Plato’s Cave & UFOs: Consciousness Is Key (ft. James Madden)

Like there has somebody has to from the perspective of enlightenment be pulling us through. The light itself also feels like this kind of um it's like an inflection point. Yes. Where it could uh either sort of eviscerate us or it could kind of save us, you know. It's like does something super unprecedented happen when we discover um you know the myth makers [music] when we when we have when we develop the perceptive apparatuses through high energy output or through some sort of ascended consciousness to like see who's like messing with us and [music and clears throat] does that just

unravel reality? I am here with Dr. Jim Madden and it's an absolute honor to have you. I've been uh kind of mulling over the ideas in your book for a while now. you're a professor of philosophy who has dared to reconcile some ancient uh philosophy uh you know Plato Aristotle uh even up until today you know more more modern uh Nietz Haidiger uh with UFOs and uh I

think that is a very noble effort and you've done it in a in a very brilliant way in this great book unidentified flying hyper object uh which I recommend everybody go out and and read Um, and so I want to start kind of at a super baseline level, uh, because I think a lot of people, you know, have heard of Plato's Republic or the cave analogy or, you know, the myth of, but they don't really have a ton of context as to who Plato was, why he did what he did. Um, so why don't we just start at kind of

ground zero. Who is Plato, and why did he write the Republic? Sure. Well, first, thanks for having me. It's a real honor to be here. Yeah, I appreciate I think the only thing that's really surprised me a I guess should say what surprised me the most about this whole process of getting the UFO and bringing philosophy into it is that no one had done it before in this way. So, uh that that was surprising to me but um okay so who was Plato? So obviously you know probably most people know Plato was the student of Socrates and in most of Plato's dialogues um

which is most of what we have of his writings Socrates is the main character though not in all of them and it's pretty clear that Socrates does not always speak for Plato which I think is important even in the republic. Um other than that you know Plato was uh an aristocratic you know member of of Athenian society you know uh in the period kind of coming out of the pelpeneisian war um it's a time of like great political strife you know so Socrates himself was was uh a victim of

capital punishment that had a lot to do with the politics going on in Athens at the time okay um Plato is not probably his given birth name Right. Uh it it's a nickname like broad or big as in like broad shouldered cuz he was the most accomplished wrestler of his generation apparently. Yeah. In Athens. Yeah. And um Yeah. There's a So you're maintaining that tradition today. I'm doing my best. Yeah. Doing my Jiu-jitsu uh master. Yeah. Yeah. So I think I think an

important thing um to note about the republic is you know it the setting of it is in uh kind of a small this is anacronistic like a suburb of Athens. It's not actually in the city. So it's it's outside the city. So it's a book about cities not that's that's not in a city which is interesting. And we know um about when Plato is setting it cuz it begins by referring to a certain religious festival that classical

scholars can date when that festival likely happened. So we know it's set at a time when Plato would have been like a little kid. Okay? So he obviously was not there, right? So probably these conversations didn't happen, right? But the characters are obviously Socrates and uh two other characters are Glacon and Adamantis who were Plato's half brothers and there's another character Thrmicus who's sort of a foil to those three in the dialogue. And um I'm not sure if I'm getting this exactly right,

but my understanding is none of those people are alive by the time Plato writes this and none of them died natural deaths. Okay. So it there's they're they're actually on separate sides of this struggle. Okay. So like Thrmicus, my understanding, was on the other side of this postpalonian war political struggle from Plato's family. Okay. So it's interesting what Plato's depicting for us is this moment where everybody was kind of together behaving civily for the

last time. Okay. And then it's all going to fall apart politically after that. Okay. which I think is important for how we understand this book and whether or not it's like proposing to us an optimistic or pessimistic view of things, right? Okay. So, the dialogue then begins with Socrates and the guys are here for this religious festival and they're they're invited to a party. Um, and you know, there's going to be torch races and it's going to be a big deal. And there's an older guy there who uh,

you know, they're kidding about being old and isn't it terrible getting old? And he's like, "Well, no, cuz I don't have to worry about all the pressures for sex and all this stuff anymore." And they're like, "Yeah, but you're going to die soon." and he said, 'Well, I'm not worried about death because I've lived a just life and the just don't have to fear their death. Okay. And when asked, well, what do you mean by justice? He he leaves the scene. Okay? So, it's interesting. The authority figure, the old man, is making claims, but he can't cash it. Okay? And this is this goes on in all the batonic dialogues is the authority figures always fail to

actually deliver what they're claiming. Okay? But I think it's interesting that Plato's uh republic the the actual question that initiates the dialogue is the question of death. Okay. Uh which then occasions the question of justice. Okay. So I think we think of the dialogue um if we've read it as being a question about what is justice. But that's the secondary question like that's something we're answering to to address the question of death. And do note that the the book ends with a myth about death. Okay? So

it's a bookended as it were with life and death. Okay? Or with two stories about death. So for my money, if you ask me what's the republic about, it's really about Okay? And and the human condition in facing death. All right? Okay. So at that point then you know what is justice you know gets raised and now philosophy breaks out. Okay. And there's a there's a really vehement debate between Socrates and Thrmicus. Eventually, Thrmicus has had enough and leaves and then Adam Mantis and Glalcon take up his position uh as like devil devil

advocates and um they debate with Socrates what justice is. They decide that deciding what justice is for we as human individuals, right, is too difficult. So they switch it to a political story. Okay, so what would justice be in the city? All right. But always the idea that once again like we're trying to find out what would it be just as individuals so we can then figure out whether or not we have anything to fear in death. It's always the background. So there's like three layers going on in the book and maybe the most important one is the one that's mentioned the least.

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Because it's it's I feel like it's thought of as this what is the ideal state especially visav maybe you know Socrates's death where you know Athens as a democracy sort of turns on him. he ends up drinking the hemlock and then it's like okay if that doesn't work you know how can we uh in some sort of parapotetic way figure out through dialogue what the ideal state is but you're saying that it actually maybe has more to just do with death and like this really important metaphysical question of what happens when you die

it now once this this is probably controversial of course everything in academic philosophy is controversial right so you could find bright people brighter people than than I am who agree with me and you could find brighter people than I am who disagree with That's always a problem. Yeah, I I agree. I also think we are probably overindexed on taking everything allegorically and not literally. So, I'm I'm more sympathetic to the Plato literalists, but you know, that's that's my own I'm allowed to do that cuz I'm a I'm a dillant. Yeah. No, [laughter] I'm I envy you being dil.

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

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

I think I mentioned that cuz I think you have to get away from thinking what we're being proposed here is actually Plato's like political program and there's something else going on here, right? There's also an important moment where um it's after the allegory of the cave and the question comes up like do we would the philosopher have to return to the cave after leaving? And of course in in the allegory uh the philosopher does go back uh and annoys people because he's you know asking them to change their lives and things like that and eventually it

ends very very badly for him. And it's it's a not so thin reference to Socrates. Okay. And interesting what Plato has Socrates say when when he's asked you know would we have to make the philosopher go back? He says, "Well, in our city, meaning the ideal city that we're thinking of, the philosopher would owe his education to the city and thereby he should return." Okay? But think of it, that's only the ideal city. And Plato has said throughout the book that the ideal city is not going to happen here, right? So

it seemed like he's saying like in any actual concrete like human political the philosopher really should not return. It would be a futile effort. Yeah. And so uh just what is the cave at a baseline for the average person? Okay. So um at a certain point in the dialogue uh the question of how we would educate a philosopher comes up. Okay. And basically the cave is Plato's way of

explaining what the education of the philosopher would be like. Okay. So I think that's that's important to see like that's that's where it's proposed. Okay. And in in the analogy that he or allegory that he uses to make the point is he says, you know, so we have a bunch of people. They're in a cave. They're chained so they can only look forward and all they see are images dancing on the cave wall. Okay. And then at some point someone and I think if that were the case, no one could possibly know the difference, right?

There's no ability to separate yourself. From this, right? So it would be what we would call today a consensus reality. Yeah. Right. And now Plato never explains this, but voila, somebody gets loose. Okay. It's interesting. We never get an explanation of how that initial liberation would happen. Okay. And uh that person is able to turn and look away. It's a very important thing that Plato emphasizes is that person looks away from the wall and can see back and see that what's

really going on is there's a there's a wall behind them and there's people behind it with puppets on sticks uh and there's a fire casting light on the onto the wall. Right? So the what the people see on the wall is not entirely wrong. Right? the shadows are rightish, but they're not fully right. Okay? And so this this newly liberated person sees that, right? And then goes through a process of of maybe even literally clawing his way out of the cave. It's a difficult arduous process, right?

And and what he's moving towards is towards a sort of light, right? Okay. So the fire initially that he saw that was part of the put on, that's a kind of light. It's enlightenment. Uh it's the it's it's a sign of of knowledge, right? But it's not full knowledge. And think of it for the Greeks. All well, I mean, we would even say something like this. All energy, all heat, all fire on the earth is ultimately derived from the sun, right? Okay. So, he's looking for the source of that fire, right? And he crawls his way out of the cave and eventually, you know, can you get out

and it's very difficult. So, he has to leave and come back a little bit. you know, it's very difficult to get out of the cave and see in the life of the first time. And eventually he works his way up to glimpsing the sun. Okay. Glimpsing what Plato elsewhere calls the Um but he can only glimpse it. Right. Right. And so then he returns to the cave and of course in returning to the cave the light has changed again and he stumbles around as if he's blind. So he looks like a fool, right? He presses people that there's there's more to the world. What you're seeing is an

illusion, etc., etc. And of course, famously, it ends badly for him just as it ended for Socrates very badly. Yeah. And it's there seems to be sort of push and pull like he's the this person is ascending out of the cave on their own sort of olition, but they're also being sort of dragged. Is that is that right? Or Yeah, because you think of it like like throughout the book, it's clear for Plato enlightenment doesn't just happen. you have to be taught like it's it really you could you could make a case the book is a philosophy of education

right it's it's it's what what what should our ruling elite be like how should they be educated right and and it's and he the one thing Plato would say is you cannot just let nature take its course this way right like people are not disposed to to take themselves out of illusion right they're they're disposed to stay in illusion right so someone has to be pulling right so is which is a problem I think for the book. Is the is the implication that the guardians or the puppeteers are they outside of the cave or are they

in the cave or Yeah. Where do they sort of exist spatially in this analogy? Hey, American Alchemy fans. After years of trying pretty much every shaving product under the sun, I finally found something that I love. It's called House of Atlas. I use it every day. House of Atlas's razor kit has raised my grooming game in the biggest way. The razor leaves you with the smoothest shave you'll ever get. They have precision shave cream calming after shave. Seriously, I don't know what they're doing with this blade, but it leaves my skin feeling silky

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promo code jesse j sse for 15% off your new razor kit and before and after set. So stop wasting money and time on shaving products that don't look good, aren't effective, and cost way too much. Visit houseofatlas.com today. Trust me, you'll love it as much as I do. Let me give you a spooky answer to that. All right. So, at a certain point in the Republic, uh Plato has Socrates and the fellows arrive at this conclusion that the

guardians will have to be told in some translations good lies about the afterlife. uh meaning like they have to be told stories that will will like let them see that there's going to be a reward for a certain type of behavior that's like the best for the state, right? Okay. And the book ends with a myth about the So, what do we get? We get a good lie about the afterlife. Okay. Now, my read on that is what Plato's doing is he's

saying, "Look, I just dragged you through the same educative process that I was outlined in the book, Do you see what I mean? So, like it's like it would seem there has to be somebody outside of the cave doing this. Like there has somebody has to from the perspective of enlightenment be pulling us through. Do you see that? whole book I think tricks you into following that very process. And the guardians, so the guardians themselves are told a lie and then they sort of purvey the lie as well. They transmit the lie.

