The Basement: Jeffrey Kripal | Inside the Archives of the Impossible

-Discover how to move your IRA or 401k into physical gold and silver — with no taxes or penalties. Get your free portfolio review and free gold & silver guide from GoldenCrest Metals: visit https://whyfileslovesgold.com or call (888) 949-9172 now. -Ready to reach your goals? Visit https://hims.com/thewhyfiles to get personalized, affordable care for weight loss, hair loss, sex, testosterone, and more. Jeff Kripal grew up in Tornado Alley, tried to fast his way to sainthood as a teenager, and then one night in Calcutta in 1989, something happened that he's spent almost forty years writing about. Now he's the man behind the Archives of the Impossible: Jacques Vallée's files, John Mack's abduction research, thousands of letters strangers sent Whitley Strieber. Not believing. Not debunking. Just listening. And he told me a story he's never written down. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

  You could try to find the perfect coffee to water ratio. Or you could press a button. With Keurig, each K-cup pod is precision measured for a perfectly delicious cup. No effort, no grind, no math required. Great coffee without the grind. Keurig.

• 0:24AJ Gentile?

  Today I'm talking with Jeffrey Kreible. He holds an endowed chair at Rice University where he runs an archive of the impossible. Over a million documents on the paranormal. Jacques Vallée's files are in there. John Mack's 150 boxes and 3,400 letters people wrote to Whitley Schreiber after they read Communion.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  Rice University, isn't that what Kennedy said we'd go to the moon?

• 0:45AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  Oh, so technically it's been an archive of the impossible since 1962.

• 0:53AJ Gentile?

  Jeff grew up in a Nebraska hardware store and at 13 he stopped eating to become a saint. Then one night in Calcutta in 1989, he thought the wall was electrocuting him. He says every book since came out of that night.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  If you think the wall is electrocuting you, guess what? The wall is electrocuting you.

• 1:10AJ Gentile?

  Today we're covering what's in those boxes, why he thinks the X-Men are real, and his new series Archive X on AMC Plus. And then there's Nobel Prize winner and the glowing raccoon. That one got an actual whoa out of me, and you'll hear it.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  Even Nobel Prize winners can hit the blowups too hard.

• 1:26AJ Gentile?

  We all can. Once we wrap up, I'll come back and break down the conversation. Let's go down to the basement. Dr. Kreible's here, this is exciting. What drew me to your work most of all is your third space, which is not believing, not debunking, just having a conversation, and that is the thesis of my entire channel.

• 1:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, well fantastic.

• 1:53AJ Gentile?

  Why is it so hard for people to live in that space?

• 1:59Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, it is. I don't know the answer to that. I mean, I see it every day. I walk into a classroom. Some people are set up to be reflexive, to step outside of their worldview and to laugh at it and to live in that third space, and most people are not capable of it. And I don't know why. And I teach at a very elite, very selective university, so these are really smart kids, and there aren't many of them capable of this third space. So I don't know. I don't know.

• 2:40AJ Gentile?

  I don't either. It wasn't a facetious question. When I started the channel, I'm interested in the content, in the stories, but I can only find people that just were totally believers, and you could, and a lot of it's like, that's bullshit. And then you have the other side where just these snide debunkers, very condescending.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  Well, try, try teaching religion. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's bad. And to get across what compare, when you compare religions, of course, what you see is the commonalities, but you also see the differences, and it's really hard. There's so much of our modern world is, is, you know, really scientific and materialistic, and it's based on a rejection of religion. And I think so that historical background is part of the answer. But the other part, I guess this will get us into the deep end. I think a lot of philosophical or religious truth is esoteric, by which I mean it's

• 3:46Speaker 03

  secret, by which I do not mean I can whisper to you a piece of data or information which you suddenly know. I mean, you literally can't know.

• 3:59AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  And you can tell people until you're blue in the face about what is so or what is the case, and they will not understand. And they're being very sincere and very genuine. I don't question their sincerity at all, but I think there are a lot of religious or philosophical truths that simply are not communicable. And, I mean, this is what has, this gets into media, by the way, and into whether you can translate certain truths.

• 4:31AJ Gentile?

  What do you mean?

• 4:36Speaker 03

  Can you translate truths into a language or a poetry or an expression that lots of people can hear and maybe even be entertained by? Or is it always for a select group of people that is small? You know, and that, that, that works away from the whole media or whole entertainment model, but I do, I do think about that. And I think that's, I think that's what academics do really well, is they, they speak to a very small audience, basically of the converted, basically they preach to the choir.

• 5:17AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 5:18Speaker 03

  And I understand that. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, if you want to be confirmed in your belief system, that's a good way to do it. But what, what happens when you enter a public space is you're, you encounter a lot of people who don't agree with you or who can't understand what you're saying. And that's why I think it's a, it's a really good, it's a good situation to be in for, certainly for an academic. And we tend to make fun, as you probably know, of popularizers. We don't, we don't like them. And by we, I don't, I don't mean me.

• 5:54AJ Gentile?

  Right. No, not you.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  But I mean, the academy in general does not reward people who speak to a broad public, they reward people who speak to a very small public. And I don't quite understand that. I mean, I, I kind of do, but I kind of don't.

• 6:12AJ Gentile?

  It's an easier room, whether you're teaching or learning, if it just confirms your own beliefs and, it's just an easier room.

• 6:18Speaker 03

  The thing, the thing about teaching, though, I could talk about teaching all day. First of all, you have a lot of young people in the room who have separated from their families for the first time. And so they're vulnerable in a particular way. They're, or they're not vulnerable, they're open to new ideas. And they're usually living with people who do not look like them and do not sound like them and who do not believe like them. And that is really healthy. And so what you're doing as a teacher is you're not giving these kids a set of beliefs

• 7:00Speaker 03

  to sign their names to, you're giving them a way to vocalize the questions they already have. And they don't even know what questions they have because they can't vocal, they can't, they can't express them. And so what you're doing as a teacher is you're just, you're, you're trying to get them to see what, what their situation is and that other people have thought about this, sometimes for millennia. And they're, they're very grateful for that, for that ability to, to express those questions. The way, the way we, we frame this is, I'm not here to give you answers, I'm here to ask better questions, get you to ask better questions. And that's really true, actually. That's, I'm not, that is really what a, what a, what a fine education is about, I think,

• 7:44Speaker 03

  is, is asking better questions.

• 7:46AJ Gentile?

  I don't know if every teacher shares that view.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  No, they do not. But, but certainly, so there's two, there's basically two models of education. There's the fill up the bucket model, you know, where you're, you're going to give them the set of data or information and then they're going to go home and they're going to get a job and blah, blah, blah. And then there's the transformation model. You're going to, you're going to rock them, you're going to rock the world, and you're going to see how they respond to that. And I'm much more in, of course, the transformation model.

• 8:19AJ Gentile?

  Those are the teachers that I remember, I think that everyone remembers.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:23AJ Gentile?

  That you just couldn't wait to get to class because you know you're going to have your mind blown.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. And they probably didn't know, they didn't know what, they didn't have a set of answers to give you, but they, they made you a better questioner, they made, they made you think. And I think that's really what, at least at its best, is what education is about.

• 8:43AJ Gentile?

  That's the information I retain as well, is those teachers who did that.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:48AJ Gentile?

  And it could be the most boring class, but the right professor makes it magical.

• 8:53Speaker 03

  My, my finest, my most memorable teacher in high school was my mathematics teacher.

• 8:58AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Freaking amazing.

• 9:01AJ Gentile?

  And you remember everything about that class.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  And I remember that there, there was actually a bust of Plato up, up on his shelf, and he, he never mentioned it.

• 9:12AJ Gentile?

  He didn't?

• 9:13Speaker 03

  Never once. And I was like, that was Plato. And of course, it makes total sense.

• 9:18AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  It makes total sense, because a lot of mathematicians are basically Platonists. They think numbers exist in some esoteric space, and he clearly did. And he was trying to communicate that to, basically it was just a bunch of kids in high school. And it was awesome. I was, it was awesome.

• 9:39AJ Gentile?

  You're so lucky to have those teachers, as I was. Amazing. So look, something quiet happened this week that most people missed. A former CFTC chair, the guy who used to regulate derivatives, went on record. And what he said should stop you cold. Congress banned a central bank digital currency. The Fed swore it wasn't building one. This guy said, quote, "That does not mean we're not looking at how to create one." Project Agora, look it up. Meaning, soon every account you own becomes a switch somebody else controls. And they've been telling you why they're going to want to flip it. National debt just crossed $40 trillion. Interest alone, over a trillion a year. Bigger than Medicare and Medicaid combined. There's one way out of that math, and you already know what it is.

• 10:24AJ Gentile?

  China's central bank has bought gold 21 months in a row. JP Morgan is telling clients, gold hits $6,000 by year end. This isn't a prediction anymore, it's already happening. That's why I trust Golden Crest Metals. Physical gold and silver you hold in your hand. It can't be hacked, can't be printed, can't be turned off. Go to Yfileslovesgold.com and get the free 2026 info kit, or text files to 638257. Yfileslovesgold.com or text files to 638257, because when they clicked switch, I was gonna bull cut it.

• 10:59Speaker 03

  I had so much math in high school from this teacher that there was no math class they could give me in college.

• 11:06AJ Gentile?

  Nope.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  None. And so I never had another math class after my senior, senior year in high school.

• 11:13AJ Gentile?

  I had, took classics in high school and no college could match it. Was the right teacher, right teachers.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  Classics?

• 11:21AJ Gentile?

  Classics.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 11:23AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. Homer and Virgil and so forth.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  So Greek and Latin?

• 11:26AJ Gentile?

  Yes. And Philology.

• 11:30Speaker 03

  This is why you're a Renaissance. It's you're still a Renaissance person.

• 11:38AJ Gentile?

  I'm just getting by. Your bio endowed share at Rice, 12 books, three volumes, study in progress. But your last line is he thinks he may be Spider-Man. And there's a plaque on your door. What? You gotta explain that. What do you mean by that?

• 11:54Speaker 03

  I'd, I'd, I like to tell bad jokes, of course. When I was a kid, I grew up reading Spider-Man. I love Spider-Man and my brother. Loved the Incredible Hulk, by the way. And there was something about Marvel in the sixties and seventies that we couldn't articulate as kids. And today I would say it was questioning authority.

• 12:17AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 12:17Speaker 03

  It was, it was standing outside and it was making fun of itself. It was practicing this reflexivity that. I think is profound, actually. And so Spider-Man for me is. It's a way to be reflexive. It's a way to make fun of myself. It, I also think it feeds into the alien thing.

• 12:38Speaker 03

  These big buggy eyes and this costume and. And I know I have Spider-Man is the literally the name on my door and my joke at the university is that he never shows up. And I just, I just use his office, you know, and people laugh at that. They think that's funny, but. Maybe that's why I tell it. Maybe that's why that, and that line is there because.

• 13:03Speaker 03

  A woman who's now a dean at Yale, she spit out her coffee after, after that was read. Laughing, you know, and I was like, okay, that's a good one. I'll use that one.

• 13:14AJ Gentile?

  Well, he's, um, he's bitten by accident. He's given powers he can't tell anybody about.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  And he makes fun of his, of his villains and. He's twisted and contorted and messed up and. Yeah, he's awesome. Peter Parker is awesome.

• 13:30AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, he is.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  That, that's, that's, that's the story I read as a kid. And I mean, in the sixties and seventies when comics were. It was junk literature, AJ. It was, it wasn't. It wasn't the Hollywood stuff. It was just a bunch of guys in New York making a few bucks out of a bunch of kids. You know, across the country, mostly boys, by the way, I'm sure. Who were like 11 or 12 or whatever we were, I don't know, 10. And we bought comics in the drugstore on these metal racks and.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  It was great.

