07]
A
There's, there's this really interesting passage from Aristotle that I use in the book where he, 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 this whole kind of romantic cosmology, you know, of his. I don't 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 he 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 like 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.
- [91:42]
B
And you have, you know, speaking of true knowledge as some sort of sense memory.
- [91:47]
A
Yeah.
- [91:48]
B
That is not, you know, the five sort of lower senses. 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. What do you make of that story and maybe rehash the story for the audience.
- [92:11]
A
Yeah. So in the republic, Ur was a virtuous person. He dies in battle for the city. That does all the Greek good stuff. Right. And he goes, you know, and then it's all wound up with fairly conventional, you know, Athenian views about the afterlife. So he crosses the river Styx and all the right gods are there. But then it comes to a point where 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 going to have the excellences that carry them through. They'll have it. Right? Okay, so that's interesting. All right. And so 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 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 recollection of a near death experience for Plato or maybe like the Elysian Mysteries? Something 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 in the virtuous person. Right. And a kind of in touch with. Right. Like just put it. And in touch with being with the good that the virtuous person has.
- [94:02]
B
Yes.
- [94:02]
A
Yeah. You know what I mean? So that is to take it allegorically, but it's in a way that would, like, make a concrete difference for conduct.
- [94:09]
B
Yes. Do you think that Plato. Because, you know, I do. I look at the Eleusinian mysteries, and I know, you know, it's probably hard to say historically whether these, you know, what exactly happened here? BRIAN Murray, Rescuers.
- [94:21]
A
They were up to something.
- [94:22]
B
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 society, 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.
- [94:51]
A
Fight club. Right.
- [94:52]
B
Yeah, exactly. Don't talk about it. And they all undergo these sort of. They drink the kekion, which is maybe, as speculated by Brian Murescu, this sort of ergot that contains lsd, this, you know, 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?
- [95:15]
A
I think that.
- [95:16]
B
That. 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?
- [95:30]
A
I have no reason to rule that out. Does that make sense? Yeah, you know what I mean? Like, in. In a lot of ways, it's not like it, you know, it's. It's not like we discovered, you know, like, peyote at Woodstock.
- [95:42]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [95:44]
A
Like, this stuff has been around. Right. You know what I mean? I think there's, you know, so I would be surprised if that wasn't. And we know it's been around religion and all that.
- [95:52]
B
Right, right.
- [95:52]
A
Okay. I mean, in, like, various pagan religions.
- [95:55]
B
Et cetera, et cetera.
- [95:56]
A
So. So I'd be surprised if there wasn't something like that going on. Does that make sense? Sense?
- [96:00]
B
It does. It's just so funny how we, in the modern 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. And it's like, well, I don't know. I think the guy was going to Eleusis and drinking some weird shit.
- [96:19]
A
Especially when you read some of the dialogues like Phaedrus and the symposium. Desire and love are running a lot. Right, okay. And I think that's important to note. Right. And I think whatever the mysteries were. Right. It does seem like it worked. Like, this is like you got, like a cheat code to the goal line. Right. And then you go back and spend the rest of your life trying to think your way back to it. Do you see what I mean?
- [96:48]
B
I do, yeah. Yeah. You immediately 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 words.
- [97:07]
A
How do you show the light by which we see other things?
- [97:10]
B
Right, Right.
- [97:10]
A
Yeah.
- [97:11]
B
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. It's. It. You have to parse their. Their word. I mean, you get the sense, you know, we were talking before the show, know, Jacques Vallee, you know, was just on Joe Rogan, 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.
- [97:40]
A
Yeah.
- [97:40]
B
And he speaks in these sort of riddled, coded parables, and not just because.
- [97:43]
A
Of, like, security clearance. Like, it's, like, inarticulable.
- [97:46]
B
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, 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 just the. Whatever the truth is, is, like, inherently.
- [98:07]
A
Yeah.
- [98:08]
B
Hard to.
