James Madden: Earth is Being Simulated by Non-Human Intelligence

Are UFOs matrix-shaping machines responsible for simulating reality itself? Do they exist outside the “cave” of our epistemological filters? Philosopher James Madden argues that the UFO mystery reveals a deeper truth: humanity is trapped inside a kind of Plato’s Cave, manipulated by “guardian” forces (possibly non-human) that use belief, disinformation, and performance to shape our reality. Drawing on Plato, Heidegger and Cold War psyops, Madden shows how the phenomenon points to a deeper truth unfathomable to those inside the cave but available to those seeking the light. House of Atlas: Get 15% off The House of Atlas Razor Kit + Before and After Set with the code [JESSE] at https://houseofatlas.com/JESSE #houseofatlaspod The Perfect Jeans: F*%k your khakis and get The Perfect Jean 15% off with the code [JESSE15] at theperfectjean.nyc/JESSE15 #theperfectjeanpod Qualia: Experience the science of feeling younger—go to https://qualialife.com/JESSE for up to 50% off your purchase and use code JESSE for an additional 15%. -------------------------- ***JOIN OUR WHOP (Exclusive Episodes & Group Calls) ➤ https://whop.com/jessemichels ***Become a Member of American Alchemy: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuG2KzrIMe3qoNcuDVpwnXw/join -------------------------- Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 02:08 Plato and the Philosophy of UFOs 05:47 Understanding Plato's Republic 08:18 The Allegory of the Cave 12:07 The Nature of Enlightenment 15:49 The Role of Technology 16:22 UFOs and Human Perception 30:11 The Intersection of UFOs and Philosophy 43:57 The Limits of Human Cognition 58:00 Technology and Human Identity 1:00:59 Exploring the Nature of UFOs 1:01:40 Conspiracy Theories and Government Disclosure 1:05:48 Placebo Effects and Credentialism 1:07:50 Testimony and Believability Spectrum 1:11:24 Disclosure and Public Skepticism 1:17:06 Consciousness and Reality 1:25:51 The Role of AI and Technology 1:32:56 The Myth of Er and Virtue 1:37:16 Language and Communication Challenges 1:42:39 Protocols for Ascension 1:50:37 The Politics of Science 1:55:33 Truth Seeking in a Complex World 2:00:47 The Unconscious and UFOlogy 2:03:38 The Challenge of Trust and Change 2:06:13 Philosophy and Esotericism -------------------------- SPOTIFY ➤ https://tinyurl.com/jessemichelsspotify INSTAGRAM ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichelsofficial TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:57Speaker 02

  Does it seem at all plausible to me that there could be something, even in our nearly empirical reality, that humans have just systematically missed for our entire history?

• 1:12Jesse Michels?

  I am here with Dr. Jim Madden. You're a professor of philosophy who has dared to reconcile some ancient philosophy with UFOs. I think a lot of people have heard of Plato's Republic, or the cave analogy, or the myth of herb, but they don't really have a ton of context as to who Plato was, why he did what he did.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  I think you would have to get away from thinking what we're being proposed here is actually Plato's political program. And there's something else going on here.

• 1:45Jesse Michels?

  If there's a push and a pull outside of the cave or whatever, is the UFO some sort of pulling? Technology because you do talk about this where it's this thing that it busts all of your priors.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it would seem there has to be somebody outside of the cave doing this like there has somebody has to from the perspective enlightenment be pulling us through.

• 2:07Jesse Michels?

  The light itself also feels like this kind of it's like an inflection point.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:11Jesse Michels?

  Where it could either sort of eviscerate us or it could kind of save us. You know, it's like, does something super unprecedented happen when we discover?

• 2:21Jesse Michels?

  You know, the myth makers, when we when we 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.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:32Jesse Michels?

  And does that just unravel reality?

• 2:56Jesse Michels?

  I am here with Dr. Jim Madden and it's an absolute honor to have you. I've been kind of mulling over the ideas in your book for a while now. You're a professor of philosophy who has dared to reconcile some ancient philosophy. You know, Plato, Aristotle, even up until today, you know, more more modern Nietzsche, Heidegger, with UFOs. And I think that is a very noble effort and you've done it in a very brilliant way in this great book, Unidentified Flying Hyper-Object, which I recommend everybody go out and read. And so I want to start kind of at a super baseline level.

• 3:40Jesse Michels?

  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 Ur, but they don't really have a ton of context as to who Plato was, why he did what he did. So why don't we just start at kind of ground zero? Who is Plato and why did he write the Republic?

• 4:00Speaker 02

  Sure. Well, first, thanks for having me. It's a real honor to be here.

• 4:03Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  I appreciate it. I think the only thing that's really surprised me, oh, I should say what surprised me the most about this whole process of getting UFO and bringing philosophy into it is that no one had done it before in this way. So that was surprising to me, but. Um, okay. So who is Plato? So obviously, you know, probably most will 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 an aristocratic, you know, member of Athenian society, you know,

• 4:47Speaker 02

  uh, in the period kind of coming out of the Peloponnesian War. Um, it's a time of like great political strife, you know, so Socrates himself was, was 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, because he was the most accomplished wrestler of his generation, apparently.

• 5:19Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, in Athens, yeah. And, um, yeah, there's a

• 5:23Jesse Michels?

  You're maintaining that tradition today, by the way.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  I'm doing my best, yeah, I'm doing my best.

• 5:26Jesse Michels?

  Jiu-Jitsu, uh, master.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  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 a kind of a small, this is an anachronistic, 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 that's, that's not in a city, which is interesting. And we know, um, about when Plato is setting it, because it begins by referring to a certain religious festival that classical scholars can date when that festival likely happened. So we know it's set at a time when Plato would have been like a little kid. Okay. So he obviously was not there, right? So probably these conversations didn't happen, right?

• 6:14Speaker 02

  But the characters are obviously Socrates and two other characters are Glaucon and Adamantus, who were Plato's half-brothers. And there's another character, Thrasymachus, who's sort of a foil to those three in the dialogue. And I'm not sure if I'm getting this exactly right, but my understanding is, none of those people are alive by the time Plato writes this, and none of them died natural deaths. Okay, so it, there's, they're, they're actually on separate sides of this struggle. Okay, so like Thrasymachus, my understanding was on the other side of this post-Peloponnesian war political struggle from Plato's family. Okay, so it's interesting,

• 6:56Speaker 02

  what Plato's depicting for us is this moment where everybody was kind of together, behaving civilly for the last time. Okay, and then it's all gonna fall apart politically after that. Okay, which I think is important for how we understand this book and whether or not it's like proposing to us an optimistic or pessimistic view of things, right? Okay. So the dialogue then begins with Socrates and the guys are here for this religious festival and they're, they're invited to a party. And, you know, there's gonna be torch races and it's gonna be a big deal. And there's an older guy there who, you know, they're kidding him about being old and isn't it terrible

• 7:39Speaker 02

  getting old? And he's like, well, no, because I don't have to worry about all the pressures for sex and all this stuff anymore. And they're like, yeah, but you're gonna 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 Platonic dialogues, is the authority figures always fail to actually deliver what they're claiming. Okay, but I think it's interesting.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  That Plato's Republic, the actual question that initiates the dialogue is the question of death. Okay, which then occasions the question of justice. Okay, so I think we think of the dialogue. If we've read it is being a question about what is justice, but that's the secondary question. Like, that's something we're answering to address the question of death. And do note that the book ends with a myth about death. Okay, so it's bookended, as it were, with life and death, okay? Or with two stories about death. So for my money, if you ask me, what's Republic about? It's really about death. Okay, and in the human condition and facing death. All right.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  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 really vehement debate between Socrates and Thersymachus. Eventually, Thersymachus has had enough and leaves. And then Adamantus and Glaucon take up his position as like devil advocates. And they debate with Socrates what justice is. They decide that deciding what justice is for we as human individuals, right? Is too difficult, so they switch it to a political story. Okay? So what would justice be in the city? All right, but always with the idea that, once again, like, we're trying to find out what would it be just as individuals? So we can then figure out whether or not we have anything to fear in death.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:44Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, because it's, I feel like it's thought of as this, what is the ideal state? Especially vis a vis, maybe, you know, Socrates's death, where, you know, Athens as a democracy sort of turns on him. He ends up drinking the hemlock. And then it's like, okay, if that doesn't work, you know, how can we, in some sort of peripatetic way, figure out through dialogue what the ideal state is? But you're saying that it actually maybe has more to just do with death. And like this really important metaphysical question of what happens when you die.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  Now, once, this is probably controversial, and of course, everything in academic philosophy is controversial, right? So you could find bright people, brighter people than. That I am who agree with me and you could find brighter people than I am who would disagree with me. That's always a problem. Yeah.

• 10:27Jesse Michels?

  I I agree. I also think we are probably over indexed on taking everything allegorically and not literally. And so I'm I'm more sympathetic to the Plato literalists, but you know, that's that's my own. I'm allowed to do that because I'm a I'm a dilettante.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. I envy you being dilettante. Okay, so so I and there's very interesting things that go on in the book. So basically, we're told the only just state would be one that had a philosopher as a ruler. Right? So ultimately, the famous philosopher king. Okay. But it also like Plato says early on that any state that occurs naturally is going to fall apart. Due to greed and injustice and and this. Okay, so. So as you think of like any natural city is not run by a philosopher. Okay, and we get we get a story of how you would cultivate philosophers sufficient to run a city.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  But no, you'd have to have a good city first to have those 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.

• 11:45Jesse Michels?

  Just end up in this sort of tautological loop or something.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, you end up in a loop. Okay, so you so I think I mentioned that because I think you have to get away from thinking what we're being proposed here is actually Plato's 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, the philosopher does go back 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. 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,

• 12:33Speaker 02

  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 situation, the philosopher really should not return. It would be a futile effort. Yeah.

• 13:04Jesse Michels?

  Fascinating. Yeah. And so just what is the cave at a baseline for the average person?

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Okay, so at a certain point in the dialogue, the question of how we would educate a philosopher comes up. Okay. And basically, the cave is Plato's way of explaining what the education of the philosopher would be like. Okay. So that's important to see. Like, that's, that's where it's proposed. And in, in the analogy that he, 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?

• 13:55Speaker 02

  There's no ability to separate yourself

• 13:58Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  from this, right? So it would be what we would call today a consensus reality.

• 14:02Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Right? Yeah. And now Plato never explains this, but voila, somebody gets loose. Okay, it's interesting. We never get an explanation of how that initial liberation would happen. Okay. And that person is able to turn and look away. It's a very important thing that Plato emphasizes is that person looks away from the wall and can see back and see that what's really going on is there's, there's a wall behind them and there's people behind it with puppets on sticks. And there's a fire casting light on the, on to the wall, right? So they, what the people see on the wall. Is not entirely wrong, right? The shadows are right-ish, but they're not fully right.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  Okay. And so this newly liberated person sees that, right? And then goes through a process of maybe even literally clawing his way out of the cave. It's a difficult, arduous process, right? And, 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. 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 didn't 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?

• 15:27Speaker 02

  And he crawls his way out of the cave and eventually, you know, can get out and it's very difficult. So he has to leave and come back a little bit, you know? It's very difficult to get out of the cave and see in the life for the first time. And eventually he worked his way up to glimpsing the sun. Okay. Glimpsing what Plato elsewhere calls the good, right? But he can only glimpse it, right, right? And so then he returns to the cave and of course, in returning to the cave, the light has changed again. And he stumbles around as if he's blind. So he looks like a fool, right? He presses people that there's, there's more of the world, what you're seeing is an illusion, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, famously it ends badly for him, just as, and for Socrates very badly. Yeah.

• 16:10Jesse Michels?

  And it's, there seems to be sort of push and pull, like he's, this person is ascending out of the cave on their own sort of volition, but they're also being sort of dragged. Is that, is that right?

• 16:21Speaker 02

  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. It's really, you could, you can make a case, the book is a philosophy of education. Right, it's what, what, what should our ruling elite be like? Like, how should they be educated, right? And, and it's, and he, the one thing Plato would say is you cannot just let nature take its course this way. Right? Like, people are not disposed to, to take themselves out of illusion, right? They're, they're disposed to stay in illusion, right? So someone has to be pulling, right? Yeah.

• 16:57Jesse Michels?

  So is this-

• 16:58Speaker 02

  And which is a problem, I think, for the book.

• 16:59Jesse Michels?

  Is the, is the implication that the guardians or the puppeteers?

• 17:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:04Jesse Michels?

  Are they outside of the cave or are they in the cave? Or, yeah, where do they sort of exist?

• 17:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:10Jesse Michels?