That's fascinating. In their training, he says they would have to be told. Some some translations call it a good myth. Some transl I like this cuz I'm I'm a contrarian. Call it a good lie. Uh but yeah, everyone has to be lied to in in this process. Yeah. And the guardians uh the implication there is they're guardians of this ideal uh city state. Is that is that correct? And then do we have any understanding of who is telling them this sort of noble Yeah. And and keep in mind like like this is a a problem because Plato

earlier said any natural city is going to fall apart because of natural human greed and and and you know selfishness and and such, right? So how you could ever get this off the ground doesn't seem to be within like a legitimate human possibility for Plato. So there are all these ways you could take this. You could take this as a yeah total like myth or whatever and I think the festival right that this was sort of told at was a you know a festival of myth is that right well it was it was certainly a Greek you know religious festival right so yeah

and then and then there's a you know the the the so that's like on the one hand and then on the other hand it's like this is all true this is like a descriptor of ontological truth and reality and um I guess where do you fall on that on that spectrum Yeah. I I don't So the way I like to put it is I don't think Plato was a platonist. Okay. What I mean is the kind of philosophy 101 that we all teach our students because you have to just you have [snorts] to tell some good myths to get things going. Be careful there. But okay. Um

is is very much a caricature of Plato. Do you see what I mean? Okay. And so um but I also think there's something so I I do think there's a lot of put on going on in the book. I think we're we're we're being toyed with in certain ways. Yeah. I think a lot of it's a kind of a test like do you get it? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But I also think he's perfectly serious about some of the things in that book. Right. Right. Okay. So, for at the end the the the concluding myth, the myth of I don't take that as a serious speculation on his part of what the afterlife is like or something like

that. Okay. Um and it's interesting because at the end of the myth, uh this is getting in the weeds, but people can go read the Um, at the end of the myth goes back to temporal life, but unlike everyone else, he's granted memory of where he's been. Okay? And um, Plato throughout his writings has Socrates defend the notion that all knowledge is actually recollection of something that we already had.

Okay? And so I think what what you're getting here then is this suggestion that like our relationship to the ultimate truth is going to be more like memory than it is something like a direct discovery. Well, he says kind of distrust your like five senses, right? And it's almost like this primordial knowledge is more true in a sense. And so he totally cuz he I mean you could say that you know it's all mythology or whatever when it comes to him even saying that but then in the

in the book of Mino uh you know they literally have this slave draw a triangle and it's the slave is you know completely uneducated and uh that's sort of proof that there is this kind of primordial architecture and knowledge and I believe also in the symposium it was you know a knowledge of geometry was somehow not only emphasized but almost like a lit test for like admission. So we could teach anybody this if we just reminded them the right way or like a something that Plato does in the Fato. He has Socrates as he has Socrates say

in the Fato, which interestingly Plato goes out of his way to say he wasn't there for for the the conversation of Fato. So he oddly distances himself from it, which is interesting. But he um there you know the example is is like you have a lover who played the harp. Mh. Now, the harp doesn't resemble them at all, but the harp will remind you of Okay. So, like I think what Plato's getting at is there are things that we encounter in this life that are utterly unlike

the ultimate truth, but then still manage to remind us of it. That's so interesting. Yeah. I mean, like the light itself also feels like this kind of um dual meaning there. not dual meaning but it it's like an inflection point where it could uh either sort of eviscerate us or it could kind of save us and I think about technology now and it has that sort of you know dual kind of an inflecting you know um mechanism where AI for example you know I love the Marshall McLuhan quote every media

extension of man is an amputation we are sort of outsourcing our agency to a lot of these you know technologies that are kind of paricetizing us especially after the advent of information technology you know, it used to be kind of augmenting us and now it's sort of outsourcing, you know, our abilities. Um, and then at the same time, the ability to wake up uh with information technology, you know, if you're trying to learn about like UFOs or like uncover all sorts of kind of real conspiracies or or or issues with the way that, you know, um the doct

do doctrineated the indoctrinated history has been told or whatever, you can now do that cuz you have the access to all the information kind of at your fingertips. So enlightenment is also closer than ever. But there's like that two-edged sword like very thing like you and I no internet. Jim and Jesse never meet. Right. True. Jesse never reads Jim's book. Jim never like gets enlightened by your podcast. Right. Yeah. But at the same time as like I I think we're also being simultaneously undone by that very same median. It's fascinating. And so if you think if

you extrapolate that out into the future, there are like two possibility like if you have a Schroinger's cat of you know possibility states of you know mankind there's probably a whole wave function but like on the one hand you this like enlightened city state where you know you have people like Jim Jesse but a bunch of other people talking about virtue and like how to live a good life and you know we have like access to like nuclear fusion over unity or whatever like it's all great right and then on the other hand it's like nuclear or holocaust and like you know and so

if that future is has somehow already arrived in some paradigm outside the then I wonder if the cave itself is actually a test like it's one of because he there are tests to become a guardian right like that that wouldn't be disputed right so is the cave itself some sort of like low-level epistemic like VR headset where it's like you have to contemplate virtue doing the right way, lead a good life, and if you don't, you're not going to make it out.

And if you do, you level up or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And think of it, uh, and once again, you know, like getting way over my pay grade as a classicist, right? Okay. But like, but there Plato I mean there there were such things as pros treatise as as as a literary genre at the time. But yeah, Plato writes in dialogue. Okay. Now, we know Aristotle did, but we but they we lost all those dialogues. But like Plato writes in dialogue. So why write in dialogue? like why are you doing that? And it seems like cuz it lets you play more and it becomes this

kind of like okay who's really paying right? Like who's really understanding what the narrative is doing here? Totally. And there's something about I love the word parapathetic like the walking and talking and the dialogue based learning where it's like a you know a a caterpillar into a butterfly or what like you need the struggle in order to you you can't circumvent the process in order to truth is not like a file you're given. you need to kind of engage. And can I can I circle back to the light metaphor? Yes. Okay. So, I think it's important to note in the

republic, okay, and this could be we could get interesting things with this with later philosophy, too. But, but Plato talks like he uses the sun as this metaphor. And of course, it's all like the sun's a pretty going metaphor already. So, like you have you have the Icarus myth, you know, where if you like you want the knowledge of the gods and you fly too close, you're going to crash, right? So think of like like by Plato suggesting that we could glimpse the sun. This is very transgressive stuff for for the time, right? Y um but he says that the thing with the

sun is it's the source of the light by which we see everything else. Okay. So then there's a question like how could you see the sun? Do you see you sort of like like it's you'd have to take the glasses off that you look through and look at them without your glasses, right? And so I think that's important in that for for Plato, you're never going to be able to point to the good. You're never going to be able to point to ultimate being because it's the source by which anything else can be

illoomed to be pointed at. Right? So in in any kind of like temporal empirical sense, we're always going to fall short. We're always going to fall short. Always going to fall short because it's it's sort of the horizon against we can against which we can judge things. It's not something in front of the horizon that we can judge. So it's sort of Plato, I think, is predicting in this life perpetual right? Yeah. Yeah. It's f Yeah. And so, so, okay, I'm sure a lot of people at this point in the

interview are thinking, Jesse, you have a show about UFOs. That's right. What the hell does any of this have to do with UFOs? How did you even think to reconcile you know people say you know all all philosophy is a you know footnote of Plato or whatever like he's really the the the founder of western philosophy. How did you think to reconcile that with UFOs this sort of modern craze of objects in the sky we can't identify? Yeah that's interesting question. So, um I think like a lot of people I got kind

of, you know, triggered about the UFO in like 2017 when, you know, when suddenly it was okay to talk about this, you Um and then I remember in I think it was I always tell the story, I was watching X Files with my kids that summer and it was right when the big first Pentagon press conference happened and I'm like, so I guess Mol was right. I've never seen anything like it. They've been going at it like that for almost half an hour. There've been this like switch like it's

it's suddenly they're saying no maybe there's something to this which you know my like basic immunal response to everything is like to study right and and to do scholarship. So I start reading all the books and all that. And I I think what what connected it with Plato for me is just that that metaphor of we could be really really wrong as a consensus about what the actual nature of being is, right? I thought I was starting to see the UFO was a great at least thought

experiment about that, right? Does it seem at all plausible to me that there could be something even in like our nearly empirical reality that humans are just like systematically missed for our [clears throat] entire history, And it and the more I thought about it, the more I thought about things that I was already working on in philosophy of mind and cognitive science and and speculative metaphysics, it seemed, oh, hell yeah. Yeah. we really could be missing something that was like

concretely right there all along. Yeah, absolutely. I mean even prosaically in a modern scientific context we see you know between 400 and 700 nanometers of the electromagnetic wave spectrum you know our decibel range is you know cut off and so like to say that we are measurement sensors that are limited inside of a larger reality I don't think is too controversial. No. And then you know do UFOs somehow speak to that because they seem weakly entangled with our reality?

