The following is a conversation with Diana Walsh Basalka, a professor of philosophy and

religion at UNCW and author of American Cosmic, UFOs, Religion, and Technology.

This book is one of the most fascinating explorations of the interconnected nature of

technology, belief, and the mystery of alien intelligence. Quick mention of our sponsors,

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As a side note, let me say, as I did in the recent video on how many intelligent alien

civilizations are out there, that the nature of alien life, intelligence, and how they might

communicate with us humans is likely stranger than we imagine, and perhaps stranger than we can imagine.

What is most fascinating to me is how the belief in the communication with such civilizations

changes people's understanding of the world, and, as Diana argues, the technology we create.

Technological innovation itself seems to manifest the mythology in our collective

intelligence that turns the seemingly impossible into reality, just a matter of years,

through the belief of individual humans that carry out that innovation.

The nature and power of this belief in both technology and extraterrestrial intelligence

is mysterious and fascinating, perhaps holding the key to us humans understanding our own mind,

our consciousness, and engineering versions of it in the machines we create.

If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it, and have a podcast,

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And now, here's my conversation with Diana Walsh Basalka.

You are a scholar of religious belief, or a belief in general. So, the fascinating question,

what do you think is the difference between our beliefs and objective reality?

What is real, period? Sure, what is real?

Easy question. So, first let me start with belief. So, belief is generally, there are different

definitions of belief, just as there are different definitions of what is real.

Okay. So, for belief in my field, it would be attitudes toward something that dictate our

actions. Okay. So, we believe the sun is going to rise tomorrow. Therefore, we act as if it will

rise tomorrow. All right. Beliefs can be wrong. For a long time, people believed, and actually,

some still do, that the earth was flat. Okay. Well, that's obviously an erroneous belief.

So, beliefs can be wrong. Now, the bigger question that philosophers ask is,

is this belief accurate toward what we consider to be objective reality? So, now let me go to

objective reality. So, what is real? I don't think we can actually obtain a correct understanding

of what is real. And in that sense, I have to refer to a philosopher again,

and that would be Immanuel Kant. So, Immanuel Kant is one of the, he was basically in the 1750s,

he wrote critiques of reason and things like that. So, he said, well, if you're a philosopher

or have any kind of understanding of Western history, you know who he is. He had this idea that

we can actually never get to the thing in itself. Okay. So, he called that the

numinal, the thing in itself. He said, let's take this table, for instance, that you and I are

talking across. So, this thing is a table. You and I both know that. We assume it's real. We

believe in it because we put our water on it and our water stays on it. Okay. However, can we know

this thing in and of itself as a table? So, that would be what he then would call the phenomenal.

How do we know that that phenomena exists as we know it is? Okay. How do we know? We use our

faculties. So, we use our senses and things like that. But again, even our senses can be wrong.

So, I've been on committees just recently, this year, last year, for hiring professors in my

department who are philosophers and every, and we're hiring metaphysicians and, you know, people

who are thinking about the nature of reality. And basically, what I've learned from them,

yeah, they're very... I'd love to attend those faculty talks. I don't know, metaphysics, professors.

What's funny is that for each one of them, I'm convinced each time. They all say different

things, but they're so convincing. I'm like, yes, hire that one, right? Is it like historical

philosophy? No, no. What do they do? No, they have an actual belief. They're practicing metaphysic...

Metaphysicians. Yes. So, what they do is they come and they're usually excellent philosophers from

Harvard or, you know, USC or whatever, you know, they come and they give what's called a job talk.

That's what philosophers... Every academic does a job talk in order to get it. They talk to us about

a department about what they do. And so, it so happens that we need a metaphysician and now

we're hiring again for one. And so, I've learned a lot about metaphysics in the last year. And

this is what I've learned, that they use physics as a basis for understanding what we can know

about what is real. And what is real is really difficult to pin down. And so, your question is,

what is belief? Well, belief, does it correspond to reality? That's the question I would ask.

And first, we don't even know what is real. So, the table, they would say, how do we know that the

table even exists? Well, how do we differentiate it from the floor, for example? So, these are the

questions that philosophers are asking. No one else is, of course. But philosophers are asking

these questions. And they have different answers for it. So, I would say that it's very difficult to

know what is real. And in fact, what I do usually is I paraphrase my friend and colleague, Brother

Guy Consulmanio. He's a Jesuit priest. He's also an astronomer. And he's the director of the Vatican

Observatory. And so, he says this. He's a very smart person. He says, well, truth is a moving

target. So, basically, to know what is real out there, like gravity or something like that,

you've got to approximate it. And as human beings, we have senses to tell us what, at least so we

don't get hurt, we're not going to fall off a building or something like that. We have eyes

to see and things like that. So, we can approximate what reality is, but we're never going to get to

it unless we develop better senses, okay? And I think that that is what we are in the process of

doing. We're developing better senses. We have telescopes. We have microscopes. We have, you

know, extensions of ourselves, which are now called technology. And we can get to a better

understanding of what reality is and what the objective world is. And therefore, our beliefs

can be honed. So, we can get better beliefs, more accurate beliefs. But can we get beliefs that

actually correspond to reality? Not in any precise way, but in approximate ways. So, I hope that's

not like too big an answer to your question. What do you think beliefs are in themselves can become

reality? I mean, so you've now adapted the, in this little bit of a conversation, adapted the

metaphysician view of reality, which is the physics. Yes. But, you know, we humans kind of

operate in the space of ideas very much so, like we've kind of in the collective intelligence of

human beings have come up with a set of ideas that persist in the minds of these many people,

and they become quite strong and powerful. Like in terms of like impact on our lives,

they can have sometimes more impact than this table does than the physics. Yeah, I agree. And in

that sense, is there some sense in which our beliefs are reality, even if they're not connected

to the physics? Yes, even if they're not real. Yeah, even if, okay, so yes, absolutely. So,

our beliefs are tremendously, they create social effects, absolutely. There was a belief that,

I'm going to use this example. There was a belief back in the day, and then we're talking about,

when I say back in the day, I'm a historian, so I'm talking about like a thousand years ago,

right, that women had no souls. Okay, so look, I don't know if human beings have souls. I can

tell you this, though, that if human beings have souls, probably animals do too. That's my own

personal belief. That's not a professor belief there. But there was this belief among the Catholic

magisterium, which is runs Europe, that women had no souls. So they had to have this big meaning

about it. Did women have souls? But that belief had consequences for women. I mean, women were

treated and have been treated as if they didn't have souls. Okay, so there's... And the soul was

really the essence of the human being? It was. It's called the animus, right? It's what is the

essence of what is eternal. Women weren't eternal. Here's another example. Okay, this is an example

from my own research. All right, so in the Catholic tradition, there's this idea of purgatory, hell,

and heaven. And these are three destinations that people can go to when they die. And if you're

great, you go to heaven automatically and you're considered a saint. If you're okay, you go to

purgatory, right? And you suffer for a time and then get back into heaven. If you're terrible,

you go to hell, right? Okay. Well, there was a place that the Catholics determined and this was

a belief for a long time, like a thousand years or more. And it was called limbo, all right? And

limbo comes from the Latin limbus and it means edge. And it was either on the edge of hell or on the

edge of heaven. No one really could determine which it was. No historians are like, well, this person

says it was on the edge of heaven. Well, listen, this was a terrible... First of all, there is no

limbo anymore. In 2007, Benedict, the then Pope, got rid of the idea that there was limbo. Okay,

so Catholics kind of went crazy because they didn't really know, they forgot that limbo existed and

they thought it was purgatory. And they said, how could you get rid of purgatory? But actually,

he just got rid of this idea of limbo. Oh, so that's a distinct thing from purgatory. It was.

And by the way, people should know they have a book on purgatory that came before... American

Cosmic. Yes, I wrote a book on purgatory. Yeah. Anyway, so limbo is a distinct thing from purgatory?

Yeah. And the types of people who go to limbo happen to be virtuous pagans, okay? Like Socrates

or somebody like that. And children who weren't baptized. So think of this, think of for like

more than a thousand years, mothers and fathers gave birth to babies who weren't baptized and

couldn't be buried with their family in these burial. And then they couldn't be reunited with

them in heaven. Think of the pain and suffering that that caused. And that was nothing. Limbo's

nothing. Yet the belief in it caused untold suffering. And that's just a small example.

And that was as real to them? It was absolutely real. I mean, the effects were real. Let's put it

that way. The place itself, not real. But the families themselves, do you think they really

believed it? They totally believed it. As much as the table is real? Yes. I've read... Listen,

we have trigger warnings today, right? So don't read this. It's going to make you upset, okay?

History, primary sources, no trigger warnings, okay? So you're going through like, you know,

somebody's diary from 1400 and you hear the suffering and pain that they went through.

There were times in my research where I'd have to put my primary source down, you know, and just

basically go outside and take a walk because it was so horrific. I knew it was true because they

wouldn't write something, you know, they're not going to write in their diary something that's

not true. And it was horrible. So yes, these people went through untold suffering for nothing,

because they had an erroneous belief. But they didn't know it was erroneous.

So it was real to them? Yeah. So I don't know if you're familiar with Donald Hoffman. He has

this idea that in terms of the distance we are from being able to know the reality, which is

there, the physics reality, is we're actually really, really, really, really far away from that.

Yeah. So like it's, I think his idea is that we're basically like completely detached from it.

Yes. What's your sense? How close are we to the reality? We'll talk about

a bunch of ideas about our beliefs in technology and beyond. But in terms of what is actually

real from a physical sense, how close are we to understanding that?

Pretty far. I'm going to use examples from what I do. Okay. So this idea that

we're suspicious of what we actually think is real is not new. Of course, it goes back

a long time, thousands of years in fact. And philosophers, I'm not actually technically

a philosopher, but I was one. I'm a professor of religious studies.

Yeah. What do you introduce yourself at like at a bar when the bartender asks, what do you do?

I never tell people what I do, especially on airplanes. It's a bad idea. So generally,

if they push though, I say, you know, I'm the chair of philosophy and religion,

although I stepped down last year, so I'm no longer the chair. But I have like a master's degree

in philosophy and I was a philosophy major and I've studied philosophy. I still study philosophy.

So I integrate it into my research. All right. So this idea that we can't know, we're suspicious

of what we know, it's called external world skepticism. That's the official philosophical

name for it. Our faculties and our senses don't give us accurate perceptions of what is there.

Okay. Especially at a quantum level or a molecular level. I mean, that's just obvious.

So yeah. So I think that you're, the person you mentioned is correct in that I think we're far

away from it. I think you're talking about our direct senses, but you know, we have tools,

measurement tools from microscopes to all the tools of astronomy, cosmology that gives us a

sense of the big universe and also the sense of the very small. Do you think there's some

other things that are completely sort of other dimensions or there's ideas of panpsychism that

consciousness permeates all matter that that's, there's like fundamental forces of physics we're

not even aware of yet? Like. Oh, absolutely. I do think, and this is why I write about technology

and I, I mean, that's actually what I specialize in is belief in technology with respect to religion.

So in my opinion, thank goodness for, thank for technology because where would we be without it?

I mean, frankly, I think that it's like Marshall McLuhan was the person who said technology is

like an extension of our senses. And I absolutely believe that to be true. I think that we're lucky

that we, you know, that Prometheus gave us technology. Okay. And that we use it and we're

making it better and better and better and better. And that makes us more efficient. It makes us more

efficient as a species. And like my point is that I think that our instruments, I mean, I don't want

to be a religious technologist, you know, but our, our, our instruments will save us. I mean,

they're already making life better for us. You think it's important that they also help us

understand reality more directly, more deeply? I think directly is better than deeply. I think

directly, more directly is probably a more accurate term for what you're trying to, I think ask me,

you know, can we actually, I mean, I think you're asking me that question that Kant basically was

trying to get at was, can we know the thing in itself? Can we know that? Can we have like some

kind of like intense knowing of it? It's almost mystical. And I would say that that's where religion

comes in. Okay. That's where we talk about religion. And if I may also go back to Emmanuel Kant,

this idea that he just before he died, just as he died, he was working on, he did this critique

of reason, where basically he believed he, he basically talks about, can we know what's real?

And he basically has this long, you know, that question, can we know what's real? And then,

you know, a thousand pages later, no, I'll just give you the rundown. Okay. So, okay. Yeah,

yeah, exactly. Then he does this other critique. And okay, so he does like three critiques. Then

he does this critique of judgment. Okay. Well, judgment is this other thing altogether. And I

think that that's what you're getting at. So, how do we know things? How can we know things

really intensely and intimately? And I think that he thought that judgment was the idea that we can

actually know the thing in itself. And he was working on that as he died. And then he never

finished it. Hannah Arendt, another philosopher of the 20th century, took it up, took up the

critique of judgment and tried to finish it. Oh, why the word judgment? Because judgment,

think about it, when you see a work of art, who judges that to be decent? Okay. So there's a,

there is a group of people who come to the decision that that's rotten, or, you know,

that's pretty good. You know, like, I noticed that you like to play a guitar,

where you choose music that I happen to like too. Okay. So you and I both have a, you know,

a sense of judgment. It's a sense. So he said there's a sense that some people have.

Why do certain communities have a similar sense? What dictates that? And so he was working on that.

He said he thought it had something to do with the knowledge, the intimate knowledge of the thing

in itself. Yeah. So another philosopher that philosophers actually don't like at all,

but religious studies people do is Martin Heidegger. So Martin Heidegger has some great essays.

One is called What is a Work of Art? And again, he gets to, you know, he talks about Van Gogh

and Van Gogh's shoes, you know, that picture, the painting Van Gogh's shoes. It's really,

a really intense picture. It's just shoes. It's, you know, it's, but it's an amazing

painting of shoes. And I think everybody can agree. That's a cool picture of shoes, right?

And so why? You know, the question is, why is that a cool picture of shoes? You know,

what kind of knowledge are we accessing to determine that indeed that works, right? And in

fact, we still like it. So basically the nature of knowledge and what does it represent? It can

operate in the space of, that's detached from reality or can it ultimately represent reality?

I guess that's the, is that the space of metaphysics? Is that, is that the? Yeah. So what can we

know is actually called epistemology? Pistemology. But metaphysics is, is basically what is the

nature of reality? Right. And those intersect? Absolutely. Yeah. A lot of things intersect

in philosophy. We just have fancy names for them. Another nonphilosopher that may be considered

a philosopher, since we're talking about reality is Ayn Rand and her philosophy of

objectivism. What are your thoughts on her sense of taking this idea of reality, calling her

philosophy objectivism, and kind of starting at the idea that you really could know everything.