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• 18:39Jesse Michels?

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• 18:59Speaker 02

  Let me give you a spooky answer to that.

• 19:00Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  All right, so- At a certain point in the Republic,

• 19:06Speaker 02

  Plato has Socrates and the fellows arrive this conclusion that the guardians will have to be told, in some translations, good lies about the afterlife. Okay. Meaning like they have to be told stories that will, will like, let them see that this is going to be a reward for a certain type of behavior. That's like the best of the state, right? Okay. And the book ends with a myth about the afterlife. Okay. So what do we get? We get a good lie about the afterlife. Okay, now my read on that is what Plato is doing is he's saying, look, I just dragged you through the same educative process that I was outlining in the book. Right? Do you see what I mean? So like, it's like,

• 19:52Speaker 02

  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?

• 20:01Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  The whole book, I think, tricks you into following that very process.

• 20:05Jesse Michels?

  And the guardians, so the guardians themselves are told a lie and then they sort of purvey the lie as well.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:11Jesse Michels?

  They transmit the lie. That's fascinating.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  In their training, he says they would have to be told, some, some translations call it a good myth. Some translate, I like this because I'm, I'm a contrarian, call it a good lie.

• 20:21Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Right?

• 20:22Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Uh, but yeah, everyone has to be lied to in, in this process. Yeah.

• 20:28Jesse Michels?

  And the guardians, uh, the implication there is they're guardians of this ideal, uh, city-state. Is that, is that correct? Okay. And then do we have any understanding of who is telling them this sort of noble mythology?

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, 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 such, right? So how you could ever get this off the ground? Doesn't seem to be within like a legitimate human possibility for Plato.

• 20:59Jesse Michels?

  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?

• 21:10Speaker 02

  Well, it was, it was certainly a Greek, you know, religious festival, right? So yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 21:16Jesse Michels?

  And then, and then there's a, you know, the, the, the, that's like on the one hand. And then on the other hand, it's like, this is all true. This is like a descriptor of ontological truth and reality. And I guess where do you fall on that, on that spectrum?

• 21:30Speaker 02

  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 have to tell some goodness 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 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.

• 22:00Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  I think a lot of it's a kind of a test. Like, do you get it?

• 22:03Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:04Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  Okay. But I also think he's perfectly serious about some of the things in that book.

• 22:08Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Okay. So for instance, at the, the, the concluding myth, the myth of Ur, I don't take that as a serious speculation on his part of what the afterlife is like, or something like that. Okay.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  And it's interesting because at the end of the myth, uh, Ur, this is getting in the weeds, but people can go read the book, but, um, at the end of the myth, Ur goes back to temporal life. But unlike everyone else, he's granted memory of where he's been. Okay. And Plato throughout his writings has Socrates defend the notion that all knowledge is actually recollection of something that we already had. Okay. And so I think what, what you're getting here then is this suggestion that like, Our relationship to the ultimate truth is going to be more like memory than it is something like a direct discovery.

• 23:03Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:04Jesse Michels?

  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 totally, because he, I mean, you could say that, you know, it's all mythology or whatever. When it comes to him even saying that, but then in the, in the book of 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, a knowledge of geometry was somehow not only emphasized, but almost like a litmus test for like admission.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  So we could teach anybody this if we just reminded them the right way.

• 23:46Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  Like a, something that Plato does in the Phaedo, or he has Socrates, he has Socrates say in the Phaedo, which interestingly Plato goes out of his way to say he wasn't there.

• 23:57Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  But for the, the conversation of Phaedo, he oddly distances himself from it, which is a shame. But he, um, there, you know, the example is, is like, you have a lover who played the harp. Now the harp doesn't resemble them at all, but the harp will remind you of them.

• 24:14Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  So like, I think what Plato was 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.

• 24:28Jesse Michels?

  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 looks like an inflection point.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 24:39Jesse Michels?

  Where it could, uh, either sort of eviscerate us or it could kind of save us.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:43Jesse Michels?

  And I think about technology now, and it has that sort of, you know, dual, kind of inflecting, you know, um, mechanism where AI, for example, you know, I, 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 pericetizing 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 issues with the way that, you know,

• 25:26Jesse Michels?

  the doctrine, the indoctrinated history has been told or whatever, you can now do that because you have the access to all of the information kind of at your fingertips. So enlightenment is also closer than ever.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, but there's like that two edged sword, like very thick, like you and I, no internet, Jim and Jesse never meet.

• 25:43Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm. True.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Jesse never reads Jim's book. Jim never like gets enlightened by your podcast, right?

• 25:48Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, totally.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  But at the same time, as like I, I think we're also being simultaneously undone.

• 25:54Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  At that very same medium.

• 25:56Jesse Michels?

  It's fascinating. And so if you think, if you extrapolate that out into the future, there are like two possibility space, like if you have a Schrodinger's cat of, you know, possibility states of, you know, mankind, there's probably a whole wave function, but like on the one hand, you have this like enlightened city state where, you know, you have people like Jim, Jesse, but a bunch of other people talking about virtue and like how to live a good life. And, you know, we have like access to like nuclear fusion, overunity or whatever. Like it's all great, right? And then on the other hand, it's like a nuclear holocaust and like, you know, and so if that future is, has somehow already arrived in some paradigm outside the cave, then I wonder if the cave itself is actually a test.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:41Jesse Michels?

  Like it's one of, because he, there are tests to become a guardian, right? And like that, that wouldn't be disputed, right? So is the cave itself? Some sort of like low level epistemic, like VR headset?

• 26:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:54Jesse Michels?

  Where it's like, you have to contemplate virtue in the right way, lead a good life. And if you don't, you're not going to make it out.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  If you do, you level up or something?

• 27:01Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  Think of it, and once again, you know, like getting way over my pay grade as a classicist, right? Okay. But like, but Plato, I mean, there, there were such things as prose treatise. As, as a literary genre at the time.

• 27:17Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  But yeah, Plato writes in dialogue. Okay, now we know Aristotle did, but they, we lost all those dialogues, but like Plato writes in dialogue. So why write in dialogue? Like, why are you doing that? And it seems like, because it lets you play more and it becomes this kind of like, okay, who's really paying attention? Right? Like, who's really understanding what the narrative is doing here?

• 27:36Jesse Michels?

  Totally. And there's something about, I love the word peripatetic, like the walking and talking and the dialogue-based learning where it's like a, you know, a caterpillar into a butterfly where you like, you need the struggle in order to, you can't circumvent the process in order to, truth is not like a file you're given. You need to kind of engage.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  Can I, can I circle back to the light metaphor?

• 27:58Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  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. Of course, it's 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, by Plato suggesting that we could glimpse the sun, this is very transgressive stuff for, for the time, right?

• 28:30Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  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 know, sort of like, like it's, you have to take the glasses off that you look through and look at them without your glasses, right? And so I think that's important in that for, 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 illumined to be pointed at. 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.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  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 failure.

• 29:27Jesse Michels?

  Right?

• 29:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:28Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. It's yeah. And so, so, okay, I'm sure a lot of people at this point in the interview are thinking, Jesse, you have a show about UFOs.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 29:38Jesse Michels?

  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 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?

• 30:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a true question. So, um, I think a lot of people, I got kind of, you know, triggered about the UFO in like 2017 and, you know, when suddenly it was okay to talk about this, you know? Um, and then I remember in, I think it was 2021. I always tell the story, I was watching X-Files with my kids that summer. And it was right when the big first Pentagon press conference happened. And I'm like, so I guess Mulder was right?

• 30:30Speaker 04

  I've never seen anything like it.

• 30:32Speaker 05

  They've been going at it like that for almost half an hour.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  There'd 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 immune response to everything is like to study, right? And and to do scholarships, 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,

• 31:19Speaker 02

  that humans are just like systematically missed for our entire history, right? And it and the more I thought about it, and the more I thought about things that I was already working on in philosophy, 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.

• 31:39Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, even prosaically in a modern scientific context, we see, you know, between 400 and 700 nanometers, the electromagnetic wave spectrum.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:49Jesse Michels?

  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.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  No.

• 32:01Jesse Michels?

  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. Jacques Vallée, you know, which you write about very eloquently in your book, talks about, you know, in Passport to Megonia and other books, a lot of past mythology involving, you know, the denizens of Megonia, like coming down on clouds or, you know, all sorts of crap with Wheels of Ezekiel, you know, the blazing shields of Rome. You know, often it's these sort of this, this proto-architecture that's very true and real. And then we are sort of recollecting it through the lens of sort of modern mythology.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:44Jesse Michels?

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• 33:27Jesse Michels?

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• 33:43Jesse Michels?

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• 33:48Speaker 02

  One of the books that really turned me on to UFO, and I think partly because it had a legitimizing, you have to honestly say it helped legitimize the study of it, was Carl Jung's book UFO, the modern myth, Modern Myth of Things in the Sky. And it's interesting, Jung makes this point that it's not entirely surprising, like right after the world wars and in the middle of, you know, the really scary years of the Cold War, where there's this nuclear threat, that suddenly people are having a lot of anxiety, and it's being expressed in these dreams and visions of, you know, airborne technology

• 34:29Speaker 02

  that may or may not be militarily threatening. And he has this, you know, this whole account of it in terms of the mandala and like a need to return to a new wholeness, that sort of thing. And so it makes a lot of sense to me that when we're having anxiousness collectively, that it's going to express itself in the going metaphors of our era, right? Our current like unconscious obsessions, right? And for us, it's technology, right? But what I found really troubling about, and it's interesting, when you read Jung's book, it's sort of like you get a feel when he starts out writing it, he talks about it as like a mass rumor, right? He talks, he does all the stream analysis of it. And then as the book goes on,

• 35:13Speaker 02

  it's like it's getting harder for him to dismiss it though. And if you've read it, and at the end, he's like, and yet they're on radar.

• 35:19Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  And yet they leave tracks.

• 35:22Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  And so it's like in some, like, you know, I'm, I'm a, you're very into psychoanalysis, okay? And it's sort of, it's easy, I think, to dismiss a lot, not dismiss the wrong word, to analyze some of this stuff psychologically. And yet, that's the thing that like, that I keep coming back to is, and yet, there do seem to be concrete effects. Yeah.

• 35:45Jesse Michels?

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

• 36:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:18Jesse Michels?

  And it's like, oh my God, I think there's something extremely real.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  You can see it like in, similar to Young, in like a real time as Diana's writing this, she's like, the view is changing. Yeah.

• 36:27Jesse Michels?

  It's, yeah, it's like, uh, yeah, go for it.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  And so like the,

• 36:35Speaker 02

  you, my take on the, using going back to the cave metaphor, if that's okay.

• 36:39Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Is I subscribe to some ideas in cognitive science and philosophy of mind that would sort of like, make us think that maybe the cave is not just a bug, but a feature of human cognition. 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. 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.

• 37:17Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  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 cognize. Did you see that? Okay. So then though, there's going to be this really thorny problem always of like, how do we ever tease out? Like,

• 37:44Speaker 02

  What is just our carving out and leaving something behind? Okay, or as opposed to illusion, as opposed to what's really there, et cetera, et cetera. Once you admit that there is a irreducible human contribution to our perception of the world.

• 37:59Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 38:00Speaker 02

  How you ever tease those two things back out is is going to be the thorniest problem possible.

• 38:05Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Just admitting that opens your whole your mind to a whole host of possibilities. I love in the early in the, you know, this, um, the three body problem, you know, in the dark forest trilogy. This, you know, Chinese science fiction novel involving aliens, UFOs. You know, it's like the the farmer and the shooter and you have, you know, people on a 2D plane. And bullets are shot or bullet holes are shot into that 2D plane. And to them, that could just be like, you know, little little craters and they're probably a flat land is another good example. You know, it's 19th century, you know, a book about this stuff where to the people on the 2D plane. The holes could just be literally, you know, they they're not discretionary holes made by shooters that they can't even perceive.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 38:49Jesse Michels?

  And so we are we are inherently sort of limited by our scope of of perception. And making that argument is an a priori assertion, but denying that argument is also an a priori assertion. And so there's you're at this kind of epistemic impasse vis a vis modern science where if you propose anything like that.

• 39:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:09Jesse Michels?

  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, this is your mind plays tricks on you, blah, blah, blah. And you end up in this sort of like impossible to resolve argument.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Anaporia is like the classic. Sort of like it's a puzzle.

• 39:33Jesse Michels?

  Oh, interesting. I've never heard that concept. That's awesome.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  And one of my. Favorite ways of putting this, it comes from William James.

• 39:40Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  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, high level stuff and your dog's there thinking it's like kind of hot shit, right? It's like doing the dog thing and, and of course, all the sounds and smells and stuff and encounters are really there.