• 14:07AJ Gentile?

  Uh, Stan Lee was, he was definitely anti-establishment. No DC for you guys?

• 14:13Speaker 03

  No, no what?

• 14:14AJ Gentile?

  DC.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  No.

• 14:16AJ Gentile?

  We were, we were a Marvel house too. Well, the dad grew up with DC.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  I remember the Batman show 1966 and. You know, I was a kid, I was four. I was born in 62, by the way, to place me. And I thought it was all true.

• 14:36AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  It was awesome.

• 14:37AJ Gentile?

  It was.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  It was great, but they were making fun of themselves. And so there was a kind of.

• 14:42AJ Gentile?

  I didn't know that.

• 14:43Speaker 03

  I didn't know.

• 14:43AJ Gentile?

  I thought Adam West was cool.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I didn't know that either as a kid. I was like, wow, this is so awesome.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  So that was the DC that would, that attracted me and the supers, but Superman and Batman were, they were too blocky. They were too sure. Of themsel, they were basically impenetrable white males and. I have, I just wasn't drawn to them, you know, for whatever reason.

• 15:09AJ Gentile?

  Marvel always had the anti-hero, the reluctant hero. Yeah, I can see that.

• 15:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:18AJ Gentile?

  We're gonna talk a lot about mutants and mystics today.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 15:23AJ Gentile?

  I wanna get into.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  What do you wanna talk about? I wanna, I wanna talk about what you wanna talk about.

• 15:29AJ Gentile?

  I wanna talk about go-karts.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  Okay, go-karts. Let's talk about go-karts.

• 15:34AJ Gentile?

  The go-kart that you and your dad found in the barn. Tell me that story.

• 15:40Speaker 03

  That's awesome again.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  Dad is a, uh, a former mechanic and he had a, he, he actually had a go-kart company when he was young. They sold go-karts, uh, through mail catalogs. And, uh, my mom, my mom actually modeled one of these go-karts.

• 15:59AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 15:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, when, when I, I don't know, I was 10 maybe or nine. And dad wanted to, um. Find, find a go-kart and, and, and introduce Jerry and I, Jerry's my brother, younger brother. Into, into the magic of go-karts. And we found this.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  This two-cycle racing go-kart in a barn near where I grew up.

• 16:26AJ Gentile?

  How did you stumble across a go-kart?

• 16:30Speaker 03

  I don't know. It was probably in the paper. It was probably the farmer selling it. It was a Fox go-kart. It was a professional race car and. And so we just, we, when these races started, we were literally lapping people.

• 16:44AJ Gentile?

  What engine was in that?

• 16:46Speaker 03

  It was a two-cycle, um, engine. It was probably a hundred and 25, uh, CCs. It was. And it had a gearbox on it, which means it didn't have a, a chain. So it was, it had this incredible power to it. It was so, it was so much power for a kid. You had to pick it up and run with it and then drop it and then it would, then it would start. You couldn't just pull a chain.

• 17:13AJ Gentile?

  No mind, you had to start down a hill.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, this was like, this was like, a man had to like lift this and run with it and then, and then, and then drop it and. And I was just a kid. I was nine or 10, so I didn't weigh anything and, um.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  It was all I could do to keep it on the track. It was just like a, it was like a rocket. It was like fantastic.

• 17:35AJ Gentile?

  Now I read that you had your dad drop a different motor in there to slow it down.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  I did, we did. I.

• 17:40AJ Gentile?

  Which Jerry didn't approve of.

• 17:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this, I started to get weird and religious. And anorexic, you know, eventually about 13 or so or 14. And I think that's when we put the smaller engine on it.

• 17:59Speaker 03

  I think that was part.

• 18:00AJ Gentile?

  It was part of your piety?

• 18:01Speaker 03

  That was part of, I was part of my weirdness.

• 18:04AJ Gentile?

  Suffering shows up a lot, like his intentional suffering.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  It was not good. It was, it was bad. Um, but this, I, this kid, and by this kid, I mean me, I was.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  I was, could, could follow. There was a guy who, who, who won the races. Uh, he was from this other town named, called Fairberry. And he was an adult. He was a young adult and I was just like 11 or 12 and I was always, you know, right behind him. If he made a mistake, I would, I would, he never did make a mistake, by the way. Um, but. It was, I was really good. It was, it was awesome.

• 18:41AJ Gentile?

  All these guys were twice your age, right?

• 18:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they, then there was this whole culture of go-karts that grew up around these races that. Um, happened for two or three years and we, we raced mostly on dirt tracks, by the way. And so you were constantly sliding, you know, and then there was a, there was a long runway, but everything else was a curve and you were. You basically were always in a, in a, it taught me how to drive, you know, I, I was, I was really good.

• 19:11AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 19:12Speaker 03

  It was, I, I know I keep saying the word awesome, but it was awesome. It was really great.

• 19:17AJ Gentile?

  I was a go-kart kid. I know, I know. Do you remember?

• 19:20Speaker 03

  Did you have a four-cycle or a two?

• 19:22AJ Gentile?

  It was, it was a two-stroke, yanked out of an old lawnmower.

• 19:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's what most people have.

• 19:29AJ Gentile?

  Pull a chain and drop it down a hill.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  I know.

• 19:31AJ Gentile?

  I didn't win anything though.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, this was a real racing cart. My brother, my brother raced in the four-cycle, uh, division and he, he, um. He had, he had a four-cycle motorcycle, but it, but it was, again, it was a racing cart. And this was because of dad. You know, and dad was our mechanic and kept these carts going and we were just, we were just the kids. We were just the drivers.

• 19:54AJ Gentile?

  Do you remember like taking that lead and looking over and seeing dad's face?

• 19:59Speaker 03

  I don't.

• 20:00AJ Gentile?

  What?

• 20:00Speaker 03

  I don't, but I'm sure, I mean, sure it made him happy.

• 20:04AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 20:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. Mom was happy too. Mom went to all of our races and I think they were both really happy for us. It was, it was, it was, it was a good time, you know, as a kid.

• 20:16AJ Gentile?

  Well, your dad was a mechanic. His dad was a, was a mechanic. What can you fix?

• 20:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I remember, I mean, Grandpa Kreppel, uh, died when I was a little boy. Uh, Grandma Kreppel died. Of, of some disease, maybe cancer or something. And then Grandpa didn't live long after that. We lived in another town. They were very poor. They were dirt poor. And I remember, I loved their house, but I remember it was a, basically a big garden and. They had chickens and. A goats, I think, and, and I think it was all because of their poverty. I think they were, they were trying to raise their food. And Grandpa was, um, Grandpa Kreppel had a garage, had a Chrysler garage. But never really made it financially.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  And that town, that town was wiped out in. 51 or 52. I can't remember the year, cause I wasn't there. I wasn't born by a tornado. And I think it really destroyed the, the garage that Grandpa had too. So it's, it was just, it, yeah, it was hard. Grandpa immigrated from Czechoslovakia, by the way. 1910 or 1911. My mom saw their, their German, their German farmers and they immigrated in the 1850s and 1860s.

• 21:38AJ Gentile?

  So can you fix anything? Are you handy?

• 21:44Speaker 03

  I think it skips a generation.

• 21:45AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  It's what I'm trying to.

• 21:46AJ Gentile?

  Sometimes.

• 21:47Speaker 03

  Um, my wife thinks I secretly just say that, but I, I can fix things. Um, that may be true, um, but I'm not, I'm certainly not as handy or as mechanical as dad is.

• 22:01AJ Gentile?

  Well, there's a quote of yours that really stood out to me. And when you're describing your dad as a mechanic and a talented metal worker. The fact that you called a metal worker talented was really struck me.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, dad, you know, dad is somebody who should have went to college and never did. And I'm sure it was because of money and I'm sure it was be, he was the youngest, he was the, the baby of that family, the six or seven kids there. And I think it was just a financial thing. His older brothers were in the military. Um, but college just wasn't a thing then, and he should have went.

• 22:40AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  He should have went and he didn't. And my brother.

• 22:43AJ Gentile?

  What do you think he would have got from college that he couldn't get working?

• 22:46Speaker 03

  He would have become an engineer.

• 22:47AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, I think he would have had a very different career. As it, as it was, they had a fine career. Mom and dad bought a hardware store. I grew up in a hardware store and, um,

• 23:01Speaker 03

  that was, that was, they knew everybody in this little town and, and that was sort of the center of the town, that hardware store. And, um, that was awesome. But, but again, I was just reflecting on dad's lack of college education and that he, he should have went, but he didn't.

• 23:17AJ Gentile?

  Do you feel like he wanted to, or is that he did?

• 23:22Speaker 03

  I just don't think it was a possibility then.

• 23:24AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 23:25Speaker 03

  And the way that feeds into this story. So when Jerry and I got to be, uh, kids, mom and dad definitely wanted us to go to college. So there was this American thing of you want, you want the kids to, to, to essentially do things you didn't. And we went, I became an academic and Jerry became a medical doctor. So we did a lot of school and sort of over, overdid it as it were. But I think that's because there's, there was none of this in, in the family. Or very little of it, I should say.

• 24:01AJ Gentile?

  But there's a lot of respect for blue collar work and small business in your story.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:05AJ Gentile?

  What did you learn from that hardware store?

• 24:08Speaker 03

  That people are people.

• 24:09AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  Um, I learned, wow, learning is not, it's not even the right metaphor.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  I mean, this goes, it's into the show too, the television series. I mean, there is this, um, there is this sense that speaking to people are, when I say people are people, what I mean by that is, is that people are really smart and I think they know a lot that they don't say. Um, and they don't always have the opportunity to say things. I mean, my, the virtue of the academy is that you have an opportunity to say things. Um, but, but, but these people didn't. And, and I think they, they actually did know a lot.

• 24:55Speaker 03

  And had a lot of these same experiences that I, that I talk about.

• 25:00AJ Gentile?

  I think your first comparative religion teacher was Dewey.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Was who?

• 25:05AJ Gentile?

  Dewey.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  Who?

• 25:10AJ Gentile?

  He's a, he was a Native American man.

• 25:14Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, oh, Dewey. I'm sorry. Yeah. I did, it didn't, it just didn't register. Yeah. Dewey.

• 25:23Speaker 03

  Dewey was this, um,

• 25:27Speaker 03

  elderly Indian man who, who actually loved my mom and dad, came into the store a lot.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  I, he was described to me as a horse trader, um, by which I think he didn't have any money and they had to, they had to call him something, you know? And he lived outside of town and

• 25:48Speaker 03

  I didn't think of it as that way. That's, that's kind of why the question threw me off. But I suspect he was. That was my first introduction to

• 25:58Speaker 03

  religious diversity, I suspect.

• 26:00AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. He's, I think you mentioned that the rest of the town didn't trust him.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  Probably not. Um, I did. My mom and dad did.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  The, the notion, you know, so that town, the, the notion of religious diversity was whether you were Lutheran or Catholic.

• 26:19AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 26:20Speaker 03

  Everybody was German, but there was this, there was this difference and there, there was one Jew in town. And by the way, he was a lawyer. So it just fit into the stereotype. Um, but there were no African Americans and there were, there was Dewey. But the town, you know, Nebraska is, is really founded because of Native American culture and Native America. I mean, even the name Nebraska and the plat river, the flat river has this French name, but there is this,

• 26:55Speaker 03

  this background, this Native American background of things that you really do get when you grow up in, in that part of the country and, and this, this, this notion, I think, really did inform a lot of what comes later.

• 27:07AJ Gentile?

  What did Dewey have to say about the town and the people there? I mean, he was probably not old enough to see things change as much as they did, but his parents certainly did.