And it's pretty obvious. And then from that, you can derive an ethics about how to live life,

like what is the, what is the good ethical life and all the virtue of selfishness, all that kind

of stuff. So you talked to a lot of academic philosophers. So I'd be curious to see from

the perspective of like, is she somebody that's taken seriously at all? Why she dismissed as I

see from my distant perspective by serious philosophers? And also like your own personal

thoughts of like, is there some interesting bits that you find inspiring in her work or not?

Okay, so Ayn Rand, I've had so many exceedingly intelligent students basically give me her books

and basically say, please, Dr. Basolka, read this book. And I'll tell them, yes, thank you,

I've read this book before. And then want to engage in, you know, let me put it this way,

they're religious about Ayn Rand. Okay, so to them, Ayn Rand represents some type of way of life,

right, her objectivism. Now, why is she not taken seriously by philosophers in general?

Well, let me put it this way. Philosophers in general tend to get pretty, I guess you could

call it, they're kind of scientists, but with words, I always call philosophy, when I describe it

to someone who's going to take a philosophy class, I say, it's basically math problems,

like word math problems, okay, so that's basically what it is.

So they take words very seriously and they're very formal.

And definitions very seriously, yeah, so they all want to get on the same page,

so they're not, so there is no confusion. So for Ayn Rand to basically say, you can know everything

and, you know, and establish ethics from that, I think philosophers automatically say no. Now,

that doesn't mean I say no. In fact, we even, we have at my university, a wonderful business school,

and when you walk into the dean of the business school's office, Ayn Rand is everywhere. So it's,

so I want to say that not all academics are anti Ayn Rand. And in fact, I don't think philosophers

are either except that they don't teach Ayn Rand. Okay, so in one sense, you could say that because

they don't teach her, they're being exclusive in what they teach, or very particular perhaps is

another way to put it. Yeah, it's hard to know where to place people like her because, you know,

do you put Albert Camus as a philosopher? So I guess what's the good term for that,

like literary philosophers, or whatever the term is, it's annoying to me that the academic

philosophers get to own the word philosophy. Because like, it's just like people who think

deeply about life is what I think about as philosophy. And like, to me, it's like, all right,

so I know Nietzsche is another person that's probably not respected in the philosophy circles,

because he is, you know, full of contradictions, full of... I love Nietzsche. Nietzsche is my

favorite philosopher. Oh, really? Yes, I absolutely love Nietzsche. So he's definitely, you know,

I love people that are full of ideas, even if they're full of contradictions in Nietzsche.

And Ayn Rand is also that I'm able to look past the obvious ego that's there on the page.

And the fact that she actually has, in my view, a lot of wrong ideas. But there's a lot of

interesting tidbits to pick up. And the same goes with Nietzsche. And I'm weirded out by

the religious aspect here on both the people who like worship Ayn Rand and people who completely

dismiss her. I just kind of see as, oh, can we just read a few interesting things and get

inspired by it and move on as opposed to have a dramatic Ayn Rand. Is there something you find

about her work that's interesting to you or her personality or any of that? Oh, I think she's

fascinating. I don't dismiss her. She was a woman who reached a level of success with her mind

at a time when that was difficult. So I mean, she's definitely worth looking at for even that

reason. But also, her idea, I guess, part of the situation with Rand, first of all, I think that

her work is, you have to, it's misinterpreted. Okay. And I think that's the same with Nietzsche.

Like a lot of people think that, I mean, in fact, it is the case that Nietzsche is writing before

the 20th century. So he's got that, you know, he's somewhat, his rhetoric is sexist and racist.

And, you know, of the time period, right? He was a educated philosopher of that time period. However,

his books are amazing. And Nietzsche's philosophy is incredible. And I think that,

I think that's what you're saying about Rand, too. And I agree. I mean, I think that, that

we get caught up, I mean, likely we should, and we should contextualize these thinkers in the time

period within which they are, we should not forgive their, you know, because there were people

during Nietzsche's time that were, you know, feminist and not racist and things like that. And,

you know, so, but each has merit. I mean, I would say Nietzsche is, and you did ask me to talk about

me to talk about some of the books that made the largest impact on me. And Nietzsche's Gay Science

is one of them. It's one of the best books ever, in my opinion. I do think Nietzsche was,

I don't know about exactly sexist, he certainly was sexist, but it felt like he didn't get laid

much in his life. No. It felt like he was extra sexist. I was like, his theories on women are

like, all right. He's pretty angry. He seems frustrated. Yeah. It's like, all right, calm down,

buddy. The fate of philosophers. I just ignore everything Nietzsche says about women.

So can we, can we talk about myth and religion a little bit? Yes. I mean, can we start at the

beginning, which is like myths? How are they born? There's this collective intelligence amongst us

human beings, and we seem to create these beautiful ideas that captivate the minds of millions.

How is such a myth born? Great question. Okay. So that brings us to terminology again. And

in my field, we definitely, I think, try not to distinguish between religion. This is going to

be controversial, I think, between religion and myth, because we call other cultures, religions,

myths, right? And then we call our myths, religions. And I guess myth has a bad connotation to it,

that it's not somehow real. Yeah. Now, what's interesting is that people like Plato, who lived

thousands of years ago, 2,500 about, basically made this distinction himself within his own

culture, which was Greek, right? So Plato is a very famous Greek philosopher. And he would say

things like this. He would say that he would make a distinction between the reality of the one God,

or the one. He would call it, he didn't call, use the word God, but he's referencing a divinity of,

okay, and he believes in the soul. Okay. So, but he would also say that the gods and goddesses of

the Greeks are just myths. So even he would make that distinction again. He would say the population

is not too bright, so they believe in these gods and goddesses. But he himself is talking to his

students, and he's basically talking about forms. So, that live in, seem to live in these other

dimensions, like this table, let's go back to this table that we're talking around right now.

He would say that this table is the instantiation of the form table, and that there's this table

that actually exists somewhere. It's where this place where numbers exist, like the number two.

Okay. So, we use the number two mathematically, therefore it exists. But have you ever seen

a real one? Have you ever seen the real two? No? No. Okay. So, but where does it exist? So,

he says that tables, so he was also talking about things that, you know, he says are real,

making a distinction between the people. And by the way, he got this from Socrates, his mentor,

who was killed by Athens because he would say such things. People don't like to be told that

they, what they believe in is not real, right? Yeah. By the way, his idea of forms is just,

he's just making me realize how incredible was that something like that was able to come up with

that. I mean, that idea became a myth, that the idea of forms, right, that permeated probably the

most influential set of ideas in the history of philosophy, in the history of ideas. Yes.

Yeah. I mean, Plato, we know him for a reason, right? Yeah. So, let's say that we're not,

it's a gray area between religious and myth and maybe not even. It is gray. Yeah.

Yeah. So, how's that idea with like little Plato start and permeate through all of society?

Oh, how does it happen? Okay. So, there are different ways that religions work. So, a lot

of people would call the UFO narrative today, like, and this is what I talk about in my book,

like a myth, right? The UFO myth. But a lot of people believe in it, okay? So, how do these

things work? Well, what I did was I took, there's a, Anne Taves at UC Santa Barbara. She's a pretty

well known academic who studies religion. And she has this building block definition of religion,

like it builds, okay? And so, she says, there are no religious experiences or mythic experiences.

There are experiences. And then they get interpreted as religious or mythic, okay? And so, I use that

with the UFO narrative. So, I take, and I compare it to the religious narrative. So,

basically what happens? What happens is this, is that a person generally has a very intense

experience. It could be with something that they see in the sky, a being, you know, that they see,

you know, like Moses in the burning bush or something like that. They tell other people,

okay? And those other people believe them because they say, that guy, let's take you. Okay, Alex.

Okay, so you're playing, you know, some of your music, Jimi Hendrix shows up out of the blue. So,

Jimi Hendrix, who does electric church stuff, right? The electric church movement. So, he shows up.

I was, sorry, for a small tangent. I was, I'm not aware of, I apologize if I should be. I'm just

know how to play all of the songs. Electric church. Is this a thing?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's Jimi Hendrix's thing. Yeah.

So, that was like a philosophy of his or what?

Yes, yes, yes. So, he thought he was, it was like a mission for him, like he was a missionary.

And he was like doing the electric church. It was through his mission of music that he was

actually impacting people spiritually. And I think you have to agree that his music is really

spiritual. Yeah. Wow, that's so cool to know that there's like a philosophy there. Yeah.

I wonder if he's ever written anything. He's spoken about it many times.

Interesting. Yeah. To actually do some, some research here. Wow. But as another level of depth,

that's awesome. Okay, so. Okay, so say Lex is playing. Yeah. One of his songs.

He shows up. What's your favorite Hendrix song? Oh, that's a hard one. I like Castles in the

Sand. It's a sad one, but I like it. So, I'm playing something and they show up. Yes.

And all of a sudden, boom, just like Elvis does for people. Hendrix shows up, all right?

And then you're amazed and he tells you something that's very, very significant.

And he says, you need to tell other people this, okay? So, then like, okay. I go on social media.

Yes. And you start and because people believe you and because you are a person of, you know,

credibility, people believe you. And so, all of a sudden a movement starts, okay? And it's the

Hendrix movement. It's Hendrix 2 or something like that. You know, we call it something,

the next iteration of Hendrix, right? Hendrix lives, but he lives is this vibration and only

Lex can like, you know, can, can manifest this vibration, okay? So, like, this is,

this is how religions start, you know, excuse your audience who are religious. I'm actually

practicing Catholic. So, this is how religions start. They start with, first off, a contact

experience. Not, I mean, not all of them, but a good portion of them. Some person has an experience

that's transcendent, sacred to them. And they go and they tell other people. And then those people

tell other people. And then something gets written about it, okay? And then it becomes,

because it's a charismatic movement, people become affected by it. And if, if too many people are

affected by it, an institution steps in and tries to control the narrative. So, this is what you'd

call the beginning of a religion or a myth, a very powerful myth. And so, it's almost like a star,

right? A star is born, okay? Yeah. When you say institution, do you mean some other

organization that's already powerful, doesn't want to become overpowered by this new movement?

Yes, absolutely. Is this usually governments? It's usually, yeah. So, I have a couple of examples.

I use the example of the Christian church in my book, because I'm most familiar with the history

of Christianity. And, you know, Christianity was started by this Jewish man. And it was a movement

that, you know, he was a very powerful, charismatic person. Other people believed in him. And then

his followers talked about him. And then other, then, you know, usually early Christians before

the 300s were generally people who were disenfranchised, because he had a pretty radical

idea that, you know, humans should have dignity. And this was pretty radical during that time.

So, women who didn't have dignity and, you know, slaves who didn't have dignity at the time

and converted Christianity in droves. And so what happened was that all of a sudden,

it became this belief system that was undercurrent. And then Constantine, who was an elite,

had an experience and made Christianity to state religion. And by that time, there were different

forms of Christianity, probably hundreds of them, well, most likely. And Constantine and the people

who were powerful with him decided that their idea, this is the Council of Nicaea now, decided

that there was one form, and they called it universal, the one form of Christianity. And

this should be it. And so they, they kind of took out all the other denominations of Christianity

in different forms of it. So you can see that a very, very powerful set of beliefs put a culture

on fire, right? And so how did they, they had to deal with that fire somehow. And so they

narrativized it. They decided, how do we interpret this? And they interpreted it as they wished.

But that wasn't the only interpretation of Christianity. I have another example. I'm in

a Catholic church, a lot of times, and I'm going to use the example of Faustina. She's,

she's a nun, and she's Polish. And I think it was in the early 20th century, if not the 1800s,

that she had a very powerful, many experiences actually of Jesus. And she saw Jesus with

rays coming out of his, his heart. And basically, she called this his divine mercy. And it became

a devotion in Poland, and it spread. The Catholic church was not, not into this at all. Okay. And

so they did everything they could to try to suppress Faustina's influence, which was growing,

and growing, and growing, and growing. Okay. And so they were very successful in trying to keep

her quiet. And she died. Okay. Years later, John Paul II, Polish, sainted her and created

the divine mercy devotion, which is worldwide now, and millions and millions of people. But

do you see how they, they, you know, completely controlled? So fascinating that it, that it

just starts with a single, like you said, contact experience, experiences, the keyword. And is your

sense that those experiences are legitimate? So it's not, yes, for the most part, artificially

constructed? Yeah, I think for the most part, they're legitimate experiences that people have.

Why would someone want to put themselves through what they go through? Like, why would Jesus want

to get crucified? I mean, that's a pretty nasty way to die. You know, why would Faustina bring

this upon herself? The people that I meet who said that they've seen UFOs, most of them don't want

to be known because of the ridicule that goes along with it. So I honestly think that, you know,

there are people who are maybe not stable and would like the attention. But for the most part,

normal people don't want this attention. So you mentioned building blocks. You didn't mention

the word God or sort of the afterlife. Are those essential to the myth? So there's a contact

experience. Is there some other aspects of myth and religion which makes them viral,

which makes them spread and captivate the imagination of people?

Yes, is there a pattern to them? I think that for each era, it's different. And people have,

first let's talk about the definition of religion, if that's okay, because most people assume

the definitions that we in the West are familiar with, which is that, you know, that of Christianity,

Islam, Judaism, you know, monotheistic religions. And there are, that's not, I mean,

those are just some religions. There are so many different types of religions. Some religions have

no God at all. Zen Buddhism, for example, is a religion that asks you to take away your belief

structures, like to kind of like, in fact, I would call that a Kantian type religion, right?

And that it's basically telling you to get rid of your concepts of what you think about things

so that you can actually have the experience like you were talking about earlier of the thing in

itself. And they call that Satori. So there are people who believe, you know, they try to,

they call it meditations and meditation. And it's fairly radical, actually, in some monasteries.

I don't know if they still do this, but they'll whack you on the head if you appear to be

not focusing and, you know, that kind of thing. You know, they do things to basically take you

away from your conceptions of reality and bring you into a state of all that is, which is what

they call Satori. And that has nothing to do with God. I like this religion. And anything that involves

sticks and whacking in order for you to focus better, I'm going to have to join a monastery.

