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.
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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, and 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're-
They have an actual belief. They're practicing metaphys-
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. And I think that that is what we are in the process of doing,
we're developing better senses. We have telescopes, we have microscopes, we have
extensions of ourselves, which are now called technology, and we can get to a better understanding
of what reality is and what the objective world is. And therefore, our beliefs can be honed.
So, we can get better beliefs, more accurate beliefs, but can we get beliefs that actually
correspond to reality? Not in any precise way, but in approximate ways. So, I hope that's not like
too big an answer to your question.
What do you think beliefs are in themselves can become reality? So, you've now adapted in this
little bit of a conversation, adapted the metaphysician view of reality, which is the physics.
But we humans kind of operate in the space of ideas very much so. 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. In terms of impact on our lives,
they can have sometimes more impact than this table does, than the physics.
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 the runs Europe, that women had no souls, so they had to have this big
meaning about it, you know, 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,
you know, women weren't eternal. Here's another example, okay? This is an example from my own
research. All right, so there in the Catholic tradition, there's this idea of purgatory,
hell, and heaven. And these are three destinations that people can go to when they die. And if you're
great, you go to heaven automatically and you're considered a saint. If you're okay, you go to
purgatory, right? And you suffer for a time and then get back into heaven. If you're terrible,
you go to hell, right? Okay. Well, there was a place that the Catholics determined, and this 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, 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 and just basically go outside and take a walk because it was so horrific. I knew it was true
because they wouldn't write something, they're not going to write in their diary something
that's not true. And it was horrible. So yes, these people went through untold suffering for
nothing 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 I think his idea is that we're basically 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 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. Okay.
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 for 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 there's like fundamental forces of physics we're not even aware of yet?
Oh, absolutely. I do think, and this is why I write about technology and I mean, that's actually
what I specialize in is belief in technology with respect to religion. So in my opinion,
thank goodness for 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 instruments will save us. I mean,
they're already making life better for us. Do 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 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.
Spoiler alert. 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 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. Well, you choose music that I happen to like too, okay? So you and I both have a,
you know, sense of judgment. It's a sense. So he said there's a sense that some people have.
Why do certain communities have a similar sense? What dictates that? And so he was working on that.
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 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 non-philosopher 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 is 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
there. 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 or 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 and Nietzsche is certainly not. Absolutely.
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, 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 is, oh, can we just read a few interesting things and get inspired by it and move
on as opposed to have a dogmatic... 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... It's misinterpreted,
okay? And I think that's the same with Nietzsche. A lot of people think that... In fact, it is the
case that Nietzsche's writing before the 20th century, so he's got the... He's somewhat... His
rhetoric is sexist and racist and of the time period, right? He was a educated philosopher of
that time period. However, his books are amazing and Nietzsche's philosophy is incredible. And I
think that's what you're saying about Rand, too. And I agree. I mean, I think that we get caught up...
Likely, we should, and we should contextualize these thinkers in the time period within which
they are. We should not forgive their... Because there were people during Nietzsche's time that
were feminist and not racist and things like that. But each has merit. I would say Nietzsche is...
You did ask 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. I was like, all right, calm down, buddy.
Oh, the fate of philosophers. I just ignore everything Nietzsche says about women. So,
can we talk about myth and religion a little bit? Yes. I mean, can we start at the beginning,
which is like myths. How are they born? There's this collective intelligence amongst us human
beings, and we seem to create these beautiful ideas that captivate the minds of millions.
How is such a myth born? Great question. Okay. So, that brings us to terminology again.
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. 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. You know,
he would say the population is not too bright, so they believe in these gods and goddesses.
But he himself is talking to his students, and he's basically talking about forms, you know, so,
you know, that live 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 is this table that actually exists somewhere. It's where this
place where numbers exist, like the number two. Okay. So, there, 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, you just make me realize how like 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. So, what, 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 change. 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. Me too. I actually do some research here. Wow, that has another level of depth.
That's awesome. Okay, so. Okay, so say Lex is playing one of his songs. He shows up.