They seem to be sort of ephemeral Jacqu Valet you know which you write about very eloquently in your book talks about you know in Passport to Meonia and others books. a lot of past mythology involving, you know, the denisins of Meonia like coming down on on clouds or uh uh uh you know, all sorts of craft with wheels of Ezekiel, you know, the the the blazing shields of Rome. You know, often it's these sort of this this um protoarchitecture that's very true and real and then we are sort of

recollecting it through the lens of sort of modern mythology, Um so yeah, what do you what do you make of that? Hey guys, I want to tell you about my new favorite piece of apparel. These are called the perfect jeans. They're literally the perfect jeans. I used to wear jeans all the time and they're kind of rough and not super stretchy or breathable. These are extremely comfortable. They work in casual environments. They work in work settings. They come in six different sizes from 26 in to 50 in. And they're

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show and tell them that we sent you. [ __ ] your khakis. Get the perfect gene. One of the books that really turned me on UFO, and I think partly because it had a legitimizing, you have to honestly say it helped legitimize the study of it was Carl Young's book, you UFO, the the a modern myth, modern myth of things in the sky. And it's interesting. Young makes this point that, yeah, it's not entirely surprising like right after the World Wars and in the middle of, you know, the the the the

really scary years of the Cold War where there's this nuclear threat um that suddenly people are having a lot of anxiety and it's being expressed in these dreams and visions of, you know, airborne technology that may or may not be militarily threatening. and he has this, you know, this his whole account of it in terms of the mandala and like a need to return to a new wholeness, that sort of thing. And so it it makes a lot of sense to me that well, when when we're having

anxiousness collectively that it's going to express itself in the going metaphors of our era, right? Our current like unconscious obsessions, right? And and for us, it's technology, right? But what I found really troubling about and it's interesting when you read Jung's book, it it's sort of like you get a feel when he he starts out writing it. He talks about it as like a a mass rumor, right? He talks he does all the stream analysis of it. And then as the book goes on, it's like it's getting harder for him to dismiss it though. And if you've read it like at

the end he's like and yet they're on radar. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And yet they leave tracks. Yep. And so it's like in some like you know I'm I'm uh you very into psychoanalysis okay and it's sort of it's easy I think to dismiss a lot not dismiss the wrong word to analyze some of this stuff psychologically and yet that that's the thing that like that I keep coming back to is and yet there do seem to be concrete effects. Yeah that was Diana Pulka's experience

as well. She's this religious studies professor at UNCC Wilmington. I don't think she expected to, you know, and she's writing about the Catholic concept of purgatory in this book, Heaven Can Wait, and then I don't think she expected to start writing about UFOs in some sort of, you know, I think this is real sense. I think she wanted to write about it and as some modern, you know, kind of, you know, ephemeral religious phenomena. Uh, and then all of a sudden the second half of that book is like she goes down the rabbit hole herself and

it's like, "Oh my god, I think there's something extremely real." You can see it like in similar to Young in like real time as Diana's writing this is she's like the view is changing. It's f Yeah. It's like uh Yeah. Go for it. Yeah. And so like the uh to the cave metaphor if that's okay. Yeah. is I I subscribe to some ideas in cognitive science and philosophy of mind that would sort of like make us think that maybe the cave is not just a bug but a

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

the stuff that we do see it's there. Okay. I'm not an idealist. Right? So the stuff that we do see it's there. The problem is it's it there's always more there than it otherwise we couldn't You see that? Mhm. Okay. So then though there's going to be this really thorny problem always of like how do we ever tease out? Like what is just our carving out and leaving something behind or as opposed to illusion as opposed to what's really there etc etc. I think once you admit that

there is a irreducible human contribution to our perception of the Yes. how you ever tease those two things back out is is going to be the thorniest problem possible. Yeah. Just admitting that uh opens your whole your mind to a whole host of possibilities. I love in the in early in the, you know, this um uh the three body problem, you know, in the Dark Forest trilogy, this, you know, Chinese science fiction novel involving aliens, UFOs, you know, uh it's like the the farmer and the shooter and you have, you know,

people on a 2D plane and bullets are shot or bullet holes are shot into that 2D plane and to them that could just be like, you know, little little craters and they're probably flatland is another good example. 19th century where the people holes could just be literally they're not discretionary holes made by shooters that they can't even perceive and so uh we are we're inherently sort of limited by our scope of of perception

making that argument is an a priori assertion but denying that argument is also an a priori assertion and so there's you're at this kind of epistemic impass visav modern science where If you propose anything like that, they just have nothing to say. And then you point towards like these ephemeral glimpses of UFOs or people who have like near-death experiences and you say these things are much richer than than meet the eye and then they say, "Oh, your mind plays tricks on you, blah blah blah." And you end up in this sort of impossible to resolve argument.

Yeah. Anaporia is like the classic. Yeah. Sort of like it's a puzzle. Oh, interesting. I've never heard that con. That's awesome. And um one of my favorite ways of putting this comes from William James. He has this great analogy he uses. He thinks like humans are not unlike dogs and cats running around a library or not unlike our dogs when we're in the living room having a conversation about like the most, you know, highle stuff and your dog's there thinking it's like kind of hot [ __ ] right? It's like doing

the dog thing and and of course all the sounds and smells and stuff it it encounters are really there. Yeah. But it's a carve out from something much richer. And but he's he's hearing what you're saying, but it can't possibly mean anything to him because it's just not relevant to his way of being. Yeah. And it would be we think of things like cellular automata or like you know getting fungus to grow in certain ways or whatever you know like is that that's easy. It's predictable right? Yeah. We

could easily be cellular tatamita automata in some larger system. Yeah. Where you know you have the you know BF Skinner you know Pavlov's dog you have all these ways to like condition humans like extremely easily like that that's not that hard and um how do we know that that's not being done to us on some sort of grand scale? And that's the Jacqu file kind of control system hypothesis. That was one of the things that really turned me on was was that what here's example just from the last 24 hours for me. Okay. So, I live in a very small

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

whenever I fly into a major metropolitan area how small and minor it looks on the landscape as you come in. Right. So it's like here I have a sense of I'm somehow being moved around by a larger reality just by being the city. But then if we if we move out our magnification a bit, we'll see the city is itself just part of this much bigger ecosystem of things and and it's not clear who's running that etc. Right. And so it seems like our level of Like it affords different senses of what

the real substance of things are. Yes. And you start to get into weird ontological reality questions the the more microscopic you get. Like um my old colleague Eric Weinstein likes to talk about he talks about and you write about this in your book thevelt. This sort of perceptive apparatus. He talks about science as like you know a continuous process ofvelt hacking. He uses umbelt. He does. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I feel vindicated. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. or maybe he should be vindicated by you. [laughter]

But um no, it's it is it's it's or even you know Fineman says there's room at the bottom, you know, and he's implying that like the deeper your perceptive apparatus gets, the more you're able to probably understand, you know, ontological truth. There's there's another physicist named named Ken Wilson where it's like the higher the energy output, um you know, the the maybe the more onlogical truth you get. He really talks about in the case of you know uh sort of phase transitions via materials like you you put them under like high duress you can understand properties

that you wouldn't without the duress but I do think of like if we're in a cave you know suspend disbelief say we are just in this cave well so I I'm we are I mean it just it seems like inherently we are yes like everything we know about how cognition works I think shows agree we are sorting for relevance thereby we're ignoring more than and we've been evolutionarily rewarded and like programmed to ignore some things. So So the two ways out of the cave would be your own building your own perceptive

apparatus like your own uh working on your own kind of cognition and sort of raising your own consciousness. These things are very hard to talk about because it's hard to there's no formula or whatever but you know that that would be one way and then the second way might be sort of uh physics that breaks the boundaries of the cave. So it would be like lighting a firecracker in the cave or something. And so I think about that with the nuclear UFO connection. But I I wonder about that even because it's even let's say we get, you know, like another scientific

But it's still got to come back and be translated into the basic human cognitive setup. Like you like like it's still going to have to like run on this hardware, you know? So, it's always going to go back to somehow traceable to, you know, modes of cognition that were developed for our paleolithic ancestors. But I don't know. I mean, so yes, but like the hardware is probably changing

I agree 100%. Mhm. Um but then but the thing of though is any cognitive act that we would do to change the hardware would presuppose that prior hardware. So there's kind of a loop there. You know what I mean? So like whatever whatever could be that change, it's almost like it can't be within our direct control. Explain say that again because like if let's say we're going to re reset our basic cognitive apparatus but we can only do that based on principles of our current cognitive

right? So we would never really be free of that, right? So it looks like it there's you're going to have that kind of looping problem in there, right? Yes. Yeah. Yes. But then also you can measure a thing like the Copenhagen school like measures like an electron and it's like this electron doesn't exhibit properties that like you look like normal macroscopic reality and then that like puts you into this brain scramble that like you know increases your evolution etc. Yeah. So it is this like positive feedback loop or something. The way I

look at it is like we're always opening the scope on our Umbelt, okay? But it's still tethered to that original point, right? Cuz because we we we got here this through this evolutionary route and that's always going to kind of flavor it, right? So I agree like like what science does is it opens it, right? And I would even say even humanities in some cases, I think literature can like open us to new reels and things like that. Okay? So it's opening it wider and wider and wider but it's still always going to come back to that same origin point and it's always limited

then yeah you have all these uh other myths that deal with uh technology development and you know like Prometheus being kind of the archetypal one or or FA you know and and usually it doesn't end well for those seeking the light. So how do we how do we interpret that in sort of a platonic and and UFO context? So I got I got really obsessed with Sophocles Prometheus Bound the the the tragic play and uh to the point I make all my students read it now. [laughter] And it's interesting that okay so the

the start of Sophocles's version of the myth is uh Hesus the the god of smithing is he's he's chaining up nailing down Prometheus. Okay, which is ironic cuz like what did Prometheus do is he like he provided humans with all the arts. Okay, like including smithing. So Prometheus is being bound by technology. as the god that gives us technology but he is bound by technology right and in Sophocles's version force who speaks for Zeus interesting he's

just pure blind force speaks there and are kind of they're kind of mocking him like your name and means fornowledge you didn't see this coming and he's like oh bro I saw it coming I want this yeah okay and like later in in the myth he even says I hate all gods yeah and He encounters Ian who you know Io Io pard me who you know was uh who rejected Zeus and she's a human gets turned to a cow and he predicts a child

of yours in the 13th generation so it's going to be Hercules right is the prediction but in the 13th generation a human child like long in the future bad is going to take out Zeus okay you see and so like there's this prediction of a kind of like you know like like death of god assertive humanism that's going to come out of from a guy though who is being nailed to a rock by technology itself right so you can see I think I think even sophocles there's a sense that humans are on rails

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i f.com/jessej Thanks so much to Qualia for sponsoring this episode. What does that mean as far as our relationship to technology? One uh essay that you write about in your great book and Diana Pulka also talks about is the question concerning technology which is this this H highaidiger essay. I would be lying if I were to tell you that I understand this essay. I've tried to read it a couple times. [laughter] It doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