So, okay, so that's so digging into definitions of religion. So like, what is, what do you think

is the scope that defines a religion? Oh, okay. So in my field, we have a few different definitions

of religion, as you can imagine, just like philosophers have different definitions of what

is real. So I take this definition, and it comes from John Livingston. And it's religion is that

set of beliefs and practices that determine, that is inspired by a transformative, what is perceived

actually to be a transformative and sacred power. Can you say that again? Yeah. So religion

is a set of, it's not just belief, it's also practices, it's both belief and practices,

because you won't have the practices without the belief. So you have those together, okay.

And it's inspired by what is perceived, because we don't know if it's real or not,

what is perceived to be of sacred and transforming power. So perceived by the followers, or is this

connected to the original sort of experience? No, no. Well, it's perceived by the followers.

That's a really good definition. So, and that's the governing idea is that there's something

of great power. Yes. Perceived to be of great power, which you can connect yourself either

emotionally or intellectually, somehow, in order to explore the world that is beyond your own

capabilities. Yes. And is there communication also involved? Generally. Yeah. That's a great

definition. Okay. So within that falls everything that we've talked about so far, including technology

and alien life and so on. Do you think ultimately religion is good for human civilization? Let me

maybe phrase it differently, is what's religion good for? Okay. Yeah. That's a great question.

Thanks for asking that. Most people don't ask that. And I think it's the question to ask,

why do we still have religion? That's the question, right? Because scientists and others, scholars,

humanists even thought that there's this thing called the secular secularization thesis. And

it's this idea that the more we progress rationally and we have better instruments for understanding

our reality, the less religious we will be. But that's been found to be untrue. We're still very

religious. Okay. So why? Why is it around? Well, it's adaptive in some way, in my opinion.

Many people would not agree with me, but I kind of see it as an evolutionary adaptation. Now,

think about religions. Okay. Think about Christianity again for one. Here comes this idea

when you have this ruthless empire called the Roman Empire, which litters its roads with

crucified bodies to let you know, don't mess with us. Okay. All right. Here all of a sudden,

you have this guy saying, God is love. Okay. All right. Well, that's weird. Okay. So why?

Why does this take off? Well, it takes off because we're becoming a colonial power. That

means we're going into other countries, we're conquering them. We are, you know, how do we

survive together as cultures that don't clash? Well, we have to have a belief structure that

allows us to, and I think religions function that way, frankly. So the religions help us

from us. So the Richard Dawkins meme idea, it allows us to explore a space of ideas.

And that in itself is the evolution of ideas. And religion is the powerful tool for us to explore

ideas. Because if I believe that men have souls. Do they? Yes, they do. We're trying to figure

that out. Well, I still, in terms of souls, do believe cats don't have souls, but we'll never

be able to confirm that. Maybe if we get better instruments, the soul instrument,

you need to come up with that one, please. For cats? Yeah, not just for cats, but for all animals

and people in general. For sure. You can put them in like a little, you know, soul machine and find

out what's the status of their soul. That's funny. I hope we'll become a scientific discipline of

consciousness and consciousness is in some sense connected to maybe what the meaning of the word

soul used to be. And I think it's a fascinating open question, like what is consciousness and so

on. Maybe we'll touch on in a little bit. But yeah, anyway, back to our. Religions being adaptive.

I think that Christianity probably helped us become better people to each other as we moved

into a more global society. And also this, it goes along with my book, which is basically making

the argument that belief in nonhuman intelligence or ETs or UFOs, UAPs, whatever you want to call

them is a new form of religion. And how does that work with the scientific method? Do you think

there's always this role of religion as being in his broad definition of religion as being a

complement to our sort of very rigorous empirical pursuit of understanding reality,

where there's always going to be this coupling will always define, redefine new eras of civilization

of what that religion actually looks like. So you talk about technology and so on being the modern

set of religious beliefs around that. So is that always going to, is religion always going to kind

of cover the space of things we can't quite understand with science yet, but we still want

to be thinking about? Oh, I see what you're saying. That's a great question. When you say religion,

I would, I would use the word religiosity, because I think that we're moving out of the dogmatic

types of religions into more of a, I hate to put it this way, but an ex files type religion where

we can say, I want to believe, or the truth is out there. But we don't know that it's out there,

or we don't, we don't know yet what it is, but we know it's out there. So there's this, this kind

of built in capacity for belief and something that we don't have evidence for yet. And that's a

sort of faith. So I would say yes to that question. Absolutely. I think it's adaptive in that way.

We're moving into a new, I mean, heck, we've already moved into this culture. Most people have not

caught up with it yet. I see that in the school systems, you know, and I think that I'm hoping

we can catch up fast because really it's moving faster than we are. So I mentioned to you offline

that I'm finishing up on the rise and fall of the third Reich. I'm not sure if you have anything

in your exploration, interesting to say, but the use of religion by dictators or the lack of the

use of religion by dictators, whether we're talking about Stalin, which is most secular,

I apologize if I'm historically incorrect on this, but I believe it's a secular and Hitler. I think

there's some controversy about how, how much religion played a role in his own personal life and

in general, in terms of influencing the, using it to manipulate the public, but definitely the

church played a role. Do you have a sense of the use of religion by governments to control the

populations by dictators, for example, or is that outside of your little explorations as a religious

scholar? It's not outside of my framework. Absolutely not. I think that it's done routinely.

Propaganda is done routinely, especially there's nothing more powerful than religion

to get people to act, I think. I have, my mother's Jewish and my father's was Roman Catholic,

okay, from Irish extraction. And so both members, both great grandparents came here under duress

because they were being, what would you call it? There was an active genocide on both sides,

being done by other cultures, okay? So on the one hand, obviously we know about the Holocaust,

okay? So they came, the great grandparents came here to avoid that and they made it. On the other

hand, there was an English genocide, we just have to say it, of the Irish. It was called a famine,

but it wasn't fun. It was a staged thing. And so millions of Irish left Ireland on

coffin ships is what they called them because they usually wouldn't get here. Mine happened to get

here, okay? So that's the context that I'm coming from. So in each case, for one thing,

the Irish weren't considered, you know, there was Catholics weren't considered,

they were considered to be terrible. And there was a lot of anti Catholic rhetoric here in the

United States, which is kind of strange because one of the, in fact, the most wealthy colonial

family were the Carols in Maryland and they were Catholic. So when you look at the United States,

our history, and you see the separation of church and state, do you want to know where that came

from? That came from those guys. They convinced George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, I mean,

they couldn't vote, yet they had, they had, they have their names on the Constitution. Is that not a

strange contradiction? So here you can see how, you know, propaganda works. There was anti Catholic

propaganda. There was anti Jewish propaganda. And a lot of it was that, you know, these people

weren't human. They weren't human beings. Another thing I'd like to say is that when the Irish did

come here, and they were indentured, a lot of times indentured servants. But that's a, that's

terminology. Then what is an indentured servant? Slave. Pretty much. So in that sense, religion

can be used derogatorily. Yeah, derogatorily as a useful grouping mechanism of saying this is the

other. And, you know, it's powerful too, because behind it is a force of, you know, what people

can tend to be sacred, a sacred force, right? So, you know, it's up to God to, you know,

decide who's, you know, so you have to go along with what God says, of course. Well, that's

basically, that's not the contact event. You know, the contact event is usually some type of

very specific, legitimate event that a person has with something that is nonhuman or considered

divine. But when religions become narrativized, I would call it by different institutions,

that's when you're in danger of getting propaganda. You said Nietzsche, one of your

favorite philosophers. He said famously, one of the many famous things he said is that God is dead.

Yes. What do you think he meant? Do you think he was right?

Okay, good. I love this question. No one asks me about Nietzsche.

And I love Nietzsche. Okay, so first, actually, I do think, and I could be corrected and probably

will be in all the comments. Yeah. Well, first, Nietzsche, it's true, wasn't the first to say

God is dead. I think Hegel said it. Okay, no one reads Hegel. He's like so difficult to read,

that is impossible. Same with Heidegger, as you mentioned. Yeah, I love him, but yeah,

he's really hard to read. So Nietzsche basically said God is dead. And let me give you the context

for him saying that. He also said this. He said there was only one Christian and he died on the

cross. Okay, so he despised Christianity and he said that. And the people who practice it.

Absolutely. Yeah, but again, he believed in Jesus and he believed Jesus was, he didn't believe he

was a divinity. He believed Jesus was a good man and he died on the cross. Okay. So he believed in

the morality. Yeah, he absolutely did. Yeah, he did. And Nietzsche basically was making a

historical statement about God is dead. He said, and he was right. He was basically saying that in

this, in the century in which he lived, and he died, I think in 1900. Again, I could be wrong

about that. So I just want to say that I believe he died in 1900. Okay, so he's writing in the 1800s.

And he's basically saying, God is dead and we killed him. Okay, so he's making a historical

statement that at that point in time, with science just kind of getting better and industrialization

happening, the idea of this thing beyond what we know as material reality is dead.

So the substrate of Western civilization is dead. That's what Nietzsche is saying,

if that makes sense. Yes. And he's basically says, with that comes the ubermensch, okay,

which is the superhuman. And he says, there aren't many of them. He says, but they're gonna come.

And he also talks about the philosophers of the future. And he's speaking and writing to them is

my belief. So he's basically telling you and me, because we're now the philosophers of his future.

Yeah, he's basically telling us, this is what's happening now, and look what it has done. He says,

now everything is possible, all manner of terrible evil, because no one has the belief

in God anymore, the belief that there is an afterlife, you asked about an afterlife.

So with this kind of belief in a morality comes this belief, you know, you can have morals

without God, okay, people do. But what Christianity is this idea that you will reap what you sow.

So if people don't believe that anymore, what will happen? And so that's what he's basically

saying is that the basic anchor for Western society is now gone. Do you think he was right?

Absolutely, absolutely right. But then again, what do you think if we brought him back to life?

And he read American Cosmic, your book, and he wrote, he tweeted about it,

writing a review maybe for the, I don't know what they post for New York Times, he'd be an

editorial writer with a blue checkmark on Twitter. What do you think he would say about

this idea that you present that's a grander idea of religion? And, you know,

like religiosity, like this new form? Yeah, wouldn't that kind of reverse the idea that God is dead?

Yeah, because it would bring up this idea of external intelligences that are not human,

which is basically a lot of religions talk about that, right? There are bodhisattvas,

there are angels, there are demons, you know, there's all these types of nonhuman intelligences

that religion makes space for. So what I'm basically saying in American Cosmic is these new

things are within the realm of UFOs and UIPs. So no, I think that, well, I think Nietzsche would

say that that's a progressive adaptation of religion is what I would hope he would say.

Nietzsche, however, is unpredictable, I think. I couldn't predict him. So I would say that

it would be my hope that he would say this is an accurate representation of a move into a new type

of religion. And it's adaptive, therefore progressive. He would probably be uncomfortable

reading a book by a brilliant female professor. He happens also to be short.

I don't know if you read that. No. Yeah. Oh, he said some pretty nasty things about short women.

Oh, my God. Yeah. Nietzsche, he should be canceled. No, no, please don't cancel Nietzsche.

You have to take people in the context of their time. Although I'm pretty sure in his time,

he was also an asshole. He was. But assholes are people too. Okay. Just bad ones. You wrote

the book, American Cosmic, UFOs, Religion, Technology. What was the goal of writing this book?

What maybe we'll mention it. We have already mentioned it many times, but in this little

space of a conversation, can you say maybe what is the key insight that you found that

lingers with you to this day from the process, the long process of putting this book together?

Sure. Just like with my book on purgatory, I went into the research thinking that it would be

something that it was entirely not. It ended up being something completely different. And I

think that's good. I think that people who do research need to are very excited actually when

their research surprises them. So I was happily surprised by my purgatory book to learn that it

was a place. And so I went into American Cosmic being a nonbeliever in UFOs entirely. And I came

out being agnostic, okay? Kind of believer. But agnostic, sort of open to the mysteries of the

world. Yes. And I didn't think that, first of all, I knew that the government was part of the

situation. I just didn't know how much. And so I learned that quickly and acclimated to it,

accepted it, and noted that indeed, Horatio, the world is much more mysterious than we think it

is. It's more mysterious. There are more mysteries in this life than your philosophy provides for.

So is a sense American Cosmic is about the mysteries of the modern life as encapsulated by

the realm of technology and the realm of alien intelligences?

Yes. I think that, I mean, I'd have to go off record as a professor and talk personally.

As a person, I do think that there are mysteries of which we have an inkling. And if it's something

as powerful as nonhuman intelligence, whether or not it's from another planet, extraterrestrial,

or it happens to be from like another dimension or something else, I think that this is going to

get the attention of institutions of power. And indeed, I think that's what has happened.

And although probably people have had interactions with these things, it appears to me historically

for a long time, as long as humans have existed, I would imagine that indeed,

this is something that's quite powerful and could change the belief structures

of our entire societies, our civilization, basically.

So it's the same way that you're talking, the belief structures were strongly affected by

religious beliefs throughout history, in the same way this has the potential.

So it serves as a source of concern for the powerful because it can have very significant

effects on the populace. Is there some broader understanding of how we should think about

alien intelligences than like little green men that you can maybe elaborate on and talk about?

Yes. This comes directly out of my research in Catholic history. What I found was that

let's take, for instance, this idea of an angel. So we all think we know what an angel looks like.

Why? Well, we've been told what an angel looks like. We see what an angel looks like. Throughout

history, people have painted angels and they all look pretty much the same. But actually,

if you go to the primary sources on either in Hebrew or in Greek or in whatever language,

and in Latin, and you look at experiences that people have talked about where they've written

down their experiences about angels, angels don't at all look like what we think. They don't look

like little cherubs with wings. They don't look like tall, strong anthropomorphic human looking

things. They don't. They look really weird. And sometimes they don't look at all a humanoid. They

look like strange spinning things with eyes and things like that. They communicate telepathically

with us. So what does that mean for the idea of extraterrestrials or what we consider to be

aliens? I'm not the first to say this. If we're in contact with nonhuman intelligence,

we're most likely in contact with its technology. Because think about us. Do we send human beings

to Mars yet? Some people say yes. But let's put that aside. So no, we don't. We use our technology.