What's your favorite Hendrix song by the way? 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. 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 as this vibration and only Lex can like, you know, can manifest this
vibration, okay? So, like, 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 all of them, but a good portion of them. Some person has an
experience that's transcendent, sacred to them, and they go and they tell other people. And then
those people tell other people. And then something gets written about it, okay? And then it becomes,
because it's a charismatic movement, people become affected by it. And if too many people are affected
by it, an institution steps in and tries to control the narrative. So, this is what you'd call the
beginning of a religion or a myth, a very powerful myth. And so, it's almost like a star, right?
A star is born, okay? Yeah. When you say institution, do you mean some other organization that's
already powerful that 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, 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 a state religion.
By that time, there were different forms of Christianity, probably hundreds of them,
well, most likely. And Constantine and the people who were powerful with him
decided that their idea, this is the Council of Nicaea now, decided that there was one form,
and they called it universal, the one form of Christianity. And this should be it. And so,
they kind of took out all the other denominations of Christianity and 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 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 a raise coming out of his heart.
And basically, she called this his divine mercy, and it became a devotion in Poland,
and it spread. The Catholic church was not into this at all, okay? And so, they did everything
they could to try to suppress Faustina's influence, which was growing, and growing, and growing,
and growing, okay? And so, they were very successful in trying to keep 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 completely
control this? So fascinating that it just starts with a single, like you said, contact experience.
Experience is the key word. Is your sense that those experiences are legitimate? So, it's not
yes, 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.
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 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
of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, monotheistic religions. And 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... 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 that kind of thing.
They do things to basically take you away from your conceptions of reality and bring you into
a state of all that is, which is what they call 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 gonna 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 about a few different definitions of religion, as you can
imagine, just like philosophers have different definitions of what is real. So I take this
definition and it comes from John Livingston. And it's... Religion is that set of beliefs and
practices that is inspired by a transformative, what is perceived actually to be a transformative
and sacred power. Can you say that again? Yeah. So religion is a set of... It's not just belief,
it's also practices. 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? Yeah. 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. 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. 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 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. Most
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, so Richard Dawkins' meme idea, it allows us to explore
space of ideas. And that in itself is the evolution of ideas. And religion is the
powerful tool for us to explore ideas. Yeah. Because, you know, if I believe that men have souls,
do they? Yes, they do. Okay.
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, we'll never, we'll never be able to confirm that.
Maybe if we get better instruments, you know, the soul instrument, you need to come up with that
one, please. For cats? Yeah, not just for cats, but for all animals and people in general. For sure.
You could 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,
it goes along with my book, which is basically making the argument that belief in non-human
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? Well, there's always going to be this
coupling. We'll 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 side of religious beliefs
around that. So is religion always going to cover the space of things we can't quite understand
with science yet, but we still want to be thinking about? Oh, I see what you're saying. That's a
great question. When you say religion, I would use the word religiosity, because I think that we're
moving out of the dogmatic types of religions into more of a, I hate to put it this way,
but an 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 know yet what it is, but we know it's out there.
So there's 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
right. 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 mostly a 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 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 famine,
but it wasn't one. It was a staged thing. And so millions of Irish left Ireland on
coffin ships is what they called them because they usually wouldn't get here. Mine happened to get
here, okay? So that's the context that I'm coming from. So in each case, for one thing,
Irish weren't considered, you know, there was Catholics weren't considered, they were considered
to be terrible. And there was a lot of anti-Catholic rhetoric here in the United States, which is kind
of strange because one of the, in fact, the most wealthy colonial family were the carols in Maryland
and they were Catholic. So when you look at the United States, 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, here you can see how, you know, propaganda works. There was anti-Catholic propaganda.
There was anti-Jewish propaganda. And all of, 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, 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 contend 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 non-human or considered divine. But when, 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 it's impossible. Same with Heidegger, as you mentioned. 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, 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 going to 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 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 are all these types of non-human
intelligences that religion makes space for. So what I'm basically saying in American Cosmic is
these new things are within the realm of UFOs and UIPs. So no, I think that, well, I think
Nietzsche would say that that's a progressive adaptation of religion is what I would hope
he would say. Nietzsche, however, is unpredictable, I think. I couldn't predict him. So I would say
that it would be my hope that he would say this is an accurate representation of a move
into a new type of religion. And it's adaptive, therefore progressive.
He would probably be uncomfortable reading a book by a brilliant female professor.