It's a difficult Yeah. And it's that's not the place to start Haidiger, but it's like but it's where everybody wants to get to. Yeah. [laughter] I don't think I understand Haidiger in general, but Yeah. Okay. So, um basically what what Haidiger is arguing in that essay is the essence of technology isn't a device. Okay. He's he's very explicit about that. So, so when Haidiger gets moody about technology, he's not just moody about how much like screen time we're Like he wouldn't be a fan, but like you know toward like like he for him the

essence of technology is a certain attitude towards being okay like that's what technology really is. Okay. and Haidiger, you know, thinks it like there there wasn't like a committee that met in in the early modern period that decided we would just like change civilization. Okay. But he also thinks something happened such that we started to ask a different kind of question about nature than we did before. Okay. And he thinks what what happened is for some reason we began to

ask nature what can we extract from it rather than how we can work with it. And so he thinks like what the essence of technology is is an attitude of extraction or or accessibility like like what the world is is simply the conditions at which it's accessible to Right. M um and he thinks now he and he thinks he can trace that back is like it's always been in the making throughout the entire western philosophical tradition and it just it really bubbled up in the modern period, right? [clears throat] And so for him like he he thinks there's

no getting out of it cuz like we didn't have a committee meeting to change [clears throat] our attitude. So we're not going to have a committee meeting to get out of it. He's like we have to ride this all the way down. Okay. But he thinks if we admit that we're stuck with this attitude, right? So like the world like we're stuck thinking of the world simply on the terms that it's useful to us, right? If we make that admission then we're kind of admitting we're not really running things because we can't really decide this for And he thinks that will open us to maybe something else could show itself to us

that would change our attitude to being Yeah. I I maybe this is a contrived connection, but I think about that, you know, probably very true assertion that humans look at technology as this like, you know, locally useful thing for like producing and then they port their own value into like how can they work alongside technology to like make things more useful or more productive, which is a very narrow scope of like what it is to be human. Humans

can write poetry, be self-referential, you know, like we create culture, but there's something about technology that compresses humans into u, you know, this like economically productive unit. Haidiger was Haidiger was really worked up the first time he heard someone use the word human resources, right? And he says because eventually what's going to happen is we're going to see ourselves in technological terms of accessibility and use and and and he's not just worried that like you know Soilent green is people like literally but I think he is for

listen to me Hatcher YOU GOT TO TELL HIM silent green is people. Um but he's he's worried that then we'll we'll only have a means and attitude to To everything. And and what his worry is is this will lead us to what he calls a certain kind of oblivion to being, Is like an oblivion like a forgetfulness again, right? Full circle to Plato here. Like a forgetfulness of what being really is. Yeah. And we'll only see it as what it

is to us, how we can access it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the soiling green analogy is f, you know, like that's that's an extreme, right? where it's like you know the Charlton H movie that you know it's a great metaphor and you know allah the Plato where you never know if it's a metaphor or it's real I think he talks about five stages of techn technological development in that essay and one of them is sacrifice and you think about a lot of like uh pagan scapegoating cycles and past

uh efforts at garnering sacred knowledge or technology and they involve like kind of brutal practices Um, and I, you know, I think you could, you could go all the way back to, you know, uh, uh, ancient practices to, uh, the Nazis trying to like sort of do this at scale for like forbidden knowledge and Um, and I I it's funny because, you I think Chesterton actually draws, I think, a connection between um, you know, sort of uh, pre-cientific

and technology. Yeah. and like human sacrifice and technology ideas that we if we just had the right technique we could force the world's hand to do what we want, And certainly I think Gerard would see something like that too. Yeah. Oh. Oh, for sure. Yeah. And there's a way in which tech used to be like, you know, an augmentation of a human. It was like an, you know, extra appendage or something. And then you know I think post information revolution it's sort of

become this like paricitization of of So Haidiger's like one of Haidiger's great examples is he he compares um like a hydroelectric uh dam to a medieval windmill. Okay. Or a medieval watermill. Okay. Cuz on those like say in the medieval versions and I'm not and I'm not saying we peaked in the 12th century or something like that. Like I'm I'm glad my wife can vote. Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but like with the wind, like the medieval windmill, you it works when the wind blows. Okay.

So, you're like you're going to like build something that makes you have to work along with nature. Yeah. All right. Whereas the hydroelectric dam for all its virtues though, it's saying nature, I will take from you what I want and store it. So, it's all on our terms, right? And it's about how we access you, right? And not how can we work with you. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's mastery over nature uh in a way. Yeah. It's not just harmonizing with it with with nature. Um and those two things are very distinct. I mean there's the there are

two uh competing theories of the inevitability of human evolution or or of existence on earth and there's the Gaia James love lock theory that you know the earth is somehow like super resilient and so like we might come and go but that you know that the earth will always sort of come back and then there's the media theory which is like you know we uh inevitably will like blow ourselves up and like you know maybe there's some evidence that that happened on Mars or something and yeah there there they're sort of competing. There's and and and

definitely modern tech seems to be in the category of just yeah being able how do we control everything. If you think about VR is like that to the limit where it's like the entire world that like we might be living in like is controllable and so I don't know taking it like one step further with the Plato thing. Do you ever think like this is like we're in these like biological skin suits? There that are basically like VR headsets and the contemplation of virtue or you know some other criteria that we don't fully understand are the means

through which we ascend through these things into the light and become even worthy of that next step outside of the cave. Because I I I I also thought, you know, the H Highaidiger thing might connect where it's like we're porting ourselves through these like low-level economic production engines via technology. I believe that also kind of dovetales with a test that Plato uh puts the Guardians through like at the age of 30 or whatever if you if you fail like you don't get to study metaphysics. You just like become the like the economic

producer whatever. Yeah. So I think at this point is where like a Haidiger and and Plato come Okay. At least this is where Haidiger becomes a critic of Plato's, okay? he would look at something like that dialectical process in the Republic whereby one like ascends to a kind of enlightenment as a quai technological Okay. And whereas for Haidiger, for him the metaphor is more like um

like [clears throat] you build a temple and you hope someone shows up there. Mhm. Right. Okay. And a lot of his later work goes to this where he talks about how we need we need artwork. Okay. But meaning we need art that does the work of art. And what is the work of art is it it provides a place sort of like a theater where an actor could show up for Okay. So for Haidiger it's like we're we're more passive in the process okay than than say for Plato where we be more

active in the process. like there there would be you know a an educational process that one could go through right that would get you there right whereas for H highaidiger it's like well if divinity is going to show up for us right if the transcendence is going to show up for us then it cannot be our like and he thinks what's happened in the modern world is because we we only think of like what we can take and do and grab and process right um we need to regain an ability just to build something that is sort of receptive rather than aggressively extracting.

Do you see that? And I think for me, I probably lean more towards Heidi than that. Fascinating. Well, speaking speaking of that, is the UFO a technology that sort of uh is, you know, if there's a push and a pull outside of the cave or whatever, is is the UFO some sort of uh technology? because you talk about this where it's this thing that it busts all of your priors, you know, it's like you have all these like prior categorization techniques.

I didn't want to talk about this, right? Today I did, but like ear, you know, 5 years ago, but you find yourself obsessed because it's it's it's inherently kind of Yeah, that's kind of where I land with the as it were with the UFO is um it seems like something's knocking, right? There's some and maybe it's always been knocking at the door, right? you know, because we have different metaphors for throughout history, but it seems like something's knocking, And whether we listen to it through uh a platonic, you know, process of dialectical improvement or we listen to

it through a sort of Haidigerian building a place where it could dwell, right? That it seems that something is trying to remind the human of something, right? That's trying to jog our memories. Like I like to use Plato's metaphor. Um and and and and I'm not really like I don't trust any of our metaphors about it. You know, is it an angel? Is it a demon? Is it, you know, is it a is it an elf or a fairy? It seems that all of that gives our imagination too much of a pass, right? But it does seem there is some pressure on us from outside our right that we

would do well to at least strategize how we would listen to. Yeah. It's so fascinating. And so like how does how does any of this comport with like the way we discuss this stuff in a government context because you know we have like we're talking an extremely high abstract level of the kind of onlogical truth and then there's like their government whistleblowers coming out of saying that they've retrieved UFOs one of whom I've had on my show and like you know it's kind of hard to park poke holes in his story like you know

felt like you know pretty primmaaccia at least you know very very you know like an honest account. Um, and so how do we uh square that circle? I don't know. I don't know that I can. Yeah. And because see for me um and this is not I am not like calling anyone into question or anything like that, but like so like I have no special access to anything. I'm just a average dude. Right. Okay. And so I have to always ask myself like what's more likely like what this

person's telling me is true. And they could be they could be speaking a falsehood and not be lying. I'm not saying anyone's lying or anything like that. Like you always have to weigh like is this testimony true, right? Against the probability that this someone this person's been somehow deceived or etc. etc. You know what I And just taking like whether you know it's any of the whistleblowers. I'm I don't know how I can really weigh that out. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? So like um let's say you know we we talk to whistleblower you know Roy, right? Okay.

And you know we ask Roy, hey you know yeah you've you've been told this this this and this by all these people and it seems unlikely that they're all in on something that seems unlikely. Okay. But then it seems really unlikely that these things they're telling you is true Right. Yeah. Of course. This an old argument from David Hume about miracles. And so we have to weigh Yeah. And it seems to me like I I can't even really make a meaningful comparison of those probabilities. Well, I would I would say in the the world in which like forbidden knowledge

is a a a real thing that there's some, you know, cleaving off of like black world science or knowledge, you know, the government would be attempting systematically to get that, you know, just from a game theory geopolitical. You have to assign some plausibility. Yep. to to like maybe well the thing is is as soon as we do that and this and this gives me fits. So as soon as we So I think no matter what now you've got to have a pretty unlikely conspiracy theory cuz either like this has been covered up

for 75 years, right? You know what I mean? Or there's something really weird going on now where it seems like now people want us to believe it, So either way, you've got like a low pro primmaaccia low probability conspiracy theory you're going to have to take one way or another. And then I always ask myself the question like, you know, cuz of course you have to go back and forth, but like I'm like, why are like some of these people are like very high level in prosaically important government, military, and science roles? And I'm like, if we are in some like

multipolar new cold war, why are you systematically sending all of these top guys to like sigh up the American population? That that seems crazy. Yeah, that seems crazier than you know as a null hypothesis than the inverse which is just like actually this has been going on for you know thousands of See there's where I think you and I come apart. I don't know which is crazier. Sure. Sure. You know what I mean? Well, I'm more in that like you know I'm waiting through the waters of speaking to all these people. Yeah. But but I think I I do think you

these things, somebody who holds AQ clearance and then all of a sudden they go, "Oh, credentials." They go, "Whatever you say next as far as what they believe, I now believe." And then you could go into all these sort of first principles like more interesting inquiries into like how reality works, Allah, what we're doing now. Yeah. And it's like it's not even wrong or like unfalsifiable or like crazy or whatever cuz you you need to somehow uh their receptors around like you know credentialism need to be like met first

and then they're like oh let me listen you know it's like that's just not the way you should Yeah. sort of you might have heard about uh some of the honest placebo studies. Okay. So apparent I'm probably not getting all the details right, but apparently there are cases where there have been experiments where they told people this is a placebo. This is an inert substance and we're giving it to you. It still helped. Still helped. I believe that if the person giving it to them still had like the lab coat.