- [98:08]
A
You know, I've been reading a lot of H.P. lovecraft horror stories lately. Yeah, right. Maybe more than I should. But it's interesting. Like. Like, so Lovecraft has this, like, really pessimistic, dark view of the. Of the world. Okay. But yet there's always this other thing that's operating that's inarticulable. You know what I mean? And so it seems like, like, like even someone like Lovecraft who has this just dark, dark view of the universe and it's hopeless.
- [98:41]
B
Yeah.
- [98:42]
A
It. 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. Right. 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 have a similar thing in Plato, right? Yeah. And I think a lot of us have this sense that there's another factor.
- [99:04]
B
Yeah, totally. Or like when I was speaking to Diana Pasulka, she said like Christians are not of this world. And it was both this very hopefully statement. Yeah. 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, not nihilistic because you have that other thing there.
- [99:26]
A
Yeah.
- [99:26]
B
But it was like this world sucks and it isn't and isn't going anywhere super positive. And like 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, I find it true to me too when, I don't know, when somebody has some super virtue signally like, I'm gonna save a world. Think about like the, the 20th century is sort of the, the age of ideology and utopian sort of, you know, like visions. And they all ended up in like mass death and like extremely dysfunctional. So like that the technocratic solutions don't really work. When you hear Lululemon, you probably think.
- [100:15]
A
Of Align yoga pants.
- [100:17]
B
Weightlessly soft, like you're wearing next to nothing. That's why you see them in class, at the grocery store and in the park. But did you know about skirts with built in liner shorts so you can still jump for the Frisbee and tanks and bodysuits. With Align's iconic stretch, you won't want.
- [100:35]
A
To take it off.
- [100:35]
B
And with endless style options, you don't have to shop in store or online@lululemon.com.
- [100:42]
A
At a certain point in the Republic. I forget whether it's Glaucon or Adeimantis, you know, it says, well, they've just got through you know, some of the absurdities, you know, like we're Gonna have to share wives, and we're gonna take your kids. You won't raise your own kids. And. And like, well, 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 painted you a picture of the most beautiful human form, and he said, when 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 rigged spring break lottery for mating is like that. That's not the point. But the point is, like, you are not going to find the ideal here. Yeah, it's not here. And so whatever your expectations for it are, they're off. Right. Okay. And think of how in the Republic, right, 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 Timaeus, which is sort of a sequel to the Republic, the day after the party, and Socrates says, hey, I'm troubled that we couldn't see the ideal in the real. Right. We never got to a concrete instance of it. So he assembles some politicians to say, tell me what the ideal city would be. And the closest he gets to an answer is from Critias, who tells him a myth, Another good lie about this great war between ancient Athens and in Atlantis. Right. And when. And. But. But once again, it's like, it's. It's sketchy, you know, he. Like, it was heard by Solon in Egypt at a children's party from a priest whose name means deception and all this like. Okay, so it's like Plato's saying we don't really ever get to see the ideal. Right. In. In the concrete world. Right. And then. And then you get this creation myth again, right. In the Timaeus, 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.
- [102:56]
B
Yes. Yeah, yeah. We're like a simulacra or like a fallen version of the thing. Yeah, that's so. Yeah, it's fascinating.
- [103:05]
A
Right. But also, though, I think it's a fair, perennial criticism of Plato that, like, there are consequences to saying this. World is worthless. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [103:14]
B
You know, well, that's why, I mean, I, and maybe I'm wrong in interpreting him this way, but I, I think the postmodern simulation theory is extremely nihilistic. It's like, okay, you know, we're all in a simulation. Play Grand Theft Auto. Like, that's, that's, that's bad. And then I, I, I, My sense is that in Plato's case, it's more meaningful.
- [103:33]
A
Yeah. I could think of no better metaphor to prepare people to have bad lives.