Who happens also to be short? I don't know if you read that. No. Yeah. Oh, he's
he said some pretty nasty things about short women. Oh, my God. Yeah. Oh, Nietzsche, he should be
canceled. No, no, please don't cancel Nietzsche. You have to take people in the context of their
time. Although I'm pretty sure in his time he was also 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 are very
excited actually when their research surprises them. So I was happily surprised by my purgatory
book to learn that it was a place, you know. And so I went into American Cosmic being a
non-believer in UFOs entirely. And I came out being agnostic. Okay. Kind of believer.
Yeah. 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 non-human intelligence,
whether or not it's from another planet, extraterrestrial, or it happens to be from
like another dimension or something else, I think that this is going to get the attention
of institutions of power. 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. 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 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 non-human
intelligence, we're most likely in contact with its technology. Because think about us.
Do we send human beings to Mars yet? Some people 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 see us? 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. It's kind of funny to think about if whatever
a sort of extraterrestrial creations have visited Earth that we're interacting with
some dumb crappy drone technology. Yeah, it's true. And we're 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 like 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 but 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 like,
you know, it could be in the space of, you know, we don't understand most of how our mind works.
It could be in the space of whatever the heck consciousness is. Like maybe consciousness
itself is communication with aliens or like, I don't know, it could be just our own thoughts
is actually the alien life forms communicating. Like, I don't know, all 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, 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 occurs 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 he 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 60s. Okay. So he's-
Back when computer science wasn't really even the field. You can get a degree in.
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-round 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 and the same. Okay. So when we talk about UFOs and UAPs and stuff,
we have to talk about digital technology and things like that. Now, if we'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 understand. So only people with 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 Czakowski 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 can contextualize them within this tradition.
And so when I started to talk to people who were actually in the space program and who were in
these programs that now the government has said, oh yeah, we do have these programs,
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 called downloads of information
and creating, sometimes with Tyler D. in my book, creating technologies that were real,
and they were selling them on NASDAQ for a lot of money, like say $100 million or something
like that, undisclosed amounts, but a lot. And these things are viable technologies that we
use now, and they make our lives better, and we progress as a species because of them.
Now, that has nothing to do with the scientific method. As much as I know, as much as anybody's
going to get angry at me for saying that, but 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 they have a power in actually having an impact in this world in
inspiring humans to create technology which enables us to do things we haven't been able
to do before. Yeah. And these, I like how we're 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 and the same or at
least part of the same intellectual journey? Thanks for asking that again because nobody
asks me that question and it's central to my project. So Jacques was a huge influence,
is a huge influence on me. He taught me a lot. He gave me access to some of his information
that he keeps, but a lot of his information is actually there out there for everyone to read.
He has an academia.edu page and he just, so he didn't have this. Unfortunately, when I was doing
my research in 2012 and 2013, so I had to go back and do microfiche type stuff. What I did
was I began to read everything that he wrote and he actually gave me a lot of his books too.
He told me, I remember, he dropped me off from, this is actually quite interesting if you allow
me to tell you a little story. Please. It also includes ayahuasca. Great. Every story includes
ayahuasca is a great story. 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. This is
actually, it opens my book. This is the book. 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. We were there with Robbie Graham, who's a great
ufologist in his own right and film theorist. I highly recommend his work. 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. He took us on this long journey and he talked to us. As we got out of the car,
he gave me several of his books. One in particular, he gave me and he said,
read this first. I was like, okay, I definitely will read that first. This is how the ayahuasca
figures in. I didn't take it nor have I taken it. We were at this place in California and Alex Gray
and his wife were there and they were talking about their experiences with psychedelics.