• 40:04Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  But it's a carve out from something much richer.

• 40:06Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  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.

• 40:15Jesse Michels?

  Totally.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:16Jesse Michels?

  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's easy. It's predictable, right?

• 40:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:28Jesse Michels?

  We could easily be cellular automata, automata in some larger system.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:34Jesse Michels?

  Where, you know, you have the 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.

• 40:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:44Jesse Michels?

  And how do we know that that's not being done to us on some sort of grand scale? And that's the Jacques Vallée kind of control system hypothesis.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  That was one of the things that really turned me on was that. Well, here's example, just from the last 24 hours for me.

• 40:57Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  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 be 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 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.

• 41:27Jesse Michels?

  Right, okay.

• 41:28Speaker 02

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

• 41:59Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  Like it affords different senses of what the real substance of things are.

• 42:04Jesse Michels?

  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, the umvelt.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:20Jesse Michels?

  This sort of perceptive apparatus. He talks about science as like, you know, a continuous process of umvelt hacking.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  He uses umvelt.

• 42:27Jesse Michels?

  He does.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  That's awesome.

• 42:28Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  I feel vindicated, that's pretty cool.

• 42:30Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah. Or maybe he should be vindicated by you. But, um, no, it's, it is, it's, it's, or even, you know, Feynman says there's room at the bottom, you know, and he's implying that like, the deeper your perceptive apparatus gets, the more you're able to probably understand, you know, ontological truth. There's, there's another physicist named, named Ken Wilson, where it's like, the higher the energy output, um, you know, the, maybe the more ontological truth you get. And he really talks about it 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.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  Well, so I, I, I'm, we are, I mean, it just, it seems like everything.

• 43:18Jesse Michels?

  Inherently we are.

• 43:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:19Jesse Michels?

  Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  Like, everything we know about how cognition works, I think, shows.

• 43:25Jesse Michels?

  I agree.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  We are sorting for relevance.

• 43:27Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  Thereby we're ignoring more. Then and and we've been evolutionarily rewarded.

• 43:32Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  And like programmed to ignore some things.

• 43:34Jesse Michels?

  So so the two ways out of the cave would be you're building your own perceptive apparatus. Like your own.

• 43:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:41Jesse Michels?

  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 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.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  But I I wonder about that.

• 44:04Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 44:05Speaker 02

  Because it's even, let's say we get, you know, like another scientific revolution.

• 44:09Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  Okay. But it's still got to come back and be translated into the basic human cognitive setup.

• 44:17Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  Did you like, you know, like, like, it's still gonna have to like run on this hardware.

• 44:22Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  Did you know, so it's always gonna go back to somehow traceable to, you know, modes of cognition that were developed for paleolithic ancestors.

• 44:34Jesse Michels?

  Yep. But I don't know, I mean, yes, but like are the hardware is probably changing too.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, yeah.

• 44:42Jesse Michels?

  You know, and and and it's always hard to say on what time scales things will happen because I'm, uh, you know, I believe in Darwin, but I believe in him as a locally useful and incomplete theory.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:52Jesse Michels?

  And I think, you know.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Hoffman's thing, yeah.

• 44:55Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, the Hoffman's thing or, you know, you know, even like their, these placeholder terms we use like punctuated equilibria in evolution where and, uh, you know, Karl Popper said.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're dead right to say, though, it's not like if we if we go the Darwinian route.

• 45:10Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  Okay, then the hardware is a moving target too.

• 45:13Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  I agree. A hundred percent.

• 45:15Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  Um, but then the thing of though is any cognitive act that we would do to change the hardware would suppose that. The prior hardware, so there's kind of a loop there.

• 45:24Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 45:30Jesse Michels?

  Hmm. Explain, say that again.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  We just think that like if, let's say we're gonna re, reset our basic cognitive apparatus somehow.

• 45:38Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  But we can only do that based on principles of our current cognitive apparatus.

• 45:43Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  Right? So we would never really be free of that, right? So it looks like it, there's, you're gonna have that kind of looping problem in there.

• 45:51Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:52Jesse Michels?

  Yes, but then also you can measure a thing, like the Copenhagen School like measures like an electron. And there's like, this electron doesn't exhibit properties that like, you look like normal macroscopic reality.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 46:04Jesse Michels?

  And then that like puts you into this brain scramble that like, you know, increases your evolution.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  Eyes, etc. Yeah.

• 46:10Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:11Jesse Michels?

  So it is this like positive feedback loop or something.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  The way I look at it is like, we're always opening the scope.

• 46:18Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  On our Umvel.

• 46:19Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Okay, but it's still tethered to that original.

• 46:22Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  Point, right? Cause, cause we, we, we got here this, through this evolutionary route, and that's always gonna kind of flavor it.

• 46:30Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  Right? So I agree like, like what science does is it opens it. And I would even say even humanities in some cases, I think literature can like.

• 46:38Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  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 gonna come back to that same.

• 46:44Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  Origin point. And it's always limited then, yeah.

• 46:46Jesse Michels?

  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 Faust, you know, and, and usually it doesn't end well for those seeking the light.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:00Jesse Michels?

  So how do we, how do we interpret that in sort of a platonic and, and UFO context?

• 47:05Speaker 02

  So I got, I got really obsessed with Sophocles Prometheus bound, the, the tragic play. And, uh, I make all my students read it now. And it's interesting that, okay, so the, the start of Sophocles' version of the myth is, uh, Hephaestus, the, the god of smithing. Is, he's, he's chaining up, nailing down Prometheus, okay? Which is ironic, cause like, what did Prometheus do? Is he like? He provided humans with all the arts, okay, like including smithing. So basically, Prometheus is being bound by technology. He's the god that gives us technology, but he is bound by technology.

• 47:43Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  And in Sophocles' version, force, who speaks for Zeus, interesting, he's just pure, blind force speaks there. And Hephaestus are kind of, they're kind of mocking him, like, your name means for knowledge, you didn't see this coming? And he's like, oh, bro, I saw it coming. I want this. Yeah, yeah, okay. And like, later in, in the myth, he even says, I hate all gods. Right?

• 48:07Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. And he encounters Ion, who, you know, Io, Io, pardon me, who, you know, was, uh, who rejected Zeus and she's a human, he gets turned to a cow, and he predicts, a child of yours in the 13th generation. So it's gonna be Hercules, right, is the prediction? But in the 13th generation, a human child, like long in the future, bad generation, is gonna take out Zeus. Okay. You see that? And so like, there's this prediction of a kind of like, you know, like, like death of God, assertive humanism that's gonna come out of this, right? From a guy, though, who is being nailed to a rock by technology itself. So you can see, I think, I think even in Sophocles, there's a sense that humans are on rails to

• 48:52Speaker 02

  a kind of self-assertive self-destruction.

• 48:55Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  Right?

• 48:56Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  Because we are these technological animals.

• 48:59Jesse Michels?

  You know how we're always diving into the edge of science and consciousness on this show? Lately, I've been thinking a lot about aging, not just in terms of years, but in how it actually feels in the body. Slow recovery, lower energy, that middle-aged fog that sneaks up on you. I feel like I can barely go out and drink alcohol anymore. That's why I started using something called Qualia senolytic, and it's been a major shift for me. Let me explain. As we age, our bodies accumulate what scientists call senescent cells, also known as zombie cells. These are worn-out cells that stop dividing but don't die. They hang around in your body, draining your energy, clogging up your recovery, and generally making you feel older than you are.

• 49:42Jesse Michels?

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• 50:24Jesse Michels?

  That's Q U A L I A L I F E dot com slash Jesse, J E S S E, for an extra 15% off your purchase. Thanks so much to Qualia for sponsoring this episode. What does that mean as far as our relationship to technology? One essay that you write about in your great book, and Diana Pasulka also talks about is the question concerning technology, which is this Heidegger essay. I would be lying if I were to tell you that I understand this essay. I've tried to read it a couple of times. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

• 50:59Speaker 02

  It's difficult, yeah. And it's, that's not the place to start Heidegger, but it's like, it's where everybody wants to get to.

• 51:04Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, I don't think I understand Heidegger in general, but.

• 51:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, so, um,

• 51:12Speaker 02

  basically what Heidegger's arguing in the essay is the essence of technology isn't a device. Okay, he's very explicit about that. So, so when Heidegger gets moody about technology, he's not just moody about how much like screen time we're having. Like, he wouldn't be a fan, but like, you know, it's like, like, he, for him, the essence of technology is a certain attitude towards being. Okay, like, that's what technology really is, okay? And Heidegger, you know, thinks. It like there, there wasn't like a committee that met in, in the early modern period that decided we would just like change civilization. Okay. But he also thinks something happened such that we started to ask a different kind of question about nature than we did before. Okay. And he thinks

• 51:57Speaker 02

  what, what happened is for some reason, we began to ask nature, what can we extract from it? Rather than how we can work with it. Okay. And so he thinks like, what the essence of technology is, is an attitude of extraction or accessibility. Like, like what the world is, is simply the conditions at which it's accessible to us. Right. Um, and he thinks now he, and he thinks he can trace that back as like, it's always been in the making throughout the entire Western philosophical tradition. And it just, it really bubbled up in the modern period. Right? And so for him, like, he, he thinks there's no getting out of it. Cause like, we didn't have a committee meeting to change our attitude. So we're not going to have a committee meeting to

• 52:40Speaker 02

  get out of it. It's like, we have to ride this all the way down. Okay. But he thinks if we admit that we're stuck with this attitude, right? So like the world, like we're stuck thinking of the world, simply on the terms that it's useful to us. Right? If we make that admission, then we're kind of admitting we're not really running things because we can't really decide this for ourselves. And he thinks that will open us to maybe something else could show itself to us that would change our attitude to being again.

• 53:09Jesse Michels?

  Hmm. 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, um, you know, this like economically productive unit. Yeah.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  Heidegger was, Heidegger was really worked up the first time he heard someone use the word human resources.

• 53:56Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 53:56Speaker 02

  Right. And he says, cause eventually what's gonna happen is we're gonna see ourselves in technological terms of accessibility and use.

• 54:02Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 54:02Speaker 02

  And, and, and he's not just worried that like, you know, soil and green is people like, but I think he is for it.

• 54:08Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 54:08Speaker 06

  Everybody, listen to me, Hatcher. You gotta tell them silent green is people.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  Um, but he's, he's worried that then we'll, we'll only have a means and attitude to ourselves.

• 54:22Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  To everything. And, and what his worry is, is this will lead us to what he calls a certain kind of oblivion to being, right?

• 54:30Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 54:31Speaker 02

  Is like an oblivion, like a forgetfulness again, right? Full circle to Plato here. Like a forgetfulness of what being really is.

• 54:39Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 54:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. And we'll only see it as what it is to us, how we can access it.

• 54:43Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, the soil and green analogy is funny, you know, like that's, that's an extreme, right? Where it's like, you know, the Charlton Heston movie that.

• 54:52Speaker 02

  It's a great metaphor though.

• 54:53Jesse Michels?

  It, it's a great metaphor and, you know, Allah, the Plato where you never know if it's a metaphor or it's real.

• 54:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:00Jesse Michels?

  I think he talks about five stages of techno- technological development in that essay, and one of them is sacrifice.

• 55:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:06Jesse Michels?

  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, ancient practices to, uh, the Nazis trying to like, sort of do this at scale.

• 55:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:29Jesse Michels?

  For like forbidden knowledge and technology. Um, and I, I, it's funny cause you know.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  I think G. K. Chesterton actually draws, I think, a connection between, um, you know, sort of, uh, Pre-scientific magic.

• 55:44Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 55:44Speaker 02

  And technology.

• 55:45Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 55:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, and like human sacrifice and technology ideas that we if we just had the right technique.

• 55:51Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 55:51Speaker 02

  We could force the world's hand to do what we want.

• 55:54Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 55:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:55Jesse Michels?

  Right. Yeah.

• 55:56Speaker 02

  And certainly, I think Gerard would see something like that, too. Yeah.

• 55:59Jesse Michels?

  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 parasitization of of humans.

• 56:18Speaker 02

  So Heidegger's, like one of Heidegger's great examples is he compares, um, like a hydroelectric dam to a medieval windmill. Okay, or a medieval watermill. Okay. Because I know, 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?

• 56:38Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 56:40Speaker 02

  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.

• 56:52Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 56:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 57:00Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  So it's all on our terms.

• 57:02Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 57:03Speaker 02

  It's about how we access you, right? And not, how can we work with you?

• 57:07Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it's mastery over nature, uh, in a way, yeah, it's not just harmonizing with it, with nature.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:14Jesse Michels?