We send our rovers to Mars. So if there's an extraterrestrial civilization, are they coming

by themselves? Are they coming to a CS? Or are they sending their technology? Most likely they

either are technology or they are sending their technology. Yeah, there might be a gray area

between what is technology and what the aliens are. So you're saying basically a robotic probe

that would be the equivalent of us, our human civilization created technology? Way more advanced

than what we could believe to be a probe, all right? It's kind of funny to think about whatever

extraterrestrial creations have visited Earth that we're interacting with some dumb crappy drone

technology. Yeah, it's true. And we're like building these myths and so on from an experience

with some crappy drone made by some crappy startup somewhere. That is correct. When the

actual intelligence is something much grander. That's the more likely situation. That's what

I like to tell people. I'm like, no, it's probably a lot weirder than you think. Yeah. Oh boy. So

by what forms can it possibly take? So I really love this idea that I tend to be humble in the

face of all that we don't know. And I tend to believe that the form alien life forms would take

and the way they would communicate is much more likely to be of a form that we can't even comprehend

or perhaps can't even perceive directly. So it could be in the space of, we don't understand

most of how our mind works. It could be in the space of whatever the head consciousness is.

Like, maybe consciousness itself is communication with aliens or like, I don't know. It could be

just our own thoughts is actually the alien life forms communicating. Like, I don't know,

all that sounds crazy. But I'm saying like, I'm just trying to come up with the craziest possible

thing that doesn't make any sense. That could very well be true. And you can't say it's not true,

because we don't understand basically anything about our mind. So it could be all of those things,

everything from hallucinations, all the things that are explored through the different drugs

that we've talked about in this podcast in general, Joe Rogan wants to talk about DMT and all those

kinds of hallucinogenic drugs, all of it, including love and fear, all those things that could be

aliens communicating with us, memes on the internet that could be pretty sure humor is alien

communication. No, I don't know. But is there some way that's helpful for you to think about

beyond the little green men? Oh, absolutely. It accords exactly with how I think actually. So

I'll explain. I liked in American Cosmic, I'd attained the status of full professor. So I was

like, okay, I can pretty much write this book like I want to do it. And I did. So I used a lot of

quotes from cool artists like David Bowie. Okay, so David Bowie opens the book, okay, and he basically

says, and so does Nietzsche, by the way, David Bowie and Nietzsche, boom, two, two awesome quotes

right together. That's how I open my book. No better opener. Yeah. Do you remember the quotes?

Yeah, of course. So the first quote by David Bowie, and that's what I'm going to concentrate on

in response to what you just said, which I think is absolutely correct. David Bowie said,

the internet is an alien life form. Okay. And if you've not seen David Bowie's interview where he

says that, I highly recommend it. He's so brilliant. Okay, so David Bowie is actually quite brilliant

about the idea of UFOs. He's also brilliant about the idea of technology. Okay. And most people

wouldn't think that. But I mean, he's pretty darn smart. Okay. So all right. So I started to think

about it. And I also early on in my research met Jacques Valais. Okay, so he's a technologist. He

has a PhD in information technology from a computer science, basically, from Northwestern. And you

got that back in the day, you know, when I say back in the day, I'm not talking a thousand years ago,

I'm talking like in the sixties. Okay, so he's back when computer science wasn't really even

the field. You can get a degree. Yeah, he has a PhD in it. And he's French, he's from France,

but he lives in Silicon Valley. And he worked on ARPANET, which is the proto internet. He mapped

Mars. He's also an astronomer. I mean, he's just this all around brilliant guy, right? And he's

also interested in UFOs. And most people take those two interests of his as separate interests.

And I remember being at a very small conference and listening to him, being in awe, of course,

because he's an awe inspiring person. And then thinking, wait a minute, why do people

compartmentalize those two things about him? They're one in the same. Okay, so when we talk

about UFOs and UAPs and stuff, we have to talk about digital technology and things like that.

Now, if we're going back to what I, so if I were to say what, if I were to believe in, and I,

like I said earlier, I was agnostic, bordering on belief, most likely a believer in these,

this extraterrestrial or not extraterrestrial, let me put it another way, non human intelligence

that's communicating with us. I'm going to tell you how I think they communicate with us. And I

go back to the Greeks again, okay? And the Greeks had this idea of muses, you know, the muses. So,

okay, so there are these things called muses. And we tend to think of them as metaphors, right?

But what if they're not? What if they're actually non human intelligence, trying to communicate

with us, but we're so stupid, we can't like understand, like, so only people with like,

you know, in super amazing capacities, like poetic, creative, you know, intelligent,

mathematical, whatever, you know, because they tend to do this symbolically, they tend to communicate

with us in symbols form. And so music, you know, symbols, we've got math that are, you know,

it's a symbolic language. And so what, so okay, so muses are probably a good idea for me of what

this would be. Now, would muses have spaceships, you know, or those things that we call physical

counterparts to what they are? That's another question altogether. But if, you know, I know,

why would I think this? Because if you look at the history of our space programs, both Russian

and American, you're going to find some pretty weird stuff, pretty weird history there, Alex.

So you want to get an idea, go back to Chakalsky and read a little bit about what he has to say.

If you look back at the history of our space programs, the viable space programs are both Russian

and American, and each has an amazingly strange history, because the founders of the calculations

that got us up into space, the rocket scientists, basically, were doing some pretty weird rituals

and doing religious things, right? They were necessary, like Jack Parsons on our side was out

in the desert with people like Elron Hubbard and doing really intense rituals, believing that they

were opening stargates and things like that. Okay, that's awesome. And they were really doing that.

Okay. So then you go to the Russian side, and they had a very specific, non dogmatic according

to Catholics or Orthodox Christianity, idea of what Christianity was, and they believed that

they were interacting with angels, okay, non human intelligences. So if you look back and you see

muses, you know, you can contextualize them within this tradition. And so when I started to talk to

people who were actually in the space program and who were in these programs that now the government

has said, oh yeah, we do have those programs, and they have the same belief structures. They

believed that they were also in contact with these non human intelligences. And they were getting

what they call downloads of information and creating sometimes with Tyler D in my book,

creating technologies that were real. And they were selling them on NASDAQ for, you know, a lot

of money, like, you know, say $100 million or something like that, undisclosed amounts, but

a lot. And these things are viable technologies that we use now and they make our lives better.

And we progress as a species because of them. Now, that has nothing to do with the scientific method.

As much as I know, as much as anybody's going to get angry at me for saying that,

but you know, sorry, those were strange encounters that created our ability to go into space.

I don't know if they're real or not, but these people believe they were real.

Right. So there's, they have a power in actually having an impact in this world in inspiring humans

to create technology, which enables us to do things we haven't been able to do before.

And these, I like how we were putting like angels, alien life forms,

aliens, and technology all in the non human intelligence camp, which I really like that because

this, that's very true. It's this other source of wisdom, intelligence, maybe a connection

to the mysterious. Yes. I was really surprised by it.

Can you speak a little bit more to the connection between aliens and technology

that Jacques Vallée had in his own, one individual mind that's very tempting to kind

of separate as two separate endeavors. Why did you come to believe that they are at one in the same

or at least part of the same intellectual journey?

Thanks for asking that again, because nobody asks me that question. And

it's central to my project. So Jacques was a huge influence, is a huge influence on me.

He taught me a lot. I had, he gave me access to some of his information that's,

that he keeps. But a lot of his information is actually there out there for everyone to read.

He has an academia.edu page and he just, so he didn't have this. Unfortunately,

when I was doing my research in 2012 and 2013, so I had to go back and do microfiche type stuff.

You know, what I did was I began to read everything that he wrote and he actually gave me a lot of

his books too. And he told me, I remember he dropped me off from, this is actually quite

interesting if you'll allow me to tell you a little story. Please. Okay. And it also includes

ayahuasca. So great. Every story includes ayahuasca is a great story. Okay. So I was at a conference

and it was a small conference of very interesting people in California on the Pacific Ocean.

And Jacques was there. And this is actually, it opens my book. This is the book. This is the,

I go, I suppress to my book. I go on this ride. He takes me through Silicon Valley.

I've lived there, right? My grandparents grew up in the same place that he raised his children in

Belmont. And so, but we were there with Robbie Graham, who's a great ufologist in his own right

and film theorist. I highly recommend his work. So we were together and he was taking us to San

Francisco where I was going to meet my brother who was going to take me home. And so he took us on

he took us on this long journey and he talked to us. And as we got out of the car, he gave me

several of his books. And one in particular, he gave me, he said, read this first.

I was like, okay, I definitely will read that first. Okay. So this is how the ayahuasca figures

in. So we were, I didn't take it nor have I taken it. Okay. So we were at this place and

in California and Alex Gray and his wife were there and they were talking about their experiences

with psychedelics. You know, he's an amazing visionary artist. Okay. So he believes that

there's a place that you can enter and he and his wife would enter this space with either,

you know, ayahuasca or LSD or something like that. And they would not talk to each other,

but they would be having the same exact experience. So they would, it was almost like having the same

dream, right? Okay. So somehow that whole event with Jacques there and them talking about their

experiences in these realms of which religious studies people are quite familiar, by the way,

because visionary experiences are what we study. So all of this seems super familiar to me.

And I recognize that immediately that Jacques that it hit me like, you know,

very obvious that UFOs and these experiences and technology all seemed, they were all meshed together.

And I knew that I had to take them. I knew I had to read everything Jacques ever wrote. And the

best stuff he's written, by the way, is his little essays that he wrote in the 1970s and

they were pure viewed essays about the beginning of the internet and how a lot of it was based on

basically like neural connection with the internet, like somehow psychic connection through the

internet with others and things like that. So the mind, the brain is a biological neural network.

There's this connection between division neurons and so on. And that's what ultimately is able to

have memories and has cognitive ability and is able to perceive the world and generate ideas.

And those ideas are then spread on the internet, even from the very early days to other humans.

So it gets injected or travels into the brains of other humans and that goes around in there

and then spits out other stuff and it goes back and forth. So it's nice to think of the network

that's in our mind, individual mind as, I mean, very much even deeply connected to the network

that is the connection between humans through the internet. And so in that sense, Jacques saw the

internet as this powerful, as a source of power and wisdom that is beyond our own. Exactly. That's

external to us, like a non, like, you know, if you could call it autonomous AI, right? It's

non human intelligence in a sense, even though humans are a part of it. Yes, or we're invaded by

it or, you know, whatever you want to call it, okay. Right, it's the chicken and the egg, right.

So if I can go on, I want to experience things. I'm not done with that. So this is where I come

to this idea that we're in this space, we're in now a new space of religion, of religiosity.

So what happens is then, and it's like a biosphere, and I'll talk about that in a minute.

So we, so like, so Jacques takes us back, we get to San Francisco, and my brother,

who is your straight lace person, you know, army guy and everything like that, I get into his car

and the first thing he tells me is, I took ayahuasca. And I was like, what? And he goes,

it's going to save humanity. That's great. Yeah. As I mentioned to you offline, I talked to Matthew

Johnson as a Hopkins professor on, he's a really a scholar of most, he's certainly most drugs.

He's also really deeply studied cocaine, all those stuff on negative effects. And he's focused

on a lot of positive effects of the different psychedelics. It's kind of fascinating. So

I'm very much interested in exploring the science of what these things do to the to the human mind,

and also personally exploring it. Although it's like this weird gray area, which he's, he's masterful

at, which is, he's a professor at Johns Hopkins, one of the most prestigious universities in the

world and, and doing large scale studies of the stuff. And until, until he got a lot of money

for these studies, even in Hopkins itself, there's not much respect, not even respect. It was like,

people just didn't want to talk about it as a, as a legitimate field of inquiry. It's kind of

fascinating how hesitant we are as a little human civilization to legitimize the exploration of the

mysterious of whatever the definition of the mysterious is for that particular period of time.

So for us now, there's like little groups of things, like I would say consciousness

in the space of like computer science research is something that's still like, I don't know,

maybe let philosophers kick it around for a little longer. And then certainly extraterrestrial life

forms from in most formulations of that problem space is still the other. It's still the source

of the mysterious, except maybe like SETI, which is like, how can we detect signals from far away

alien intelligences that we'll be able to perceive. Yeah, it's, and psychedelics is another one of

those that's like, we're starting to see, okay, well, can we try to see if there's some medical

applications of like helping you get like he does studies of help you quit smoking or help you in

some kind of treatment of some disease. And he's sneaking into that. I mean, it's like openly

sneaking into it. He's doing studies on it of like, how can you expand the mind with these

tools and what can the mind discover through psychedelics and so on. And we're like slowly

creeping into the space of being able to explore these mysterious questions. But it's like, it

sucks that sometimes a lot of people have to die, meaning sorry, they have to age out.

Like it's like, faculty have, and people have a fixed set of ideas, and they stick by them.

And in order for new ideas to come in, then the young folks have to be born with an open mind,

the possibility of those ideas, and then they have to become old enough and get A's in school

and whatever to then carry those ideas forward. So, you know, the acceptance of the exploration

and the mysterious takes time. It's kind of sad. It is sad. I agree. Maybe to go into my source of

passion, which is artificial intelligence. What's your sense about the possibility, like Pamela

McCordick has this quote that I like, I talked to her a couple of years ago, or I guess already in

this podcast, that artificial intelligence began with the ancient wish to forge the gods. So,

do you think artificial intelligence may become the very kind of gods that

were at the center of the religions of most of our history?

Yeah, there's a lot there. So, I'm going to start by addressing this idea of artificial

intelligence being separate from human beings. Okay. So, I don't think that's actually,

that might happen. Okay. I mean, it's already happened, but let's put it this way. Like you're

talking about super artificial intelligence, like autonomous conscious artificial intelligence.

Okay. Yeah. Something with artificial consciousness.

First of all, I think she's correct. Okay. But also, there's an awesome quote. I'd also like

to bring up this writer of fiction, actually, Ted Chang. And one of his essays, he writes short

essays. One of them was The Basis for the Movie Arrival, which if you haven't seen it, it's a really

great movie about UFOs. It has a very creative way of proposing an idea of how they might be able

to communicate, first of all, how they appear to us. Second of all, how they may be communicating

with us humans. Exactly. The author Ted Chang has a lot. I recommend his writings, his short stories.

One is very short, and it appeared in Nature about 20 years ago, and it is called, I think it's

called eating the crumbs from the table or something like that. And it's basically this short essay,

and I hate to do a spoiler here, but if you don't want to know what it's about, don't listen right

now. Yeah. Spoiler alert. Yeah. Okay. So, this is what it's about. So, basically, it's about human

beings becoming two different species. And one of them is created, they're called metahumans,

and they start biohacking themselves with tech. Sound familiar? So, they do this,

and they become metahumans and another species, just kind of another fork. Such that humans

can barely understand them because they're so far removed. So, in a sense, are they gods? Right?