• 27:15Speaker 03

  He, Dewey, you know, I mean, I'm just thinking, I'm just remembering him. Dewey had a notion of the divine that was not Christian. It was very, um, very much about a great spirit that was overlooking everyone. And it was a very ecumenical kind of notion. But I just remember just hearing about this, this notion of divinity that was very different from what I, I, certainly I grew up with. Um, the Catholics and the Germans were very certain, you know, that God was X, Y, and Z. And Dewey's notion of, of, of the divine was much more open, I think.

• 27:53AJ Gentile?

  How old were you when you were talking to him?

• 27:56Speaker 03

  Probably 10 to 12, maybe.

• 28:00AJ Gentile?

  So before you got very Catholic?

• 28:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, yeah, but I wasn't, you know, I, I was very Catholic, you know, very anorexic in my youth, but not in a, not in a moral sense. I, I wasn't condemning of other worldviews, but.

• 28:16AJ Gentile?

  Hold on, I have to push back on that.

• 28:17Speaker 03

  Okay. Well, maybe I was then.

• 28:19AJ Gentile?

  Maybe you were because when you were 13, I think you wrote.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 28:25AJ Gentile?

  That you wanted the porn out of your comics.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  Well, okay, I did. No, I did. I wrote about that actually. Um, I did, I did.

• 28:36AJ Gentile?

  You did.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  I did want.

• 28:37AJ Gentile?

  When we wanted more porn in the comics, me and my friends.

• 28:40Speaker 03

  You wanted it in?

• 28:41AJ Gentile?

  You wanted the, yeah, you wanted voluptuous.

• 28:45Speaker 03

  Okay. So.

• 28:46AJ Gentile?

  So you were the crybaby.

• 28:48Speaker 03

  So, yeah, yeah, I was. I think, okay, I'll, I'll let me back up a bit. Let me defend myself. Um, first of all, yes, I did. My first published piece was a letter to the editor asking them to remove the, the, I didn't use the word porn, by the way, you, you did.

• 29:08AJ Gentile?

  Pornography.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. I think pornographic, I think.

• 29:11AJ Gentile?

  Okay, okay.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  Um, that these images were pornographic. Um, they were. It was sort of porn for kids.

• 29:20Speaker 03

  I, I think that was part of the attraction of the comics, by the way. I think that's kind of what drew us to, to comics was those voluptuous bodies.

• 29:29AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  Um, but at 12 or 13, or whenever this was, whenever I published this piece, um, I, I had become aware very much of that dimension and was objecting to it. But that,

• 29:45Speaker 03

  that's really not the same as, um, the Dewey thing with, with the other, other cultural worldviews. I was very moral. I, I very, very much was, but not, I wasn't, it wasn't a condemnation of other cultures or other world. I guess that's what I'm trying to say. There was definitely a pushback against sex, definitely. Um, and vulgarity and a whole bunch of other things that was very painful.

• 30:18AJ Gentile?

  You, there's a lot of irony in your story.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  There is. There is. There's a ton of irony.

• 30:25AJ Gentile?

  What was so offensive about the pornographic material in the con, because in, in the seventies, it wasn't that bad yet. In the eighties, it got pretty, pretty raunchy.

• 30:34AJ Gentile?

  Those are my years.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  I mean, these were my anorexic, this is the beginning of the anorexia. So I was definitely pushing back on sexuality and I was offended, I think, by my own, my own instinctual attractions to this. I mean, I'm looking back on it now.

• 30:56AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  And of course, I wrote about that in the memoir, The Manifesto. Because I think it's very significant. I think my first published piece was about sex and gender.

• 31:10AJ Gentile?

  Was it detracting from the story? Was it?

• 31:13Speaker 03

  I don't think it was a problem. I mean, looking back, AJ, it was, it was not a problem. But it was to me then. Definitely was to me then.

• 31:22AJ Gentile?

  That's, I think it's such an important part of your story.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so too. I mean, that's why I feature, that's why I foregrounded it. Because I do think it's an important part.

• 31:33AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, I read your memoir with my, with my mouth open. Like, I didn't know this guy at all. You've been told for years that weight loss comes down to willpower. Skip the fries, hit the gym, just try harder. But if that were the whole story, it would've worked by now. Sometimes the problem isn't effort. It's that willpower alone is never going to be enough. Wegovy at Hims gives you real medical support instead of leaving you to grind it out solo. It's the first ever GLP-1 weight loss medication available as a pill. And it also comes as a pen, whichever fits your routine. In a clinical trial, people lost an average of 14% of their body weight at 64 weeks, alongside diet and exercise, with some losing up to 20%. Getting started is simple.

• 32:16AJ Gentile?

  Head to hims.com and complete an online consultation. A licensed provider reviews your info and determines if treatment is right for you. Hims also backs you with nutrition and lifestyle guidance, plus 24/7 messaging access to your care team. Ready to reach your goals? Visit hims.com/theyfiles to get personalized, affordable care for weight loss, hair loss, sex, testosterone, and more. That's H-I-M-S dot com slash the Y files. Hims.com slash the Y files. Individual results may vary, and stopping treatment may result in weight regain. Weight loss by Hims is not available in all 50 states. Wegovy is the registered trademark of Novo Nordisk AS. To get started and learn more, including important safety information, Wegovy clinical study information, and restrictions, visit hims.com.

• 33:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, and you know, I brag about today, I think it's great when I can get away with, get away with swear words to copy editors. I leave, I leave swear words in books and stuff. And I just wait for the copy editor. Sometimes, usually the copy editor edits it out, but not always. Sometimes they let me get away with it.

• 33:20AJ Gentile?

  They do?

• 33:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so I, I use it. I think vulgarity is really useful, actually, as long as it's not used too much. You know, you, you can kind of use it as a, as a...

• 33:37AJ Gentile?

  As a seasoning.

• 33:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, as a seasoning or a provo- provo- provocation. And, and I do, I use it in my teaching too. And I use it in my writing.

• 33:48AJ Gentile?

  I heard you say that you will correct others' obscenities.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  I did, as a, I did, as a, as a young teenager. I would literally go into the locker room and everybody was swearing, of course, because that's what kids did. And I would just correct everybody. It was, it was awful, AJ. It was really, it was really, I was really, I was the annoying, weird, religious kid. I really was.

• 34:13AJ Gentile?

  And your parents weren't?

• 34:16Speaker 03

  No, not at all. And I think, and I think my parents were very compassionate with me, but they definitely were not, they were not prudish. And nor was my brother, Jerry. I think Jerry was just embarrassed by it. Because I grew up, I was this, this cool, athletic kid. And then I became this weird, religious freak that nobody knew what to do with.

• 34:44AJ Gentile?

  And you don't remember the trigger? What were you trying to fill?

• 34:47Speaker 03

  I think the trigger was puberty, frankly. I think what happened, I mean, I'm looking back on this, and you read the memoir. I think what happened was I was kicked out of Eden.

• 34:58AJ Gentile?

  Ah.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  I think my childhood was basically perfect. And I didn't want to grow up. And I saw sexuality, I saw my own sexual maturation as a, as a, as a, as a exit from the garden. And I, I'm speaking mythically now, obviously. And I just didn't want to do it. And so the natural conclusion is you're going to stop. You're going to stop the, the sexual maturation. And of course, you can't.

• 35:27AJ Gentile?

  You can't.

• 35:28Speaker 03

  But that was the effort. And I pretty much shut it down for five or six years.

• 35:35AJ Gentile?

  Your sexuality?

• 35:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:37AJ Gentile?

  It came back, came roaring back, which we'll get to later.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  Came roaring back, but, but after I was entered psycho, this is another stage of my whole thing. But after psychoanalysis, and I, I figured out, you know, this is a later stage, but this was really the origin of me becoming an intellectual too, is I figured out that people were driven by, by, by instinct, instinctual forces that were often sexual, of which they were not in control. And I was number one. I was the number one example of that in my own life. Because I, if you would've asked Jeff at 16, "Why are you not eating?", he would've said to you, "I'm fasting."

• 36:23AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 36:23Speaker 03

  "I'm, I'm, I'm trying to be a saint." And I was reading The Lives of Saints, and I was into superpowers even then, both from the comics and from The Lives of the Saints. And so I framed all of the eating behavior in, in terms, religiously. And I think that was very sincere, and I don't question that. But there was this other thing at work that, that was happening, this, this, this pushback on sexuality. And when I realized what was going on, that's when the sexuality came roaring back, you know, in, in my college years, in my early twenties. And, and, and, and so that distinction between what was conscious,

• 37:04Speaker 03

  the religious behavior or the religious beliefs, and what was unconscious, the, the, the sexuality or the psychosexual development was profound to me. Because I had never heard of the unconscious.

• 37:18AJ Gentile?

  You didn't?

• 37:19Speaker 03

  No. I was just a kid from Nebraska. There, there was no sense of the unconscious. There was no, there was, the, the human was just, was one thing. Was just conscious and...

• 37:32AJ Gentile?

  But didn't, your anorexia was basically cured by observing the unconscious?

• 37:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, then I was introduced to the unconscious. I was introduced to Freud, and I was introduced to psychoanalysis. But that was all in college. And none of that was available to me in high school. There was, there was no such model available.

• 37:53AJ Gentile?

  Were you not eating in high school as well?

• 37:55Speaker 03

  I was not. So I was not eating from about 13 or 12 till about 19 or 20.

• 38:04AJ Gentile?

  What did mom and dad have to do or say about that?

• 38:09Speaker 03

  They were...

• 38:11AJ Gentile?

  Nebraska boy eats.

• 38:12Speaker 03

  They were deeply disturbed.

• 38:13AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 38:14Speaker 03

  Because their, their boy was once an athlete, and now he was this skinny, uber pious weirdo, you know, basically. And I'm using my own language there. But I think that, I think it was very difficult on them, for sure. And it was, it was difficult on everybody around me, I'm sure of that. But I think that's what turned me, that's what turned around in, in the college, in the introduction to psychoanalysis. And that's really what made me think about all the things I think about today.

• 38:49AJ Gentile?

  It, it shows in your work. You grew up in Tornado Alley, just north of Kansas. And I think you've written that Oz was part of your psyche.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:59AJ Gentile?

  And you played the wizard, the college play.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  I did.

• 39:03AJ Gentile?

  Are you still the wizard? Are you still the man behind the curtain?

• 39:07Speaker 03

  Probably. Yeah, nobody's ever asked me that before. The Wizard of Oz was the defining, certainly movie and defining mythology of where I grew up. I mean, I literally grew up in a town that was destroyed by a massive tornado 10 years before I was born. So I grew up in the shadow of this monster storm. And so The Wizard of Oz, which of course begins with, and ends with a tornado, made a lot of sense to me. And if you watch the movie, it's all about religion. It's all about, it's all about the paranormal too.

• 39:45AJ Gentile?

  It is.

• 39:47Speaker 03

  And I, of course, wouldn't have articulated any of that as a kid, but that was deeply informative on my psyche. And when I played the wizard, that was a high, that was a grade school or middle school, that was a grade school play.

• 40:00AJ Gentile?

  Were you good?

• 40:01Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 40:02AJ Gentile?

  Were you good?

• 40:03Speaker 03

  No.

• 40:03AJ Gentile?

  Do you remember the costume?

• 40:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was bad. I was bad. It was...

• 40:09AJ Gentile?

  Remember any lines?

• 40:10Speaker 03

  No. I don't remember the line. I mean, I just was bad, AJ. But that's what they had to work with, kids, you know? In a, in a, in a, in a grade school play.

• 40:24AJ Gentile?

  You were lucid dreaming when you were four and five, and you had a way of snapping out of it? Kind of like tapping your feet together?

• 40:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:33AJ Gentile?

  Did you realize that you were learning to click your heels to go home?

• 40:35Speaker 03

  No.