- [103:37]
B
Right, than, than like the simulation, Simulation theory. Right. So you're like, oh, you're playing a video game. Nothing matters, you know? 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, you're being sort of tested and, you know, you're seeing these simulacra, like you're not seeing the ideal forms or whatever, but there's another level, and the other level is, involves goodness. And, you know, and so, I don't know, I mean, that I would, I would hope that, that, that interpretation of Plato is correct and then I don't know if I'm correct and, you know.
- [104:14]
A
Believing that, but you would not get trouble for me.
- [104:18]
B
Okay, well, thanks. Awesome. So Glaucon also says when, when speaking about the cave, he says, are there protocols that allow us to ascend outside of the cave? And I asked Jacques Vallee 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, to, you know, again, speaking, you know, typically kind of coded fashion. Do you think there are protocols?
- [104:46]
A
I mean, I mean, I, I, 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 irrational passion around your life. Right. Know thyself. Right. Do you. Sitting. You know what I mean?
- [105:04]
B
You know, like, like those are the protocols.
- [105:06]
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, it's certainly in the Republic, in Aristotle's Nicomachian ethics, those are the protocols.
- [105:12]
B
Right, right, right.
- [105:13]
A
Yeah.
- [105:14]
B
It's so funny because in modern UFO.
- [105:16]
A
World, lots of junk food is probably not good for that. I agree. Right.
- [105:18]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's, yeah, like, maybe it's off. Often I find when I speak to people who are like, really into, like, theurgy or like.
- [105:29]
A
Yeah.
- [105:29]
B
You know, like celestial ascent or whatever.
- [105:31]
A
Yeah.
- [105:32]
B
It's like, like they've got to just fix a bunch of local things in their life. And they say the ascent thing is just this escape thing. And 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.
- [105:53]
A
Yeah.
- [105:54]
B
Whereby, you know, whatever issues you're facing have to be solved karmically in this world in like a very, just banal local sense.
- [106:02]
A
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, the benefits for like marriage and things that were being found out around some of these things and like all overall stuff. And one of them was a very good friend of mine. I asked him afterwards, I said, so it 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. You know what I mean?
- [106:42]
B
Yeah.
- [106:42]
A
He was like, yeah, exactly right. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah. You know.
- [106:46]
B
Yeah.
- [106:46]
A
And it seems like, it seems like the original protocol was a kind of life.
- [106:50]
B
Yes.
- [106:50]
A
Yeah, yeah, right.
- [106:51]
B
I have a friend who says like life is like surfing. Psychedelics are like snowboarding and. Yeah, snowboarding. You get really hurt 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. Surfing is 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.
- [107:18]
A
Yeah.
- [107:19]
B
And I believe in not stigmatizing it. I believe in it in the context of like desperate, you know, PTSD ridden veterans and stuff.
- [107:27]
A
Stuff.
- [107:28]
B
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 form where it's like, I'm having issues, I need to go stamp it out with Ayahuasca. Like, no, you gotta go through the pain.
- [107:43]
A
Like even going around. Not just psychedelics, I'm just Looking for a protocol in general. Right. It seems like, you know what I mean? Like there's, there's a way there, there's, there's something besides any sort of cheat code too. I don't mean to like reduce something by calling it a cheat code. And I think there is this, you know, this, this program of, of living that's been, that has been in the conversation for thousands of years. Right. That maybe we were too quick to walk away from.
- [108:14]
B
Yes.
- [108:14]
A
Right.
- [108:15]
B
Yeah. And it's almost like some of the, the people that I feel like perform best in the caves, 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.
- [108:33]
A
Yeah. And if, 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. Right.
- [108:41]
B
Yeah.
- [108:41]
A
Do you know what I mean? And that's going to help you cut through your own BS in ways and, and it's going to maybe remove a lot of the static in the background.
- [108:49]
B
Yes.
- [108:49]
A
You can hear, hear some things.