No, they're metahumans. They're superhumans. They're enhanced humans. Okay. I see that,

hopefully on the horizon, frankly. I hope so. Not that we have two species, but that we can use

our technology or we can become so integrated with our technology that we can survive. Okay. We

can survive the radiation in space. We can't go places now because of the radiation in space.

Perhaps we can develop our bodies such that we can survive the radiation in space.

So, there's this idea of these metahumans now. There's also this idea that technology is just

another form of humans. We've created it, right? And so, maybe it is bent on surviving, thereby

using us kind of as a meme or a team. Some people are calling them teams now, these self generating.

They're replicating themselves through us. Okay. I see that also. And I don't think that's

terribly bad. Maybe it's just the way that we are evolving. It doesn't mean that we're evolving

all the time. We're taller than we used to be. We have different skills. So, I don't see that as

a bad thing. I think a lot of people see it as, if we're not how we are now, it's a tragedy. But

it's not a tragedy. How we are now is actually a tragedy for most people alive. Yeah. And we

might be evolving in ways we can't possibly perceive. Like you said, that the humans have

created Twitter and Twitter may be changing us in ways that we can't even understand now,

currently. From a perspective, if you look at the entirety of the network of Twitter,

that might be an organism that the organism understands what's happening from its level

of perception. But we humans are just like the cells of the human body. We're interacting

individually, but we're not actually aware of the big picture that's happening. And we naturally,

somehow, or whatever the force that's creating the entirety of this, whatever one version of it

is the evolutionary process, like biological evolution, whatever force that is, is just

creating these greater and greater level of complexity. And maybe somehow, not other kinds

of nonhuman intelligence are involved that we're calling alien intelligences. Yes.

So, just to step back, and we'll come back to AI because I love the topic. But through American

Cosmic, and in general, you've interacted with much of the UFO community you mentioned,

ufologists. By the way, is it ufologists, or is it ufologists? It's ufologists.

Ufologists. Yeah. So, first of all, what is a ufologist? And second of all,

what have you learned about this community of ufologists, or also as you refer to them as the

invisibles, or the members of the invisible college, or just in general, people who study UFOs

from the different, all the different kinds of groups that study UFOs?

Sure. Generally, what I found is that they are, okay, so people who are interested in UFOs from

like being a kid and seeing some cool movie like Star Wars or something, and then they become

interested and then they study it. As best they can, UFOs or UAPs, they're generally an honest

group of people who are using their tools, and there are generally two types of them. There

are those who believe in the nuts and bolts, like the physical craft, and they believe in

that these are things from other planets, okay? So, that's like the ETH hypothesis,

you know. I'm sorry, ETH hypothesis. ETH is what we call it. Yeah, sorry about that.

So, this is like there's an actual spaceship, like something akin, but much more advanced

than the rockets we use now. Yeah. And they have some kind of, not necessarily biological,

but something like biological organisms that travel on these spaceships.

So, this would be like what to the Stars Academy is trying to decipher, like how, you know,

how do they do it? You know, maybe we could use that technology, the propulsion and things like

that. They look at the rocket technology. Okay, so there are those, and then there are people

who believe that it's more consciousness based, okay? So, these are your two types of

ufologists who are known, and these are people who we know about. Then I found that there are

people who are, quote unquote, I call them the invisibles, because Jacques Velay in the 70s,

he and I think actually Alan Hynek, his colleague, quoted, this is a Francis Bacon thing, by the way,

it goes back to the early modern time period, when scientists could be killed for basically

trying to go outside with the church or the government institution determined was dogma.

And so, they had to be really careful. So, he called it the invisible college.

So, Hynek took that term and reused it or what do you call it, repurposed it. So, he repurposed it.

So, that they were still talking to each other though. So, what I found to be the case was

that there was a group of people who were scientists, but were not on the internet, you

know, 10 people today and students of mine in particular, and my own kids actually,

they think that you only exist if you're on the internet or something only exists if it's on the

internet. And that's of course untrue. And so, what I found was that there are most people who

are the most powerful people of our society and are doing things are not on the internet,

you're not going to find any trace of them. So, a lot of these people are what I call invisibles,

people who are studying, at least their work is invisible. You might find them on the internet,

but you're going to find that they're part of the bowling league or something like that, right?

You will not find that they are actually engaged in research about this topic. And so,

I called them the invisibles because I was surprised to find them. And I thought, well,

this is no longer the invisible college because these people are not even talking to each other.

And that's why I reference this movie Fight Club. In it, you have an invisible,

okay? And his name is Tyler Durden and he's incredible. He does incredible things. He's like

a person who should not exist, right? Because he does so many things that are amazing. And so,

I found a person like that and I call, and he's a real person. He's partially on the internet,

but nothing that he does around that topic of UFOs is on the internet. So, I decided to call him

Tyler D after Tyler Durden. And so, these people, I've turned the UFO Fight Club because they work

together, but they don't know. In fact, his boss doesn't know what he does. They don't talk to

each other because you know, the first rule of Fight Club. Same as the second, yeah. Exactly,

yeah. You don't talk about that. No, you don't do it. Why do you have a sense that

there's such a, I don't want to say fear, but a principle of staying out of the limelight?

I think there's something real. And I think that the use of it could be dangerous for people.

Oh, sorry. You mean like something real, like there's actual

technology. I don't know. What's the right terminology here to use? Alien technology,

ideas about technology that are being explored, that are dangerous, have made public,

that maybe become dangerous, have made public. Yes. So, you don't have to call it alien technology.

You can call it ideas about alien technology because I don't know if it's actual alien technology

or not. I honestly don't know. But I do know for a fact, because it's a historical fact,

that Jack Parsons and Konstantin Tchaikovsky, who's Russian, believed in these things and

believed that they were downloading this information. Whether or not they were, I don't,

I mean, they definitely created the rocket technologies. That's true. How they did and

whether their process was exactly what they said it was, I don't know. So, this is the same thing

today. So, we've got some powerful technologies going on here. And of course, we have a military

and we have a military for a reason. Almost every government who needs a military has one.

And so, they're going to keep these the way they should be kept in my interpretation.

I mean, think about it. Everybody accepts the fact that we have a military,

almost everybody does. Why are they so upset then that the military keeps secrets?

Yeah. Well, that's the nature of things. We can get into that whole thing. I tend to,

I've spoken with the CTO Lockheed Martin on this. I've obviously read and think about war a lot.

It's such a difficult question because this space, this particular space of technology,

there's a gray area that I think is evolving over time. I think nuclear weapons change the game in

terms of what should and shouldn't be secret. I think there's already technology that will

enable us to destroy each other. And so, there's some sense in which some technology should be

made public. This is the same discussion between companies. Which part of your technology should

make public through like, for example, academic publications and all that kind of stuff?

Like how the Google search engine works, PageRank algorithm or

how the different deep learning, there's pretty vibrant machine learning research

communities within Google, Facebook and so on. And they release a lot of different ideas.

It's an interesting question like, how dangerous is it to release some of the ideas? I think it's

a gray area that's constantly changing. I do also think it's super interesting. I wonder if you

could elaborate a little bit that there's this gray area between what's actually real in terms of

alien technology and the belief of it when held in the minds of really brilliant people that they

ultimately may produce the same kind of result in terms of being able to create new technologies

that are human usable. Like, is there, in your mind, there one in the same?

Is like believing in alien craft and actually being in possession of an alien craft?

I don't think they're the same, no. Belief is powerful, okay? In new age communities,

you know, people think thoughts are things, okay? That's been said, you know, thoughts are

things. You can make them happen kind of thing, believing them enough. It is true that if I believe

I can run a 540 mile, I'll do it, okay? And I probably will do it. And I've done it before,

actually. I'm much younger, but I did it. But my coach is the one that instilled that belief in

me, right? And so, but can I run like a one minute mile? No, okay. So I guess, does that

answer your question? Like, there's only so far belief goes in generating reality?

Well, yeah, I mean, I guess that's what, just having listened to Jacques Valais, it seemed like

reality is not, was not as important for the scientific exploration of the concept of alien

technology. I could be wrong, but this is what I think Jacques is getting at. There are other

ways to access places in reality, other than what we consider to be physical. Right. That's

this consciousness. Okay. So in, like I said, so religious studies is among other things. It's

looking at visionary experiences. All right. So people do have visionary experiences they did

without drugs, you know, they did with drugs, they do with drugs, they do many have them without

drugs today. And oftentimes, those visionary experiences correspond to each other. Now,

how do we, how do we make sense of that? So, you know, do these places actually exist? In a sense,

I think they do. And so I think that, you know, like, let's take that very famous case of a

Virgin Mary apparition in Fatima, where I think there was like a lot of people, thousands and

thousands, if not like, I think 50,000 or something like that, a lot of people gathered to see what's

now called the miracle of Fatima, which was the spinning of the sun. Well, a lot of people saw

different things, but they all saw some kind of thing. Okay. So they all saw different things,

but it was something happened. Okay. So I guess the question is, what are these places where we

access non, what I'd call like non physical realities, okay, where we actually do get information. We

did get, like who could say that Jack Parsons didn't get information from doing these rituals and

accessing these, we have to say that he actually did, because we see the results of physical results.

The same thing with Tyler. And that's why I put Tyler in this camp with this tradition

with Jack Parsons. I say that Tyler is getting these, what he calls downloads, and you can see

the results of them physically. He sells them on the Nasdaq. He makes millions of dollars from them.

They help people. I've seen people who they've helped. Okay. So do you think psychedelics that

I just mentioned earlier have a possibility of going to these kind of same kind of places of

exploring ideas that are outside of our more commonplace understanding of the world?

In my, yeah, I think so. Absolutely. However, I think we have to be really careful about

those, because young people or people in general, I should say, absolutely can get hurt by them.

I mean, but we get hurt by alcohol, you know, we drive our cars and we get to kill each other.

But psychedelics are really interesting, because I know that within the history of our country,

we have used psychedelics in various capacities for our military in order to try to stimulate

ideas and access places and information that can't be accessed normally. This is all fact.

Yeah. I talked to Matt for like four hours. So we ran out of time being able to talk. Well,

I wanted to talk to him about MK Ultra and Ted Kaczynski. There's so many mysterious things

there. There's like layers of what's known or what's not known. It's fascinating,

but I think what is interesting is psychedelics were used or were attempted to be used as tools

of different kinds. That's the point. So like we think of technology as tools to enable us to do

things. And that same way that psychedelics, like many drugs could be used as tools,

some more effective than others. Absolutely. I don't think what you, I'm not sure what you can

do effectively with alcohol. Although somebody, I think somebody commented somewhere on social

media that I don't know why everyone gives it's so negative about alcohol, because I think the

person said that it's given me some of the most incredible, it enabled me to let go and have

some of the most incredible experiences with friends in my life. And it's true. We kind of

sometimes say alcohol is dangerous. It can make you do horrible, but the reality is it's also

so a fascinating tool for letting go of trying to be somebody, maybe that you're not and allowing

you to be yourself fully in whatever crazy form that is and allow you to have really deep and

interesting experiences with those you love. So yeah, even alcohol can be used as an effective tool

for exploring experiences and becoming, expanding your mind and becoming a better person. So what

the hell was I talking about? So yeah, so psychedelics and MK Ultra, is there something

interesting to say in our historical use of psychedelics? I mean, think about it. When did

we start doing that? When did we start using those? That's true. It's quite a long time ago, right?

But okay, but true. But when did our government start experimenting with them with us? Okay.

Our government is the United States government. Yeah. Okay. So that happened in around the 1950s.

Okay. After quote unquote, the 1940s, where we have 47 and we have, you know, this, you know,

this Roswell type stuff going on. Okay. Like crash sites and things like that. So I think that

I think there might be a correlation there. I don't know what it is. Okay. But I do think

that's fascinating. Actually, yeah, there's a lot of interesting things started around the time.

Yeah. Yeah. And so eldest Huxley would say we opened the doors of perception. Okay. And what flew in?

Oh, man, that's beautifully put. It'd be interesting to get your opinions on certain

more concrete sightings that are sort of monumental sightings with alien intelligences

in the history, in the recent history that at least I'm aware of. I'm not

very much aware of this history, but the most recent one I've spoken with David Fraver on this

podcast. I really like him as a person. He's a fun guy, but also he's gotten a chance to

he's described as account of having experience with what he and others now termed the tic tac UFO.

What do you think of that particular sighting, which is captivated the imagination of many,

in particular, because there's been videos released of it. Yes. Of these UFOs, but I find the videos

to be way too blurry and grainy to be of interest to me, personally, to me, the most fascinating

thing is the first person to come from David and others about that experience. But what are your

thoughts? Those videos have been out for a while, actually, much, I think in the mid 2000s, they

were out. But what you have is you have kind of like this corroboration from a group and also

the New York Times involvement in 2017. My opinion about the tic tacks is that first,

I believe the people who have had the experiences, I know some of them, like some of the radar people

and things like that, they saw them and they're not, I don't believe they're making it up. I do

think that this is being used as a spin. And I'm just going to say that. And the reason I think

that is this is because at the time it was released, I was still in touch with many people who were

among the UFO Fight Club. And so they had intimate knowledge of these things. And the first thing

they said was, we have satellites that can read the news on your phone when you're reading it.

So we've got better footage than this, and this is not good footage at all. Therefore,

they believe that it was authentic footage that had been doctored up. Now, why? I don't know why.

Okay. So I honestly don't know if it's accurate or not. I mean, I believe the people, absolutely.

But was this something out there to fool these people? Perhaps, I don't know. Is it spun? The

people who I know who are part of the UFO Fight Club believed it was real and said,

this is badly done, but real. Okay. I see. But when you say spinning, there's some parties

involved that are trying to leverage it. Yeah. For funds, probably. For funds, for financial

interest. Yeah, I think so. Nevertheless, it has inspired a conversation and just a lot of people

in the world that there's something mysterious out there that we're not fully informed about.

And I was certainly grateful that the New York Times ran the story right before my book came out.

Well, see, but there's the financial interest that to me, as a person who doesn't give a damn

about money, actually, I don't like money, except for when it's used in the context of a company

to build cool things. But like personally, I don't know, I find the financial interest side

off putting, especially when we're talking about the exploration of some of the most,

like money is a silly creation of human beings. I agree.