• 40:37Speaker 03

  That's again, that was that that's in the memoir. I didn't know. I didn't know the Wizard of Oz connection. It never occurred to me that I had learned that in the in a movie. But I think I did.

• 40:51AJ Gentile?

  Yes, you played Hermes as well.

• 40:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:54AJ Gentile?

  And that shows up in your personality. Now, what was that costume like? Did you have the wings on the feet and everything?

• 41:02Speaker 03

  It was a kid and

• 41:03AJ Gentile?

  Where the photos?

• 41:04Speaker 03

  Bad spandex. I mean, it was it was just it was awful. I mean, Hermes is a silver god. I remember that.

• 41:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then I remember that there was these demons in the background who were played played by basically the kids who beat me up and it was it was just bad. It was just awful. But yeah, I mean, I think I think I think the Wizard of Oz and the Greek mythology. I think they were deeply informative.

• 41:32AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:33AJ Gentile?

  What play would that be that you were Hermes?

• 41:36Speaker 03

  I don't know. They would would have been some grade school play again. Something some some Greek story.

• 41:43AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. Was your town so small that like everyone had to be in the show?

• 41:47Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah, it was small.

• 41:49AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, it's small.

• 41:52Speaker 03

  I mean, I had I had 64 people in my graduating class and that was huge.

• 41:56AJ Gentile?

  64?

• 41:57Speaker 03

  That was really big. I I think after that, I think in Jerry's class, there were like 45 or 40. And and there was only one class that was ever bigger than ours. It was like 68 or 70 or something. And so it was a small. It was a small town.

• 42:12AJ Gentile?

  What's the town like today? This is Hebron?

• 42:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's even smaller.

• 42:16AJ Gentile?

  It's even small, I guess. Yeah.

• 42:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I you know, we had about 18, 1900 people then. I think there's 16 or 1700 people in the town today. And I go back there, you know, twice a year. And it's smaller and the school, the high school is is what's called a consolidated high school now, which means it drew in from other towns.

• 42:38AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 42:39Speaker 03

  Because it had to is these little towns had their own school at one point and then they didn't.

• 42:46AJ Gentile?

  There's a story that you tell that I really like that I could relate to is when you were playing safety and time stopped.

• 42:53Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 42:54AJ Gentile?

  Can you tell us that story?

• 42:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:57Speaker 03

  So, again, I was it's really hard to be a football player when you're anorexic, by the way.

• 43:03AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 43:03Speaker 03

  Uh, but I

• 43:04AJ Gentile?

  In Nebraska?

• 43:05Speaker 03

  I was, I was. And one of the positions I played was safety. And I was pretty good at it, actually. And I remember this one time, I saw the quarterback. I saw him pass and I went up for this this interception. And everything just got real quiet. Time stopped. Everything I was it was a slow motion. It was a classic kind of thing that people report in accidents a lot. And I remember the band and that all the noise just went away and I could maneuver my body and and then when I hit the hit the grass and it intercepted the ball, then all the noise came back and time started. And I I didn't think about that as a kid.

• 43:49Speaker 03

  It's like, well, I didn't think about what was that? And but that definitely happened.

• 43:55AJ Gentile?

  Well, it's happened to me many times. I could still remember time stopping at the balls just I know it's going to be there. Did it ever happen again?

• 44:05AJ Gentile?

  This is flow state to the extreme.

• 44:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. I don't. I mean, I do think this feeds into like the contemporary work in that I don't think we think about these things. I don't think because it's hard to integrate that into a worldview. Like, how does that? You know, to go back to the Spider-Man stuff, I mean, this comes into the Spider-Man movies too. And I'm like, yeah, that really happens, actually, you know? So the the movies and the science fiction, I think, are based on actual human experiences. But we're not we're not in control of those experiences. I can't reproduce the time

• 44:42AJ Gentile?

  No, you can't.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  Stopping. I can't will it.

• 44:48AJ Gentile?

  You've never hit that state when you're writing? I mean, because you're prolific.

• 44:54Speaker 03

  So writing for me is a really special thing.

• 45:03Speaker 03

  I, you know, I wrote a whole book on writing called Authors of the Impossible. And I think writing is a time or a place where weird things happen. And people who really write, who really, really write, they know this and they kind of get into a zone and they drink coffee or whatever they do. They create their own little ritual and they get into a mild trance state. And and I, you know, I've written about this. I think, you know, like my my poor wife, you know, she would interrupt me writing. And once once that trance state's interrupted, you can't get it back.

• 45:40AJ Gentile?

  No, you can't.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  It at least for that day. It's just gone.

• 45:44AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  And so, you know, Julie saw me sitting in this chair, basically doing nothing. But I was in this mild trance state and I was writing. And I think it really does happen. And I think writers know that. And I think getting I think once you understand the trance and once you understand the writing process, then you can also understand why when someone interrupts you, it's really over. And you can kind of accept that in a way that you can't accept before before you realize that. And, you know, Eric Wargo, he talks about precognition and

• 46:19AJ Gentile?

  I was just going to bring him up.

• 46:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I I think that happens too. I not so much in my own writing. I've only I've had one precognitive experience that I think really was precognitive. But it wasn't it wasn't about writing.

• 46:33AJ Gentile?

  What happened?

• 46:36Speaker 03

  I don't write about this.

• 46:40Speaker 03

  And the person's now gone. So I suppose I can talk about it.

• 46:45Speaker 03

  It was a dream. You know, a lot of precognition, according to Eric, happens in dreams. And this one definitely happened in a dream. And it was me at the front door, holding the front door. And there was a storm coming from the other side of the street. And I and I was trying to protect myself and my family and my house from this storm that was definitely coming. And that day, that very day, and I didn't experience the dream as precognitive, by the way. But that day, a woman came into my office. This was a previous institution. This was not where I'm at now. And she said to me, well, she shut the door.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  And she said to me that she was having a relationship with with a colleague of mine. And she didn't want me to tell anyone.

• 47:40AJ Gentile?

  Why is she telling you? Right.

• 47:43Speaker 03

  So I responded, I mean, my own response, I walked home. And I said, I need to talk to the college counselor about confidentiality issues. And really, what I wanted to know was, did I have any legal responsibility to to maintain secrecy? Because basically, what happened was this woman sent a piece of information between us that was devastating to to certainly this colleague and potentially to me.

• 48:19AJ Gentile?

  Married colleague?

• 48:20Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 48:21AJ Gentile?

  Married colleague?

• 48:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, and

• 48:25AJ Gentile?

  Wouldn't were you looking for a reason to tell?

• 48:29Speaker 03

  I didn't. I knew that if I didn't speak this to someone, it would come back. And and I was afraid that I would get fired and that it was it was a family and a professional issue. And but it also implicated my colleague and it was really hard. It was really tough. And this is why I went to the counselor. And she said to me, she said, Jeff, you don't you don't have any legal responsibility. And so what I end up doing was, and I and as I walked back, it was either that day or it was the day after I saw the counselor, I walk and I remembered the dream. I think, oh, that's what that dream was about.

• 49:14Speaker 03

  And so the dream helped me do what I did, which was very difficult. But it protected certainly protected me and protected my family and protected my

• 49:28AJ Gentile?

  What did you do?

• 49:30Speaker 03

  I went to the administration and I told them what had happened.

• 49:35AJ Gentile?

  Did they take action? Oh, no.

• 49:38Speaker 03

  But then what ended up happening, AJ, was the the person who told me this eventually came to me and thanked me.

• 49:50Speaker 03

  Because she obviously said this so somebody would do something.

• 49:55AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 49:56Speaker 03

  And I realized at that point, oh, my God, she

• 50:00Speaker 03

  I was supposed to do this. And and it was really, really difficult. But it was the dream that that really helped me to kind of what I'm trying to say that placed all this in a context. So I think that was my one really powerful precognition. And I and I don't I don't experience precognitive dreaming, you know, or precognitive writing, you know, other than that.

• 50:23AJ Gentile?

  Do you write down your dreams at all?

• 50:25Speaker 03

  I not anymore. I I used to. I mean, you just you get tired.

• 50:31AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, it's hard.

• 50:33Speaker 03

  And

• 50:34AJ Gentile?

  That's why, you know, Eric, I'm so jealous. He's got, what, 21 years of dreams?

• 50:41Speaker 03

  I used I used to. I used to write down my dreams obsessively. And, you know, it was largely for psychoanalytic or or interpretive reasons. And I just don't do that anymore. And I mean, we can get into this, but I I think

• 51:04Speaker 03

  At some point, it's not even necessary.

• 51:07AJ Gentile?

  Really? You don't think so? I learned so much when I go through.

• 51:12Speaker 03

  Well, as a young person, as a young man, yes, that was very significant. I'm not so sure there's a lot to learn now.

• 51:21AJ Gentile?

  That's a fair point.

• 51:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:24AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 51:24Speaker 03

  I'm tired, AJ. I'm really tired. And I've written a lot. And sometimes I think I've probably written too much. And I just don't have much left.

• 51:39AJ Gentile?

  Yes, you do.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  Well, thank you for saying that. Thank you for believing that. I'm not so sure I do.

• 51:45AJ Gentile?

  Well, I mean, you're on your third career at this point. It's gonna be something new.

• 51:50Speaker 03

  But I'm doing something. It gets me away from writing. It gets me away from that.

• 51:55AJ Gentile?

  And that's useful to get out of there?

• 51:58Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 51:59AJ Gentile?

  It is for me.

• 52:00Speaker 03

  I think so, because I don't, I don't, we can talk about this too, but I don't think people read anymore. The thing about writing, which is so powerful to me, is these books will exist when I'm gone. They'll keep working with people. They'll keep doing their magic. And I can interact with a reader thousands of miles away now. And I don't even know the person's, and people write me all the time. And they'll say, you appeared in my dreams and you did X, Y, and like, okay, that's creepy. That's creepy. Don't say that.

• 52:34AJ Gentile?

  Don't say that.

• 52:35Speaker 03

  But, but okay, okay. Then that means what I wrote was effective. It got into you. And I think you are actually the magus here or the magis. You're really doing the magic. But I do understand that the books, there's a certain openness to things that people pick up. And then they act on that, you know? And so what I'm trying to say is, books are really important for me because I can work with people, even though I don't know I'm working with them. And I don't even have to be alive. You know, they'll work in 50 years, just fine.

• 53:16Speaker 03

  But I am at a particular point in my life cycle where I want to reach people who don't read books. And books are a particular, as you know, they're a particular genre. You know, one of my jokes about film and television is, there are no footnotes. Well, there are footnotes in books. And they're like really important. And it's where you can like back up. And you can qualify what you just said. Well, you can't do that.

• 53:50AJ Gentile?

  No, you can go and revise, a new edition. You can't do that.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so it's a different set of challenges is what I'm trying to say.

• 53:59AJ Gentile?

  It's much more intimate, though, the book.

• 54:02Speaker 03

  I think so. I think reading and writing are profound. I think they're way more profound than we think they are. And I think there's a kind of potential paranormal dimension that happens. And what struck me with paranormal experiences was how many of them actually involve reading.

• 54:27Speaker 03

  I was like, well, this is a book. And we talked about this already with the Wizard of Oz stuff. Or they involve a film, or they involve some kind of writing, or the person is impelled to tell this story or to write out this story. They're connected to writing in some way.

• 54:46AJ Gentile?

  It's interesting that you say that because in watching your show, and I see this with all experiencers, when something happens to them, the first thing they do, they don't go to Google. They go get the books, they go get communion, and they read. And I think it's because of that intimate connection.

• 55:04Speaker 03

  I've had experiencers tell me, particularly communion, particularly books like communion, that that was the only place that they got, they got, what's the right word? I mean, they got support for what they experienced. And they realized that, oh, Whitley, in this case, Whitley experienced what I saw, you know? So there is this profound transmission, is another word that I'm looking for here. There's something profoundly transmission-like that happens in books that does not happen elsewhere.