- [108:50]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kind of increasing the signal to noise ratio, which, you know, that's a very hard thing to do to I guess, like discernment, that's what that is. And seeing low level things that you're encountering as simulacra of higher things I think helps. And then there's sort of the Scylla and Charybdis where, you know, Carl Jung talks about this in his book on synchronicities where it's like, 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 real reality will just like full, full wholesale conform to your own beliefs. You'll, 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, you know, impugn any sort of meaning, you know, then, then there's like that, that's like an issue, you know, too. So it's like there's a silly Charybdis.
- [109:43]
A
It's narcissism versus parenthood paranoia.
- [109:45]
B
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And it's so, it's, it's clearly this like, you know, it's an art, it's not a science. It's this sort of aesthetic thing.
- [109:53]
A
And so I guess my point is, is like, if. When you ask about protocols, it's. It's like, you know, the. The Greeks were not. They. 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, et cetera, et cetera. And then there, There. That's like the path of INS site.
- [110:13]
B
Do you have anything to say? I won't ask this if you don't, but on the. On the monolith as like a symbol, I thought of maybe asking that because, like, it's brought up in the Pasulka book. It's brought up in Gerard, actually, in the Sacred and. The Sacred and the Violence. Violence and the Sacred.
- [110:28]
A
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. Like, really humane importance. Right?
- [110:41]
B
Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. It represents, like, in 2001 Space Odyssey, you have the monolith, which is like. It's like. Yeah. 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.
- [110:58]
A
Yeah.
- [110:58]
B
The 2000, you know, proportions all line up. Yeah, 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 Pasulka's book starts out about how, like, media shapes our understanding of what we see. And maybe even literally, like Jacques Vallee talks about, you know, maybe these aren't space aliens, but if we start to believe that enough, you know, they'll. They'll appear like this sort of egregore model of consensus reality where reality is actually just a consensus collapsing function. It's not this sort of objective.
- [111:37]
A
I mean, I think, think we can not in a magical way, but we can pretend things into existence. Do you?
- [111:44]
B
I agree.
- [111:45]
A
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.
- [111:52]
B
Right.
- [111:53]
A
It's like that some contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers, you know, talk about, like, we're always performing for this big other that's in the room. But big other is something we've pretended into existence.
- [112:04]
B
Yes.
- [112:05]
A
Right.
- [112:05]
B
Yeah.
- [112:05]
A
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 exist in.
- [112:18]
B
Totally.
- [112:18]
A
Like, we can pretend things into existence that then have a downward effect on us. Right. Not unlike our technologies.
- [112:24]
B
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. 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 hold most sacred. It involves a founding myth, you know, the big bang. It involves rituals, you know, people with lab coats or whatever in this sort of priestly citadel or whatever.
- [112:51]
A
Remember the honest placebos? Those, those symbols.
- [112:54]
B
Yes.
- [112:54]
A
Of science work.
- [112:55]
B
They really work.
- [112:56]
A
And that's something we've pretended.
- [112:58]
B
Do you think we see a shift into kind of, you know, there's talks of a re. Enchantment. And, you know, this from the Max Weber, German sociologist. The age of disenchantment, which we seem to, I think, be coming out of like Richard Dawkins and all these guys, like, who are 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, you have a lot of people talking about this sort of reench. I mean, I did not expect. In starting this channel. I started it actually. It wasn't Even originally about 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 it.
- [113:41]
A
So, I mean, I think you're right. There, there is. I mean, this, this is bad armchair sociology. Right. I think you're right. There's. There's an openness that wasn't there, you know, say in like the early 2000s, like when, when, when the big trend then was the new atheists and all that. Right. Okay. So I think there's gonna be a difference between the Gen Z ers from the millennials there. You know what I mean? Right. Because, like, the millennials kind of were coming online in the middle of the Richard Dawkins craze, and now, like, the Gen Zers are coming online in the middle of this. So I do agree with you, and I think there's a healthy openness to enchantment. But I also worry, though, Too, that, that it could become an unhealthy openness to mystification too. You know what I mean? Where like just any enchantment's going to do now.