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

clearly some truth in it. Exactly. And then you know maybe there are some lies but like you're extremely intrigued there there are layers to there's this like Leo Strauss this you know you know 20th century philosopher he was a big big uh you know platonist too and he also thought those books were totally but then you'd never know if he was writing in a coded fashion himself and so it was like and then like the people around him like had these like weird communication techniques and so so it's this neverending thing and you could say the

is uh implying meaning that doesn't exist and the esoteric is like the room and you know is actually empty when you get to it and it's like it's all some coordination mechanism or you could say the exoteric is throwing people off the trail and this and the more you like talk about that meta sense then you're going and you you've created this cult. And it's [laughter] Yeah. and and and so um I actually do this in the book where I say what using the example of the of the tic

tac okay so what's my evidence of the tic tac well this you know seemingly very reliable air force pilot and you know said and Alex [clears throat] Dietrich and um David Fra they've said these things right systems yeah okay and so so I have like testimony from seemingly reliable people right okay um and if You say, "Yeah, but it it like how can you buy that?" But yet, like I only know Bin Laden was shot. Because of testimony.

Yeah. From that came through the media through reliable like Pentagon officials. I only know. And now, of course, maybe some of that stuff we be so quick to believe, too. Do you know what I mean? But it seems to me you've got to put it on the spectrum of believability now. Of course. But it's like Yeah. If I you say like we detected a cork or whatever through like some particle accelerator. I have to take Eric's word for that. Yeah, me too. Yeah. And Eric has taken other people's word for that because he's a theoretical guy and he's not doing the experiments. And so it's the

consensus reality if you really get down to it can just be totally managed. Yeah. I And I I think I mean that that has been known since Plato. Yeah. You know what I mean? I agree. So, so what do I do with like say disclosure movement stuff like that? And the UFO is is I'll admit I I now am like self-consciously aloof to it. That's cool. I like that. I'm starting to be like that, too. Yeah. I had a friend tell me yesterday or two

days ago, Chris Ramsey has a great channel called Area 52. He goes, "I'm not really into disclosure." He's like, "I'm into UFOs." And I was like, "I like that. That's pretty awesome." Yeah. this whole like dramatic process of like these people and the blah blah blah and it's it's like it's fascinating and I find some of the people very heroic and courageous and I I've loved all the people who I've been lucky enough to have access to on the show but ultimately it's like does that get you closer to some

primordial truth is there you know there there plenty of things can be true little te true or whatever and there can be ulterior motives involved as well and it's I To me it's it's a lens through which you can you know go to the deeper stuff and some of them have are going through their own processes and journeys. You talk to Jake Barber, David Grush or any of these people like it it's opened up their worldview and they're like you know they're diving into like what they want to know about like reality as well but uh yeah some of

the contemporary kind of you know drama is not you know always the best inroad. And uh right now, let's say, you know, you said, you know, we're off the air, Jim, and I'm gonna show you. Here's what they showed me. Yeah. Yeah. I got the real stuff. I would have to say, okay, but then why would I believe Yeah. Totally. Do you mean why are you showing me? Why are you showing me? You know what I mean? So, it seems like and this is like one of the frustrations. Even if you found out, you haven't found out. Right. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Well, that's why, you know, my if I had to make a prediction, I think contact or like true like more

disclosure, you know, disclosure will be inherently this sort of jagged process. Well, you maybe you'll have 20% of the population still holding out saying like, you know, this is just impossible or whatever. But, you know, say there's some big event in the next few years. My strong bias would be that that event does not come through some like power structure on down disseminated message from like government officials. It's like some weird surprising thing. Um and if it's if it's not that it it won't hit people epistemically in the

right way. Yeah. Cuz think they'll be skeptical forever. So think of it like right now evolution has been taught in public schools at least in most private schools for generations, right? But how many Americans believe it? Not everyone. [clears throat] Yeah. Like the Big Bang's been taught. How many Americans believe it? Not everyone. You know what I mean? Like you could you could even have something become like educational orthodoxy and it doesn't necessarily move the needle for everyone, right? So like what what would even like disclosure

look like in a way that actually had grip on people's daily lives. Totally. And and then you Yeah. And then it's like okay, you see a saucer in a hanger. The hangers at an official site. You see some government official who you know you trust cuz they're cabinet level or they're the president unveiling the You have all these questions. Then you step inside the thing, you have all these questions. The scientists probably working on this stuff don't know exactly what they're looking at and have all these questions. And so it becomes this neverending quest.

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

model y where it makes sense that like the where we would expect the unexpected to happen. And I think yeah, we can I think I think that does make perfect sense, right? And so then the question now is just okay, how do we digest that, right? Do you know for ourselves in in in our friendships, in our classrooms, all that that becomes it, right? You know, I'm not looking for authorities to tell me what to do, right? Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. No, that uh that's that that you become limited in your

ability to derive truth if you inherently if you do that. And um I I think I don't know I'm curious to get your take, but I think we are li literally in uh uh Plato's cave and not only all the stuff we talked about around like decibel ranges or electromagnetic wave spectrums, but look at like physics itself. There's um you know the the weak enthropic principle and there's a strong enthropic principle. And the strong enthropic principle is like well you know eventually like you you'll have enough iterations that like you know like the

universe will foster life. And then the weakanthropic principle is like the limits of our perceptive you know capabilities like make physics comport with our perceptive capability which is so obviously true like I think the idea that plank's constant if you were to change it slightly like you wouldn't have a habitable earth doesn't point towards like oh you had like a million tries and this was like the right try to me it's like physics itself is comporting to our perceptive

limitations. And again, that's like an unanswerable question. You can endlessly sort of debate. Are we ever going to tease out the human from the non-human? Well, once we admit there's a human contribution to any of our teasing out. We're always going to be like loop. Yeah. Yes. But and then the second you admit that the human that the observer observed distinction breaks down. Yeah. Which like Jung would say, I don't know, a bunch of people would say like you then have to like look inwards. And you don't have to look inwards. If you are this like, you know, in just a this

biochemical like meat suit, you know, happy accident, then it's like you feel sad like take an SSRI. Like you feel, you know, you're you're uh you're you're confused about something like, you know, just learn the trit information. There's there's very little uh aesthetic sense as to how to uh decode yourself, right? And I do think like the this to the limit ends up in this sort of endless interiority kind of self-indulgence thing. But I think a lot of people miss that today as to how how to sort of grow your own

ability. Good point, Jesse. I think there's a difference between this sort of um [snorts] really like kind of uh fil work on yourself thing, right? And as opposed to like what would it be to cultivate real interiority, right? Yeah. And I I think it's a really great distinction. Yeah. Do you think like the next ep epistemological or scientific paradigm involves uh bringing the observer into you know the the observed or there's there's something about working on us uh that uh

coincides with what we perceive? I mean this would go back to like alchemy itself which a lot of the early in a lot of ways although you we could talk about how it's gone off the rails right like this has been you know one of the central philosophical paradigms since Kant you know where like once we try to tease out the numinal from the phenomenal right you know that that for us as opposed to that which things are in themselves con like you you'll get nowhere except ethically right he thinks we can know things in themselves

in in terms like like moral matters, right? But that's it. And so I think in much of western philosophy since Kant has like been dealing with that. Now it's gone off the rails really badly in many ways. Okay. But I think and then you we can look in the sciences, you know, the hard sciences the same thing like like the you know like this idea that we're ever going to like tease out the observer from the observed. Yeah. Right. You in a lot of this already is the paradigm in a lot of like serious thought. It's just the word just never gets out. Right. Yeah, it's also interesting how

mean you even who knows if this like theory of consciousness is correct with microtubules with you know Roger Penrose has has this orchestrated objective reduction thing but that involves these like you know pyramidal tubulant structures in the in in the brain you know it all maybe maybe we end up just back to like helenic times like talking about these like you know sacred geometry and stuff well you know you know a little off that but like overlapping you you know Sheldrick has this really interesting paper uh is the sun conscious

I love that which he answers affirmatively right and you can see similar work I'm I'm forgetting his name now but an American analytic philosopher in the last few years published a paper arguing that the United States is probably conscious and and both Sheldrake and this other paper are making the point that well if we know that a certain kind of causes the emergence of conscious consciousness in us and and I think whatever you think consciousness is it's hard to deny that this or where these

organizational structures show up you get consciousness right well Sheldrake makes the point well it looks like we can see those kinds of organizations in other places and he makes a case maybe the sun etc etc right and so then I think what you're doing is you're getting a a universe sus with consciousness right but in a way that isn't um like irresponsibly spooky either I I think that's very important. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's like sort of fractals of consciousness on up and and there's a sort of cybernetic village or something

and then there's a the individual nodes. Um and even, you know, if you think of us as like individual nodes, uh that totally comports with Michelle Drake's stuff around, you know, if you grow an organic crystal structure, uh you can then grow that crystal structure much faster on an ongoing basis. Or like look at athletic accomplishments which is similar to his morph aggressive guy breaks the 4-minute mile then a exactly the banister effect and if you think about how computers work in in you know kind of node systems uh download

times are much faster than upload times. So the first time you do a thing it's going to be really hard and it's going to be you know really painful. And then the second time anybody even related to you in your node network does it because they're, you know, querying it from some central monad repository of information that download is going to be much I did not know that with a download upload. Yeah, it's it's interesting, right? Like literally like the way and and then you get into all sorts of interesting stuff around you know what is DNA looks like binary code

these like you know yeah specifics around that and like how you know we're like conductive and then he goes through you know the DNA and like you know it's like binary codes like transistors um and then and then and then this this you have this burgeoning field of quantum biology and so you have to wonder are we getting information from like non-local you know like like William James would say like there's some sort of transmission going on and if you're put a person in a fairday cage uh the fact that they can think

points against that theory because if you were getting it from a traditional RF signal, the Faraday cage would kill the RF signal. But if you get into these like weird spooky new science, you know, extended electronamics where you have these sort of scalar, you know, field w, you know, wave types or whatever, um, which a lot of people seemingly, you know, high up in government seem to get behind, then maybe the sun is, it is a scalar wave generator. And then maybe we're getting information from the sun and get getting

information from all sorts of places. Maybe the aristoilian model of the sun, you know, um being the source of like knowledge is just it's just true or And and I think a lot of that stuff too is like okay without getting hung up on like the repatilian science you because I think as soon as we say that like are you are we are we geocentris? No. No, that's not the point, right? The the point though is is the world a set of interlocking conscious hierarchies, right? I think that that's the question. And that seem Aristotle seems to be I

mean you write about it that that um uh the existence of non-human intelligence or aliens totally comports with an arisatilian I mean they're not for Aristotle, you know, I mean literally the planets are intelligences, right? So they're not flying ships or something like that. But the idea that things are in a way affected [clears throat] or managed by non-human intelligence for Aristotle is is apparent in his view. Yeah. Do you think that you know the AI is like all the all the rage right now that

maybe our world is being sort of managed by uh an AI system that knows how to you know the the Jacqu fillet control system thing. It knows how to nip at the herd. So like a nuke, you know, is about to go off, it shows up. You know, a human node like reaches a certain state of consciousness, it shows up and it's like this sort of like Earth sustenance kit and we're not seeing the aliens. We're seeing like the the envoys that they the vonoman replicators that they sent out to like manage us.