• 55:46Speaker 03

  And that's what I'm trying, I think, and I think that's true with Jacques Vallée, and Bertrand Mew, and Amy Michelle, and, you know, and John Keel. I mean, a lot of the people we know, and we can talk about, there's something that happens that it goes way, way beyond any kind of mechanical notion of reading or writing.

• 56:12Speaker 03

  And I think that's mysterious. You know, I'll give you an example of this. I just wrote an essay called "The Flying Saucer and the Quest."

• 56:22Speaker 03

  And

• 56:22AJ Gentile?

  Where can you read that? Where is that essay?

• 56:25Speaker 03

  It's in ARC, A-R-C. It's online.

• 56:30AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 56:31Speaker 03

  It's in ARC, Religion, Politics, etc., is the subtitle of the... But what's so significant about that essay is, I talk a lot about Jacques Vallée's original

• 56:46Speaker 03

  vision of the flying saucer, which he had in 1955 as a teenager. Well, he became a science fiction writer after that. There's something about that that results in, in his case, science fiction. And then, you know, I also referred to this major religious leader in the essay. And I spoke to this person. And he saw a flying saucer. And then he entered a religious quest as well. And he had never put the two and two together, but I did. And I said, well, what happens after, what often happens after one encounters a flying saucer

• 57:27Speaker 03

  is one goes on a spiritual quest, or becomes a science fiction writer, or what have you. And he looked at me, and he was just shocked. He was like, oh, my God, you know, my spiritual quest began right after I saw that UFO. And he became a major religious leader in another country, not Christian.

• 57:53Speaker 03

  So I think there's some connection between these extraordinary experiences and the act of writing, or the act of a spiritual quest, or a spiritual sensibility, that I think we don't understand.

• 58:06AJ Gentile?

  I agree. And later, if you don't mind, I'd like to talk about Kirby and PKD a little bit. Because I think you're 100% right. I think they lived it.

• 58:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:18AJ Gentile?

  Can you take us to the pivot point where you're in seminary and you make the pivot?

• 58:25Speaker 03

  So, the pivot, as it were, so I was healed. The monks who trained me were very concerned about me because I was basically dying. I was down to 125 pounds. And what you see here is basically 220, 225, it was 100 more pounds.

• 58:46AJ Gentile?

  You're still light for Nebraska.

• 58:49Speaker 03

  I was dying. I wasn't eating. And the monks were very concerned. And one of their own was a psychoanalyst. And so they put me into psychoanalysis. And I immediately started having dreams and did the whole Freudian thing. And I realized that the anorexia was tied up with my sexual repression.

• 59:12Speaker 03

  And I ceased to be sexually repressed in the seminary, you know? And that was, I guess, troubling for a lot of reasons around my vocation that I assumed I had. But it was

• 59:27AJ Gentile?

  Well, a Benedictine psychoanalyst should have been able to size that up in five minutes.

• 59:32Speaker 03

  He did.

• 59:33AJ Gentile?

  He did.

• 59:33Speaker 03

  He did.

• 59:34AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 59:35Speaker 03

  He knew instantly. I didn't.

• 59:38AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 59:39Speaker 03

  But I had a series of dreams over the months of the psychoanalysis, or over the years, that were very, very revealing to me and very, very significant. And I eventually did realize it. And that was my pivot. And so, basically, what happened, AJ, was my, I gained 60, 70 pounds in six months. I mean, I just blossomed physically. But as I was blossoming physically, my sexuality was also coming back online. And that's a problem, as you know, if you're going to be celibate and the whole vocation thing. And so, but the seminary, they were so wise.

• 1:00:24Speaker 03

  And it wasn't about shutting the doors and turning you into a monk or a priest. It was helping you decide whether you had such a vocation. And so they understood very well that what was happening. And I then, you know, after I graduated from college seminary, I entered the University of Chicago as a graduate student. And that really took me into this.

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  But that really was the pivot. It was really all around sexuality and religion.

• 1:00:58Speaker 03

  And I realized that religion is about, partly, it's about suppressing that sexuality for religious reasons, and that some people can do that very well for a lot of historical and cultural reasons. And other people can't do that and shouldn't do that.

• 1:01:13AJ Gentile?

  Do you think it's required to be pious?

• 1:01:15Speaker 03

  It was in my tradition.

• 1:01:16AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  There was an identification between not being sexually active and being holy. There definitely was.

• 1:01:26AJ Gentile?

  So as you were coming back online, did you feel less pious?

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:01:33AJ Gentile?

  Was there shame?

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:01:35AJ Gentile?

  Good.

• 1:01:36Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:01:39Speaker 03

  The seminary where I was wasn't about shame. And I think they were just so wise and so good. There wasn't a moral judgment about it. But it was definitely, I definitely did see a lessening of piety, certainly in my own life, the more I became a sexual being. Yes, yes. And that, of course, informs the later work.

• 1:02:07AJ Gentile?

  Yes, it does.

• 1:02:08Speaker 03

  You know, in a major way.

• 1:02:09AJ Gentile?

  Was that, were you in seminary where that priest scolded you and the boys after a party?

• 1:02:17Speaker 03

  That he did what?

• 1:02:18AJ Gentile?

  Scolded you and the other boys after a party? I don't want to step on the punchline.

• 1:02:27Speaker 03

  So I don't, I don't know the story. Maybe you should give the punchline.

• 1:02:31AJ Gentile?

  It's the gay bar story.

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  Oh, okay. Oh, yeah. No. So, okay. So

• 1:02:39Speaker 03

  I've only been to one gay bar and it was with this priest.

• 1:02:44AJ Gentile?

  There's no judgment here. I'm from New York City, man.

• 1:02:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, it was Chicago, actually, is where it was. And

• 1:02:53Speaker 03

  it's just, this would have never happened when I was in the seminary, actually, but it, it happened when I was in graduate school. And there was no, there was nothing inappropriate that happened, but it did strike me that, that this was with the priest, obviously. And I didn't fit in, AJ. I, I no more fit into the gay bar than, you know, any straight guy does. I was, I was completely out of the water.

• 1:03:20AJ Gentile?

  You were.

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  I was. But it was funny. You know, I mean, this is, the humor was like, it was like integral to the experience. It wasn't, it wasn't about some kind of moral condemnation, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. And I felt nothing but compassion for certainly the priest I was with.

• 1:03:42Speaker 03

  Cause he was doing, I, I, I don't, I don't know. I don't know what his motivation was, or whether this was in hiding, as it were, or in confidence or not. I just don't know.

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  Do I write about that?

• 1:03:58AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:03:59Speaker 03

  No. How did you know?

• 1:04:01AJ Gentile?

  That's none of your concern.

• 1:04:04Speaker 03

  Okay. All right. I must have written about it somewhere, or somebody told you that.

• 1:04:09AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:04:10Speaker 03

  It's okay.

• 1:04:11AJ Gentile?

  The last thing before we go to break is, is your famous story is Calcutta, 1989.

• 1:04:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:17AJ Gentile?

  The night.

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19AJ Gentile?

  Can you walk us through what happened?

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I get asked that a lot, actually.

• 1:04:23AJ Gentile?

  But before we get to the night, I want to know about the day. What happened during the day?

• 1:04:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. During the day, I was very ill.

• 1:04:32AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:04:34Speaker 03

  And by ill, I don't, you know, it's a typical kind of gut thing. I mean, I was, I was sick.

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  And then at night, what, what, it was during Kali Puja in 1989 in Calcutta. So there were all these what are called pandals or, or temporary temples around the city. And it's a big party, AJ. It's not, it's, it's fun. And I was going to all these pandals in the city and seeing this goddess who is either, is over this god and the god is either asleep or in trance or sexually aroused. There's, there's different, there's different stories to it.

• 1:05:18Speaker 03

  And then I got back to my apartment. It was probably late at night. And this happened probably early in the morning. And basically what happened was there was some, there was an energy, and I mean a profound energy. There was so much energy that I, I thought something in the wall, I thought it was electrical and there was some kind of electrical malfunction. I thought I was being electrocuted. I mean, we're not talking about a subtle pious dream experience. We're talking about a major electrical electrocution, really. This kind of spiritual electrocution.

• 1:05:58AJ Gentile?

  And you're awake?

• 1:06:00Speaker 03

  Certainly that was my experience.

• 1:06:01AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:06:03Speaker 03

  And I was also sexually aroused.

• 1:06:07Speaker 03

  And I had the profound sense that I should not come.

• 1:06:14Speaker 03

  In other words, don't ejaculate.

• 1:06:16AJ Gentile?

  Because it will end the experience?

• 1:06:19Speaker 03

  So I didn't. And the energy

• 1:06:25Speaker 03

  focused into my heart region and it felt like a kind of black hole or some kind of portal just sucked into my heart. And then I had this out of body experience. And I was outside my body. It felt like there was a magnet up somewhere in the ceiling and that I was just being pulled up to this, this magnet that was somewhere up there. And then I don't have any memory of what happened. And then I, I remember coming back to my body and I remember holding on to the, the bed,

• 1:07:04Speaker 03

  the banister and trying to get back into my body. It was, it was actually funny. I thought it was funny. And then I got back into my body and I got control of my body again.

• 1:07:15AJ Gentile?

  Did you click your heels to get back?

• 1:07:17Speaker 03

  Did what?

• 1:07:18AJ Gentile?

  Did you click your heel? No. Okay. Okay.

• 1:07:20Speaker 03

  I did not. I got back into my body. The clicking the heels thing was over, I think, at that point. I got back into the body and I just felt like all of this stuff had been down. I mean, we didn't even have the metaphor of downloading at that time. It's 89. So there was no public computer at that point. There wasn't this notion of downloading. But looking back on it, there was definitely this downloading of this massive amount of information that just flowed into me.

• 1:07:49Speaker 03

  And I, and I, then I wrote my dissertation pretty much out of that same state. And we can talk about the dissertation after the break, but it became my first book and it was a huge, it expelled me really from, from certainly Indian studies. But it was because of this mystical state. And that then feeds into my interest in scholars who have mystical experiences and what they do with them and how that feeds into scholarship. I think there's a, there's a kind of superhuman or a kind of esoteric dimension to a lot of things that, that kind of goes unnoticed.

• 1:08:28AJ Gentile?

  Why is there a transmission of information through a hypersexual experience?

• 1:08:32Speaker 03

  I don't know, but there was.

• 1:08:34AJ Gentile?

  I'm just curious. I don't.

• 1:08:37Speaker 03

  There definitely was. I mean, there's this whole tradition in India of, of Kundalini awakening that is often very sexual and very bodily, but it also is a transmission event.

• 1:08:51AJ Gentile?

  I've had a similar experience during meditation, which I'm not very good at. And I can, and I can't get back there.

• 1:08:57Speaker 03

  I can't get back there either. I've never had this experience again. But that, that was a major kind of event because it was profoundly sexual. It was profoundly mystical or spiritual.

• 1:09:10AJ Gentile?

  But sexual without gender, without, without corporeal?

• 1:09:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, there wasn't, there wasn't any visual component to it.

• 1:09:19AJ Gentile?

  I understand this very well.

• 1:09:22Speaker 03

  But it was definitely bodily, but not bodily at the same time. I mean, that, that sounds paradoxical, but that was really the case. But I think it leads into the, the books. I, what I actually think, looking back on it, because I've, I've written about it and thought about it for, that happened in 89. So I, this is almost 40 years ago. I've thought about it for those four decades. I really believe, this is because of reading PKD, by the way, Bill K. Dick. I really believe all the books were transmitted into me then.

• 1:09:58AJ Gentile?

  And are there still books to be written from that experience?

• 1:10:02Speaker 03

  I don't know. That's, that's a good question.