And it's used to provide temporary, like the unfortunate thing with money is that it helps

you buy things that too easily allow you to forget the important things in life and also to forget

the difficult aspects of life to do the difficult intellectual work of being cognizant of your

mortality of like fully engaging in life, in life of reason to of thinking deeply about the world,

all those kinds of things. If you get like a nice car or something like that, and just like,

I don't know, all the different things you could do with money is it can make you forget that.

Anyway, as there's a long way to say that, yes, yes, it's very nice that you coincided nicely

with the book. But also it, I think it, I mean, like I said, I think it inspired quite a lot of

people that, you know, maybe there's a lot of things out there that were like, it reminded a

lot of people, there's things out there we don't know about. Lex, I can agree with you on that.

But can I push back on two things? Okay, all right. The first one is that I was happy to receive

money from the book because of the New York Times article. That's absolutely false. So I

published my book with Oxford, which is an academic press, and you don't get paid with an academic

press. Okay, so money was not it for me. What it was was recognition that my research was being

validated. So, you know, because then people called me and said, well, maybe it's more than

interesting. Okay, and they did. Okay, the other thing about money is just as you say that,

now I agree with you, there, I'm upset about money too. I think there should be universal

health care, universal income. You know, I don't think people should be in poverty, especially

because we are so wealthy as a species, frankly. Okay, that said, think about this. If you are,

if you don't have money, you can't have a life of the mind either, right? 100%. So I'm not espousing

that like money's the devil. I just think that there's money can be a drug or I will compare it

to like food or something like that, where like, you really should have enough to nourish yourself.

Yes. Right. And too much could and too much can be a huge problem. So that's where I come from

with the money. And I'm just aware I'm fortunate enough to have the skills and the health to be

able to earn a living in whatever way, like I wish of him being in the United States and being able

to speak English. So the very least I could work with McDonald's and my standards are, I told Joe,

I mean, mistake, I told Joe Rogan that I've always had a few money and people are like, oh,

Lex was always rich. No, no, no, I was always broke. What I mean by I've always had a few

monies. My standard, what it takes to have a few is always very little. I'm just happy with

very little. But yes, it's true that money for many people and included for myself, it's just

a different level for different people is freedom. Yes. Freedom to think, freedom to do, pursue your

passions. It just so happens. I am very fortunate that many of my passions often come with a salary

if I wished. I love programming. So even just working as a basic level software engineer

will be a source of a lot of joy for me. And that happens in this modern world to come with a salary.

So yeah, it's definitely true. I just mean that it can become a dangerous drug. So I'm glad you

are in this pursuit that you are in for the love of knowledge. And it's true. People should definitely

buy your book. I won't be making money off of it. Oh, yeah, this rocks. Yeah, absolutely. Maybe my

next book. Yes. Yeah, your sense is there's something as there's some groups of people that

maybe try to leverage this for financial gains. And you know, probably good financial. I mean,

they may have good reasons for this too. Like, okay, let's take the study of UFOs. Okay, maybe many

people in government that decide who dole out the money, let's put it that way, they think UFOs

aren't real. So they're not going to give these programs money. So how do these programs make

money? They're going to have to find a way to do it. So maybe that's how they do it. Okay, so

that's fascinating. This is a way to raise money for doing the research. Yeah, I think so.

So let's take a step back to Roswell. We talked about a little bit. What's your sense about that

whole time? Roswell and just Area 51 and the sightings and also the follow on mythology around

those sightings. That's with us today. All right. So where do I get started? Well, I mean, it is

a mythology here, right? The mythology of Roswell, it's very religious, like in the sense that there's

a pilgrimage to Roswell people make. And they go to, there's a festival there as well, like a

religious festival. You can get little kitschy stuff, like you can get at a religious festival

there. So it's very much like a place of pilgrimage where a herophany occurred. And a herophany is

basically contact with nonhuman intelligence. Okay, so nonhuman intelligence is thought to have

contacted humans or crashed at this place in Roswell, New Mexico. Now, what's fascinating is

that I begin my book by going out to a crash site in New Mexico. I have to get blindfolded with my,

well, to tell you the truth, the story is that I'm with Tyler, who's an invisible, and he wants to

show me a place in New Mexico where a crash happened. And he says that he thinks that I need

to see physical evidence because I don't believe. And so I said, I'll go, but I'm going to bring

a friend of mine. And he said, no, you have to go alone. He goes, it's a place that is on

government owned property. And it's a no fly zone. And when you go, you'll be blindfolded. And I said,

I definitely need to bring a friend. So he said, well, who do you want to bring? I just had met

this university scientist, he's very well known. And I call him James in my book. And I asked, and

I had a feeling James would definitely want to do this. And I asked James and he said, I'll go

tomorrow. Okay. So I suggested this to Tyler and Tyler said, absolutely not. And I thought,

I know he's going to look up James and he's going to say yes. Because if anybody can figure out what

this material is that we're going to go look for, it's going to be James. He has the instruments.

And so Tyler did, in fact, look him up and finally said, okay, I got, you can go. So we both head

out there and we get blindfolded and Tyler takes us out there. It takes about 40 minutes. I was

outside of a certain place in New Mexico. So in terms of Roswell, this is what I can say,

is that according to Tyler, there were about seven crashes out in the 1940s in New Mexico,

in different various places. We went to one of them according to Tyler. At the time, I was

completely an atheist with regard to anything that had to do with UFOs. So we were out there,

we had specially configured metal detectors for these metals. And we did find these. Okay.

And they've since been studied by various scientists, material scientists, so forth.

And I believe Jacques talked about not those particular ones, but others on the Joe Rogan

show. They're anomalies. So there are scientists don't, I'm not a scientist. So I can't weigh in

on whether I just, I just believe the people, these people I believe because they're

well known scientists. What do you mean they're not anomalies? So the

No, they are not, they are not anomalous. Oh, anomalous in terms of the materials that

are naturally occurring on earth. Yes. Okay. So that, so there's some kind of

inklings of evidence that, that something happened in Roswell, in terms of crashes

of alien technology. Now, what else is there to the mythology? So there's some

some, some crashes, right? Yeah. I mean, that's kind of epic. It's pretty epic. Yeah. And what

else? Like what, what are we supposed to take away from this? Right. Yeah. So it's weird. Okay.

So there's this, okay. So in religious studies, like I said, we call it a herophany, which is

the meeting of a non human intelligent thing, whatever it is an angel, a God, whatever a goddess

with, or an alien, with humans. And that's the place. Okay. So the place is New Mexico. So we,

so New Mexico becomes folded into the mythology of this new religion is what I call a new type of

religion of the UFO. And it becomes ground zero for this new mythology. Just like Mecca is the,

is the place where Muslims go, they have to go right at least once in their lives. It's a pilgrimage

place now. So this is, so in my book, that's how I, I tell it. Now, what about Roswell in the

public imagination? Obviously, according to Annie Jacobson, who's good, you know, she's a great

author, investigative journalist, she's written about Roswell too. I don't agree with all of

what she comes up with. But part of it is that there's a lot of military stuff going on there

that is classified. And there's a reason why you can't get in. And nor would you want to, right?

So, so there's a lot of experimentation going on there. I don't believe that it has to do with

ETs, frankly. But in the imaginations of Americans, Roswell is that place. But I went to a different

place. And apparently, there are several places in New Mexico. Now, strangely enough, I traveled

back to New Mexico at the very end chapter of my book. But it's not, I don't, I don't go there

physically. I go there through the story of a Catholic, a nun, who actually believes that she

bilocated to New Mexico in the, gosh, in the 1600s. So she, yeah, it was very strange. And I was at the

Vatican at the Space Observatory when I made that connection that she probably went to the very,

well, she believed she went to this very place that I had gone.

Can you, can you elaborate on a little bit? Like, what does it mean to go to that place?

For her?

Yeah, for her. I mean, we're kind of breaking down the barrier between what it means to be at a

place in time. Right. I agree with you. This is the field of religious studies. So, and again,

I don't say it's true in my book. I just say it's a very strange coincidence that I'm at the

Vatican Observatory. In fact, I'd finished my book. But while I was at the Vatican Observatory,

I was there with Tyler. And we were looking at the records, they're called the trial records,

but they're the canonization records of these two saints. Each was said to have done amazing

things. One was Joseph of Cupertino, who levitated, okay, or is said to have levitated.

The other was Maria of Agrida from Spain, their contemporaries in the 1600s, who was said to

have been able to bilocate, which is to be in two places at once. Okay. So, this is a belief in

Catholicism that certain very holy people can do these kinds of things like levitate,

which by the way is also associated with UFO abductions, you know, people get levitated out

of their beds and things like that. So, we were sent there by a billionaire who was interested

in levitation and bilocation. And since I could get into the Vatican, and I knew the director of

the Vatican Observatory, both Tyler and I were able to go to the secret archives and look at the

canonization records and then go to Castle Gandolfo, which is about an hour from the Vatican,

where the first observatory, the space observatory of the Vatican is. The second one is in Arizona

and it has a much larger telescope. So, we went and we, and Brother Guy gave me the keys to the

archive. I said, look at anything you want. And I got to see a lot of stuff by Carl Sagan,

by the way. And he talked about, yeah, it was awesome. So, they have a whole section on extraterrestrial,

the search for extraterrestrial life. And they don't, by the way.

How awesome is that?

It was awesome. Yeah. So, we got to stay there. They have a scholar's quarters.

And so, they had two. And so, Tyler stayed in one and I stayed in the other. And Brother Guy

probably shouldn't have been so nice to me and given me the keys because I, when I got home,

we were there for two weeks, when I got home, I got this frantic phone call from him. And he

basically said, Diana, he goes, do you remember where you put the original Kepler? And so, I had

this Kepler, right? And so, I misplaced it. Luckily, I remembered where it went. I was like,

oh gosh, thank goodness I found it. But he'll probably change the rules of the Vatican Observatory

after my visit. So, Maria is, she's actually in the history of our country in that she first wrote

a cosmography of what she said was the spinning earth. And this is in the 1600s. And she, that's

her first book. And she wrote that. And then she said that she was transported on the wings of angels

to the New World. And she said that she met a culture of people. And she basically told them

about the faith of Catholicism. And then what happened was that the people that, and she described

the fauna, she described the people and everything like that. And so, there were actually missionaries

there. And when they went to try to convert some of the people who already lived there,

apparently they already knew a bunch of stuff. And they said, how did you know all this stuff? And

they said, this lady in blue came and told us, and they said, did it look like this? And they

showed them, they obviously didn't have a photograph, but they had a picture of a sister, a nun. And

they said, yeah, she wore similar clothes, but she was much younger, right? And these guys were,

you know, thought that was weird. But when they went back to Spain, they found that this woman

had been doing that in her mind, had been traveling. I mean, I don't know what to make of it. There's

so many things that are sort of forcing you to kind of go outside of, you know, I'm of many minds.

I have very, most of my days spent with very rigorous scientific kind of things, and even

engineering kind of things. And then I'm also open minded. And just the entirety of the idea

of extraterrestrial life forces you to think outside of conventional boundaries of thought,

scientific, current scientific thought, let's put it that way. And your story right now is

freaking you out. That's okay. That's a nice way to put it. What do you, just another person that

seems to be a key figure in this, in the mythology of this is Bob Lazar. It'd be interesting. Maybe

there's others you can tell me about, but Bob, who's also been on Joe Rogan, but his story has been

told quite a bit. And he's got, I think he said that he witnessed some of the work being done

on the spacecraft that was, you know, that was captured. And so on, in order to try to reverse

engineer some of the technology in terms of the propulsion and so on. What are your thoughts about

his story, how it fits into the mythology of this whole thing and brought to you a ufologist,

ufologist community? Okay. So regarding Bob Lazar, with respect to his claims,

again, I have no way to adjudicate whether or not he actually, you know, encountered this.

I do have friends who are. And the people that I know who know his story, some know him,

believe him. And they have said to me that the most important thing that they think he has said,

in fact, one of them, I think he made a meme out of it or something like that was basically,

he said, maybe the public, you know, I regret making it public, maybe the public isn't ready

for this kind of information. And basically, they've, they emphasize that to me. And they

emphasized it so much that they wanted me to know, right? So that is somewhat creepy to me.

So I think, okay, this poor guy Bob Lazar, so many people, you know, this is what happens to

people who have experiences like this, they're questioned, their reputations are put on the

line. In some instances, their, their reputations are manipulated on purpose to make them look

incredible. To me, as a scientist, it's just inspiring that it kind of gives this kind of,

I'm not even thinking of it, is there an actual spacecraft being hidden somewhere and studied

and so on. I'm thinking of it like, I don't know, it's a thing that gives you a spark of a dream,

you know, to, as a reminder that we don't understand most of how this world works.

And then we can build technologies that aren't here today, that will allow us to understand

much more. And it's kind of like almost like a feeling that it provides, and it inspires and

makes you dream. That's the way I see the Bob Lazar story. I don't necessarily, people ask me,

because I'm at MIT, people ask me, like, did Bob Lazar actually go to MIT and so on? I don't know,

and I personally don't care. Like, it's, that's not what's interesting to me about that story.

To me, the myth is more interesting, not interesting actually, but inspiring.

Yes. Because inspiring, you're suggesting that the myth inspires you to create reality.

Yes. Yeah. I think that's, that's true. So even if it's like not real, it doesn't matter, does it?

I mean, in some sense, just like you said, it does. In some sense, it, it doesn't.

So a lot of people know how much I love 2001 Space Odyssey. So I got all these emails asking like,

hey bro, do you know what's up with the monoliths in like the middle of the desert or whatever it

was? I don't, I haven't been actually paying attention. I apologize. But you kind of mentioned

offline that this was kind of cool and interesting. What, what do you make of these monoliths? And in

general, are you, are you a fan of 2001 Space Odyssey where a monolith showed up? Do you have

any thoughts about either the science fiction, the mythology of it, or the reality of it?

Yes. Okay. No, okay. And please say more. Right. So first of all, Kubrick's films are not ever

easy for me because they're so weird, right? And I don't actually enjoy watching them.

But yeah, it doesn't take away from their incredible brilliance though, and their visionary

merit. So 2001 Space Odyssey is incredibly visionary. And of course, all those things that

people say, I don't have to restate them. In terms of what I've, it's a subtext to my book,

by the way, I didn't mean it to be, but it's almost, it's, it's almost a character in my book,

2001 Space Odyssey. And when the monoliths started to appear, again, everything went crazy with my

everything, internet, social media, phone, what's up, what's going on, right? Is this disclosure?