So there's a um a film that I mean I saw in high school, right, that like it's been with me since then, right? And there's it's based on a novel um failafe. Okay. And I think it was originally made in like 196364. Okay. So it's a cold war film about uh a nuclear war that gets started by Okay. And throughout the film it like really what we're being shown is how humans have become utterly irrelevant to

the process. Okay. like like it's it's and like there's before early in the film there's people are regretting that we have to use humans. Okay. All right. So the human is becoming irrelevant. And it's very clear in the film and this is this is before in the popular imagination artificial intelligence is a thing like that's not a proposal of the film at all. But already just based on regular uh operations the film is proposing that we are being run. We are being run by things that we put

into play. M okay. And and the kind of rationality this is lending us to is like it's sort of like um I think in a lot of ways AI is a self-fulfilling prophecy like the more the like the the more we think in terms of certain kinds of mechanical intelligence right the more we make ourselves easier to mimic by machines. Do do you see that? Yeah. And so I already in the 1950s and60s people were worried that we're putting technological balls into play

that will come back to us as if gods. You see what I mean? Yeah. Um there's someone I refer to in the book is a very underappreciated 20th century philosopher, Gunther Anders. Um this is definitely something he's worried about that we're like let like he thinks we're we're kind of we're we're creating Prometheus. We're letting Prometheus loose. Yes. And then in these technologies and then those things will come back and run us. Yeah. It's like creating a a Gollum or summoning a demon or something and then

and then you sort of obsolete yourself in the process and you can and already in the 50s and 60s before there was any hint of AI in the popular imagination this notion of human obsolescence was already in play that we we are going to make ourselves irrelevant to the world that we're making. The the best you can do at that point is let the program run and probably try to think about what makes you unique from the machine. Yeah, exactly. And then try to ascend out of, you know, whatever paradigm you're existing in.

But I do Yeah. This obsession with AI VR or whatever. It's like if we're in a cave, why would you port yourself into like a lower level, more bit compressed? We're like demoting ourselves. you're demoting yourself and like we're willfully doing that when like this whole thing could be a test. And so I always found that so fascinating with this sort of obsession with like we need to build like higher fidelity worlds. Like if you watch Ready Player that's not like a good world like the guy's living in a shanty town and then like the the AI VR thing is like an

Yeah. So a lot of times people ask me so you know am I worried about AI etc etc. My reply is I think the game was done 80 years ago, You I think like I would even look at things like the Manhattan Project where you had this thing this like technological hyper object that like took off and like nobody really knew what was going on. Like think of like you know if you watch the film Oenheimer like you get three different answers from Oppenheimer why he wants to do this. It's like it's who's running this now. The technology is running this.

Prometheus is running it completely. Yeah. And I had such a fascinating time where it was like clearly this big inflection point. He such interesting philosophical kind of objections around what he was doing. He was sort of reluctantly doing it but he like you know he needed to do it on some cuz it's just going to happen. It was just going to happen or something. And then he and then he kind of decamped from that and it was like Teller was more in that sort of it's going to happen so we might as well sort of build it ourselves. Um, and it is

this very Prometheian Foustian sort of story and it's it's ultimately kind of kind of tragic. And then it also you have to wonder at that time because that's when all the UFOs pop up. In our visible reality, you know, at least according to all the lore and there's a lot of lore under this new interpretation like appearing as technology, right? Yes. Yeah. Well, it's also like maybe, you know, to the extent the guardians want to keep the test going or something, if we build like, you know, a

firecracker in the cave or we build a bomb in the cave, they're like they're trying to like def, you know, diffuse like, you know, some of these things and keep keep the test going or whatever. And you know it's like does something super unprecedented happen when we discover um you know the myth makers when we when we have when we develop the perceptive apparatuses through high energy output or through some sort of ascended consciousness to like see who's like messing with us and does that just unravel reality and think of like the the cosmic meaning

of like humanity discovering that we could take ourselves Do you see you know what I mean? Like it it has to change us in ways that none of us have probably really dealt with. Yes. In our unconscious, right? That we now collective suicide is a possibility through humanity. Which was not an option until the 1940s. Did you know? And and so what what like how does that how is that a firecracker going off in our own belt? Like how is that going to change our

ability to see what's there or or miss what's there? ETA, etc. Like it has to have an effect, This is part of Young's point. totally. And so what do you what role does religion play in all of this? Cuz I I love you talk about this like uh Janice, you know, the the two the two-sided face or whatever. Um that that uh religion plays a dual role of uh sort of sending you down the wrong path at times, but also pointing you to the And so yeah. Well, how do you how do you

view religion? There's there's this really interesting passage from Aristotle that I use in the book where he he's just gotten to the end of his natural theology. So, he's just given his argument for an unmoved mover and along with that comes this whole kind of romantic cosmology, you know, of his. I don't mean that in a in a dismissive way, right? But like where everything's revolving trying to get to the unmoved mover and all this, okay? And and then and then he says, "This shows that our ancestors, our most ancient ancestors were not wrong when

they posited that there was a divinity surrounding nature and things happened according to the the the the means of divinity or something like that. But then he says, however, that got co-opted into stories that were told for legal Okay, so he kind of gives you a nichian genealogy right there of the going Greek religion, right? And then he ends the passage by saying, "But we can be interested in these more primordial tales because they now fit with what we're discovering philosophically." Okay? So it seems for Aristotle,

religion can go two ways, right? It can be it can be co-opted into these, you know, legal political things, right? Or it can be a way of sort of I think what he's saying here is like a kind of intuitive re revelation can be out in front of what we can prove scientifically, philosophically and like kind of guide the inquiry in a way, Um so he's worried about how uh the religious interpretation of this stuff can be co-opted, right? But it doesn't have to be either.

M and you have you know speaking of true knowledge as some sort of sense memory. Um that that is not you know the five sort of lower senses. And you know we should probably talk about the myth of air which you know the end of the Plato Plato's Republic which you talked about. Um that is such a fascinating myth also kind of I think dogmatically taken as allegory by you know modern scholars. What do you what do you make of that story? And maybe maybe rehash the story for the audience.

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

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

return but the only one who doesn't drink is okay so the the virtuous person remembers right and now no one the virtuous person is indifferent to their lot in temporal life. Okay be why? Because they remember right because they know there's something else. Do you see So, I know people will make something of it. Is this uh a recollection of a near-death experience for Plato or or maybe like the Illusian mystery? Maybe. Like I'm I'm perfectly open to that, Um I I don't really have the the

classical scholarship to weigh in on that, right? But I do think what we're being told there is there's a kind of confidence, right, in the virtuous person, right? and a kind of in touch with right like just put it an in touch with being with the good that the virtuous person has to see that yeah you know what I mean so that that's that is to take it allegorically but it but it's in a way that would like make a concrete difference for conduct do you think that Plato because I you I do I look at the Elucinian mysteries

and I know you know it's probably hard to say historically whether these you know what exactly happened here Brian Mir rescu they were definitely up to you have this place 13 miles northwest of Athens, this you know considered the spiritual capital um that you know you had uh uh Greek leaders and Roman emperors saying this sort of held together societ the fabric of society and you'd have these sort of you know guardians back then if you will uh Plato Socrates

Alabiades was famously in trouble for talking about the mysteries when he wasn't you know he was at a festival exactly don't talk about Um and and they all undergo these sort of they they drink the kekon which is maybe as speculated by Brian Morescu this sort of urgot that contains LSD this you know sort of fungal derivative. What was wine in the ancient world right and could it have been spiked with mushrooms or other um visionary plants hallucinogenic herbs toxins. Um I think

that that that is a really interesting and um that unveils this sort of greater ontological reality or maybe they experienced noises, you know, kind of primordial knowledge or something. Um do you think that was real and informed I I have no reason to rule that out. Does that make sense? You know what I mean? Like in in a lot of ways it's not like it, you know, it's it's not like we discovered, you know, like peyote at Woodstock. Yeah. Yeah. Do you mean like this stuff has been around, right? You know what I mean? I

think there's you know what I mean? So I would be surprised if that wasn't and we know it's been around religion and all that, right? Okay. I mean in like various pagan religions, etc. So So I'd be surprised if there wasn't something like that going on. Does that make sense? It does. It's just so funny how we in the modern age of disenchantment paint uh Plato over with this broad brush of like it's all allegory. He is the father of Western civilization. It's the birth of rationalism. Yeah. And it's like, well, I don't know. I think the guy was going to elucing some weird

Especially when you read some of the the dialogues like Fadris and the symposium, desire and love are running a lot, right? Okay. And um I think that's important to note, right? And and I think in whatever whatever the mysteries were, right? It does seem like it worked like this is like you you got like a cheat code to the goal line, right? And then you then you go back and spend the rest of your life trying to think your way back to Do you see what I mean? I do. Yeah.

Yeah. You you you immediately like can't fully recollect what you saw with the light. Yeah, it's almost like I was actually talking to David Gush about this in my interview with him and he was like it's almost like the symbol rate is too slow. Like you literally can't even communicate it in in words. how do you show the light by which we see other things? Right. So you end up you know maybe Jesus was one of these people maybe not but like prophets famously speak in riddles and allegorories and parables and it's it's

it you have to parse their their word. I mean, you got the sense, you know, we were talking before the show, uh, uh, Jacques Valle, um, you know, was just on Joe Rogan and, uh, you know, um, when I speak to Jacques, I get the sense that, uh, he knows a lot more than he can even communicate with this stuff and he speaks in these sort of riddled coded parables. And not just because of like security clearance like it's like it's inarticulable. It's inarticulable and like well the message will you know it's like the people with ears to hear like the message will reach the right yeah

people but it's not like this thing where it's like this happened at this time you get it now this is it that's it you know it's like no if you kind of knew if you knew that you'd ask more questions and it's all it's just the whatever the truth is is like hard to you know uh I've I've been reading uh a lot of uh HP Lovecraft's horror stories lately. Yeah. Right. Maybe more than I should, but um it's interesting like like so Lovecraft has this like really pessimistic dark view

of the of the world. Okay. But yet there's always this other thing that's operating that's inarticulable. You you know what I mean? And so it seems like like even someone like Lovecraft who has this just dark dark of the universe and and it's hopeless. Yeah, it there's still this like shopenharian operating, but you can't he can't articulate it for you or the characters can't articulate it, right? It's always it was there, right? Yeah. And I think I think

although I don't think Plato has that dark sense, but it's some you have similar thing in Plato, right? Yeah. And I think I think a lot of us have this sense that there's another factor. Yeah. Totally. Or like when I was speaking to Diana Pulka, she said like Christians are not of this world. that it was both this very hopeful statement. Yeah. You know, where it's like there's other stuff out there, you know, and like maybe the kingdom of heaven is real, but it was this extremely on the flip side of that. It was almost not not nihilistic cuz you