• 1:10:04AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:10:05Speaker 03

  That's why I feel like it's been so easy to write these books because they're, they're just me expressing whatever happened to me in 89. Now, they're expressions that are based on reflections of historical materials. So these books wouldn't have happened without, say, mutant semantics, without the comics and the science fiction. So yes, they're about that, but they're also about this transmission that happened. And I don't think, AJ, I don't think I had any context. Well, I know I didn't in 1989 for any of these books. And so I, I couldn't have told you. If you would have asked Jeff in 1989, in November of 1988, what was that about?

• 1:10:50Speaker 03

  He would have just looked at you like, I don't know. That was awesome, though. That was really awesome. And it made me interpret, or it helped me to interpret the Hindu materials that I was reading in a non-reductive way. That, because I realized that somebody could have a sexual experience and it not really be about sex.

• 1:11:14AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:11:16Speaker 03

  And that was stunning to me, but it was also obvious. That was obvious. It was like, yeah, that happens. It happened to me. It can happen to anybody. It certainly happened to these, this textual tradition.

• 1:11:28AJ Gentile?

  I don't think people can understand that fully without going through it.

• 1:11:30Speaker 03

  No. It just blows, it blows our binaries, as we say in the academy. It blows the way we split the world into the spiritual and the sexual. It blew my world. It blew my religious world where we do make this division between the spiritual and sexual. And I don't think those two things are separate.

• 1:11:49AJ Gentile?

  No. When I came back, my wife was there and she was like, what was that? I said, I don't know, but that was fantastic.

• 1:11:57AJ Gentile?

  Well, Eric would say that you did have context, that all of your creativity just came at once. We usually get it one at a time.

• 1:12:04Speaker 03

  I, I think Eric's right about that.

• 1:12:06AJ Gentile?

  I do too.

• 1:12:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08AJ Gentile?

  So you had one night and when we come back from the break, we'll talk about how now you're spending all of your time documenting everyone else's night. Okay. Well, it's hot in here and I've heard that the archive of the impossible is hot. What is, so I've seen it on your show, the archive at Rice.

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:26AJ Gentile?

  Is it really shelves to the ceiling?

• 1:12:29Speaker 03

  It really is.

• 1:12:29AJ Gentile?

  Is that really the place on the show?

• 1:12:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's really like that. That's a literal place.

• 1:12:35AJ Gentile?

  I thought there's no way. That's real. It's twenty foot.

• 1:12:39Speaker 03

  Okay, so.

• 1:12:41Speaker 03

  The archives themselves. It's a, it's three stories. You're looking at three stories. And that's actually what it looks like. And they're stored offsite, which means not on the university campus. In a special building that's literally three stories tall. And the archives of the impossible, or the Center for the Impossible is called now, is about two percent of the archival holdings. So it represents two percent of what you're seeing there, but it represents fifty to sixty percent of research interest.

• 1:13:14AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:13:15Speaker 03

  So. Two percent of the archives. About a million documents. I mean, it's, it's pretty, it's big. Uh, constitutes over half of people who come to Rice to do research.

• 1:13:27AJ Gentile?

  So it started with Jacques?

• 1:13:29Speaker 03

  It started in two thousand fourteen. I, I remember it. I was in Berkeley. I was being taken to the airport by Jacques. And Jacques asked, he had just met with Gary Nolan, by the way. And I remember Jacques asked me for help to place his archives in a university somewhere. And I said, yes.

• 1:13:54AJ Gentile?

  Well, he was worried about what?

• 1:13:57Speaker 03

  Well, he didn't make it clear then, but since then, particularly in his journals. Jacques has made it very clear that he wanted to place his own files in an archive to avoid the, the silos, the, the secrecy. Basically, that, that defines a lot of the government programs, but is very frustrating to a researcher. Because to do research on any topic implies public knowledge.

• 1:14:27AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:14:27Speaker 03

  And you can't speak about things that are secret or confidential. So Jacques was very frustrated with that. And so he asked me for help and I didn't, I didn't even think of Rice. I, I just said, sure, I'll help. And then I went back to Rice and we have a long connection with NASA, by the way. And space exploration. And so it just made a lot of sense. And so I approached our archive, our director of the archive, our director of Woodson Research Center then, and he said, yes. And so we negotiated this gift with Jacques for about four years.

• 1:15:03AJ Gentile?

  Why did Jacques choose you?

• 1:15:08Speaker 03

  I think, um, this, this will sound a little narcissistic, but I think he chose me because I had written about him in a book called Authors of the Impossible, and he was very impressed with that essay. He knew.

• 1:15:24Speaker 03

  He knew that I was not someone who would reduce his thought to some simple

• 1:15:33Speaker 03

  explanation, and that I deeply appreciated both the humanistic and the scientific. And I think he felt that that that was the place he wanted to place his, his own life work. And so he, he gifted us every, pretty much everything in three different gifts from two thousand eighteen to, I don't know, twenty twenty-three or so, you know, it was, um, so it came, it came in three sections. And so Jacques is our first, our first gift, and that's about fifty boxes.

• 1:16:04AJ Gentile?

  Why did it take four years?

• 1:16:08Speaker 03

  People are, and, and, and I'm, I'm not speaking just of Jacques, but people in general are very slow to give up a life work. And it's, it's a poignant and powerful conversation to have with people. And basically, the conversation is around.

• 1:16:29Speaker 03

  It's usually people in their seventies or eighties. So it's, it's partly about mortality.

• 1:16:34AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:16:36Speaker 03

  Um, and I think that's why it took so long. And as the gifts went on with Jacques in particular, they got more and more significant. So the first gift is just background information and it, it's not that significant. The second gift is correspondence that is significant because it's pretty much everyone in this world going dating back to the fifth nineteen fifties. And then the third gift is his files. Well, you know, his case studies. And he held back uh, his contemporary case files. Uh, particularly the stuff he's doing with Gary now. Um, so that may come later still.

• 1:17:15AJ Gentile?

  Well, he's journaled about you. Did you read it?

• 1:17:18Speaker 03

  Well, if you're talking about the journal, the diaries, I've read all the diaries. There's seven volumes now. Right? And I definitely have read those and including about myself and about his gift to us and how he thinks about archives, which I think is correct.

• 1:17:37AJ Gentile?

  What's his handwriting look like?

• 1:17:39Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 1:17:39AJ Gentile?

  What's his handwriting look like?

• 1:17:43Speaker 03

  Jacques is one of the most, uh, I don't know his handwriting per se. Well, yeah, I do know because he's one of the most organized people I know.

• 1:17:51AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 1:17:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, these, these boxes came to us incredibly organized already, and he had a whole filing system and he, he had a way of organizing his correspondence and his case studies that was already super organized. Uh, you know, we've gotten other gifts. The archivists refer to them as paper bombs.

• 1:18:15Speaker 03

  That is not Jacques Vallée.

• 1:18:16AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:18:18Speaker 03

  Uh, i- if anything, Jacques is super or super organized and they, the, the archivists have to do very little, actually.

• 1:18:28AJ Gentile?

  So I read that there's an embargo on some of his work, twenty twenty-eight, twenty thirty-one. Who places that embargo and?

• 1:18:34Speaker 03

  Jacques, the donor does.

• 1:18:35AJ Gentile?

  He does.

• 1:18:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, we do not do that, that.

• 1:18:39Speaker 03

  I, I personally think Jacques wants to be dead to, to, to, to make this available. You know, and he, he definitely wants it made available. He wants it a, a public publicly accessible archive, but he doesn't want to be around and

• 1:18:58Speaker 03

  I personally think he, part, one of the reasons he doesn't want to be around is a lot of the files, AJ, which, which I think you'll appreciate are him debunking.

• 1:19:09AJ Gentile?

  Ah.

• 1:19:10Speaker 03

  Case after case after case. And you know, he's famous for that, as you know, and it's, it's, it's hard to do in some cases, but also easy to do in others. And he wrote a whole book called Messengers of Deception about it. And, but we have all of the original material that he wrote those books for. Out of, you know, we have all those case studies. We, we have, we literally have the cab receipts. You know, it is major synchronicity with Malkizadak. We, we have that in the archives. Um, so. I mean, I've seen it because I had to help archive it. But, but, uh, other people can't see it because of, because of the donor, the wishes of the donor. And, and what the

• 1:19:54Speaker 03

  what Woodson Research Center does, it's led, it's, it's led by a woman named Amanda Foki now. It, it, um,

• 1:20:04Speaker 03

  the donor has legal rights, the copyright over the collection. We, the, the university does not claim copyright. But it does claim ownership. And so you, there's a legal document that the donor signs. But the, the donor can at, at any point, um, access the material. So.

• 1:20:26AJ Gentile?

  And I've read that you can request seeing some of the archives.

• 1:20:30Speaker 03

  You can, as a, as a researcher, most of the, most of the collections, not all of them, there are two or three collections that are on moratorium, by the way, because of the donor. But there's twenty-five collections. Or about, they're about. And most of them are totally public, which means a researcher can come and request to see X number of boxes. And those boxes will be driven from the offsite archive where you saw me in the show to Woodson, which is the, which is a room in the library, and that's where the research is actually done. It takes about twenty-four hours. And there's a computer thing that goes up and down those three stories and selects the box out and.

• 1:21:13AJ Gentile?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:21:14Speaker 03

  I mean, it's impressive.

• 1:21:15AJ Gentile?

  I'd love to see it.

• 1:21:16Speaker 03

  It's awesome. I mean, I hadn't seen it as a faculty member. I had been at Rice for almost twenty, twenty-four years at that point. I've been there about twenty-five years now, and I had never seen it.

• 1:21:28AJ Gentile?

  You didn't?

• 1:21:29Speaker 03

  No, no, because what faculty do, faculty who use the archives, which is not a lot of us, we, we simply go to Woodson and we request things and then they're delivered to us, you know, on campus the, the next day. But we don't go offsite to see the actual physical archives.

• 1:21:47AJ Gentile?

  Have you thought about digitizing any of this yet?

• 1:21:49Speaker 03

  Okay. It's a question I get a lot.

• 1:21:54Speaker 03

  Here's what people maybe don't think about.

• 1:21:59Speaker 03

  There are moral or ethical reasons why it's tough to digitize stuff. We are, to answer your question, we are digitizing particular collections for what's called a metadata research center, but we have to remove what are called identifying markers. We have to remove all addresses and phone numbers and names and places. And that takes money and that takes time. And so we're in the process of doing that, but we can't just scan everything and make it publicly available because we're bound to something called the IRB, Institutional Review Board, and it's for moral and ethical reasons, particularly around medical records.

• 1:22:38AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:22:39Speaker 03

  And there's a lot of medical records.

• 1:22:41AJ Gentile?

  Well, you have John Mack's work.

• 1:22:43Speaker 03

  And he was a psychiatrist.

• 1:22:44AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:22:45Speaker 03

  So those are, those are medical records and they're from the 1990s, which means these people are still alive.

• 1:22:51AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 1:22:52Speaker 03

  And so we have to be really, really careful about that.

• 1:22:55AJ Gentile?

  Do you have all his videos as well? Um, I know, and his family's very protective of him. I know that personally. So for you to be entrusted with that work.

• 1:23:05Speaker 03

  Yes, we, so the, the executive director of the Center for the Impossible, and I work with her virtually every day as Corin Austin, and Corin was John's assistant. So there's a direct line from John Mack to Jeff Kripal is what I'm trying to say. And I say that with, with humor and humility, but there is through Corin. And it was Corin who really chose us.

• 1:23:33Speaker 03

  I remember her showing up at, at the back of the library with, with a U-Haul.

• 1:23:41AJ Gentile?

  So you didn't reach out first?