He's an amazing visionary artist. He believes that there's a place that you can enter and he and
his wife would enter this space with either ayahuasca or LSD or something like that and they
would not talk to each other, but they would be having the same exact experience. It was almost
like having the same dream. 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. All of this seems super familiar to me
and I recognize that immediately that Jacques, it hit me very obvious that UFOs and these
experiences and technology all seemed, they were all meshed together. 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 peer-reviewed essays
about the beginning of the internet and how a lot of it was based on basically neural
connection with the internet, like somehow psychic connection through the internet with others and
things like that. The brain is a biological neural network. There's this connection between
individual 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. Those ideas are then
spread on the internet even from the very early days to other humans. 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. It's nice to think of the network that's in our mind,
individual mind as very much even deeply connected to the network that is the connection between
humans through the internet. In that sense, Jacques saw the internet as this powerful
as a source of power and wisdom that is beyond our own. Exactly. That's external to us. If you
could call it autonomous AI. It's non-human intelligence in a sense, even though humans
are a part of it. Yes, we're invaded by it or whatever you want to call it. Whoever is the
chicken and egg. If I can go on, I want to experience things. I'm not done with that.
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. What happens is then, and it's like a biosphere and I'll talk about
that in a minute. Jacques takes us back. We get to San Francisco and my brother who is your
straight lace person, 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? He goes, it's going to save humanity.
That's great. As I mentioned to you offline, I talked to Matthew Johnson,
is a Hopkins professor. He's really a scholar of most. He started most drugs. He's also really
deeply studied cocaine, all those stuff on negative effects. He's focused on a lot of
positive effects of the different psychedelics. It's fascinating. I'm very much interested in
exploring the science of what these things do to the human mind and also personally exploring it.
Although it's like this weird gray area, which he's masterful at, which is he's a professor at
John Hopkins, one of the most prestigious universities in the world and doing large-scale
studies of the stuff. Until he got a lot of money for these studies, even in Hopkins itself, there's
not much respect. It's not even respect. People just didn't want to talk about it as a legitimate
field of inquiry. It's 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. For us now, there's little groups of things. I would say consciousness
in the space of computer science research is something that's still, I don't know,
maybe let philosophers kick it around for a little longer. Then certainly extraterrestrial life forms
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, 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 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 of 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,
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 law.
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. 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, and 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? No, they're metahumans, they're superhumans, they're enhanced humans. I see
that hopefully on the horizon, frankly. I hope so. Not that we have two species, but that we can
use our technology or we can become so integrated with our technology that we can survive. We can
survive the radiation in space. We can't go places now because of the radiation in space.
Perhaps we can develop our bodies such that we can survive the radiation in space. So there's
this idea of these metahumans. Now, there's also this idea that technology is just another form
of humans. We've created it, right? And so maybe it is bent on surviving, 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. 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,
like 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
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 this
the organism understands what's happening from its level of perception. But we humans are just like
the cells of the human body. We're interacting individually, but we're not actually aware of
the big picture that's happening. And we naturally somehow or whatever the force that's creating the
entirety of this, whatever one one version of it is the evolutionary process like biological
evolution, whatever force that is is just creating these greater and greater level of complexity.
And maybe somehow not other kinds of non human intelligence are involved that we're calling
alien intelligences. So just to step back and we'll come back to AI because I gotta 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, you know, and seeing
some cool movie like Star Wars or something. And then they become interested and then they study it.
As best they can, UFOs or UAPs, they're generally an honest group of people who are using their
tools. And there are generally two types of them. There are those who believe in 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 a 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 spaces.
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 Velais in the, in the 70s, he and
I think actually Alan Heineck, 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 they call he called it the invisible college.
So Heineck 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. Okay. And so I called them the
invisibles because I was surprised to find them. And I thought, well, this is no longer the
invisible college, because these people are not even talking to each other. And that's why I
reference this movie fight clip. 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 it. 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, 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. 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 you know, 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 of between companies, which part of your technology
should you make public through like, for example, academic publications and all that kind of stuff.
Like how the Google search engine works, PageRank algorithm or
how the different deep learning, like there's pretty vibrant machine learning research
communities within Google, Facebook and so on. And they release a lot of different ideas.
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. 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. In new age communities, people think thoughts are things. That's been
said, 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. And I probably will do it.
And I've done it before actually. Much younger, but I did it. But my coach is the one that instilled
that belief in me. But can I run like a one minute mile? No. So I guess, does that answer your
question? There's only so far belief goes in generating reality. Well, yeah, I guess that's
what just having listened to Jacques Valais, it seemed like reality 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. There's consciousness. So like I said, so religious studies is, among
other things, it's looking at visionary experiences. So people do have visionary experiences. They did
without drugs. They did with drugs. They do with drugs. They do many have them without drugs today.