  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 of existence on Earth. And there's the Gaia-James Lovelock theory that, you know, the Earth is somehow like super resilient. And so like, we might come and go, but that, you know, that the Earth will always sort of come back. And then there's the Medea theory, which is like, you know, we inevitably will like blow ourselves up and like, you know, that maybe there's some evidence that that happened on Mars or something.

• 57:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:44Jesse Michels?

  Um. Yeah, they're they're they're sort of competing there's 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 farther with the Play-Doh thing. Do you ever think like this is like we're in these like biological skin suits?

• 58:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:10Jesse Michels?

  There that are basically like VR headsets. And the contemplation of virtue or yeah, 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 also thought, you know, the Heidegger thing might connect where it's like we're porting ourselves through these like low level economic production engines and via technology. I believe that also kind of dovetails with a test that Plato puts the guardians through like at the age of 30 or whatever. If you if you fail, like you don't get to study metaphysics, you just like become the like the economic producer or whatever.

• 58:53Speaker 02

  So I think at this point is where like a Heidegger and and Plato come apart. Hmm. Okay, at least it's where Heidegger becomes a critic of Plato's.

• 59:01Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 59:02Speaker 02

  Okay, because he would look at something like that dialectical process in the Republic whereby one like ascends to a kind of enlightenment as a quasi technological attitude. Okay. And whereas for Heidegger, for him, the metaphor is more like

• 59:22Speaker 02

  architectural, like you build a temple and you hope someone shows up there. Right? Okay, and a lot of his later work goes to this where he talks about how we need, we need artwork. Okay, but meaning we need art that does the work of art. And what is the work of art? Is it it provides a place sort of like a theater where an actor could show up for us. Hmm. Okay, so for Heidegger, it's like we're we're more. Passive in the process, okay, then then say for Plato, were we 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 Heidegger, it's like, well, if divinity is going to show up for us, right, if the transcends going to show up for us,

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  then it cannot be our doing. Like, and he thinks what's happened in the modern world is because we we only think of like what we can take and do and grab and process, right?

• 1:00:18Speaker 02

  We need to regain an ability just to build something that is sort of receptive rather than aggressively extracting. Do you see that?

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  And I think for me, I probably lean more towards Heidegger on that.

• 1:00:33Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Fascinating. Well, speaking speaking of that.

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• 1:01:37Jesse Michels?

  Is the UFO a technology that sort of, you know, if there's a push and a pull outside of the cave or whatever, is is the UFO some sort of pulling technology? Because you you talk about this where it's this thing that it busts all of your priors. You know, it's like you have all these like prior categorization techniques.

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  I didn't want to talk about this. Today I did, but like early, you know, five years ago.

• 1:02:02Jesse Michels?

  But you find yourself obsessed because it's inherently kind of uncategorizable.

• 1:02:07Speaker 02

  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 it to our history. But it seems like something's knocking, right? And whether we listen to it through a platonic, you know, process of dialectical improvement, or we listen to it through a sort of Heideggerian building, a place where it could dwell, right? That it seems that something is trying to remind the human of something, right? That's just trying to jog our memories, like, I like to use Plato's metaphor.

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  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, is it an elf or a fairy? It seems that all of that gives our imagination too much of a pass, right? But it does seem there is some pressure on us from outside our umwelt, right? That we would do well to at least strategize how we would listen to, yeah.

• 1:03:05Jesse Michels?

  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 at an extremely high abstract level of the kind of ontological truth. And then there's like, there are government whistleblowers coming out of, you know, 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, pull coals in his story, like, you know, it felt like, you know, pretty prima facie, at least, you know, very, very, you know, like an honest account. And so how do we square that circle?

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  I don't know, I don't know that I can. Yeah, and because for me, 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 an average dude, right, okay, right? And so I have to always ask myself, like, what's more likely? Like, what this person's telling me is true? And they could be, they could be speaking of falsehood and not be lying. I'm not saying anyone's lying or anything like that. You always have to weigh, it's like, is this testimony true? Right? Against the probability that this someone, this person's been somehow deceived, or et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:04:19Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  And just taking like, whether, you know, it's any of the whistleblowers.

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  I'm, I don't know how I can really weigh that out.

• 1:04:28Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  Do you know what I mean? So like, um, let's say, you know, we, we talked to whistleblower, you know, Roy, right?

• 1:04:34Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  And, you know, we asked Roy, hey, you know, yeah, you've, you've been told this, this, this, and this by all these people.

• 1:04:42Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  It seems unlikely that they're all in on something. That seems unlikely.

• 1:04:45Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  But then it seems really unlikely that these things they're telling you is true too.

• 1:04:52Jesse Michels?

  Right?

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:04:53Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  This is an old argument from David Hume about miracles. And so we have to weigh that.

• 1:04:57Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:57Speaker 02

  And it seems to me like I can't even really make a meaningful comparison of those probabilities.

• 1:05:02Jesse Michels?

  Well, I would, I would say in the, the world in which like forbidden knowledge is a, a real thing.

• 1:05:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:05:08Jesse Michels?

  That there's some, you know, cleaving off of like black world science or knowledge. You know, the government would be attempting systematically to

• 1:05:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:17Jesse Michels?

  get that, you know, just from a game theory geopolitical lens.

• 1:05:20Speaker 02

  You have to assign some plausibility.

• 1:05:22Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  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. Cause either like, this has been covered up for 75 years. You know what I mean? Or there's something really weird going on now, where it seems like now people want us to believe it.

• 1:05:46Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 1:05:46Speaker 02

  So either way, you've got like a low prob, prima facie, a low probability conspiracy theory you're gonna have to take.

• 1:05:51Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  One or another, right?

• 1:05:52Jesse Michels?

  And then I always ask myself the question, like, you know, cause of course you have to go back and forth, but like,

• 1:05:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:57Jesse Michels?

  I'm like, why are the, like, some of these people are like very high level in prosaically important government, military and science roles? I'm like, if we are in some like multipolar new cold war, why are you systematically sending all of these top guys to like psy-op the American population? That, that seems crazy.

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:20Jesse Michels?

  Um, that seems crazier than, you know, as a null hypothesis.

• 1:06:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:24Jesse Michels?

  Than, uh, the inverse, which is just like, actually this has been going on for, you know,

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:28Jesse Michels?

  thousands of years.

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  See, there's where I think you and I come apart. I don't know which is crazier.

• 1:06:31Jesse Michels?

  Sure, sure, sure. Well, I'm more in that, like, um, you know, I'm wading through the waters of speaking to all these people.

• 1:06:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, but, but I think, I, I do think you have to say now that. I mean, I it's been on the floor of the Congress and things like that.

• 1:06:46Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:47Speaker 02

  That's it. That's got to pump the probability up a little bit, right?

• 1:06:51Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:52Speaker 02

  You know, but not, I don't know if all the way.

• 1:06:55Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 1:06:55Speaker 02

  Right? Cause.

• 1:06:56Jesse Michels?

  Well, it's funny, like, as I say, like, people don't think correctly, I think. And so if you, that's a sort of crazy thing for me to say.

• 1:07:03Speaker 02

  I know.

• 1:07:04Jesse Michels?

  But it's like, you could just say, like, New York Times, Congress, Schumer Amendment. Uh, you know, you say these things, somebody who holds a Q clearance, and then all of a sudden they go, oh, credentials. They go, whatever you say next, as far as what they believe.

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:19Jesse Michels?

  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.

• 1:07:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:28Jesse Michels?

  And it's like, it's, you know, not even wrong, or like unfalsifiable, or like crazy, or whatever, because 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.

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:45Jesse Michels?

  Inquire.

• 1:07:47Speaker 02

  You might have heard about, uh, some of the honest placebo studies.

• 1:07:51Jesse Michels?

  Hmm, no.

• 1:07:52Speaker 02

  Okay, so apparent, I'm probably not getting all the details right, but apparently there are cases where there've been experiments where they told people, this is a placebo. This is inert substance.

• 1:08:02Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 1:08:02Speaker 02

  And we're giving it to you.

• 1:08:04Jesse Michels?

  It's still helped.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  Still helped.

• 1:08:05Jesse Michels?

  I believe that.

• 1:08:06Speaker 02

  If the person giving it to them.

• 1:08:08Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  Still had like the lab coat.

• 1:08:10Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:11Speaker 02

  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?

• 1:08:19Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:19Speaker 02

  But like, but like if someone dresses up like a doctor, like an authority figure, all the credentials, right?

• 1:08:24Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I think we have to really mistrust.

• 1:08:27Jesse Michels?

  Totally. Well, and there's certain people who have an A priori disposition towards magic, and then others who don't. And then that becomes their reality. Like, it's, it's like the Plato thing, where it's like, everything I'm going to tell you is a lie. And like, then why would you say that? And you get all confused. And then he goes on to tell some like, stuff that like, there's clearly some truth in it.

• 1:08:44Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:08:44Jesse Michels?

  And then, you know, maybe there's some lies, but like, you're extremely intrigued. There, there are layers to, there's this like Leo Strauss, this, you know, uh, uh, you know, 20th century philosopher. He was a big, big, uh, you know. Platonist too.

• 1:08:59Speaker 02

  And But he also thought those books were fullized.

• 1:09:02Jesse Michels?

  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 never ending thing. And you could say the exoteric is implying meaning that doesn't exist.

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:09:19Jesse Michels?

  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.

• 1:09:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:26Jesse Michels?

  Or you could say the exoteric is throwing people off the trail and this has a, and the more you like, talk about that from a medicine sense, then you're going and you've created this cult.

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:09:36Jesse Michels?

  And it's like.

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and so I actually do this in the book where I say, okay. Using the example of the Tic Tac, okay? So what's my evidence of the Tic Tac? Well, this, you know, seemingly very reliable Air Force pilot and, you know, said, and Alex Dietrich and, David Fraber, they said these things, right?

• 1:09:58Jesse Michels?

  Raytheon clear system.

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay. And so, so I have like testimony from seemingly reliable people.

• 1:10:04Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:10:04Speaker 02

  Right, okay.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  And if you say, yeah, but it like, how can you buy that? But yet, like, I only know Bin Laden was shot.

• 1:10:13Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 1:10:14Speaker 02

  Because of testimony.

• 1:10:16Jesse Michels?

  Media.

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, from the came through the media through reliable like Pentagon officials. I only know, and now of course, maybe some of that stuff we shouldn't 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.

• 1:10:31Jesse Michels?

  Of course.

• 1:10:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:32Jesse Michels?

  But it's like, yeah, if you say like, we detected a quirk or whatever through like some particle accelerator.

• 1:10:37Speaker 02

  I'd have to take Eric's word for that.

• 1:10:39Jesse Michels?

  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.

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. I, and I, I think, I mean, That has been known since Plato.

• 1:10:58Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm. Yeah.

• 1:11:00Speaker 02

  You know what I mean?

• 1:11:01Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  I agree. And so, so what do I do with like, say, disclosure movement, stuff like that?

• 1:11:06Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  And the UFO is, is I'll admit, I, I now am like self consciously aloof to it.

• 1:11:12Jesse Michels?

  That's cool. I like that. I'm starting to be like that, too.

• 1:11:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:15Jesse Michels?

  I had a friend tell me yesterday or two days ago, Chris Ramsey has a great channel called Area 52. He goes, I'm not really into disclosure. He's like, I'm into UFOs. And I was like, I like that. That's pretty awesome. Yeah. This whole like dramatic process of like these people and the blah, blah, blah. And it's like, it's fascinating. And I find some of the people very heroic and courageous. And I've loved all of 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 are plenty of things can be true, little t true or whatever. And there can be ulterior motives involved as well. And it's

• 1:11:57Jesse Michels?

  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 they're, it, it's opened up their worldview and they're like, you know, they're diving into like what they want to know about like reality as well. But, uh, yeah, some of the contemporary kind of, you know, drama is not, you know, always the best in red.

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  And right now, let's say, you know, you said, you know, we're off the air gym and I'm going to show you.

• 1:12:27Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  Here's what they showed me.

• 1:12:28Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  I got the real stuff.

• 1:12:29Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:30Speaker 02

  I would have to say, okay, but then why would I believe Jesse?

• 1:12:33Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  Do you?

• 1:12:35Jesse Michels?

  Why are you showing me?

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Why are you showing me? So it seems like, and this is like one of the frustrations, but even if you found out, you haven't found out.

• 1:12:42Jesse Michels?

  Right. Right. Right.

• 1:12:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:43Jesse Michels?

  Well, that's why, you know, my, if I had to make a prediction, I think contact or like true, like more disclosure. You know, disclosure will be inherently this sort of jagged process. Well, you'll, maybe you'll have 20% of the population still holding out saying like, you know, this is just impossible or whatever. But, you know, say there's some big event in the next few years. My strong bias would be that that event does not come through some like power structure on down disseminated message from like government officials. It's like some weird, surprising thing.