• 1:23:43Speaker 03

  I, I did not reach out to Corin. Corin reached out to me. And, and she saw very quickly that this was the place to place John Mack's archives. And we don't have, by the way, we don't have all of John's archives. We have 150 boxes. We have everything from 87 to 2004, when he died. All of his, all of the UFO stuff, we have all of it, but we don't have the stuff before that that Harvard has. But the family was very insistent that things after 87 or 88 or whatever, we're not going to Harvard, but they were going somewhere else. And, and we were the, Rice University was the place that was chosen

• 1:24:28Speaker 03

  by, by both Corin and, and the Mack family, by the way.

• 1:24:31AJ Gentile?

  Has Harvard ever come back around? I mean, they were borderline abusive to John.

• 1:24:38Speaker 03

  They, of course, they came around. Yeah, they, they, they did not ultimately challenge his tenure or his job. They, they retracted, but it was after a year of basically being literally on trial and.

• 1:24:55AJ Gentile?

  It was very public. I mean, the chair of his department was giving horrible interviews.

• 1:24:59Speaker 03

  The damage was done.

• 1:25:00AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:25:01Speaker 03

  The emotional damage was done and I don't, I don't, I can't speak for that university, of course, but

• 1:25:09Speaker 03

  there, it was a very different scene in the 1990s than it is in the 2020s. And John was basically a scholar of one. He was a person of one.

• 1:25:22AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:22Speaker 03

  Who was studying this phenomenon and was insistent that it was not psychopathological, that there was something to it.

• 1:25:31Speaker 03

  And he wrote all these books, which I, which, which I've all read and, and have thoughts about.

• 1:25:39Speaker 03

  I, I'm not concerned about my, you know, a question I also get is, am I concerned about Rice coming after me? And no, I'm not. And partly it's because of Rice. I think Rice is very capacious and generous in terms of intellectual freedom, but also I'm a weird religion professor.

• 1:25:57AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:58Speaker 03

  I don't know anything to begin with, AJ. Where John was very much in a medical school and he was a psychiatrist and he was exposed, he, he was exposed to things I'm not exposed to.

• 1:26:15Speaker 03

  And, and again, I just think it's just very different in 2026 than it is 1994 or 1995, whenever he was put on trial.

• 1:26:25AJ Gentile?

  And it's, I didn't know until I saw your show that Corin was an experiencer herself.

• 1:26:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, big one.

• 1:26:30AJ Gentile?

  Big one.

• 1:26:31Speaker 03

  Big time.

• 1:26:33AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, I watched that episode, which I guess was episode two. I've only seen one and two. I think the third comes out tonight as we record this.

• 1:26:39Speaker 03

  The third, the third comes out next Thursday.

• 1:26:42AJ Gentile?

  Next Thursday. And I watched that episode with Google Maps on my lap and, and research and all of it lines up, man. It was wild.

• 1:26:51Speaker 03

  Corin is not, you know, Corin is not just an experiencer, as Mike, as Mike Casanova puts it, she's wicked smart.

• 1:27:01AJ Gentile?

  He should say that.

• 1:27:02Speaker 03

  She, she really is. She's very articulate. And I've had her into class and I've, I've written about Corin and she's ideal. She's not just an experiencer. She's articulate about why this is important and why Mack was so interested in it. And, you know, her and I both,

• 1:27:26Speaker 03

  and we can get into this too, we, we both work against what we call the fear narrative, which is basically, it's always bad, you know, it's always about horror or demons or something nasty and.

• 1:27:42AJ Gentile?

  You mean abduction?

• 1:27:43Speaker 03

  Well, not just abduction, really anything. I mean, anything in this realm, all the anomalous stuff. It's always, it's always bad. And so like all the government stuff, all of the, it's always bad, you know? And Corin's, Corin's whole shtick, which is my shtick too, is that there's just transformation involved. It's not just bad. It, it might start out in fear or horror or terror, but it morphs into transformation and/or transmission. And there's this other really positive component too, that just gets sliced off.

• 1:28:22Speaker 03

  And we're trying to, that's really what the, what the Archives of the Impossible or the Center for the Impossible is about is that, that whole narrative that involves the fear or the terror initially, but then morphs to transformation or transmission.

• 1:28:37AJ Gentile?

  I think John would have been very happy with your approach to this.

• 1:28:41Speaker 03

  Did, did you know him?

• 1:28:42AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:28:44Speaker 03

  I think he would. If you read, if you read Mack's stuff, if you read his book on abduction in 93 or 94, and you read his later book, Passport to the Cosmos, he's real, what, what he's really about is fundamentally pushing back against the scientific narrative. It's not just about science or, or reduction, but it, she's also pushing back against the, the religious narrative. And he's saying there's some other kind, there's a third worldview that's trying to develop here and we don't actually have a language for it. It doesn't exist. And that's really what I think John Mack was about on some level was that.

• 1:29:27Speaker 03

  And that's certainly what, what we're about, you know, it's certainly what the series is about as well. It's certainly what I, the Center for the Impossible is about in my own mind, is that third space.

• 1:29:39AJ Gentile?

  I remember you told a story that you were lecturing at Harvard and an elegant gentleman stood up and asked about aliens.

• 1:29:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:45AJ Gentile?

  And you thought that might've been John. Do you think it was?

• 1:29:48Speaker 03

  I'm certain it was.

• 1:29:49AJ Gentile?

  What was his question? And what was the lecture?

• 1:29:51Speaker 03

  The lecture was on Hindu mysticism.

• 1:29:53AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:29:54Speaker 03

  And it was Sudhir Kakkar, by the way, was the lecturer. And I was there, I was teaching, I taught at Harvard from 2000 to 2001.

• 1:30:01AJ Gentile?

  What was that like going there after they turned down your application to study there? Cause that's, that's why you went to University of Chicago, right?

• 1:30:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:09AJ Gentile?

  Harvard said no?

• 1:30:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was the height or the nadir, depending on your view of the campaign against Colley's Child. And Harvard was interviewing me basically because of Harvard, Colley's Child. I, that was a year-long interview, basically is what it was. And.

• 1:30:27AJ Gentile?

  I didn't know this.

• 1:30:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. And they asked me to come back for a second year.

• 1:30:33AJ Gentile?

  What year was this?

• 1:30:35Speaker 03

  Uh, 2000, 2001.

• 1:30:37AJ Gentile?

  So Colley's was still very active.

• 1:30:38Speaker 03

  Very, very active. And I said, no, I'm not coming back. I'm not doing a second year. And I did it mostly for family reasons. My, our, our girls were young then and I was living, we were living in a place called New Wilmington in Pennsylvania. And it was really hard for me. It wasn't hard for the girls or for Julie. I mean, I thought I was like irreplaceable. Turns out I wasn't.

• 1:31:07AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:08Speaker 03

  Turns out they didn't need me.

• 1:31:10AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:31:10Speaker 03

  So it was hard on me, but it wasn't hard, so hard on the family. And so when, when Harvard asked me to do it a second year, I said, no, I'm not going to do that. And the truth is that the campaigns against me got so bad while I was at Harvard, because I was at Harvard, that

• 1:31:32Speaker 03

  I just didn't want to do that again. I didn't want to live like that.

• 1:31:35AJ Gentile?

  I think if it was 2001, you were kind of getting to the end of your rope with all of it.

• 1:31:39Speaker 03

  I was. It started in 96 and, and

• 1:31:44Speaker 03

  I was at the end of my rope.

• 1:31:45AJ Gentile?

  Do you want to give just two sentences of what we're talking about, just for the audience with regarding Colley's?

• 1:31:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:49AJ Gentile?

  I don't want to put words in your mouth.

• 1:31:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. So my first book, it was my dissertation, actually, and it was my first book called Colley's Child, The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna. It was very much about that experience we, we talked about earlier, but it was also, I, I didn't mention that experience. It was just in the background. And it was very much about the, the texts around the life and teachings of, of this Hindu saint. And I basically made the argument that, that his homoerotic orientation was, was significant and was central really to both his spiritual teachings and to his charismatic genius, really. And that just blew the circuits.

• 1:32:31AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. You didn't see that coming?

• 1:32:35Speaker 03

  I saw it coming intellectually.

• 1:32:36AJ Gentile?

  Yes, you could.

• 1:32:37Speaker 03

  I did not see it coming emotionally.

• 1:32:40AJ Gentile?

  Cause if this were a Catholic saint, it would have been the same.

• 1:32:44Speaker 03

  Well, I had, I wrote the same about Jesus.

• 1:32:46AJ Gentile?

  I know. Well, I know. But they don't know.

• 1:32:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:52Speaker 03

  I think the same thoughts about any charismatic religious figure, pretty much I think the same thoughts. But they didn't know, you're right. And it was awful, AJ. And so, you know, when I say a campaign against me, it was from January of 96 to really the summer of 2003 or so. I mean, this was not a flash in the pan.

• 1:33:17AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:33:18Speaker 03

  This was many, many years of opening my email and just getting a flood of hate mail and really concerned, concerned American Hindus, concerned about my safety, actually. And writing me out of the blue and just, "Don't go here, don't go there, don't go to this conference." And of course, I listened to them because they were obviously very concerned. And I was receiving lots of explicit pushback for this. Which is all to say, my intellectual life began in the midst of controversy and really flame.

• 1:34:01Speaker 03

  And I was pretty much expelled from an entire culture and country. I mean, the book was debated in parliament.

• 1:34:10AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:34:10Speaker 03

  I mean, this was not a small thing.

• 1:34:13AJ Gentile?

  No, twice in parliament.

• 1:34:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I was just a kid. I was a young 30-something PhD, just fresh out of graduate school.

• 1:34:23AJ Gentile?

  But you spent 15 years studying this culture that you loved, that now you're repudiated.

• 1:34:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I couldn't do it anymore. And so, by 2003 or so, or 2000, pretty much by the time I moved to Rice, 2002, I was done with it. And by done with it, I mean, I was exhausted.

• 1:34:44AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:34:44Speaker 03

  And I had PTSD.

• 1:34:49Speaker 03

  And I had seen therapists. And I mean, I had done everything that a human being can do. And nothing was resolving it. And so, I ultimately left in about 03, 02, somewhere in there. And turned to the American counterculture and wrote the history of Esalen. Really because of that, I could no longer go to India, but I could go to Big Sur. And my joke was, "Well, the hippies aren't going to kill me for thinking about sex and religion." And I was absolutely right, by the way. Not only did they not kill me, they wanted to tell me stories.

• 1:35:29AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:35:30Speaker 03

  They wanted to tell me more. I was like, "You know, I can't write about that." That's like, they just kept telling me stuff. And I was like, "Oh, my God, they're just telling me stuff." And by "stuff," I mean, they told me story after story of some extraordinary experience they had that usually involved sexuality or spirituality and kind of blew my circuits, as it were.

• 1:35:55AJ Gentile?

  Before we get to Esalen, do you remember John's alien question during your lecture?

• 1:36:00Speaker 03

  He wanted to know. He asked Sudhir, I remember. Sudhir was a friend, was a colleague, was a hero of mine, actually. An intellectual hero of mine. He asked Sudhir whether he thought there were aliens in Hindu mysticism. You know, something like that. And Sudhir didn't know how to respond.

• 1:36:18AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:36:21Speaker 03

  I'm sure he stumbled over that one. And as any academic would,

• 1:36:27Speaker 03

  it just struck me, it was out of the blue. And there was this elegant gentleman in the back. I'm absolutely positive that was John Mack. And of course, I didn't know him then. And I didn't have any interest in certainly aliens or UFOs or anything like that at that point.

• 1:36:44AJ Gentile?

  So, how did you go from Hindu studies to Esalen?

• 1:36:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, because of Kali's Child. Well, here's what happened.