And oftentimes, those visionary experiences correspond to each other. Now, how do we make
sense of that? So do these places actually exist? In a sense, I think they do. And so I think that,
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. 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. 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
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.
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? Okay, but true. But when did our government
start experimenting with them with us? Our government is the United States government.
Yeah. Okay, so that happened in around the 1950s. After quote unquote the 1940s,
where we have 47 and we have this Roswell type stuff going on, 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? That's fascinating actually, yeah. There's a lot of interesting things started
around that time period. Yeah. And so, Aldous Huxley would say we opened the doors of perception,
okay, and what flew in. Oh man, that was 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?
They imagine they show 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-tacs is that first, I believe the people who have had the experiences, I know some of them,
like some of the radar people and things like that, they 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. 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. They had intimate knowledge of these
things. The first thing they said was, we have satellites that can read the news on your phone
when you're reading it. 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. I honestly don't know if it's accurate or not. 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. When you say spinning, there are some parties involved
that are trying to leverage it for funds or financial interests. 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. I was certainly grateful that The New York Times
ran the story right before my book came out. 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 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. Money is a silly creation of human beings.
I agree.
And it's used to provide temporary... 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 fully engaging in life, in life of reason too,
of thinking deeply about the world, all those kinds of things. If you get a nice car or something
like that and just like, I don't know, all the different things you could do with money,
it can make you forget that. Anyway, there's a long way to say that, yes, yes, it's very nice
that it 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... Maybe there's a lot of things out there that
were... 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?
Let's do it.
All right. The first one is that I was happy to receive money from the book because of the
New York Times article. That's absolutely false. So I published my book with Oxford,
which is an academic press, and you don't get paid with an academic press. Okay, so money was not
it for me. What it was was recognition that my research was being validated. So, you know,
because then people called me and said, well, maybe it's more than interesting. Okay. And
they did. Okay. The other thing about money is just as you say that... Now, I agree with you,
I'm upset about money too. I think there should be universal healthcare, universal income.
I don't think people should be in poverty, especially because we are so wealthy as a
species, frankly. Okay, that said, think about this. If you don't have money,
you can't have a life of the mind either. Right? 100%. So I'm not espousing that money's the devil.
I just think that there's money can be a drug or I would compare it to food or something like that,
where you really should have enough to nourish yourself. Yes. Right? And too much could...
And too much can be a huge problem. So that's where I come from with money. And I'm just
aware I'm fortunate enough to have the skills and the health to be able to earn a living
in whatever way, like I wish of him being in the United States and being able to speak English. So,
at the very least, I could work with McDonald's. And my standards are... I told Joe... I mean, the
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, including for myself, it's just a different level for
different people, is freedom. Yes, absolutely. 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. Right. So everything... 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 is definitely true. I just mean that it can
be and 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. Yes. 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 I... That's fascinating. This is a way to raise
money for... For doing the research. Yeah, I think so. So let's take a step back to Roswell. We talked
about it a little bit. What's your sense about that whole time? Roswell in 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 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 heropony occurred and a heropony is basically contact with non-human
intelligence. Okay. So non-human 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 who's very well known and I call him James in my book. And I asked, and I had a feeling
James would definitely want to do this. And I asked James and 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
outside of a certain place in New Mexico. So in terms of Roswell, this is what I can say,
is that according to Tyler, there were about seven crashes out in the 1940s in New Mexico,
in various places. We went to one of them according to Tyler. At the time, I was completely an
atheist with regard to anything that had to do with the UFOs. So we were out there, we had
specially configured metal detectors for these metals. And we did find these. Okay. And they've
since been studied by very 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 no, they are, 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 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, it's, I don't, I don't go there physically.
I go there through the story of a Catholic nun who actually believes that she bi-located 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 and 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, is said to have
levitated. The other was Maria of Agrida from Spain. They're 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 in to the Vatican and I knew
the director of the Vatican Observatory, both Tyler and I were able to go to the secret archives
and look at the canonization records and then go to Castle 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 and 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. Yeah. And so, they had two. And so, Tyler stayed in one and I stayed
in the other. And Brother Guy probably shouldn't have been so nice to me and given me the keys
because when I got home, we were 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 was in the 1600s. And she, that's her first book.