• 1:13:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:16Jesse Michels?

  And if it's if it's not that it it won't hit people epistemically in the right way.

• 1:13:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, because

• 1:13:22Jesse Michels?

  Because they'll be skeptical forever.

• 1:13:24Speaker 02

  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?

• 1:13:36Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:36Speaker 02

  Not everyone. Yeah, like the Big Bang's been taught.

• 1:13:38Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:39Speaker 02

  How many Americans believe it?

• 1:13:41Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  Not everyone, you know what I mean? So it's like you could you could even have something become like educational orthodox.

• 1:13:45Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:46Speaker 02

  And it doesn't necessarily move the needle for everyone.

• 1:13:48Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:49Speaker 02

  So like what what would even like disclosure look like in a way that actually had grip on people's daily lives?

• 1:13:57Jesse Michels?

  Totally. And then you, yeah, and then it's like, okay, you see a saucer and a hanger, the hanger's at an official site. You see some government official who you know you trust because they're cabinet level or the president unveiling the thing. You have all these questions. Then you step inside the thing. You have all these questions. The scientists probably working on this stuff don't know exactly what they're looking at and have all these questions. And so it becomes this never ending quest. And yeah, so yeah, the the philosophical question of like, what is disclosure? And meanwhile, what you could be doing is just working on your own perceptive filter apparatus. If you treat yourself like in, you know, an Umvelt, you know, lens or whatever, work on the lens.

• 1:14:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so for me, you know, it it becomes, you know, less, you know, what are we gonna like? Not that even really ever was like, well, we're going to get the government to tell us. It's more, can I can I come up with a philosophical metaphysical cognitive model?

• 1:14:56Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 1:14:56Speaker 02

  Where it makes sense.

• 1:14:58Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:58Speaker 02

  That like the on where we would expect the unexpected to happen. And I think, yeah, we can. I think I think that does make perfectly good sense. Right?

• 1:15:04Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:04Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:15:14Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:15:15Speaker 02

  Becomes it, right? You know, I'm not looking for authorities to tell me what to do, right? Yeah.

• 1:15:21Jesse Michels?

  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 literally in, 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 anthropic principle. And there's a strong anthropic principle and the strong anthropic 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 weak anthropic principle is like, the limits of our perceptive, you know, capabilities like,

• 1:16:05Jesse Michels?

  make physics comport with our perceptive capability.

• 1:16:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:09Jesse Michels?

  Which is so obviously true. Like, I think the idea that Planck's constant, if you were to change it slightly, like you wouldn't have a habitable earth, doesn't point towards like, oh, you had like, 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 that.

• 1:16:33Speaker 02

  How are we ever gonna tease out the human from the non-human?

• 1:16:36Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  Well, once we admit there's a human contribution to any of our teasing out.

• 1:16:40Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:16:41Speaker 02

  We're always gonna be like, loop it, yeah.

• 1:16:43Jesse Michels?

  Yes, but and then the second you admit that the human, that the observer observed distinction breaks down.

• 1:16:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:49Jesse Michels?

  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, and, and just a, this biochemical like meat suit, you know, happy accident. Then it's like, you feel sad, like taking SSRI, like if you, you know, you're, you're, uh, you're, you're confused about something like, you know, just learn the trite information. There's, there's very little aesthetic sense as to how to decode yourself.

• 1:17:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:17:20Jesse Michels?

  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 to sort of grow your own abilities to proceed.

• 1:17:33Speaker 02

  Point, Jesse, there's, I think there's a difference between this sort of, um, Really like kind of facile work on yourself thing, right? And as opposed to like, what would it be to cultivate real interiority?

• 1:17:46Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:17:47Speaker 02

  Right? Yeah. And I think it's a really great distinction. Yeah.

• 1:17:50Jesse Michels?

  Do you think like the next epistemological or scientific paradigm involves bringing the observer into, you know, the, the observed? Or there's, there's something about working on us that coincides with what we perceive? I mean, this would go back to like alchemy itself, which a lot of the early scientists were.

• 1:18:11Speaker 02

  A lot of ways, although we could talk about how it's gone off the rails, right? Like this has been, you know, one of the central philosophical paradigms since Kant.

• 1:18:19Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:18:20Speaker 02

  You know, where like, once we try to tease out the numinal from the phenomenal, right? You know, the, that for us, as opposed to that which things are in themselves. Kant's like, you'll, you'll get nowhere except ethically, right? He thinks we can know things in themselves in, in terms of 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 can, we can look at 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.

• 1:18:56Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:56Speaker 02

  Right? You know, in a lot of ways, this already is the paradigm in a lot of like serious thought. It's just the word just never gets out.

• 1:19:04Jesse Michels?

  Yes. Yes.

• 1:19:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:06Jesse Michels?

  It's also interesting how science itself might be converging on more of a platonic worldview, where you have in increasing popularity, the work of like Rupert Sheldrake, you know, these morphic fields or Michael Levin, where there's this interaction between biological forms and their local information fields that dictate their morphology or function in the case of like inherited learnings that seem to transcend pure kind of genetic inheritance. And often comports with, I mean, you even, who knows if this like theory of consciousness is correct with microtubules with, you know, Roger Penrose has, has this orchestrated objective reduction thing.

• 1:19:47Jesse Michels?

  But that involves these like, you know, pyramidal tubulin structures in the, in, in the brain. You know, it all, maybe, maybe we end up just back to like Hellenic times, like talking about these like, you know, sacred geometry and stuff.

• 1:20:02Speaker 02

  Well, you know, you know, a little off that, but. Overlapping, you know, Sheldrake has this really interesting paper, is the sun conscious?

• 1:20:10Jesse Michels?

  I love that.

• 1:20:11Speaker 02

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

• 1:20:52Speaker 02

  And so then I think what you're doing is you're getting a universe suffused with consciousness, right? But in a way that isn't, um, like irresponsibly spooky either.

• 1:21:03Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:04Speaker 02

  I think that's very important, yeah.

• 1:21:05Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, well, it's like sort of fractals of consciousness on up, and there's a sort of cybernetic village or something, and then there's the individual nodes.

• 1:21:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:14Jesse Michels?

  And even, you know, if you think of us as like individual nodes, that totally comports with Sheldrake's stuff around, you know, if you grow an organic crystal structure, you can then grow that crystal structure much faster on an ongoing basis, or like, look at athletic accomplishments, which is similar to his morphic resonance.

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  The one guy breaks the four minute mile in a bunch.

• 1:21:34Jesse Michels?

  Exactly, the Bannister effect, and if you think about how computers work 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 faster.

• 1:22:01Speaker 02

  I did not know that with the download upload, yeah.

• 1:22:03Jesse Michels?

  It's, it's interesting, right? Like literally, like the way, and then you get into all sorts of interesting stuff around, you know, what is DNA? Looks like binary code.

• 1:22:12Speaker 02

  And what you're moving to there is then like a fundamentally networked world.

• 1:22:16Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:22:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, and yes, yeah.

• 1:22:18Jesse Michels?

  And but in a way that comports with literal observable size.

• 1:22:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, 100%.

• 1:22:22Jesse Michels?

  I mean, I'm buddies with this guy Jim Keller, who's this legendary chip maker, like the iPhones and, you know, I'm sorry, the chips in many of our iPhones, like literally are based off of his architecture. He worked at Tesla and he's like, it is remarkable how much, uh, you know, uh, uh, uh, human, the, the human looks like a semiconductor in many ways. And he goes through all these like, you know, yeah, specifics around that and like how, you know, we're, we're like conductive and then he goes through, you know, the DNA and like, you know, it's like binary codes, like transistors. And then, 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.

• 1:23:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:06Jesse Michels?

  And if you're, put a person in a Faraday cage.

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• 1:23:39Jesse Michels?

  The fact that they can think points against that theory because if you're getting it from a traditional RF signal, the Faraday cage would kill the RF signal. But if you get into these like weird spooky new science called, you know, extended electrodynamics, where you have these sort of scalar, you know, field, you know, wave types or whatever,

• 1:24:00Jesse Michels?

  which a lot of people seemingly, you know, high up in government seem to get behind, then maybe the sun is, it is a scalar wave generator. And then maybe we're getting information from the sun and getting, getting information from all sorts of places. And maybe the Aristotelian model of the sun, you know, um, being the source of like knowledge is just, it's just true or something.

• 1:24:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think in a lot of that stuff too is like, okay, without getting hung up on like the Aristotelian science. Cause I think as soon as we say that, like, are you, are we, are we geocentrist now? No, that's not the point, right? The, the point though is. Is the world a set of interlocking conscious hierarchies?

• 1:24:39Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:24:39Speaker 02

  Right. I think that's the question. Yeah.

• 1:24:41Jesse Michels?

  And that seems 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 Aristotelian worldview.

• 1:24:53Speaker 02

  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 or managed by non-human intelligence for Aristotle is, is apparent in his view. Yeah.

• 1:25:10Jesse Michels?

  Do you think that, you know, AI is like all the, all the rage right now? That maybe our world is being sort of managed by, uh, an AI system that knows how did, you know, the, the Jacques Vallée 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 von Neumann replicators that they sent out to like manage us.

• 1:25:46Speaker 02

  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, fail safe. Okay. And I think it was originally made in like 1963, 64. Okay. So it's a Cold War film about, uh, a nuclear war that gets started by accident.

• 1:26:09Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:26:09Speaker 02

  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 in like, there's, uh, before, early in the film, there's like, people are regretting that we have to use humans. Okay. All right. So the human is becoming irrelevant and, and it's very clear in the film. And this is, this is before in the popular imagination, artificial intelligence is a thing. And like, that's not a proposal to film at all.

• 1:26:38Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:26:38Speaker 02

  But already just based on regular mechanical, uh, operations, the film is proposing that we are being run. We are being run by things that we put into play.

• 1:26:48Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:26:49Speaker 02

  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 more we think in terms of certain kinds of mechanical intelligence, right? The more we make ourselves easier to mimic by machines. Do you see that?

• 1:27:11Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:11Speaker 02

  And so already in the 1950s and 60s, people were worried that we're putting technological balls into play that will come back to us as if gods. Yeah, yeah. Right? There's a someone I refer to in the book is very underappreciated 20th century philosopher Gunther Anders. This is definitely something he's worried about that we're like, like he thinks we're, we're kind of, we're, we're creating Prometheus.

• 1:27:38Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:39Speaker 02

  We're letting Prometheus loose.

• 1:27:40Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:27:41Speaker 02

  And then in these technologies, and then those things will come back and run us.

• 1:27:44Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it's like creating a Gollum or summoning a demon or something. And then, and then you sort of obsolete yourself.

• 1:27:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:51Jesse Michels?

  In the process.

• 1:27:52Speaker 02

  And you can see in already in the 50s and 60s, before there was any hint of AI in the popular imagination.

• 1:27:58Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 1:27:59Speaker 02

  This notion of human obsolescence was already in play.

• 1:28:02Jesse Michels?

  Totally.

• 1:28:02Speaker 02

  That we are, we are going to make ourselves irrelevant to the world that we're making.

• 1:28:07Jesse Michels?

  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.

• 1:28:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:28:17Jesse Michels?

  And then try to ascend out of, you know, whatever paradigm you're existing in. But I do, yeah, this is 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 cave?

• 1:28:31Speaker 02

  We're like demoting ourselves.

• 1:28:32Jesse Michels?

  You're demoting yourself and like, we're willfully doing that when like this whole thing could be a test.

• 1:28:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:38Jesse Michels?

  And so I always found that so fascinating with this sort of obsession with like, we need to build like higher fidelity worlds. Like if you watch Ready Player One, that's not like a good world, like the guy's living in a shanty town. And then like the, the AI VR thing is like an escape.

• 1:28:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. So a lot of times people ask me, so, you know, am I worried about AI, et cetera, et cetera? And my reply is, I think the game was done 80 years ago.

• 1:29:02Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  Do you know what I mean? I think like, I would even look at things like the Manhattan Project, where you had this thing, this like technological hyper object like took off and like, nobody really knew what was going on.

• 1:29:13Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:13Speaker 02

  It like, think of like, you know, if you watch the film Oppenheimer, like you get three different answers from Oppenheimer, why he wants to do this.

• 1:29:20Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:20Speaker 02

  So it's who's running this now?

• 1:29:22Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:23Speaker 02

  The technology is running this. Prometheus is running it.

• 1:29:26Jesse Michels?

  Completely. Yeah. And I, it's such a fascinating time where it was like clearly this big inflection point. He had such interesting philosophical kind of objections around what he was doing. He was sort of reluctantly doing it, but he like, you know, he needed to do it on some level.