- [114:30]
B
Anything goes.
- [114:31]
A
Anything goes. Yeah. Or. Or even an openness to maybe the most unhealthy versions of religion and thing and things like that.
- [114:39]
B
Yeah.
- [114:40]
A
So I worry that like, you know, the. The much abused pendulum swing metaphor.
- [114:46]
B
Right.
- [114:46]
A
But I do worry that the swing could go to the irrational.
- [114:49]
B
Yep.
- [114:50]
A
Right. Too. Do you mean.
- [114:51]
B
Yeah, yeah, I do. I do as well.
- [114:53]
A
Yeah. And look, you can. You can see in the UFO world like some people will go for anything pro ufo, right.
- [115:00]
B
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And they get super defensive where they're like, this is. This is real. UFOs are real.
- [115:06]
A
Yeah.
- [115:07]
B
Like go on the sort of press circuit thing and that's all they want. It's like a. It's more of like a political campaign.
- [115:12]
A
Yeah.
- [115:13]
B
And it's not this sort of egoless search for truth.
- [115:16]
A
So I do worry, you know, that are like our recovery from materialism could. Could slip into a kind of anti enlightenment irrationalism too.
- [115:29]
B
Yes.
- [115:29]
A
Yes.
- [115:30]
B
Yeah, definitely could. What do you think? If Plato were here today and he saw the UFO thing, the AI thing. Like he saw this sort of like these really intense movements.
- [115:45]
A
Yeah.
- [115:45]
B
That involved secret technology. They involve, you know, kind of asymmetric tail risk.
- [115:52]
A
Yeah.
- [115:53]
B
But they also involve the saving of humanity. What do you think he would say?
- [116:00]
A
I think he would mistrust the whole deal.
- [116:02]
B
I love it.
- [116:03]
A
I think he would. I think he'd say, hey, welcome to your cave, man.
- [116:06]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [116:07]
A
I think he mistrust it.
- [116:08]
B
Yeah. He would say. Yeah. Because the thing. It's probably like a lot of these things point charismatically at the truth. Truth. But they're all being used politically. They're all sort of political footballs or whatever. So it's like.
- [116:19]
A
Yeah. And they think so. I read the Republic as. This is a manual for political skepticism.
- [116:24]
B
I love that.
- [116:25]
A
And, and I think he. He would look at all this and say, you know, the. We've seen this movie before, guys.
- [116:32]
B
Yeah.
- [116:32]
A
Yeah.
- [116:33]
B
Well, there are very few people, I think, who truly search for truth in a sort of trans political way where it's like, it's. It transcends self gain or, you know, desire for, you know, dominion over others of the world or whatever. And yeah. I think that's like the. That's the least commoditized thing in the world.
- [116:53]
A
Yeah. It's probably the one thing you can't commodify yeah, you can't do it.
- [116:58]
B
You can't do it. And it's tough because it's not rewarded, 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, like, you know, the more it becomes this economically self sustaining thing or whatever, it's impo. It's sort of impossible to unbound it from. From that. And, and then, and then all of a sudden that like leaks into like just the pure truth seeking.
- [117:28]
A
Right.
- [117:29]
B
And it's a standard that no podcast ever holds itself to or whatever where it's like, it's just intellectual entertainment circuit or whatever. But somehow on the UFO topic, I, 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. You're. 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 seeing, like trying to 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. I don't really know.
- [118:11]
A
Prior to the revolution. Right. How do you do this? Yeah.
- [118:14]
B
Yeah.
- [118:14]
A
So I mean, okay, for me this is going to sound maybe paradoxical. I trust myself because I have changed my mind on very big ticket stuff.
- [118:27]
B
Yeah.
- [118:27]
A
Certain points in my life. Okay. What. And now you might think, no, that would mean you'd 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.
- [118:40]
B
Exactly.