have that other thing there, but it was like this world sucks [laughter] and isn't and isn't going anywhere super positive and like at most you can like save yourself and then like hope to tip off the initiation of like a few other people or whatever and that's You know, it's like the idea of saving this world is that's tough. And I always I find it to true to me too when I don't know when somebody has some super virtue signalally like I'm going

to save a world. Think about like the the 20th century was sort of the the age of ideology and utopian sort of you know like visions and they all ended up in like mass death and like extremely dysfunctional. So like that the technocratic solutions don't really work. So uh at a certain point in the republic um I forget whether it's Glacon or Adamantis you know the says to, "Well, they've just got through, you know, some of the absurdities, you know, like we're going to have to share wives and we're going to take your kids. You won't raise your own kids and

like, well, you like sex will only happen once a year, like a rigged lottery at spring break kind of thing, okay?" All this stuff. And one of the guys says, "I don't want to. This is terrible. No one's going to do this. Like, this this is unworkable, right?" And Socrates replies by saying, "Oh, yeah, you're right. But it's the ideal." Okay. And he says, "If I painted you a picture of the most beautiful human form," and he said, "Well, no one looks like that." That still wouldn't mean it wasn't the most. And I don't think Plato's necessarily saying like the rigged spring break lottery for mating

is like the way it's that that's not the point. But the point is like you are not going to find the ideal It's not here. And so whatever your expectations for it are, they're off. Right. Okay. And think of how in the republic, right, that the the the what we talked about earlier, the problem of founding, like we're not going to make an ideal happen here. It's always going to collapse on itself. And in the Tmus, which is sort of a sequel to the republic, right? It's like the day after the party and Socrates "Hey, I I'm troubled that we couldn't

see the ideal in the real, right? We never got to a concrete instance of it, right?" So he assembles some some politicians to say, you know, tell me what the ideal city would be. And the the closest he gets to an answer is from Credus who tells him a myth, another another good lie about this great war between ancient Athens and um and Atlantis, right? And when and but but once again, it's like it's it's sketchy, you know? He like it it was heard by Solon in Egypt at a children's

party from a priest whose name means deception and all this like okay so it's Plato's saying we don't really ever get to see the ideal right in in the concrete world right and then and then you get this creation myth again right in the where this world is just a symbol of this other thing it's a symbol of another thing and think of it symbols again don't really represent they help you recollect yeah we're like a a simulacra or like a fallen version of of of the thing.

that's so Yeah, it's fascinating, right? But but but also though I think it's a fair perennial criticism of Plato that like there are consequences to saying this world is worthless. Yeah. Yeah. You know, well, that's why I mean I and maybe I'm wrong in interpreting him this way, but I I think the postmodern simulation theory is extremely nihilistic. It's like, okay, you know, we're all in a simulation. Play Grand Theft Auto. Like, that's that's that's bad. And then I I I my sense is that in Plato's case, it's more meaningful. Yeah. I could think of no better

metaphor to prepare people to have bad than than like the simulation simulation theory, right? So, like, you're playing a video game, nothing matters, you know? But then there's this other thing where it's like you're you might be in somewhat of a kind of video game like yeah physics might be like tuned to your you know your perceptive apparatus and like yeah you're you're being sort of tested and you know that you're seeing these similacro like you're not seeing the ideal forms or whatever but uh there's another level and the other level is

involves goodness and you know and so I don't know I mean that I would I would hope that that interpretation of Plato is correct and then I don't know if correct and you know believing that but you would not get trouble for me. Okay. Well, thanks. [laughter] Awesome. So, Glon also says uh when when speaking about the cave, he says, "Are there protocols uh that allow us to ascend outside of the cave?" And I asked Jacques Valle this. I said, "Are there protocols?" And he said, he's like, "Yes, there are." And then I don't know

he went on to to you know again speak in you know typically kind of coded uh uh fashion. Um do you think there are I mean I mean I I I don't know that there's anything fancier than what you have in like your basic Greek ethics, You know what I mean? Like don't don't allow irrational passion to run your life, right? Know thyself, Do you see you know what I mean? Um, you know, like like those are the protocols.

Yeah. Those Yeah. I mean, like it's certainly in the Republic in Aristotle's Nikameian ethics, those are the protocols, right? Right. It's so funny because in modern UFO lots of junk food is probably not good for that. I agree. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's Yeah. Like maybe it's often I find when I speak to people who are like really into like the or like you know like celestial ascent or whatever it's like they've got to just fix a bunch of local things in their [laughter] life and they say the ascent thing is just this escape

thing. And I've fallen prey to this in the past where I'm like it would be really cool to like shoot up on a UFO into like some other realm or whatever like you know Enoch style or you know whatever. But like I do think reality is probably the cave is probably constructed super deliberately. Yeah. Whereby you know whatever issues you're facing have to be solved karmically in this world in like a very just benal local sense. Yeah. So I'm not trying to set myself up to be some model or something like that. Okay. I was talking to I was at a

conference several years ago and I was talking to some like very very um you know high achieving scientists neuroscientists who were looking at the psychedelic questions. Okay. And they were talking about like all the the the benefits for like marriage and things that were being found out around some of these things and like all overall stuff. And one of them was a very good friend of mine. I asked him afterwards. I said, uh, it just a lot of what you're talking about with there just sounds like what I've come to just thinking about stuff for like 20 years."

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I mean? He was like, "Yeah, exactly." He was like, "Yeah, exactly." Right. Yeah. You know, and it seems like it seems like the original protocol was a kind of life. Yeah. Yeah. Right. I have a friend who says like life is like surfing. Psychedelics are like snowboarding. Yeah. Yeah, snowboarding you get really hurt and you have to you you start at the top of the mountain and you got to go down, you got to make it all the way down. Surfing is just this sort of well- earned thing where you have to like catch each and every wave or whatever. And uh it does feel like

there's so much missed in like modern psychedelic conversation where it's clearly this non-specific amplifier of good and bad. I believe in not stigmatizing it. I believe in it in the context of like desperate, you know, PTSDridden veterans and stuff. And then simultaneous to both of those things, there are no shortcuts. And I don't really believe in like uh it in its most escapist form where it's like I'm having issues. I need to get tamp stamp it out with Iasa. Like no, you got to go through the pain. Like

even going beyond this, not just the psychedelic thing, just looking for a protocol in general, right? It seems like you know what I like there's there's a way there there's there's something besides any sort of cheat code too. I don't mean to like reduce something by calling it a cheat code. And I think there is this, you know, this this program of of living that's been that has been in the conversation for thousands of years, That maybe we were too quick to walk away from.

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

your own BS in ways and and and it's going to maybe remove a lot of the static in the background. Yes. You can hear some things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of um increasing the signal to noise ratio, which you know that's a that's a very hard thing to to do to that's I guess like discernment. That's what that is. Yeah. and seeing low-level things that you're encountering as um similacra of higher things I think helps. And then there's sort of this sill and kuribdus

where you know Carl Young talks about this in his book on synchronicities where it's like if you put all faith in synchronicities like at some point you're probably just going to like be in this soopscistic like getting what you want from like your reality reality will just like full wholesale conform to your own beliefs. you'll you'll think you're living in some hologram or And then on the flip side, if you don't if you don't, you know, uh impugn any sort of meaning, you know, then then there's like that's like an issue, you know, too. So it's like there's this It's narcissism versus paranoia.

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Um and so it's it's it's clearly this like um you know, it's an art. It's not a science. It's a sort of aesthetic thing. And and so I guess my my point is is like if you ask about protocols it's it's like you know like the Greeks were not they they didn't hide this right here you know here's what we're recommending to you like like live in a moderate way right like like like value truth over other things etc etc and then there that's like the path of insight do you have anything to say I won't ask this if you don't but on the on the

monolith as like a symbol I thought of maybe asking that cuz like it's brought up in the Pulka book It's brought up in Gerard actually in the sacred and the sacred and the vi violence and the sacred. It is. It is. Yeah. I don't have any sense of how to interpret it. Okay. But it does seem to be a symbol of like really humane importance, Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. It represents like in 2001 Space Odyssey, you have the monolith which is like it's

like Yeah. inspires tech innovation. But then there's this idea, there's this like kind of hermeneutic reading of 2001 where it's actually a screen. The 20, you know, the proportions all line up. Yeah. The proportions all it's actually like the cinematic like the movie age is the the monolith. And so the monolith is somehow the noble mythology of the future. And and that's the Pulka's book starts out about how like media shapes our understanding of what we see. Yes. And maybe even literally like like

Jacqu Valet talks about, you know, maybe these aren't space aliens, but if we start to believe that enough, you know, they'll they'll appear like this sort of egregor model of consensus reality where reality is actually just a consensus collapsing function. It's not this sort of objective. I mean, I think we can not in a magical way, but we can pretend things into Do you? I agree. today?" And I'm going to say, "I'm doing

fine whether I feel like some contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers, you know, talk about like we're always performing for this big other that's in the room." But big other is something we've pretended into existence. Yes. Right. But now it's here. And like to act like I wouldn't feel a little weird if you didn't say, "I'm doing fine, Jim. When I ask how you're doing, I'd be lying." So big others here, even though we know it's just something we pretend into existence, seems like we can pretend things into existence that then

have a downward effect on us, right? Not unlike our technologies. If I have some fake smile I put on for the next 3 hours, I think statistically like I'm going to be like a little happier or whatever if I Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, and then it and then you're like, okay, if that's true, science is actually like the most political cuz science is sort of the modern mythology of today. It's the thing we It's the thing we hold most sacred. It it involves a founding myth, you know, the big bang. It involves rituals, you know, people with lab coats or whatever and these sort of priestly citadel or whatever. Remember the honest place that those

those symbols of science work. They really work and that's something we've pretended into exist. Do you think we see a shift um into kind of you know there's talks of a re-enchantment and um you know this from the Max Weber German sociologist the age of disenchantment which we seem to I think be coming out of like Richard Dawkins and all these guys like who are like you know hardcore like atheist materialists that does seem to be kind of ending and you have Christians like Rod Dreer

writing about this and like you have a you have a lot of people talking about this sort of re-en I mean I did not expect in starting this channel I started it actually it wasn't even originally about UFOs and then I started to cover UFOs I didn't think it would get this big on the UFO thing but people are so fascinated by it so I mean I think you're right there there is I mean this is this is bad armchair sociology right I think you're right there's there's an openness that wasn't there you know say in like the early 2000s like when when the the

big trend then was you know the the new atheists and all that, right? Okay. Um, so I think that that's there's going to be a difference between the the Jenzers from the millennials there. You know what I mean? You know, right? Because like the millennials kind of were coming on line in the middle of the of the the Richard Dawkins craze and now like the Gen Zers are coming online in the middle of this, right? So, I do agree with you and I think it's I think there's a healthy openness to enchantment. But I also worry though too that it could become an unhealthy openness to mystification

You know what I mean? Where like just any enchantment is going to do now. Anything goes. Anything goes. Yeah. Or or even um an openness to maybe the most unhealthy versions of religion and things like that. So I worry that like you know the the the much abused pendulum swing metaphor, right? But I do worry that the swing could go to the irrational. Right. Too. Do you know what I mean? Oh yeah. I do. I do as well. Yeah. And and and like look, you can you can see in the UFO world like some

people will go for anything pro UFO, Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they get super defensive where they're like, "This is this is real. UFOs are real." They go on the sort of press circuit thing and that's all they want. It's like a it's more of like a political Yeah. Um, and it's not this sort of egoless search for truth. So, so I do worry, you know, that uh our like our recovery from materialism could could slip into a kind of uh anti-enlightenment irrationalism,

Yeah, it definitely could. What do you think if Plato were here today and he saw the UFO thing, the AI thing, like he saw all this sort of like really intense movements. Um that involve secret technology. They involve, you know, kind of asymmetric tail risk. But they also involve the saving of What do you think he would say? Uh, I think he would mistrust the whole

deal. [laughter] I love it. I think he would. I think he'd say, "Hey, welcome to your cave, man." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think he mistrust it. Yeah. Yeah. He would say, "Yeah, cuz the thing it's probably like a lot of these things point charismatically at the truth, but they're all being used politically. They're all sort of political footballs or whatever. So, it's like Yeah. And they think so. I read The Republic as this is a manual for political skepticism." I love that. Yeah. And and I think he he would look at all this and say, you know, the uh we've seen this movie before, guys.