• 1:29:45Speaker 02

  It's just gonna happen.

• 1:29:46Jesse Michels?

  It was just gonna happen or something. And then he, and then he kind of decamped from that. And it was like, Teller was more in that sort of, it's gonna happen. So we might as well sort of build it ourselves. And it is this very Promethean, Faustian sort of story. And it's, it's ultimately kind of, kind of tragic. And then it also, you have to wonder at that time, because that's when all the UFOs pop up.

• 1:30:08Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:30:08Jesse Michels?

  In our visible reality, you know, at least according to all the lore and there's a lot of lore.

• 1:30:13Speaker 02

  We're under this new interpretation.

• 1:30:15Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:30:16Speaker 02

  Like appearing as technology, right? Yeah.

• 1:30:18Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:30:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:19Jesse Michels?

  Well, it's also like, maybe, you know, to the extent the guardians want to keep the test going or something.

• 1:30:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:26Jesse Michels?

  If we build like a, you know, a firecracker in the cave, or we build a bomb in the cave, they're like, they're trying to like defu-, you know, to defuse like, you know, some of these things that keep, keep the test going or whatever. And, you know, it's like, does something super unprecedented happen when we discover,

• 1:30:44Jesse Michels?

  you know, the myth makers, when we, when we, 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.

• 1:30:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:55Jesse Michels?

  And does that just unravel reality?

• 1:30:57Speaker 02

  And think of like, the, the cosmic meaning of like humanity discovering that we could take ourselves out. Do you see, you know what I mean? Like, it has to change us in ways that none of us have probably really dealt with.

• 1:31:11Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:31:12Speaker 02

  In our unconscious, right?

• 1:31:13Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:13Speaker 02

  That we now know collective suicide is a possibility through humanity.

• 1:31:18Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:31:18Speaker 02

  Which was not an option until. The 1940s, you know?

• 1:31:23Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:23Speaker 02

  And, and so what, what, like, how does that? How is that a firecracker going off in our Oom belt?

• 1:31:30Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:31:30Speaker 02

  Like, how is that gonna change our ability to see what's there or, or miss what's there, et cetera, et cetera? Like, it has to have an effect. This is part of Young's point, yeah.

• 1:31:39Jesse Michels?

  Totally. And so what do you? What role does religion play in all of this? Cause I, I love that you talk about this, like, uh, Janus, 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 sacred.

• 1:32:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:01Jesse Michels?

  And so, yeah, well, how do you, how do you view religion?

• 1:32:04Speaker 02

  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. And I mean that in a, in a dismissive way, right? But like where everything's revolving, uh, 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 happen according to the, the, the, the means of divinity, something like that. But then he says, however, that got co-opted into stories that were told for legal purposes.

• 1:32:50Speaker 02

  Okay. So he kind of gives you a Nietzschean genealogy right there of the going Greek religion, right? And then he ends the passage by saying, but we can be interested in these more primordial tales because they now fit with what we're discovering philosophically. So it seems for Aristotle, religion can go two ways, right? It can be, 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 revelation can be out in front of what we can prove scientifically, philosophically, and like kind of guide the inquiry in a way. Yeah. So he's worried about how. Uh, the religious temptation of this stuff can be co-opted, right?

• 1:33:35Speaker 02

  But it doesn't have to be either.

• 1:33:37Jesse Michels?

  Hmm. And you have, you know, speaking of true knowledge as some sort of sense memory.

• 1:33:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:44Jesse Michels?

  Um, that, that is not, you know, the, the five sort of lower senses.

• 1:33:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:49Jesse Michels?

  And, you know, I, we, we should probably talk about the myth of air, which, you know, the, 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.

• 1:34:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:34:03Jesse Michels?

  What, what do you, what do you make of that story? Maybe, maybe rehash the story for the audience.

• 1:34:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, uh, in, in the, in the Republic, uh, uh, Er was a, was a, a virtuous person. He dies in battle for the city that does all the Greek good stuff, right? And he goes, he goes, you know, and then it's, it's all wound up with fairly conventional, you know, Athenian views about, about the afterlife. So he crosses the river Styx 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.

• 1:34:47Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:34:48Speaker 02

  Because they know no matter what, they'll be okay.

• 1:34:51Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:34:51Speaker 02

  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 Er.

• 1:35:12Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:35:12Speaker 02

  Okay. So the, the virtuous person remembers, right? And now, now one, the virtuous person is indifferent to their lot in temporal life. Okay. Be, be, why? Because they remember, right? Cause they know there's something else. Hmm. Do you see that? 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 illusion mysteries or something? Maybe like I'm, I'm perfectly open to that, right? 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?

• 1:35:53Speaker 02

  I just put it in touch with being with the good that the virtuous person has.

• 1:35:58Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know what I mean?

• 1:36:00Jesse Michels?

  So I, that's, that is to take it allegorically, but it, but it's in a way that would like make a

• 1:36:04Speaker 02

  concrete difference for conduct.

• 1:36:05Jesse Michels?

  Yes. Do you think that Plato, cause I, you know, I do, I look at the Eleusinian mysteries and I know, you know, it's probably hard to say historically, whether these, you know, what exactly happened here. Brian Murray rescue.

• 1:36:17Speaker 02

  They were up to something though.

• 1:36:18Jesse Michels?

  They were definitely up to something. You have this place 13 miles northwest of Athens, this, you know, considered the spiritual capital. That, you know, you had, uh, uh, Greek leaders and Roman emperors saying this sort of held together society, the fabric of society. And you'd have these sort of, you know, guardians back then, if you will.

• 1:36:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:38Jesse Michels?

  Plato, Socrates, Sophocles, Alcibiades was famously in trouble for talking about the mysteries when he wasn't, you know, he was at a festival.

• 1:36:47Speaker 02

  First world of cyclone, right?

• 1:36:48Jesse Michels?

  Exactly. Don't talk about it.

• 1:36:51Jesse Michels?

  And, and they all undergo these sort of, they, they drink the keke on, which is maybe as speculated by Brian Murray rescue, this sort of ergot that contains LSD, this, you know, sort of fungal derivative.

• 1:37:01Speaker 07

  What was wine in the ancient world, right? And could it have been spiked with mushrooms or other visionary plants, hallucinogenic herbs, toxins? I think that, that, that is a really interesting question.

• 1:37:14Jesse Michels?

  And that unveils this sort of greater ontological reality, or maybe the experience noesis, you know, kind of primordial knowledge or something. Do you think that was real and informed Plato?

• 1:37:26Speaker 02

  I have no reason to rule that out. Does that make sense?

• 1:37:29Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:29Speaker 02

  You know what I mean?

• 1:37:30Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:30Speaker 02

  Like in, in a lot of ways. It's not like, you know, it's, it's not like we discovered, you know, like peyote at Woodstock.

• 1:37:39Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:39Speaker 02

  Like this stuff has been around, right?

• 1:37:42Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:42Speaker 02

  You don't even, I think there's, you know, I would be surprised if that wasn't, and we know it's been around in religion and all that.

• 1:37:48Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:48Speaker 02

  Right, okay. I mean, in, in like various pagan religions, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:37:52Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 1:37:52Speaker 02

  So, so I'd be surprised if there wasn't something like that going on. Does that make sense?

• 1:37:55Jesse Michels?

  It does, it does. It's just so funny how we, in the modern age of disenchantment, paint Plato over with this broad brush of like, it's all allegory. He is the father of Western civilization. It's the birth of rationalism.

• 1:38:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:10Jesse Michels?

  And it's like, well, I don't know. I think the guy was going to Eleusis and drinking some weird shit.

• 1:38:15Speaker 02

  Especially when you read some of the dialogues, like Phaedrus and the Symposium. Desire and love are running a lot, right? Okay. And I think that's important to note, right?

• 1:38:27Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:27Speaker 02

  And, and I think whatever, whatever the mysteries were, right? It does seem like it worked like this. It's 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 it.

• 1:38:43Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:38:43Speaker 02

  Do you see what I mean?

• 1:38:44Jesse Michels?

  I do, yeah. Yeah, you, you, you immediately like can't fully recollect what you saw with the light.

• 1:38:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:52Jesse Michels?

  It's almost like, I was actually talking to David Grush about this in my interview with him. And he was like, it's almost like the symbol rate is too slow. Like you literally can't even communicate it in, in words.

• 1:39:04Speaker 02

  How do you show the light by which we see other things, right?

• 1:39:06Jesse Michels?

  Right?

• 1:39:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:07Jesse Michels?

  So you end up, you know, maybe Jesus was one of these people, maybe not, but like prophets famously speak in riddles and allegories and parables. And it's, it's, you have to parse their, their word. I mean, you get the sense, you know, we were talking before the show, Jacques Vallée, you know, was just on Joe Rogan. And, you know, when I speak to Jacques, I get the sense that he knows a lot more than he can even communicate with this stuff.

• 1:39:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:37Jesse Michels?

  And he speaks in these sort of riddled coded parables.

• 1:39:39Speaker 02

  And not just because of like security clearance, like it's like. Inarticulable.

• 1:39:42Jesse Michels?

  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.

• 1:39:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:49Jesse Michels?

  People, but it's not like this thing where it's like, this happened at this time. You get it now? This is it. That's it. You know, it's like, no, if you kind of knew, if you knew that, you'd ask more questions and it's all, it's just. The, whatever the truth is, is like inherently.

• 1:40:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:04Jesse Michels?

  Hard to, you know.

• 1:40:06Speaker 02

  I've, I've been reading, uh, a lot of, uh, HP Lovecraft's horror stories lately.

• 1:40:13Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:13Speaker 02

  Right? Uh, 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.

• 1:40:21Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:22Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:40:22Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:23Speaker 02

  But yet, there's always this other thing.

• 1:40:26Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:40:26Speaker 02

  That's operating.

• 1:40:27Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:40:27Speaker 02

  That's inarticulable. Do you, you're, you're, and so it seems like, like, like even someone like Lovecraft, who has this just dark.

• 1:40:35Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:36Speaker 02

  You know, the universe and it's hopeless.

• 1:40:38Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:38Speaker 02

  It, there's still this like Schopenhauerian will.

• 1:40:41Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:40:42Speaker 02

  Operating, but you can't, he can't articulate it for you. The characters can't articulate it. It's always, it was there.

• 1:40:49Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:40:49Speaker 02

  Right? Yeah. And I think, I think, although I don't think Plato has that dark sense, but it's some, you still have a similar thing in Plato, right? Yeah. And I think, I think a lot of us have this sense that there's another factor.

• 1:41:00Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, totally. Or like, when I was speaking to Diana Pasulka, she said like, Christians are not of this world. And it was both this very hopeful. Statement.

• 1:41:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:10Jesse Michels?

  You know, where it's like, there's other stuff out there.

• 1:41:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:14Jesse Michels?

  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. Cause you have that other thing there.

• 1:41:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:23Jesse Michels?

  But it was like, this world sucks. And it isn't, and isn't going anywhere super positive. And like, at most, you can like, save yourself. And then like, hope to tip off the initiation of like a few other people or whatever. And that's it.

• 1:41:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:40Jesse Michels?

  You know, it's like the idea of saving this world is, that's tough. And I always, I find it tru- true to me too, when. I don't know, when somebody has some super virtue signaling, like I'm going to save a world. Think about like the, the 20th century is sort of the, the age of ideology. And utopian sort of, you know, like visions. And they all ended up in like mass death.

• 1:42:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:01Jesse Michels?

  And like extremely dysfunctional. So like that, the, the technocratic solutions don't really work.

• 1:42:07Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:42:10Speaker 00

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• 1:42:36Speaker 02

  At a certain point in the Republic, I forget whether it's Gallic or Adamantus, you know, it says, well, they've just got through, you know, some of the absurdities, you know, like, we're gonna have to share wives, and we're gonna take your kids, you won't raise your own kids, and like, well, like, sex will only happen once a year, like a rigged lottery at spring break, kind of thing. Right. Okay, all this stuff. And one of the guys says, I don't want to, this is terrible, no one's gonna do this. Like, this is unworkable, right? And Socrates replies by saying, oh, yeah, you're right, but it's the ideal. Okay? And he says, if I painted you a picture of the most beautiful human form, and he said, well, no one looks like that, that still wouldn't mean it wasn't the most. And I don't think Plato was necessarily saying, like, the rigged spring break lottery

• 1:43:21Speaker 02

  for mating is like, that's not the point, but the point is, like, you are not gonna find the ideal here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not here. And so whatever your expectations for it are, they're off. Yeah. Right? Okay. And think of how, in the Republic, right, the, what we talked about earlier, the problem of founding, like, we're not gonna make an ideal happen here. It's always gonna collapse on itself. And in the Timaeus, which is sort of a sequel to the Republic, right? It's like, the day after the party, and Socrates says, hey, I'm troubled that we couldn't see the ideal in the real, right? We never got to a concrete instance of it, right? So he assembles some politicians to say, you know, tell me what the ideal city would be.