And she wrote that. And then she said that she was transported on the wings of angels
to the New World. And she said that she met a culture of people and she basically told them
about the faith of Catholicism, okay? And then what happened was that the people that,
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, yes, 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 a 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.
So what are your thoughts about his story, how it fits into the mythology of this whole thing,
and brought to you a 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, 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, 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 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 a,
it's almost a character in my book, 2001 Space Odyssey. And when the monolith started to appear,
again, everything went crazy with my everything, internet, social media, phone. What's up,
what's going on, right? Is this disclosure? And I thought, well, you know, I'll tell you one thing,
is it's, it's, 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 Eger or Robert
Ayer. I think it's Robert Eger. 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 at Space Odyssey. I was fascinated. Okay, so what is this about?
His, I accepted as soon as I listened to it, and watched it. So basically, he says that the
monolith is, okay, can you pick up your phone here? What does that look like?
It looks awfully a lot like a monolith. Yeah. Okay, so basically, that's what he was saying,
was that Kubrick was basically, the monolith was technology or the screen in particular. And he
basically was saying that the cinema screen, we'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 or
phone screens. We have TV screens. Everything is something, you know, and now that COVID has come,
we're forced to go into these screens, and we're forced to live a different material
existence than we have lived before. So in my sense, I think that if it's an art project,
it's a really good one for that. So I like that, that meaning of it. It's a screen,
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 know, you have to pause and remind
yourself how weirdly different this reality is than just even like, I mean, 30 years ago.
The internet changed so much, and social media has changed so much about actually
just the space of our thinking. Wikipedia changed so much about the offloading of our knowledge,
the way we interact with knowledge. I mean, it offloaded our long-term memory about facts
onto digital formats, in the sense that it 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 others.
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.
What did he think about your book? Did he get it just to read it?
Yeah. Oh, yeah. So he is a non-believer in alien intelligence and UFOs. 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 the idea that aliens have visited or had made direct contact with humans
in some form. There's also the exploration and the idea of just alien intelligence is
out there in the universe. The Drake equation, estimating how many
intelligent civilizations may be out there, how many have ever existed, how many you're
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 intelligent 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 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 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?
Oh, you're saying, I thought, okay, I see. I just have a sense that there may be 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'm 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. 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 growth over destruction. 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 they're desiring to get access to those resources. I don't know.
I tend to try to be optimistic on that front. I think I'm emotionally optimistic and intellectually
non-optimistic. Yeah, I guess I'm there with you. I tend to believe that the
happiness and deep fulfillment in life is found in that emotional place. The intellectual
place is really useful for building cool new technologies and ideas and so on, but happiness
is in the emotional place. And there it pays off to be optimistic, I think. You said that
technology might be able to save us. That's also kind of optimistic too. It might kill us.
But talking to you offline a little bit, there was a sense that we humans are facing existential
risks. It's not obvious that we will survive for long. 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 you can choose anything, actually, and it could destroy us. So pollution,
here we're in a pandemic, a meteor. So we can use technology. The thing 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. Let's
use technology to do this. Well, actually, when we engage with technology, we actually engage with it
and it engages back with us and we engage with it. So it's this co-evolution that's happening.
And in that sense, I think that as we create more autonomous intelligent AI, it will help us
survive because if we co-evolve with it, it will need us as much as we need it, is in my opinion.
How that happens or if that bears out to be true, we'll see. But I don't think the idea that we
use technology is a correct way to put it. I think that technology is something so strange,
the way it is today, like digital technology. I'm not talking about hammers or things like that,
those kinds of tools. Technology is so far removed from that and our environment is so
now conditioned by our technology and the infrastructure we live within, the material
structure. I don't think it's going to be a Frankenstein. I think it's actually going to,
like a Mary Shelley type idea of technology, I think it's actually going to be more Promethean
in the sense of, think about it, we create children and then we get old and we rely upon
our children to help us. Well, I feel like that about technology. We've created it, right?