- [118:41]
A
In. In ways that might even be embarrassing to me. Totally in certain circles. Do you see that? Yeah. And so I think, you know, you can trust what you. 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 the people more the degree to which they have actually changed their mind. Mind.
- [119:02]
B
I agree.
- [119:02]
A
And admitted it publicly and said I was wrong.
- [119:05]
B
Yep.
- [119:05]
A
Et cetera, et cetera. Do you know what I mean? And I think as long as you're truly open to changing Your mind. Yeah, right. And of course. And you'll. Only you will know that. Right? Like, like in your, you know, you. As you lie awake at night worrying.
- [119:18]
B
Right, yeah.
- [119:19]
A
Only you'll know that is, you know, could I change my mind and have I changed my mind? Yeah, I think that's. That, that. I think that maintaining that openness to being like utterly debased by the truth.
- [119:29]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [119:30]
A
I think that's the most important intellectual virtue.
- [119:32]
B
Well, I think 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 in. 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, these core truths because all, all truth seeking everything in life is leveraged by somebody's internal psych psychology.
- [120:05]
A
Everything, everything.
- [120:06]
B
100 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 occult 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, 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 it's like the, you know, St. Francis of Assisi where it's like this forcing function towards good.
- [120:38]
A
Yeah.
- [120:39]
B
And yeah, I don't know, it's. It's fascinating.
- [120:42]
A
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 where on is not worth living to say, well, have you really inquired like, have you really looked into your own like irrational biases, right. 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.
- [121:23]
B
100%. What's the young line like? You know, you call it, you call it your, you know, you call it fate until you reconcile with your subconscious or whatever.
- [121:33]
A
Exactly.
- [121:33]
B
You know, and, and yeah, and it's, 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, the dirty little secret in all of ufology 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.
- [122:09]
A
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.
- [122:21]
B
Totally.
- [122:22]
A
And make sure we're not being exploited. It.
- [122:23]
B
Yeah, I flipped from being pretty die hard liberal growing up and I still am, I guess, anti neoconservatism or whatever. So that was, you know, where I think the macro shifted. What's that?
- [122:36]
A
Bomb, fewer people.
- [122:37]
B
The what bomb?
- [122:37]
A
Fewer people.
- [122:38]
B
Yeah, yeah, bomb, fewer people. I was always, you know, I'm still consistent on that. Yeah, exactly. And so maybe there's some sort of like neocons, conservative neoliberal alliance or something, and I'm sort of anti that or whatever. But like, like I also shifted. I've also become like more, a little more right wing. And you know, I, 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.
- [123:05]
A
Because you probably had to eat a lot of crow with some friends when you.
- [123:08]
B
Oh, I still do. I have friends who like went to, you know, college with me. They're like, what's wrong with you, dude? Like, yeah, sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you look, I have to eat a lot of crow on. And the right wing is a lot of crow, you know. Yeah. There are issues, both sides.
- [123:23]
A
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's an interview or something with him where he said Look, I thought the point was to be right, not to be consistent.
- [123:38]
B
Yeah, yeah, totally.
- [123:40]
A
Yeah.
- [123:41]
B
And it should. Like, like, I think the best way to get to truth is this dialectical thing.
- [123:46]
A
Yes.
- [123:46]
B
Where you play with falsity. You're like, you don't know, like you. But you, you assume a belief that you think is kind of too radical or beyond the pale or ridiculous. And in many cases, like the Pasulka thing or the Carl Jung thing, you're like, actually, I think there's something real here.
- [124:00]
A
Yes.
- [124:01]
B
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 concealer yourself from quote unquote misinformation as deemed by some authority figure is grounds for like horrible critical thinking and being manipulated.
- [124:17]
A
Yeah. Hagel, like conscious, like he's really dismissive of, of the fear of being wrong. Yeah. 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.
- [124:35]
B
Yeah.
- [124:36]
A
Right. To make any progress.
- [124:37]
B
I love that.