And I thought, well, you know, I'll tell you one thing is it's, let's look at the timing of it.

It's a cool, if it's an art, you know, and then copy art and things like that, it's actually happening

at a really interesting time when all of us are forced to go online. When all of us are forced

because of COVID, right? We're completely now invaded by the screen, or we're invading the

screen. Like we're leaving our infrastructure now is completely changed. So the monolith,

basically, if art is supposed to like show us life, it certainly has, if that's an art project,

somebody did an awesome job with it. But apparently that monolith was there for a long time, right?

I mean, that's the thing, it's been there for a couple of years. So they said, okay, all right.

That said, if your audience is interested, I think the best theory about the meaning of the

monolith is Robert Ager or Robert Ayer. I think it's Robert Ager. He's got a website where he does

analyses of films, and it's called Collative Learning or Collative Learning. And he does the

meaning of the monolith. Everyone should go look at that because I fully agree with him. I studied

different meanings of the monolith in 2001, a space odyssey. I was fascinated. Okay. So what is this

about? His, I accepted as soon as I listened to it and watched it. So basically, he says that the

monolith is, okay, can you pick up your phone here? What does that look like?

Looks awfully a lot like a monolith. Yeah. Okay. So basically, that's what he was saying,

was that Kubrick was basically, the monolith was technology or the screen in particular.

And he basically was saying that the cinema screen, we're being completely, and if you think

about it, look at all this, we live in a screen culture. We have computer screens, iPhone screens,

there's phone screens, we have TV screens, everything is something, and now that COVID has come,

we're forced to go into these screens and we're forced to live a different material

existence than we have lived before. So in my sense, I think that if it's an art project,

it's a really good one for that. So I like that, that meaning of it, it's a screen and the screen

could take all kinds of forms. I mean, our perception system, in a sense, is a screen

between reality and our mind. The screen of the computer is a screen. The virtual reality

worlds that we might be one day living in, there will be an interface. I mean, ultimately,

it's about the interface. That's interesting. It's an interface to another world of ideas.

It's also material change. It's a change in our material, I mean, when people talk about augmented

reality, I say we already live in augmented reality, don't we? Because this isn't our grandparents

existence. Yeah, I sometimes, you have to pause and remind yourself how weirdly different this

reality is than just even like, I mean, 30 years ago, the internet changed so much and social media

has changed so much about actually just the space of our thinking. Wikipedia changed so much about

the offloading of our knowledge, the way we interact with knowledge. I mean, it offloaded

our long term memory about facts onto a digital format, so in the sense that expanded our mind.

It's kind of interesting. I'd be curious to see if he has just one interpretation.

I wonder if there's a part of this. I've corresponded with him, yes. So over the years,

he and I have corresponded. And I told him, I said, look, I'm going to be using this in my book. So

I think you should read what I say. And he, of course, wanted to see it.

So what do you think about your book? There you get it. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So he is a non believer

in alien intelligence and UFOs. But he, and that's fine. But I still agree with him that the meaning

of the monolith was the screen. But that doesn't mean the screen isn't like what David Bowie said,

right? So it's not exclusive. So I could still use his theory, but differ from the conclusions.

In terms of non believer and believer, there's, when you say believer, you also are kind of implying

this, that the idea that aliens have visited or had made direct contact with humans in some form.

There's also the exploration and the idea of just alien intelligence is out there

in the universe. You know, the Drake equation, estimating how many

intelligence civilizations may be out there, how many have ever existed, how many are about

to communicate with us. I mean, when you just zoom out from our own little selfish perspective of

Earth and look at the entirety, let's say the Milky Way galaxy, but maybe even the universe,

does the idea that there are intelligence civilizations out there,

something that you're excited about, or something that you're terrified about?

That's a good question. So basically, I would say I'm not so keen on it.

I think that our relationship with technology, as it is, and as it, as I hope it will go,

will help us survive. I don't think we're equipped to do it as we stand now, but I think that if we

can up our game or let's just put it this way, if technology is an extension of ourselves,

which it actually is, it will help us because it'll probably be smarter than us. It'll help

us survive in the ways in which it determines best. That said, if there are non human

intelligences out there and they have more advanced, obviously, technologies than us,

and they actually come, the history of human engagement with other cultures has not gone

well for cultures that are less aggressive. So you see what I'm saying? It's not a good idea.

Well, I wonder where we stand on the, where humans stand in the full spectrum of aggression.

Well, heck, where are we now, Lex? I mean, we're not too great here. We're still

aggressing against each other. No, I know, but that will give us a benefit, right? Like,

oh, you're saying, I thought, okay, I see, I just have a sense that there may be a lot of

maybe a lot of intelligences out there that are less aggressive because they've evolved past it.

We can't assume that. No, I know we can't assume that. If we can't assume it,

then I'm going to assume the worst. Well, that's despite the fact that I am Russian

and think that life is suffering, I tend to assume, not the best, but I tend to assume that

there is a best core to creatures, to people and to creatures that ultimately wins out.

I think there's an evolutionary advantage to being good to other living creatures.

And so ultimately, I think that if there's intelligent civilizations out there that

prosper sufficiently to be able to travel across the great spans of space, that they've evolved

past silly aggression, that it's more likely in my mind to be deeply cooperative. So like,

growth over destruction. Like, growth does not require destruction, I think. But

if you see the universe as ultimately a place where it's highly constrained in resources that

are necessary for traveling across space and time, then perhaps aggression is necessary in

order to aggress against others that are desiring to get access to those resources. I don't know.

I tend to try to be optimistic on that front. I think I'm emotionally optimistic and intellectually

nonoptimistic. Yeah, I guess I'm there with you. I tend to believe that the happiness

and deep fulfillment in life is found in that emotional place. The intellectual place is

really useful for building cool new technologies and ideas and so on, but happiness is in the

emotional place. And there, it pays off to be optimistic, I think. You said that technology

might be able to save us. You know, that's also kind of optimistic, too. It might kill us.

There's a talking to you offline a little bit that there was a sense that, you know,

that we humans are facing existential risks, that it's not obvious that we will survive for long.

Do you have, is there things that you worry about in terms of ways we may destroy ourselves or deeply

damage the fabric of human civilization that technology may allow us to avoid or alleviate?

Yes, I think that any, you can choose anything, actually, and it could destroy us. Okay, so,

you know, pollution, you know, here we're in a pandemic, okay, a meteor, okay. So we can use

technology, or the thing is, is that we say we use technology, but actually that's not a correct

way of putting it, in my opinion. So there is a term used by others coined by somebody I don't

know, and I'm sorry to not give credit where credit's due, but it's called technogenesis.

And it's this idea, Heidegger actually had this idea, but he didn't use that term. And it's this

idea that we co evolve with technology, that we don't actually use it. Most people think

it's like a tool we use, okay, let's use technology to do this. Well, actually, when we engage with

technology, we actually engage with it, and it engages back with us, and we engage with it.

So it's this co evolution that's happening. And in that sense, I think that as we create

more autonomous intelligent AI, it will help us survive. Because, you know, if we co evolve with

it, it will need us as much as we need it, is my opinion. How that happens, or if that

how if that bears out to be true, we'll see. But I don't think the idea that we use technology

is is a correct way to put it. I think that technology is something so strange, the way

it is today, like digital technology, I'm not talking about hammers, or things like that,

those kinds of tools, okay, is technology is so far removed from that. And our environment is so

now conditioned by our technology and the infrastructure we live within the material

structure. I think that it's going to, it's not, I don't think it's going to be a Frankenstein.

I think it's actually going, you know, like a Mary Shelley type idea of technology, I think it's

actually going to be more Promethean in the sense of, you know, think about it, we create

children, and then we get old, and we rely upon our children to help us, okay,

well, I feel like that about technology, we've created, well, we've created it, right? And so,

it's kind of growing up now. Or maybe it's in its teenage years. And we'll see. What do you think

about, in terms of this co evolution of the work around brain computer interfaces, and maybe Neural

Inc. on seeing Neural Inc. in particular as its long term mission as a symbiosis with artificial

intelligence. So like giving a greater bandwidth channel of communication between technology,

AI systems, and the biological neural networks of our human mind. What do you think about this

idea of connecting directly to the brain in AI systems? I mean, okay, I've listened to your

podcast with Alon. I've listened to Alon before, a very intelligent, obviously super smart guy.

I think this is already, I mean, not in the specific ways that he is doing it, but I think we

are already doing that, okay? And I can give you some examples. And there are really trivial

examples, but they do make the point. And this is one of them. So before he started this research

on UFOs and UAPs and technology, I actually was looking at the effects of technology and

in particular media on religion. And what I did was I was lucky to be asked to be

a consultant for various movies. And one in particular I learned a lot from and that was

the conjuring. So I was a history consultant for the conjuring. It happens to be my field.

It's Catholic studies, right? And you've got these people who are real people and they're,

you know, exercising demons and things like that. Okay, so I thought, wow, this is a great

example for me. You know, I didn't do it for the money. It doesn't pay well, but I did it to learn,

right? So I work closely with the screenwriters who I work with now all the time with. I work

with them all the time now. And what I found was this, I found that as the most interesting part

of the creation of this movie was the editing process because they would use, it would go

through editing and they would use test audiences. And a lot of the test audiences would be like,

you know, there's like these things where they test their flicker rates and things like that,

the eye flicker rates. And so when it goes really intense, they go to UC Irvine and they do this

thing called cognitive consumption, which is basically, or I'm sorry, cognitive consumerism,

where they basically hook test audiences up to EKGs and they read their brains and they figure

out which scenes create the most arousal. Yeah. And so they cut out all the other scenes. Okay.

So what we're getting is we're getting like this drug when we go to the movies or when we do video

games or when we watch, we're literally physiologically responding to our technologies.

So we're already there. We're already interfacing with them physiologically. So that's my example.

Now, the kind of thing that he's doing, Musk is doing with Neuralink, I say, go for it. That's

awesome. I hope he does it. You know, I'm fascinated. I want it to happen. Why do I want it to happen?

Because I think that, well, first it's inevitable that it's going to happen. I also want to point

out that Jacques Valais was trying to get this done back in the 60s and the 70s. He was writing

papers about, in fact, the ARPANET, the proto internet, was called Augmentation of the Human

Intellect. So we've been doing this for a while. Okay. So props to Elon Musk, but we've been thinking

about this for a good time. We've even been visioning it. Okay. So there was a really interesting

Jesuit priest. He was French, Tellier Deschardins. I don't know if you know who he is. If not,

he's fascinating. He was actually a soldier before he became a priest. And so he believed,

he also saw what he called a biosphere. Now, this guy is talking in like the early 20th century,

like the 1917, you know, that time period. And so basically he said and wrote about this thing

called the new sphere. And he basically said, there will be a point when we merge with our

technology, and it's going to be somewhat like some kind of a biosphere. We have this atmosphere,

and then we have the stratosphere, and it's going to be this biosphere, and we're all going to be

hooked into it mentally. So we'll be able to communicate in a way in which we don't communicate

now. So, you know, that sounds so similar to the singularity. So after I've read him many,

many years ago, but when I read the Kurzweil's book about the singularity, to me, it read just

like religious language, like it read like, you know, because he, in fact, it's so much like

revelation to me when I read it, that I even assign it to my students in my classes. I'm like,

this is, this is it. You know, this is like a really great book of the singularity, you know,

the coming singularity. And this religious event, because it seems like it, when he writes about

it, he says, I felt it before I even understood it, you know? He, I mean, Kurzweil. Kurzweil,

yeah, Kurzweil. I mean, what are your feelings about, not feelings, thoughts, the feelings too,

about the idea of the singularity? Do you think it's ultimately the thing that echoes throughout

the history of ideas? Is this like moment of revelation, like this, this almost mythological

religious moment? Or is there something more physical to this idea of concrete about the idea of,

there'll come a point where our technology, there'll be like a phase shift between

the, the basic fabric of like humanity, of how we interact, you know, how evolution brought us

to be this biological interaction, that our technology crosses some kind of line of capability

that the world be more technology than human to where it'll leave us behind.

Sort of. Oh yeah, I don't think it's going to leave us behind. I think it's going to take us along.

But it will be, I mean, I guess the idea of the singularity, first of all,

isn't the idea of the singularity is like, we can't possibly predict what's on the other side

of the singularity. These are the senses, like this is like the world will be fundamentally

transformed. Yes, okay, so right. And then it was, you know, this was characterized in various

movies like Lucy and stuff like that. You know, Lucy being the first human that, right, we,

so kind of replicating and this is going to be the next iteration of humans is the singularity.

I actually don't believe that, frankly. However, and the reason I don't believe it is because

we're material beings and technology has to have a host. So we're not going to, you know,

become something super abstract. Like there's, it's just an impossible to do. There's nothing

like that. Well, people will be listening to this podcast a hundred years from now and laughing at

it because they'll be all existing in a virtual reality will be all information as opposed to

material meaning connected to some kind of concept of physical, physical reality.

I don't even know the right words to use. You see, that's because there are none,

because there's no place from, there's no view from nowhere. There's no non material.

Like we have thoughts, but they're connected to us, right? They're in our, you know,

they're somehow, okay. As far as, as far as you know. Listen, platonic forms, I think, is about as,

as, you know, close to what we're talking about as possible. Like this place where these things

exist and then there's like a physical instantiation of it. No, but see, we're,

we're, the question is from the perspective of the platonic form, what does our physical world

look like? You know what I'm saying? Like, you know, if, if say you're a creature existing in a

virtual reality, like if you grew up your whole life in a virtual reality game, like what is it

in somebody in that virtual reality world tells you that there actually exists this physical world

world. And in fact, your own, you think you're in this virtual world, but it's actually you're in

a body and this is just your mind putting yourself in there's a piece of technology. Like, will they,

how will they be able to think of that physical world? Would they, would they sound exactly like

you just sounded a minute ago saying like, well, that's silly. Who cares if there's a physical

world? It's the, the entirety of the perception and my memories and all of that is in this other

realm of, of like information. It's just all just information. Why do I need some kind of weird

meat bag to contain? So there's a great, again, I always, you know, return to something for your

audience to read or you. There's a great, very short article online for free by David Chalmers.

Do you know him? He's the philosopher of consciousness. Yeah, interviewed him on this

podcast. Yeah, yeah, he's cool. I used to, I was friends with his best friend for a while

when I was in grad school. He probably has some weird friends. He does. He's a philosopher,

okay. So I like his fashion choice and his style too. Hang out with him a little bit. It's a great

guy. Okay. So he wrote this article, which I use a lot. I love it because it's accessible to

undergraduates and it's called Matrix as Metaphysics. And basically it's, it's an answer to

external world skepticism, which is basically how do we know there's an external world, right?