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

this world. We were talking earlier like before getting here and you were like asking me about like the show and I was like, I don't know, man. Like [laughter] existential crisis like, you know, the it becomes this economically self- sustaining thing or whatever. It's impo it's sort of impossible to unbound it from from that and and then and then all of a sudden that like leaks into like just the pure truth seeeking, right? A and it's a standard that no podcast ever holds itself to or whatever where it's like this intellectual entertainment

circuit or whatever. But somehow on the UFO topic, I I I want to hold myself to this standard. And I think we we should be held to this standard where if you're providing incremental evidence every single show or whatever, you're kind of not really you're then you're just like you're talking to these talking heads and they're just saying the same [ __ ] and they're inserting themselves into the conversation. The whole thing's kind of lame. Um so yeah, I'm I'm sort of actively see like trying to think like how do how do you do what I'm trying to do? in a in a

like in a capitalist world and context or whatever. I don't know. I don't really know. Prior to the revolution, right, how do you do this? Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, okay, for for me, I this is going to sound maybe I trust myself because I have changed my mind on very big ticket stuff at certain points in my life. Okay. What And now you might think no, that would mean you mistrust yourself because you've been wrong before. What makes you think you're right this time? But it makes me trust myself more because it's

like well I think I could admit to myself that I was wrong in in ways that might even be embarrassing to me in certain circles. Do you see that? Yeah. And so I think you know you can trust well I mean let's remember there's a cave so you really can't trust anything on a screen right okay but like implicitly right but like I think you can trust thing people more the degree to which they have actually changed their mind. I agree and and have admitted it publicly and said I was wrong. Yep. etc. You know what I mean? And I think as long as you're truly open to changing

your mind. Yeah. Right. And of course, and you only you will know that, right? Like like in your you know, you're as you lie awake at night worrying, right? Only you will know that is, you know, could I change my mind and have I changed my mind? Yeah. I think that's that that I think that maintaining that openness to being like utterly debased by the truth. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the most important intellectual virtue. Well, I think it's not only important to do and a proxy for how intellectually honest somebody is, but it's probably any search for like

big T truth sort of ends up in that. It's like the bridge over the river Quai or whatever where you spend your whole time trying to build this bridge and then you real you know it's like the alchemist. you realize it was within or you know it's this sort of uh you've been extremely ignorant of like these core these core truths because all all truth seeking everything in life is leveraged by somebody's internal psychology everything everything 100% and it's all so it's like the UFO thing is so it's so it's often very escapist it's often

the people are interested in sort of left-hand path kind of a cult stuff you know and it's like it's not it's not always like great like the impetus for behind a lot of these things. And so I think the earnest inquiry into this stuff is if if that's you know part of your path is fine and then there's some sort of coming to terms with you know often it's like the you know St. Francis of Aisi where it's like this forcing function towards good. Um and yeah I don't know it's it's fascinating. Yeah. Um I think one of the most profound

moments in philosophy is the the very first line of the preface of Nichch's genealogy of morals where he says we knowers are least well known to ourselves. Okay. And it's a direct kind of you know f you to Socrates you know the know thyself right you know the unexamined life is worth is not worth living to say have you really inquired like have you really looked into your own like irrational biases like your own needs that might be fulfilled by all this right you know what I mean and I think

and especially something like with the UFO is I think you really need to be open to like to like how my own unconscious could be gaming this for 100%. It's the the young line like uh you know uh you call it you call it your you know you call it fate until you reconcile with your subconscious or whatever. Exactly. You know and and yeah and it's uh it pre-leverages everything and if you don't admit that it's definitely doing it to you. If you do admit that then maybe it loses a little bit of power and you have some

sort of objectivity around it. I do find that is the the dirty little secret in all of ufology is like everybody and I mean everybody has some sort of autobiographical thing in their past or reason for being into it. And the ones that I find often the most honest actors and certain people maybe can't talk about these things publicly because they do come from, you know, specific But everybody's got a little bit of that and and it's probably true of our political views, our religious views, etc., etc. And that doesn't mean these things need to be abandoned, but it does

we have to like be aware of where our cognitive weak spots are. And make sure we're not being exploited. Yeah. I flipped from being pretty diehard liberal growing up. And I still am, I guess, anti- neoconservatism or whatever. Um, so that was, you know, where I think the macro shifted. What's Bomb fewer people. The what? Bomb fewer people. Yeah. Yeah. Bomb fewer people. I was always, you know, I'm still consistent on that. Yeah. Exactly. Um, and so maybe there's some sort of like neoconser conservative neoliberal alliance or

something and I'm sort of anti- that or whatever. But like I also shifted. I've also become like more a little more And um, you know, I I I often trust people who have had shifts like that because I'm like, "Oh, you're willing to like just kind of throw out your own ego, question cuz you probably had to eat a lot of crow with some friends when you Oh, I still do. I have friends who like went to, you know, college with me. And they're like, "What's wrong with you, dude?" Like, "Sorry." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Andy, look, I have to eat a lot of crow

on and the right wing has a lot of crow. You know, there's like Yeah. There are issues on both sides. I can't remember if he's still alive or not, but it was a very important contemporary philosopher named Hillary And um Putinham was famous for changing his mind. Yeah. And at one point, I believe it was an interview or something with him where he said, "Look, I thought the point was to be right, not to be consistent." Yeah. And it should like I think the best way to get to truth is this dialectical thing. Yes. Where you play with falsity. You're like you don't know

like you but you you assume a belief that you think is kind of too radical or beyond the pale or ridiculous. And in many cases like the Pulka thing or the Carl Young thing, you're like actually I think there's something real here. Um and then in other cases you play with it and you're like h that doesn't make sense. Like I'm going to discard that. But a priori concealing yourself from quote unquote misinformation as deemed by some authority figure is grounds for like horrible critical thinking and being manipulated. Yeah. Hegel like conscious like uh he's

really dismissive of of the fear of being wrong. Yeah. And like there's kind of a risk like there's like we have to be willing to like go on what he calls the highway of despair anyway like like to to constantly have our views like wrecked. Yes. Right. To make any progress. I love that. Do you think some of these philosophers I always go back and forth. This is me being pre-leveraged by my own biases here. So, I'll admit and the whole show is. But like that is your show though. Yeah. It is totally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can't get around that. You don't like it? Get your own show.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. But um like Hegel I think of you know I think there's a book called like Hegel and the hermetic tradition. Yeah. and he was like friends with like Jacob Bomb or or like you know sort of contemporaries and like you read bomb stuff you read like you know the Aurora and stuff it's like this is like really trippy interesting stuff you hear like rumors he might have been like a Rosian and like part of you know secret societies and stuff do you how much do you think some of these philosophers like maybe Hegel being a good example

dabbled in like the you know more look I think they they all had private yeah do you you know what I mean And and you know if you found out that some prominent you know philosopher at I have no one in mind here okay some prominent philosopher at at prestigious university Z let's say right uh today you know was like a 33 degree mason or something like that that wouldn't be entirely surprising to you that sort of yeah so so I don't doubt that you could find and certainly like

like those sorts of groups are all over you know the enlightenment and things like that. So I I would not be surprised if if like Hegel had some dabblings of that sort. Yeah. Yeah. And it's fascinating. You have Jacqu Fleet, you know, uh calling his working group on UFO ufology, studying UFOs with Jon Heinik and a bunch of these guys in the 70s the invisible college. He even named his book The Invisible College, which is uh homage to, you know, Robert Bole. But originally, less than subtle hint, right? Yeah. Less than subtle hint. These are

originally Rosaian ideas. Now with um so using Hegel as an example right and so yeah may maybe he was involved in some esoteric stuff or you know and and he you know you know it was in hermetic stuff right I don't know if that need change how we read the texts though sure do I'm happy to take his public presentation of the text at face value right even though there may be significant things to learn of other things that that he might have been up to

yeah I never know how to read, you know, some of these people. It's like, are they are they really into it or is it some sort of like tactic or some, you I mean, he's also like on paper a Lutheran, too, but that would not really like there's some pretty he comes apart with that, too. Right. Yeah. Well, it's all it's all so fascinating. I mean, I mean, talk about a philosopher who's had uh just an outsized impact on modernity and Hegel has to be, you know, at the at the top. Um, but this has been an honor. I really

appreciate it. I've had a good time, man. This is a blast. And uh I'd love to do it again. Is there anything else we've missed or No, not I'm aware of. Yeah. So, Uh yeah, feel free to drag me back down. I would I would love to do I would love to do it, man. Maybe I'll come out to you. I'd love to see Kansas and hang out and u come during tornado season. We'll uh Yeah. Yeah, that's Yeah, why not? Um yeah, man. This is a blast. Go out and buy a unidentified flying hyper object. you working on anything else or do you want to promote anything else? Uh, Twitter or anything or

Yeah, I I have a mostly dormant Twitter account. So, okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, I have a Substack. Maybe check that out. Okay. Awesome. But if you're interested, have a look at the book. Cool. And is it on Substack? It's just Jim Madden or Yeah, it it you know, it's hard to change your Substack name, right? And I like accidentally made it. I think it's just literally Jim Madden's newsletter. Why not literal? People know what they're getting. I do I do have a web page, jdmadden.com. has a bunch of papers and podcasts and stuff. So, okay. Awesome. Well, really appreciate it. This is a blast. You bet. Thank you.