- [124:38]
A
Yeah.
- [124:38]
B
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 though. Yeah, it is, totally. Yeah. Yeah. You can't get around that.
- [124:50]
A
I don't like it. Get your own show.
- [124:52]
B
Yeah, yeah, exactly. But like Hagel, I think of, you know, I think there's a book called like Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition.
- [124:59]
A
Yeah.
- [124:59]
B
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 this is 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 esoteric look, I think they.
- [125:26]
A
They all had private lives.
- [125:27]
B
Yeah.
- [125:28]
A
You know what I mean? And, and you know, if you found out prominent, you know, philosopher at. I have no one in mind here. Okay. So I'm prominent philosopher 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.
- [125:49]
B
That sort of thing.
- [125:50]
A
Yeah. So I Don't doubt that you could find. And certainly, like, those sorts of groups are all over, you know, the Enlightenment and things like that.
- [125:57]
B
Yeah.
- [125:57]
A
So I would not be surprised if, If. If, like, Hagel had some dabblings of that sort. Yeah, yeah.
- [126:04]
B
And it's fascinating. You have Jacques Valle, you know, calling his working group on UFO, Ufology, studying UFOs with Jalon Hynek and a bunch of these guys in the seventies, the Invisible College. He even named his book the Invisible College, which is homage to, you know, Robert Boyle.
- [126:20]
A
But originally, less than subtle hint, right?
- [126:22]
B
Yeah, less than subtle hint. These are originally Rosicrucian ideas.
- [126:25]
A
Now with using Hegel as an example. And so, yeah, maybe he was involved in some esoteric stuff or, you know, and. And he had, you know. You know, it was in the hermetic stuff. Right. I don't know if that need change how we read the texts, though.
- [126:41]
B
Sure.
- [126:43]
A
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.
- [126:54]
B
Yeah. I never know how to read. You know, some of these people, it's like, are they. Are they really into it, or is it some sort of, like, tactic or something?
- [127:02]
A
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.
- [127:09]
B
Right, Right. Yeah. Well, it's all. It's all so fascinating. I mean. I mean, talk about a philosopher who's had just an outsized impact on modernity. And Hegel has to be, you know, at the. At the top.
- [127:22]
A
Definitely.
- [127:23]
B
But this has been an honor. I really appreciate it.
- [127:25]
A
I've had a good time.
- [127:26]
B
Yeah, this is a blast. And I'd love to do it again. Is there anything else we've missed or anything?
- [127:31]
A
No, nothing I'm aware of. Yeah. So.
- [127:33]
B
Okay.
- [127:34]
A
Yeah. Feel free to drag me back down. I would. I would love to do it.
- [127:36]
B
I would love to do it, man. Maybe I'll come out to you. I'd love to see Kansas and hang.
- [127:40]
A
Out and come during tornado season. We'll.
- [127:42]
B
Yeah, yeah, that's. Yeah, why not? Yeah, man, this is a blast. Go. Go out and buy unidentified flying hyper object. You working on anything else or do you want to promote anything else, Twitter or anything?
- [127:56]
A
Yeah, I. I have a mostly dormant Twitter account, so. Okay, so I have a substack maybe check that out.
- [128:01]
B
Okay, awesome.
- [128:02]
A
But if you're interested, have a look at the book.
- [128:04]
B
Cool. And is it on substack. It's just Jim Madden or.
- [128:07]
A
Yeah, it. It. You know, it's hard to change your substack name, right? And I, like, accidentally made it. I think it's just literally Jim Madden's newsletter.
- [128:14]
B
Okay. Why not? Yeah, literally. People know what they're getting.
- [128:18]
A
I do. I do have a webpage. JD Madden.com has a bunch of papers and podcasts and stuff, so.
- [128:22]
B
Okay, awesome. Well, really appreciate it. This is a blast.
- [128:26]
A
You bet. Thank you.
- [128:27]
B
Yeah.