How do we know that we're not in a matrix right now? And so basically, he's using, he's, he's also,

he even references, he uses a religious reference even, he says, you could think of the matrix of

the movie as a new, as the new book of Genesis for our new world, right? And I thought, yeah,

that's absolutely correct because, you know, we don't know and we don't, we won't know for sure

or for certain. Therefore, what we know is what is real to us. And so he goes through these scenarios

and within philosophy it's called, there's a, this is different from that, but it's like this

brain in a vat, right? If you're a brain in a vat and some not so kind scientist is like

recreating this world for you just to see, you know, and you think you're this awesome rock star,

right? And you're living this awesome existence, but you're actually just this brain in this vat,

okay? But there's still a brain in a vat, okay? So his idea in The Matrix as Metaphysics kind of

takes out the brain in a vat like this, I don't know if this is possible. So I've read critiques

of this that, you know, what you're talking about is a non dualism, like there's like, you know,

or it's not necessarily non dualism. I just, I mean, information in and of itself

has to have some kind of material component to it.

I mean, it's that when taking it outside the realm of human beings, because dualism is kind of

talking about humans, in a sense, it's just possible to me that there could be creatures that exist

in a very different form, perhaps rely on very different set of materials

that may perhaps not even look like materials to us. Yes, I agree. Which is why like information,

it could be even in computers, that information that's traveling inside a computer is connected to

actual material movement, right? So like there is, it is ultimately connected to material movement,

but it's less and less about the material and more and more about the information. So I just mean

that it's possible that... You think the singularity is basically like sloughing off our material

existence? Well, I don't know. Because I can tell you that this has been the hope of philosophers

and theologians forever. Yeah, well, I don't, I think we're living through a singularity. I don't

think, I think this world just, just like as you've said already, has been already transformed

significantly and keeps continually being transformed. And we're just riding this big,

beautiful wave of transformation. And that's why it's both exciting and terrifying

from a scientific perspective that like we're so bad at predicting the future. And the future is

always so amazing in terms of the things that has brought us. I mean, I don't know if it's always

will be this exciting in terms of the rate of innovation, but it seems to be increasing still.

And it's really exciting. It's exciting. It's terrifying because obviously we're building

better and better tools for destroying ourselves. But I, on the optimistic side, believe that we're

also can build better and better tools to defend against all the ways we can destroy ourselves.

And it's kind of this interesting race of innovation. Books are great. Of course, the greatest

book of all time, two of the greatest books of all time are yours. But besides those,

what, what books, technical fiction or philosophical had an impact on your life

or possibly you think others might want to read and get some insights from.

And what ideas did you pick up from them? Great. Okay. I really enjoy Nietzsche. Okay. So anything

by Nietzsche, Frederick Nietzsche, he's a philosopher. I actually hated him when I first read him

in my early twenties. That's like the opposite of most people's experience, right? They usually

love them in their twenties and then they throw them to the curb later. Yeah. Yeah. I think he's

totally misrepresented and misinterpreted. He grew on you. Well, it happened in one night. So

let me just describe it because it's kind of funny. It happened on New Year's. So I had friends and

when I was in my twenties and they were kept, they kept telling me, you have to read Nietzsche. You

have to read Nietzsche. And I tried. Okay. But again, you know, no, I didn't like, was not into

how he described the philosophical concepts he was trying to get across. So, but they would

like, they weren't giving up by very persistent friends. So one of them gave me the gay science

and I had it on my book stand and it was New Year's Eve and I'm actually not a big part. I'm

actually an introvert. I'm a geeky introvert. Okay. So I don't go out and party a lot. It was

New Year's Eve. Even that couldn't get me out to go party. So I just wanted to go to bed. Yeah.

And New Year's Eve hit and everybody went out and I was asleep and they woke me up. And I was

like, darn, they woke me up. I might as well read this book by Nietzsche. Okay. So I picked it up

and lo and behold, I turned to a page that was exactly about, it was called Sanctus

Januarius, which is basically St. January. And it was about New Year's Eve. And I thought,

whoa, what a weird coincidence. And it was a really, it was also super Catholic. And it was

a really beautiful little aphorism. It's actually a book of aphorisms, which are kind of religious,

right? And so it's religious, the genre is religious. Let's put it that way, but he's not.

So basically he says, today is the day when people are supposed to make these resolutions,

right? And he says, from here on out, I will never say no. I will only say yes. Okay. I look away.

If something's horrible, I'll just look away from it. I won't get angry at it. And then he also

says, I will be like St. January. And St. January is actually the saint whose blood is in this place

in Italy. I think it's in Italy. And every year, it turns to blood again. So it's like,

it's desiccated. So it's this miracle. He says, my blood is now, it flows again. And I was like,

wow, that's really beautiful. And I said, and a strange coincidence, because it just turned

12. So it's like New Year's Eve, I pick up the book, I read this aphorism, and I said, strange

coincidence, that, and then I turn the page. And the page is about coincidences. And I was like,

I shut it. And I thought, this is weird. And I felt like they was alive. I felt like the book

was alive and Nietzsche was speaking to me, right? I had a like experience and engagement with Nietzsche.

And so after that, I couldn't put his stuff down. It was engaging, fascinating, everything. So yeah,

so that's one book, The Gay Science. What did you pick up from The Gay Science or from Nietzsche

and Jenner? Is there some ideas that... Yeah, yeah, the idea is basically that truth,

he's got awesome one liners. So truth is a woman. So okay, what does he mean by that?

Truth is a woman. Basically, she's going to lie to you. She looks real attractive,

but she's not going to tell you the truth. Okay, so basically, I'm not saying that,

that's true about women. I'm obviously a woman. So basically, what he's saying is that truth

is not is like what I said, Brother Guy said, it's a moving target. Okay, we started this

whole conversation with what's real, right? So I should have just gone straight to Nietzsche.

Haven't you heard truth is a woman? Okay, so truth is a woman. All right, so that and also,

and you know, Foucault, this other philosopher, French philosopher actually takes up this idea

and creates his own framework called genealogy from it. So the genealogy of morals,

so that we only believe certain things and we sediment them into truth. So we say, you know,

a truth told, who said that? Was it Lenin or Stalin? A truth told enough times, I mean,

a lie told enough times becomes the truth. So that's basically Nietzschean right there.

Okay, so that's Nietzsche. So Nietzsche also is a huge critic of Christianity,

which I'm actually Catholic, I'm a practicing Catholic. So I appreciated his critique. I

thought it was actually quite accurate. And he's a critique of religion in general,

and he's fascinating. And also, I find that his, he talks about altered states of consciousness,

and he calls them elevated states. And he, I think through his book, you can actually experience

elevated states. So yeah, Nietzsche, thumbs up. So what other book? Yeah, okay, so Hannah Rent,

she is a philosopher that not a lot of people know about. But she was a Jewish woman during the

Holocaust, and she was interned at Bergen Belsen, which was basically Auschwitz for women, and she

escaped. She came to the United States, and she had worked with Heidegger, even though he's supposed

to be anti Semitic and a Nazi and everything, but they were lovers. Okay, so she comes out and she's

at Columbia University, and she teaches philosophy there. And she writes this, she writes two books

which I'll recommend. One is called Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she attends the Nuremberg trials,

and she basically makes this really astute observation about evil. And she says, Eichmann is

one of the people who sent the Jews to the concentration camps who ran the trains, okay.

And she said, the thing about Eichmann was that he didn't seem particularly evil. Actually,

he seemed to be quite a nice guy. She said, what was interesting about him was he seemed

incredibly thoughtless and stupid. And she said, and he used a lot of stereotypes like memes.

So she actually wrote about memes before we had them. And now people just use memes, and they're

actually used against us even. There's even a segment of warfare called memetic warfare. All

right. So memes are something that can sway a whole population of people. So she wrote about

memes before they were even in existence. And that's Eichmann in Jerusalem. And I think she also

has some really amazing things to say about evil, is that when people remain thoughtless,

she has another book called The Life of the Mind, which is gigantic, and I don't think anybody will

read it. But frankly, it's one of the best books I've ever read. And I've read it many times.

And basically, the life of the mind, and the life of the mind, she asks a very simple question.

She says, why do people do bad things? Why are they evil? And what she says is she wonders if it's,

she says that bad people sleep well at night, contrary to, you know how they're saying,

how do you sleep at night? Well, that's only because you're a good person that you're asking

that question, because you actually have a conscience. And a conscience is this dual kind

of you fight with yourself about the consequences of your actions. And she says, bad people don't

seem to have a conscience. So they actually sleep well at night. And so she goes through a whole

history of philosophy about evil. And that's really a good one too. But I also have to recommend

this one too. There's one more. So I know I recommended two, but just from the same philosopher.

My friend Jeffrey Kreipel, he's at Rice University and he's in my field of Religious Studies.

He wrote, he's written several books. I mean, he's written a heck of a lot of books, let's put it

that way. But he's his, I think his best book, or the one that impacted me the most, is called

Authors of the Impossible. And his book is his writing is very much like Nietzsche's writing,

in the sense that he, it's almost as if he reaches out of the pages and he grabs you and he kind of

slaps you around and says, think about this, you know, and you can't help but be changed after

you've read it. And he's got a great chapter in there about Jacques Velay. Oh, so he colors a

bunch of different thinkers and authors that are out that somehow are, what is it, renegade in

some aspect or revolution in some aspect? Yeah, they're thinking the impossible. There's a great

one. He's written called Mutants and Mystics, where he talks about the comic strips. Gosh,

why can't I remember the name of the person? He just died of Stan Lee. He talks about the history

of the comics by Stan Lee, and they're all paranormal. They all start off super paranormal

and it's fascinating. On the topic of Hannah Arendt. Yeah, Hannah Arendt. So I haven't

read her work, but I've vaguely touched upon sort of like commentary of her work. And it seems like

some people think her work is dangerous in some aspect. I don't know if you can comment on

why that is. It feels like similar with Arendt or something like that, where like this is,

I should say not dangerous, but controversial. Yes, they think it's controversial. This is

the reason, I believe, I've heard of the controversy. The controversy is that she didn't,

first of all, she is Jewish and she did escape a concentration camp. And yet she's called,

she's been called anti Jewish. And I think part of that was that she basically was saying something

that I believe that a lot of normal people are like Eichmann and evil things are done by people

who just follow the rules and they don't think about what they're doing. And that's one of the

most pernicious forms of evil of our time. So we talked quite a bit about the definitions of religion

and what are the different building blocks of religion. So one of the, I don't think we touched

on, we did a little bit with afterlife, but in the sense, I don't know if you're familiar with

Ernest Becker work and all the philosophies around there about the fear of death and

how the fear of our own mortality, awareness of our own mortality and its fear is,

in case of Ernest Becker, is a significant component in the psychology in the way we humans

develop our understanding of the world. So what are your thoughts in the context of religion or

maybe in the context of your own mind about the role of death in life or fear of death in life?

And are you afraid of death, Diana? We cover everything in this podcast. Every single topic

is covered. Wow. Okay. I so happen to have benefited, perhaps, from living with an older

brother who seemingly had no fear of death while growing up. And he did everything. Okay. So he was,

he climbed mountains, he was a rock climber, he jumped out of airplanes. Of course, he had to be a

green beret and go into the special forces where that type of thing is a requirement, right? And so

because of that, I did a lot of things outside of my comfort zone, and which probably I shouldn't

have done. And hope to goodness, my kids don't do them. Okay. Okay. So do I fear death? I think

about death a lot, actually. You may not know this about me, but in my field, I was the head,

I was the cochair of the death panel. It's called the death panel. It's the panel to

think about death in religious studies. And I was that for many years.

So you've thought about it a bit.

A bit. Let's see. I think that people are a little too confident, I think, about life in

general, that they're going to kind of live all the time and not die. I happen to, I mean,

I hate to say it, I'm super positive and most people would consider me to be too happy almost,

right? And so it's odd then that I spend a lot of time thinking about death, but I wonder if

there's a connection there. I'm happy to be alive, right? That's kind of what the thinking about death

does is it makes you appreciate the days that you do have. It's a weird controversy. I tend

to believe that the fact that this life ends gives each day a significant amount of meaning.

So I don't know. It seems like an important feature of life. It's not like a bug. It seems

like a feature that it ends, but it's a strange feature because I wish it, I call the good stuff

you wish it wouldn't end. Well, you know what's interesting, Lex, and I do point this out to

my students because we cover a lot of the basic studies courses I teach. We cover all religions

or as many as we can, like the major religions. And so take Hinduism, for example. Now, this

is an ancient religion. So you and I are here talking about how we enjoy living and life and

things like that. Well, the goal of Hinduism is basically never to get reincarnated again,

is basically to not live and to get off Samsara, which is the wheel of life and death.

Escape the whole thing. Yeah, exactly. Think of that. Conditions are so different

that you and I and my students are happy to be alive. But they're back in the day,

thousands of years ago, when they actually didn't write it, they spoke the Vedas, which were the

sacred traditions of India. They wanted off. They didn't want to come back. Life was terrible.

That's what people don't have the adequate understanding of history, that for the majority

of people, life is really hard, right? And you and I and your audience among the lucky.

Yeah. That we actually like life. We want to live.

Most of the time. Yeah, most of the time. What do you think the biggest since we're covering

every single possible topic? Let me ask the biggest one, the unanswerable one, from the

perspective of alien intelligence, or from the perspective of religious studies, or from the

perspective of just Diana, what do you think is the meaning of this existence of this life of ours?

Yes. Okay. So, all right. So, well, of course, I have to, my philosophical training as

undergrad always makes me think about like, what's the assumption in your question? There's

an assumption there. It's like, there is a meaning. Okay, that's the assumption.

What do you mean by meaning? What do you mean by life? Do you define the terms?

No, no. But listen, I'll answer your question. I'm just going to say that there's this assumption

that we should have meaning to life. Okay. Well, maybe we shouldn't. Maybe it's just all random.

Okay. However, I believe that it's not. And in my opinion, on the meaning of life,

in my opinion, is intrinsic. I enjoy living. I want to live. Sometimes I don't enjoy living.

And when I don't enjoy living, I change my circumstances. So, it's intrinsic. And I think