And so it's kind of growing up now. Or maybe it's in its teenage years. We'll see. What do you
think about in terms of this co-evolution of the work around brain-computer interfaces and
maybe Neuralink and Elon seeing Neuralink 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
you, your podcast with Elon. I've listened to Elon 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. And you've got these people who are real people and they're exercising
demons and things like that. So I thought, wow, this is a great example for me. I didn't do it
for the money. It doesn't pay well, but I did it to learn. So I work closely with the screenwriters
who I work with now all the time. 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 it would go through editing and they would use test audiences. And a lot of the test
audiences would be that these things where they test their flicker rates and things like that,
the eye flicker rates. And 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, we're going to do
video games, we're going to 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. 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 Villay 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. So props to Elon Musk, but we've been thinking
about this for a good time. We've even been visioning it. So there was a really interesting
Jesuit priest who's 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 the
early 20th century, like the 17, 19, that time period. And so basically he said and wrote about
this thing called the Neosphere. And he basically said, there will be a point when we merge with
our technology and it's going to be somewhat like some kind of a biosphere. We have this atmosphere
and then we have the stratosphere and this going to be this biosphere and we're all going to be
hooked into it mentally. So we'll be able to communicate in a way in which we don't communicate
now. So, you know, that sounds so similar to the singularity. So after I'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 and my classes. I'm like,
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 almost mythological,
religious moment? Or is there something more physical to this idea of concrete about the idea
of the coma point where our technology, there'll be like a phase shift between the basic fabric of
like humanity of how we interact, you know, how evolution brought us to be these biological
interactions, 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. Lucy being the first human
that we, so kind of replicating, this is going to be the next iteration of humans is the singularity.
I actually don't believe that, frankly. However, and the reason I don't believe it is because
we're material beings and technology has to have a host. So we're not going to, you know, become
something super abstract. Like there's, it's just impossible to do. There's nothing like that.
Well, people 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 here. 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 where 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, if say
you're a creature existing in a virtual reality, like if you grew up your whole life in a virtual
reality game, like what is it? And somebody in that virtual reality world tells you that there
actually exists this physical world. And in fact, your own, you think you're in this virtual world,
but it's actually you're in a body. And this is just your mind putting yourself in. There's a
piece of technology. Like, how will they, 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, 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 hairstyle 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 can 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, that, that when taking it outside the realm of human beings,
because dualism is kind of talking about humans, in a sense, it's just possible to me that there
could be creatures that exist in a very different form, perhaps rely on very different set of
materials that may, may perhaps not even look like materials to us. Yes, I agree. Which is why
like information, it could be even in computers, the information that's traveling inside a computer
is connected to actual material movement, right? So like 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 there's, 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 in a
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.
Yes. 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. I think so too. Yeah. 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. Yeah. 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 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 20s.
That's like the opposite of most people's experience, right? They usually love them
in their 20s 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. Yeah. It happened on New Year's. So I had friends and
when I was in my 20s and they kept telling me, you have to read Nietzsche. You have to read Nietzsche.
And I tried. Okay. But again, you know, no, I didn't like, was not into how he described
the philosophical concepts he was trying to get across. So, but they would, they weren't giving
up a very persistent friends. So one of them gave me the gay science and I had it on my
book stand and it was New Year's Eve. And I'm actually not a big part. I'm actually an introvert.
I'm a geeky introvert. Okay. So I don't go out and party a lot. It was New Year's Eve. Even that
couldn't get me out to go party. So I just wanted to go to bed. Yeah. And New Year's Eve hit and
everybody went out and I was asleep and they woke me up. And I was like, darn, they woke me up.
Might as well read this book by Nietzsche. Okay. So I picked it up and lo and behold,
I turned to a page that was exactly about, it was called Sanctus Januaryus, which is basically
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. I said, strange coincidence, that. And then I turn the
page and the page is about coincidences. And I was like, I shed it. And I thought, this is weird.
And I felt like they was alive. I felt like the book was alive and Nietzsche was speaking to me.
I had a 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 Gentles?
Yeah, the idea is basically that truth, he's got awesome one-liners. So truth is a woman.