• 1:44:04Speaker 02

  And the closest he gets to an answer is from Critias, who tells him a myth, another good lie, about this great war between ancient Athens and Atlantis, right? And when, but, but once again, it's like, it's sketchy, you know, he, like, it was heard by Solon in Egypt at a children's party from a priest whose name means deception and all this, like, okay, so it's like, Plato's saying, we don't really ever get to see. The ideal in the concrete world, right? And then, and then you get this creation myth again, right? In the Thomas where this world is just a symbol of this other thing. It's a symbol of another thing.

• 1:44:46Speaker 02

  And think of it, symbols again, don't really represent, they help you recollect something.

• 1:44:50Jesse Michels?

  Yes. Yeah, we're like a simulacra or like a fallen version of, of, of the thing.

• 1:44:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:57Jesse Michels?

  That's so, yeah, it's fascinating.

• 1:44:59Speaker 02

  Right, but, but also though, I think it's a fair perennial criticism Plato.

• 1:45:03Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:45:04Speaker 02

  That like there are consequences to saying this world is worthless.

• 1:45:07Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:09Jesse Michels?

  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, my sense is that in Plato's case, it's more meaningful.

• 1:45:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I could think of no better metaphor to prepare people to have bad lives.

• 1:45:31Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 1:45:31Speaker 02

  Than, than like the simulation.

• 1:45:33Jesse Michels?

  Simulation theory, right? So you're like, oh, 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 simulacra, 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

• 1:46:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:04Jesse Michels?

  Interpretation of Plato is correct and then I don't know if I'm correct and you know, believing that, but.

• 1:46:10Speaker 02

  You, you would not get trouble from me.

• 1:46:11Jesse Michels?

  Okay, well, thanks.

• 1:46:14Jesse Michels?

  Awesome. So Glaucon also says, uh, when, when speaking about the cave, he says, are there protocols? Uh, that allow us to ascend outside of the cave?

• 1:46:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:24Jesse Michels?

  And I asked Jacques Vallée this, I said, are there protocols? And he said, he's like, yes, there are. And then, I don't know, he went on to, to, you know, again, speaking, you know, typically kind of coded, uh, uh, fashion. Do you think there are protocols?

• 1:46:40Speaker 02

  I mean. I mean, I don't know that there's anything fancier than what you have in like your basic Greek ethics, right? You know what I mean? Like, don't allow irrational passion around your life, right? Know thyself, right? Do you know what I mean? You know, like,

• 1:46:59Jesse Michels?

  Like, those are the protocols.

• 1:47:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. It's certainly in the Republic, in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, those are the protocols.

• 1:47:05Jesse Michels?

  Right, right.

• 1:47:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:47:07Jesse Michels?

  It's so funny, because in modern UFO world.

• 1:47:10Speaker 02

  Lots of junk food is probably not good for that, I agree, right?

• 1:47:12Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, 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 theurgy, 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 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, whereby, you know, whatever issues you're facing have to be solved karmically in this world, in like a very just banal, local sense.

• 1:47:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I'm not trying to set myself up to be some model or something like that, okay? But I was talking to, I was at a conference several years ago, and I was talking to some like, very, very, you know, high achieving scientists, neuroscientists, who are looking at the psychedelic questions. Okay. And they're talking about like, all the benefits for like marriage, and things that were being found out around some of these things, and like overall stuff. And one of them was a very good friend of mine, I asked him afterwards, I said, so, it's just, a lot of what you're talking about there just sounds like what I've come to just thinking about stuff for like 20 years.

• 1:48:34Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, do you know what I mean?

• 1:48:35Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:36Speaker 02

  He was like, yeah, exactly. It was like, yeah, exactly.

• 1:48:38Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 1:48:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know?

• 1:48:40Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:40Speaker 02

  And it seems like, it seems like the original protocol was a kind of life.

• 1:48:43Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:48:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:48:44Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:48:45Jesse Michels?

  I have a friend who says like, life is like surfing, psychedelics are like snowboarding.

• 1:48:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:48:50Jesse Michels?

  Snowboarding. Get really hurt and you have to get your start at the top of the mountain and you gotta go down. You gotta make it all the way down. Surfing is just this sort of well earned thing where you have to like catch each and every wave or whatever. And it does feel like there's so much missed and like the modern psychedelic conversation where it's clearly this non-specific amplifier of good and bad. And I believe in not stigmatizing it. I believe in it in the context of like desperate, you know, PTSD ridden veterans and stuff. And then simultaneous to both of those things, there are no shortcuts and I don't really believe in like

• 1:49:27Jesse Michels?

  uh it in its most escapist form where it's like, I'm having issues. I need to go get tamp, tamp, stamp it out with ayahuasca like no, yeah, go through the pain like.

• 1:49:37Speaker 02

  Even going around the not just psychedelic thing, but just looking for a protocol in general, right? It seems like, you know what I mean? Like there's, there's a way, there's,

• 1:49:48Speaker 02

  there's something besides any sort of cheat code too. I don't mean to like do something by calling it cheat code and I think there is this,

• 1:49:57Speaker 02

  you know, this, this program of, of living that's been, that has been in the conversation for thousands of years, right? That maybe we were too quick to walk away from.

• 1:50:07Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:50:08Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:50:08Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. And 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.

• 1:50:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. And if, if you, if you make a commitment to, you know, live a kind of contemplative life, like you're worried, you're more worried about what's true.

• 1:50:34Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:35Speaker 02

  Do you know what I mean? And that's going to help you cut through your own BS in ways and, and it's going to maybe remove a lot of the static in the background.

• 1:50:43Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:50:43Speaker 02

  You can hear some things.

• 1:50:44Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of.

• 1:50:48Jesse Michels?

  Increasing the signal to noise ratio, which you know, that's a, it's a very hard thing to, to do to, I guess, like discernment, that's what that is.

• 1:50:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:58Jesse Michels?

  And seeing low level things that you're encountering as simulacra of higher things, I think helps. And then there's just sort of this Syllocarybdis where, you know, Carl Jung 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 gonna like, be in the solipsistic, 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 whatever. And then on the flip side, if you don't, if you don't, you know, impugn any sort of meaning, you know, then, then there's like, that's, that's like an issue, you know, too. So it's like, there's this Syllocarybdis.

• 1:51:37Speaker 02

  It's narcissism versus paranoia.

• 1:51:39Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:51:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:51:40Jesse Michels?

  Exactly. And it's, so it's, it's clearly this like, you know, it's an art, it's not a science, it's a sort of aesthetic thing.

• 1:51:47Speaker 02

  And so I guess my, my point is, is like, if you ask about protocols, it's, it's like, you know, the, the Greeks were not, they, they didn't hide this, right? Here's, you know, here's what we're recommending to you, like, like live in a moderate way, right? Like, like, like value truth over other things, such and such, and then there, that's like the path of insight.

• 1:52:07Jesse Michels?

  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, cause like it's, it's brought up in the Pasulka book. It's brought up in Gerard, actually, in the sacred and the sacred and the violence, violence in the sacred.

• 1:52:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:52:34Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:52:34Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:52:35Jesse Michels?

  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.

• 1:52:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:52Jesse Michels?

  The 2000, you know.

• 1:52:53Speaker 02

  Proportions all line up.

• 1:52:54Jesse Michels?

  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 Pasulka's book starts out about how like media shapes our understanding of what we see.

• 1:53:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:53:12Jesse Michels?

  And maybe even literally like, like Jacques Vallée talks about, you know, maybe these aren't space aliens. But if we start to believe that enough, you know, they'll, they'll appear like this sort of egregore model of consensus reality where reality is actually just a consensus collapsing function. It's not this sort of objective.

• 1:53:31Speaker 02

  I mean, I think we can, not in a magical way, but we can pretend things into existence.

• 1:53:36Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:53:37Speaker 02

  Do you, I agree. Yeah.

• 1:53:39Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:39Speaker 02

  So like, you know, you walk in the room and say, hey, Jim, how are you doing today? And I'm going to say, I'm doing fine.

• 1:53:45Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:53:45Speaker 02

  Whether I feel fine or not.

• 1:53:46Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:46Speaker 02

  It's like that some contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers, you know, talk about like, we're always performing for this big other.

• 1:53:53Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:53Speaker 02

  That's in the room.

• 1:53:54Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:54Speaker 02

  But big other is something we've pretended into existence.

• 1:53:58Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:53:58Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:53:59Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:53:59Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:54:05Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:54:12Jesse Michels?

  Totally.

• 1:54:12Speaker 02

  Like we can pretend things into existence that then have a downward effect on us. Right? Not unlike our technologies.

• 1:54:18Jesse Michels?

  If I have some fake smile I put on for the next three hours, I think statistically, like I'm going to be like a little happier or whatever.

• 1:54:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54:24Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54:26Jesse Michels?

  So, and then it get, and then you're like, okay, if that's true, science is actually like the most political. Cause science is sort of the modern mythology of today. It's the thing we, it's the thing we hold most sacred.

• 1:54:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54:36Jesse Michels?

  It, it involves the founding myth, you know, the big being. It involves rituals, you know, people with lab coats or whatever, and they sort of priestly citadel or whatever.

• 1:54:45Speaker 02

  Remember the honest placebo, those, those symbols.

• 1:54:47Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:54:48Speaker 02

  Of science work.

• 1:54:49Jesse Michels?

  They really work.

• 1:54:50Speaker 02

  And that's something we've pretended.

• 1:54:51Jesse Michels?

  Do you think we see a shift into kind of, you know, there's talks of a re enchantment? And you know, this is from the Max Weber, German sociologist, the age of disenchantment, which we seem to, I think, be coming out of like Richard Dawkins and all these guys like who are like, you know, hardcore, like atheist materialists. That does seem to be kind of ending and you have Christians like Rod Dreher writing about this. And like you have, you have a lot of people talking about this sort of re enchantment. 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.

• 1:55:35Speaker 02

  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 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 Gen Z'ers from the millennials there. Do you, you know what I mean? You know, right? Cause like the millennials kind of were coming online in the middle of the, of the, the Richard Dawkins craze. And now like the Gen Z'ers are coming online in the middle of this. So I do agree with you and I think it's, I think there's a healthy openness to enchantment.

• 1:56:13Speaker 02

  But I also worry though, too, that it could become an unhealthy openness to mystification too. You know what I mean? Where like just any enchantment is going to do now.

• 1:56:24Jesse Michels?

  Anything goes.

• 1:56:25Speaker 02

  Anything goes. Yeah. Or, or even, um, an openness to maybe the most unhealthy versions of religion and things, and things like that. Yeah. So I worry that like, you know, the, the, the much abused pendulum swing metaphor. But I do worry that the swing could go to the irrational.

• 1:56:43Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 1:56:43Speaker 02

  Right? Too. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:56:45Jesse Michels?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:56:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:46Jesse Michels?

  I do, I do as well.

• 1:56:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and like, look, you can, you can see in, in the UFO world, like some people will go for anything pro UFO.

• 1:56:54Jesse Michels?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. And they get super defensive where they're like, this is, this is real. UFOs are real.

• 1:57:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:00Jesse Michels?

  Like go on the sort of press circuit thing and that's all they want. It's like a, it's more of like a political campaign.

• 1:57:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:06Jesse Michels?

  Um, and it's not this sort of egoless search for truth.

• 1:57:10Speaker 02

  So I, so I do worry, you know, that, uh, are like. Our recovery from materialism could could slip into a kind of anti-enlightenment irrationalism too.

• 1:57:23Jesse Michels?

  Yes. Yeah, definitely could. What do you think if Plato were here today? And he saw the UFO thing, the AI thing, like he saw this sort of like these really intense movements that involve secret technology. They involve, you know, kind of asymmetric tail risk.

• 1:57:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:46Jesse Michels?

  But they also involve the saving of humanity. What do you think he would say?

• 1:57:53Speaker 02

  Uh, I think he would mistrust the whole deal.

• 1:57:56Jesse Michels?

  I love it.

• 1:57:57Speaker 02

  I think he would. I think he'd say, hey, welcome to your cave, man.

• 1:57:59Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:01Speaker 02

  He mistrust it.

• 1:58:01Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, he would say, yeah, because 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.

• 1:58:12Speaker 02

  And I think, so I read the Republic as this is a manual for political skepticism.

• 1:58:17Jesse Michels?

  Hmm. I love that.