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 like what I said Brother Guy said,
it's a moving target. We started this whole conversation with what's real. 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 Foucault, this other philosopher, a 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 it,
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 he talks about altered states of consciousness,
and he calls them elevated states. And 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 mimetic 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, in 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, that somehow are, what is it, renegade in
some aspect or revolution in some aspect. They're thinking the impossible. There's a great one,
he's written called Mutants and Mystics, where he talks about the comic strips, the, gosh,
why can't I remember the name of the person? He just died of 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. 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 Ein Rand 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,
she, 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
the Ernest Becker work and all the philosophies around there about the fear of death and how the,
a 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, 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 co-chair of the death panel.
It's called the death panel. There was like, it's the panel to think about death in religious
studies. And I was that for many years. So you've thought about it a bit?
A bit. Let's see. I think that people are a little too confident, I think, about life in
general, that they're going to kind of live all the time and not die. I 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. Yeah. I'm happy to be alive, right? That's kind of what the thinking
about death does is it makes you appreciate the days that you do have. Yeah. It's a weird
controversy. I tend to believe that the fact that this life ends gives each day a significant amount
of meaning. So I don't know. It seems like an important feature of life. It's not like a bug,
it seems like a feature that it ends, but it's a strange feature because I wish it,
I call the good stuff, you wish it wouldn't end. Well, you know what's interesting, Lex,
and I do point this out to my students because we cover a lot of the basic studies courses I teach,
we cover all religions or as many as we can, like the major religions. And so take Hinduism,
for example. Now, this is an ancient religion, okay? So you and I are here talking about how
we enjoy living and life and things like that. Well, the goal of Hinduism is basically never
to get reincarnated again. It's basically to not live, okay? And to get off Samsara,
which is the wheel of life and death. 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 wrote, when they actually didn't write it,
they spoke the Vedas, which were the sacred traditions of India. They wanted off. They didn't
want to come back. Life was terrible. That's what people don't have the adequate understanding
of history, that for the majority of people, life is really hard, right? And you and I are,
and your audience, among the lucky. Yeah. 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. Okay, 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
that certain things are intrinsic. And like love, love of your children is kind of,
well, it's actually physiological, but it's also intrinsic. It's beautiful.
You know, there's something about it that is intrinsically desirable. So, I think the meaning
of life is like that, intrinsically desirable. So, it's something that just is born inside you,
based on what makes you feel good? No, that's hedonism. That's about what a wordy place love,
love of your children. Yeah. So, basically, love of your children, by the way, is not always easy
because they do things that they shouldn't do. You have to discipline them. That's one of the
worst things about parenthood to me is disciplining my children. I don't like to do that. I love them.
So, a lot of things that I do that I feel are good are not easy. So, there's an intrinsic sense
that like, okay, let's take animals, okay? So, we have dogs and cats, okay? So, you might not,
but I do. I've told you about them. Can you share their names? If I share their names,
I will share their names, okay? So, we have a cat and it has red fluffy hair. And so,
we called it Trump. Well, when we got our dog, we figured that it needed a companion. So,
we called it Putin. So, we have Trump and Putin. That's the greatest pet names of all time. I'm
sorry. And maybe we'll be able to share a picture of your cat because this is awesome. It is really cute. Yeah. Very photogenic. I mean,
is this something that's, whether we're talking about love or the intrinsic meaning,
do you think that's something that's really special to humans? Or if there is intelligent alien
civilizations out there, do you think that's something that they possess as well? Maybe in
different forms? Like, whatever this thing that meaning is, this intrinsic drive that we have,
do you think that's just a property of life, of some level of complexity, that we will see that
everywhere in this universe? In my opinion, and this is just my opinion, I do think that it is,
but I also think that it can take different forms. So, if there is like a think of gravity,
right? Gravity kind of like makes stuff stick to it, right? It can track stuff. Well, what is love to
you? That does that too, right? So, people who are, we call them charismatic. Charism, it means love.
Charism means light and love. So, a charismatic person is a person who attracts people to them
like the sun does, right? So, I think that whatever this property is that's intrinsic is like gravity
and most likely takes different forms in different types of life forms. Yeah, I can't wait until
like Albert Einstein type of figure in the future will discover that love is, in fact,
one of the fundamental forces of physics. That would be cool. Diana, this is one of the favorite
conversations I've ever had. It's truly an honor to talk to you and thank you so much for spending
all this time with me. Absolutely. It's been fun. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation
with Diana Walsh Basalka and thank you to our sponsors, Element, Electrolike Drink,
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