• 1:58:19Speaker 02

  And and I think he would look at all this and say, you know, the, uh, we've seen this movie before, guys.

• 1:58:26Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. 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 transcends self gain or, you know, desire for, you know, dominion over others or the world or whatever. And, uh, yeah, I think that's like the, that's the least commoditized thing in the world.

• 1:58:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's probably the one thing you can't commodify.

• 1:58:49Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:50Speaker 02

  You can't do it.

• 1:58:51Jesse Michels?

  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 existential crisis, like, you know, the more it becomes this economically self sustaining thing or whatever.

• 1:59:12Jesse Michels?

  It's sort of impossible to unbound it from that. And then, and then all of a sudden that like leaks into like just the pure truth seeking.

• 1:59:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:59:22Jesse Michels?

  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 want to hold myself to this standard. And I think we should be held to this standard where if you're not providing incremental evidence every single show or whatever, you're kind of not really, then you're just like, you're talking to these talking heads. And they're just saying the same shit and they're inserting themselves into the conversation. The whole thing's kind of lame. So yeah, I'm sort of actively seeing like, trying to think like, how do 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.

• 2:00:05Speaker 02

  Prior to the revolution, right? How do you do this?

• 2:00:07Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:00:08Speaker 02

  So, I mean, okay, from, for me, this is going to sound maybe paradoxical. I trust myself because I have changed my mind on very big ticket stuff.

• 2:00:20Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 2:00:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:00:34Jesse Michels?

  Exactly.

• 2:00:35Speaker 02

  In ways that might even be embarrassing to me.

• 2:00:37Jesse Michels?

  Totally.

• 2:00:38Speaker 02

  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, but like, I think you can trust the people more, the degree to which they have actually changed their mind.

• 2:00:56Jesse Michels?

  I agree.

• 2:00:56Speaker 02

  And have admitted it publicly and said, I was wrong.

• 2:00:59Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 2:00:59Speaker 02

  Et cetera, et cetera. Do you know what I mean? And I think as long as you're truly open to changing your mind.

• 2:01:04Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:04Speaker 02

  Right? And of course, and you'll only you will know that, right? Like, like in your, you know, your, as you lie awake at night worrying, right?

• 2:01:12Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:12Speaker 02

  Only you will know that.

• 2:01:13Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:01:14Speaker 02

  You know, could I change my mind and have I changed my mind? Yeah. I think that's, that, I think that maintaining that. Openness to being like utterly debased by the truth.

• 2:01:23Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:01:24Speaker 02

  I think that's the most important life virtue.

• 2:01:26Jesse Michels?

  Well, I think it's not only important to do in a proxy for how intellectually honest somebody is, but it's probably any search for like big T truth sort of ends up in the, it's like the bridge over the river Kwai or whatever, where you spend your whole time trying to build this bridge and then you realize, you know, it's like the alchemist, you realize it was within or, you know, it's this sort of, uh, you've been extremely ignorant of like these core, these core truths. Cause all, all truth seeking, everything in life is leveraged by somebody's internal psychology. Everything.

• 2:01:59Speaker 02

  Everything, a hundred percent.

• 2:02:00Jesse Michels?

  And it's all, so it's like the UFO thing is so, it's so, it's often very escapist. It's often the people are interested in sort of left-hand path, kind of occult stuff.

• 2:02:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:02:10Jesse Michels?

  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 the stuff is if, if that's, you know, part of your path is fine. And then there's some sort of coming to terms with, you know, often it's like the, you know, St. Francis of Assisi, where it's like this forcing function towards good.

• 2:02:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:02:33Jesse Michels?

  And yeah, I don't know. It's fascinating. Yeah.

• 2:02:36Speaker 02

  I think one of the most profound moments in philosophy is the, the very first line of the preface of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, where he says, we knowers are least well-known to ourselves. Okay. And it's a direct kind of, you know, F you to Socrates, you know, the know thyself, right? You know, the unexamined life's worth, um, is not worth living to say, well, have you really inquired? Like, have you really looked into your own like irrational biases?

• 2:03:04Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 2:03:04Speaker 02

  Like your own needs that might be fulfilled by all this, right? Do you know what I mean?

• 2:03:08Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:08Speaker 02

  And especially something like with the UFO is I think you really need to be open to like, to like, how my own unconscious could be gaming this for me.

• 2:03:17Jesse Michels?

  A hundred percent. Well, 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.

• 2:03:26Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:03:27Jesse Michels?

  You know, it's a good line. Yeah. And, and yeah, and it's, uh, it, it pre-leverages everything. And if you don't admit that. It's definitely doing it to you. If you do admit that, then maybe it loses a little bit of power and you have some sort of objectivity around it. But I do find that is that the dirty little secret in all of ufology is like, everybody, and I mean, everybody, has some sort of autobiographical thing in their past or reason for being into it. And the ones that I find often the most honest actors and certain people maybe can't talk about these things publicly because they do come from, you know, specific positions.

• 2:04:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:04:01Jesse Michels?

  But everybody's got a little bit of that.

• 2:04:03Speaker 02

  And it's probably true of our political views, our religious views, et cetera, et cetera. And that doesn't mean these things need to be abandoned, but it does mean we have to like, be aware of where our cognitive weak spots are.

• 2:04:15Jesse Michels?

  Totally.

• 2:04:16Speaker 02

  And make sure we're not being exploited.

• 2:04:17Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, I flipped from being pretty diehard liberal growing up and I still am, I guess, anti neoconservatism or whatever. So that was, you know, where I think the macro shifted. What's that?

• 2:04:30Speaker 02

  Bomb fewer people.

• 2:04:30Jesse Michels?

  There was.

• 2:04:31Speaker 02

  Bomb fewer people.

• 2:04:32Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, bomb fewer people. I was always, you know, I'm still consistent on that. Yeah, exactly. And so maybe there's some sort of like neoconservative 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 right wing. And, um, you know, I, I often trust people who have had shifts like that. Because I'm like, oh, you're willing to like, just kind of throw out your own ego, question yourself.

• 2:04:59Speaker 02

  Because you probably had to eat a lot of crow with some friends.

• 2:05:02Jesse Michels?

  Oh, yeah, I still do. I have friends who like went to college with me and they're like, what's wrong with you, dude?

• 2:05:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:05:07Jesse Michels?

  Sorry.

• 2:05:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:09Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. And you look, I have to eat a lot of crow and the right wing is a lot of, you know, there's like, yeah, there are issues, but both sides.

• 2:05:16Speaker 02

  I can't remember if he's still alive or not, but it was a very important contemporary philosopher named Hilary Putnam. And, um, Putnam was famous for changing his mind.

• 2:05:25Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. And at one point, I believe there was an interview or something with him where he said, look, I thought the point was to be right, not to be consistent.

• 2:05:32Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:05:34Jesse Michels?

  Totally.

• 2:05:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:05:35Jesse Michels?

  And it should like, I think the best way to get to truth is this dialectical thing.

• 2:05:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:05:40Jesse Michels?

  Where you play with falsity. You're like, you don't know, like you, but you, you, you assume a belief that you think is kind of too radical or beyond the pale or ridiculous. And in many cases, like the Pasulka thing or the Carl Jung thing, you're like, actually, I think there's something real here.

• 2:05:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:05:54Jesse Michels?

  Um, and then in other cases, you play with it and you're like, ah, 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.

• 2:06:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Hegel like conscious, like, uh, he's really dismissive of, of the fear of being wrong.

• 2:06:18Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 2:06:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. And there's 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.

• 2:06:25Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 2:06:26Speaker 02

  Anyway, like, like to constantly have our views like wrecked.

• 2:06:29Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:06:30Speaker 02

  To make any progress.

• 2:06:31Jesse Michels?

  I love that.

• 2:06:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:06:32Jesse Michels?

  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.

• 2:06:41Speaker 02

  That is your show though.

• 2:06:41Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it is totally. Yeah. You can't get around that.

• 2:06:44Speaker 02

  You don't like it, get your own show.

• 2:06:45Jesse Michels?

  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.

• 2:06:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:06:53Jesse Michels?

  And he was like friends with like Jacob Baum or like, you know, the sort of contemporaries and like, you read Baum stuff, you read like, you know, the Aurora and stuff. It's like, this is like really trippy, interesting stuff. And you hear like rumors, he might've been like a Rosicrucian and like part of, you know, secret societies and stuff. Do you, how much do you think some of these philosophers, like maybe Hegel being a good example, dabbled in like the, you know, more esoteric?

• 2:07:19Speaker 02

  Look, I think they, they all had private lives.

• 2:07:21Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:21Speaker 02

  Do you, you know, 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, so a prominent philosopher at prestigious university Z, let's say, right? Uh, today, you know, was like a thirty-three degree mason or something like that. That wouldn't be entirely surprising to you.

• 2:07:42Jesse Michels?

  No.

• 2:07:43Speaker 02

  That's what it's, yeah, so, so I don't doubt that you could find, and it's certainly like, like those sorts of groups are all over, you know, the Enlightenment and things like that.

• 2:07:51Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:51Speaker 02

  So I, I would not be surprised if, if like Hegel

• 2:07:55Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:55Speaker 02

  had some dabblings of that sort, yeah, yeah.

• 2:07:57Jesse Michels?

  And it's fascinating, you have Jacques Vallée, you know, uh, calling his working group on UFO, ufology, studying UFOs with Jalen Heineck and a bunch of these guys in the seventies, the Invisible College, even named his book The Invisible College, which is uh, homage to, you know, Robert Boyle, but originally these were

• 2:08:15Speaker 02

  Subtle hint, right?

• 2:08:15Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, less than subtle hint, and these are originally Rosicrucian ideas.

• 2:08:19Speaker 02

  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 had, you know, you know, uh, it was in the hermetic stuff, right? I don't know if that need change how we read the texts, though.

• 2:08:35Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 2:08:35Speaker 02

  Do you, do you, you're, you're, I'm happy to take his public presentation of the text at face value.

• 2:08:42Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:42Speaker 02

  Right? Even though there may be significant things to learn

• 2:08:46Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:46Speaker 02

  of other things that he, that he might have been up to.

• 2:08:48Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. I never know how to read, you know, some of these people, it's like, are they, are they really into it? Or is it some sort of like tactic or something, you know?

• 2:08:56Speaker 02

  I mean, he's also like on paper a Lutheran too, but that would not really, like, there's some pretty, he, he comes apart with that too.

• 2:09:03Jesse Michels?

  Right, right. Yeah, well, it's all, it's all so fascinating, I mean, he, I mean, talk about a philosopher who's had, uh, just an outsized impact on modernity.

• 2:09:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:09:13Jesse Michels?

  And Hegel has to be, you know, at the, at the top.

• 2:09:15Speaker 02

  Definitely.

• 2:09:16Jesse Michels?

  Um, but this has been an honor, I really appreciate.

• 2:09:19Speaker 02

  I've had a good time, man.

• 2:09:20Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, this is a blast, and, uh, I'd love to do it again, is there anything else that we've missed or anything?

• 2:09:25Speaker 02

  No, not, not something I'm aware of, yes.

• 2:09:27Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:09:27Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, feel free to drag me back down, I would, I would love to do it.

• 2:09:30Jesse Michels?

  I would love to do it, man, maybe I'll come out to you, I'd love to see Kansas and hang out and

• 2:09:34Speaker 02

  Come during tornado season and we'll, uh,

• 2:09:36Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, that's, yeah, why not?

• 2:09:40Jesse Michels?

  Um, yeah, man, this is a blast. Go, go out and buy a unidentified flying hyper object. You working on anything else or do you want to promote anything else?

• 2:09:47Speaker 02

  Uh.

• 2:09:48Jesse Michels?

  Twitter or anything or?

• 2:09:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I have a mostly dormant Twitter account, so.

• 2:09:52Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:09:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I have a Substack, maybe check that out.

• 2:09:55Jesse Michels?

  Okay, awesome.

• 2:09:56Speaker 02

  But if you're interested, have a look at the book.

• 2:09:58Jesse Michels?

  Cool. And is it on Substack? It's just Jim Madden or?

• 2:10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it, it, you know, it's hard to change your Substack name.

• 2:10:04Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:04Speaker 02

  And I like accidentally made it, I think it's just literally Jim Madden's newsletter.

• 2:10:08Jesse Michels?

  Okay. Hey, why not? Literal, people know what they're getting.

• 2:10:11Speaker 02

  I do, I do have a webpage, JD Madden dot com.

• 2:10:14Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:10:14Speaker 02

  It has a bunch of papers and podcasts and stuff, so.

• 2:10:16Jesse Michels?

  Okay, awesome. Well, really appreciate it. This is a blast.

• 2:10:19Speaker 02

  You bet. Thank you.

• 2:10:21Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.