• 1:36:54Speaker 03

  So, the man who co-founded Esalen is a man named Michael Murphy. He read Kali's Child.

• 1:37:00AJ Gentile?

  Ah.

• 1:37:01Speaker 03

  And he loved it. He read it correctly. By correctly, I mean, the way I intended it. And he called me, called me out of the blue in the June of 98, I think it was. And he said, "This is an amazing book. You've really talked about this metaphysical shift."

• 1:37:23AJ Gentile?

  That had to be a sob of a phone call. Like, "Thank you."

• 1:37:27Speaker 03

  It was very confirming. And then he invited me out to Esalen. And I went out in November of 98 for the first time. And I saw that community and saw that community of intellectuals. And they were very, not only interested in these very issues, but were deeply committed to them. And I did find it very confirming. And I found it heartening. And so, when I wrote Esalen, it was really to save my soul. It really was. I really wanted, no, I didn't wanted. I was saving my soul.

• 1:38:02Speaker 03

  And the interest in all of the weird stuff that, you know, we can eventually talk about was really because of people. I just talked to human beings who just told me all these incredible things that happened to them. And I realized, A, they were not making this up. The stuff had really happened. And B, academics had no way of talking about it. We always, and by "we," I mean historians and scholars of religion, always reduced it to some power game or some social representation or something with the brain or whatever the explanation is. And I realized that none of it really works.

• 1:38:45Speaker 03

  And it's not that they had the answer. They just had the experiences that were so significant. And so, I set myself after the Esalen book to sort of understand this. And that's what then produced Authors of the Impossible and Mutant Semestics and so forth and so on. And that's why we're here. I hope. I think that's why we're here.

• 1:39:08AJ Gentile?

  I think so.

• 1:39:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:09AJ Gentile?

  So, you became Professor Xavier.

• 1:39:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, that was my, you know, I grew up again with Marvel Comics. And the X-Men, by the way, were, it was a B level.

• 1:39:24AJ Gentile?

  It was.

• 1:39:24Speaker 03

  It was not good. But it became good in 75 or whatever year it was. It was reinvented. And it struck me, again, we can get into the Mutant Semestics book, but it struck me that, first of all, it's Professor Xavier. It's an academic who's also disabled, by the way, and highly telepathic. So, they were integrating a lot of parapsychology, but also academia into the mythology. And it just struck me as a very powerful way to express what I was trying to do and what I'm still trying to do.

• 1:40:04AJ Gentile?

  A lot of those kids in the story are like Spider-Man. They didn't ask for it. They didn't want it.

• 1:40:11Speaker 03

  They're freaks.

• 1:40:12AJ Gentile?

  They're freaks.

• 1:40:14Speaker 03

  They don't fit in. They're social deviants. And it often, by the way, involves sexuality.

• 1:40:19AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:40:20Speaker 03

  And so, I grocked it immediately, you know, I mean, immediately in 2007 or 2006 or whenever that was. And it also, this is actually, this is funny. I tell this story as well. It involves the Esalen history because I realized that the Esalen history is really the history of the human potential movement, which became the New Age and now the spiritual but not religious. But really, the human potential movement and its origins is really about people with special powers who are evolving. And I was like, "Holy shit. This is like the real world X-Men."

• 1:41:05Speaker 03

  You know, the X-Men was just this like mythology on the East Coast. Wait, yeah, East Coast. Told by a bunch of men for kids. But the human potential movement was really for 20 and 30-somethings. And they meant it. It wasn't just a story for them. And then what happened was, I went to this movie. I went, I remember, it was an X-Men movie, 2006.

• 1:41:38Speaker 03

  Because I remember the year. It was probably Days of Future Past, I think it was. And I came out to my minivan, or our minivan. And this X was on the parking lot. And it was just gleaming. It was just like there. And I was like, "Why is, what is that doing there?" And I picked it up. And it was just a piece of cheap jewelry, you know, that someone had dropped. But it was an X. It was definitely an X.

• 1:42:11AJ Gentile?

  You still have it, don't you?

• 1:42:12Speaker 03

  I still have it. I framed it, actually. And it was, so I realized, okay. So, this was all part of the same process, this kind of creative process in which I realized that I was writing about the real world X-Men. And then I was watching this X-Men movie. And then this synchronicity. So, there was something about the world that was calling me to live out this myth. And then what happened, AJ, was...

• 1:42:44Speaker 03

  No, this, no, Days of Future Past was later. So then what happened was,

• 1:42:50Speaker 03

  somebody can look up Days of Future Past, what year that it was. But what happened was is that the screenwriter who wrote that movie contacted me and said,

• 1:43:03Speaker 03

  "Professor Kripal, blah, blah, blah. Will you sign these copies? We're gonna, we wanna give Mutants and Mystics out to this, this end of the shoot party, to all the cast and the characters." And I was like, "Are you kidding me? Of course I'll do that." So I, I signed copies to everyone.

• 1:43:21AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:43:22Speaker 03

  And, um, and I mailed them off. They were like 12 or 13. And then I mailed them off and my first thought was, "Some guy just..."

• 1:43:31Speaker 03

  I just lost 12 copies. But it, but then I looked up the address and it was in, it was in Beverly Hills and it was, it was real. And then he sent me pictures of the boxes that they, they gave out. And so, and then what happened was,

• 1:43:47Speaker 03

  uh, later a director of one of, of, of the, of the new X-Men movies, I knew him. His name's Josh, Josh Boone. And I said to Josh, I was like,

• 1:43:58Speaker 03

  'cause the screenwriter was, was no longer writing me. And I was like, "Well, why,

• 1:44:04Speaker 03

  why aren't they writing me?" And Josh says to me, um, he says, um, "Well, I don't know, Jeff," he says, "but I know when I agreed to do the new X-Men movie, they handed me one book and it was yours." So I was like, "Okay, that's significant." That the book is in the stream of the mythology that's appearing on the screen. And it, it's, it's not direct. There's not this direct influence, but it's, it's behind there somewhere.

• 1:44:32AJ Gentile?

  Do you feel that 11-year-old boy come out a little bit? You have to.

• 1:44:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, that was a very proud moment for me.

• 1:44:39AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:44:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was awesome. It was great.

• 1:44:42AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:44:43Speaker 03

  I was like, "Okay." Um, and it wasn't just, it wasn't about writing a letter to some comic book. It was like, this is Hollywood. It was like major figures, major actors and directors. And they were reading my stuff. And, and when the screenwriter wrote me, he was like, "Listen, I'm sitting on set." This, I remember the email. He says, "I'm sitting on set with Magneto and Professor Xavier and I'm reading them Mutants and Mystics."

• 1:45:08AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 1:45:09Speaker 03

  So I know through this correspondence that, that this was done, you know? And, and again, I don't have any proof of any direct influence, but, but other readers do. I mean, other readers write me and they're like, "Well, this is, this happened here and this happened there. And this is because of what you wrote."

• 1:45:27AJ Gentile?

  What a joy for an old nerd. It's not just Professor X, Magneto. It's Jean-Luc Picard and Gandalf.

• 1:45:32Speaker 03

  Uh huh. Yeah.

• 1:45:34AJ Gentile?

  Very cool.

• 1:45:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. So when I say Professor Xavier, it's not, it's not just me blowing steam. It's like, "No, that's, that's like really going on." That's like really behind. And so there's this link between science fiction and, um, the paranormal, I, I think is a real one. I don't think it's, it's, it's... And it, and it's religious. And, you know, I, I do think there's something about the study of religion. Like, it doesn't bother me at all that a lot of this stuff is faked. Of course it's faked. That's what religion is.

• 1:46:08AJ Gentile?

  It's show business.

• 1:46:10Speaker 03

  It's fake, it's fake it till you make it.

• 1:46:11AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:12Speaker 03

  That's, that's it. And, and a lot of religious stuff is totally fraudulent and some of it's real. And it's all, it's all mixed together. And the, and the fake stuff leads to the real stuff. It's, there isn't this binary, it's not like it's empirically real or it's faked and fraudulent. It's like it all goes together. And it doesn't bother me. And, but I think it's because I'm a, I'm in religious studies. I, I really do. I don't think it's be, I'm not in the sciences. I'm not a,

• 1:46:43Speaker 03

  I, I don't care.

• 1:46:46AJ Gentile?

  I've heard you say that, um, to be a good fraud, you have to be intelligent, anyway.

• 1:46:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I often talk about the placebo effect. I mean, you just fake it. You just make shit up. And then it works sometimes. And

• 1:47:01AJ Gentile?

  It does.

• 1:47:02Speaker 03

  We don't know why it works, but it does.

• 1:47:05AJ Gentile?

  It works for me.

• 1:47:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. And I think a lot of this stuff that, you know, a lot of the weird stuff that, that, that we talk about or you talk about on your show,

• 1:47:18Speaker 03

  you know, some, a lot of it is fraudulent or, or, or can be fake, but, but there's also a there, there. There's something to it all. Um, and again, I don't think we have a language for putting those two together. We just, we just turn it into two binaries.

• 1:47:36AJ Gentile?

  So about science fiction,

• 1:47:40AJ Gentile?

  do you think Jack Kirby was an experiencer? I mean, we can agree that PKD definitely was.

• 1:47:45Speaker 03

  I think Kirby in particular. So I read Kirby as a kid. I didn't, I of course didn't know him. I think Kirby, well, I know Kirby was fascinated by the paranormal, by, by parapsychology. I think, you know, Chris Knowles calls Kirby a shaman with a pencil.

• 1:48:05Speaker 03

  And I think he was.

• 1:48:06AJ Gentile?

  I've called him a time traveler.

• 1:48:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:08AJ Gentile?

  He did a story about the face on Mars, 40 years before.

• 1:48:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's so Chris Knowles. I mean, Chris is really, uh, you know, Our Gods Were Spandex kind of author. And he loves Kirby because of this, actually. And

• 1:48:25Speaker 03

  I think a lot of Kirby's fantasy is, is real experiences that he had. And by real experiences, I mean just experiences he had. I, I think those experiences themselves were fantastic. And by fantastic, I don't mean not real. I mean, they're expressing something, you know?

• 1:48:46AJ Gentile?

  What about Philip K. Dick?

• 1:48:48Speaker 03

  Well, Dick too. I mean, so for the, for your listeners, so you've probably seen a movie based on a Philip K. Dick story. Almost certainly. Hollywood has probably made a dozen films now out of Philip K. Dick. Philip K. Dick was an American science fiction writer who died in, what, 80, 81 or so, somewhere in there?

• 1:49:14Speaker 03

  But he had a massive

• 1:49:18Speaker 03

  inrush, massive

• 1:49:21Speaker 03

  metaphysical inrush about 1970, January, February, February of 1974. And then he wrote these novels afterwards, which are basically barely novels. But it's all about this, this, he called it VALIS, vast active living intelligence system. And Dick came to believe that a lot of his science fiction was true and that it was from the future. And that what some writers like himself were doing was accessing this sort of supermind that, that existed in the far future that was retrograding or retrocausing inspiration into particular people in the present. And he was one of them.

• 1:50:05AJ Gentile?

  I'm constantly directing people to his talk that he gave in 1978 in France.

• 1:50:09Speaker 03

  In Metz.

• 1:50:10AJ Gentile?

  In Metz, where I, I think fans were going there just for like a meet and greet. And he goes on a three-hour, takes you on a three-hour tour of his alternate reality and seeing the future and the people. And the faces in the crowd are priceless, but it's brilliant.

• 1:50:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think there's a lot of discomfort in the audience.

• 1:50:28AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:50:29Speaker 03

  Uh, because they thought, "Oh, you know, he's just a great science fiction writer." No, he, he, he intended this. See, this was like serious to him.

• 1:50:37AJ Gentile?

  The translator gave up after a while.

• 1:50:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, I think The Matrix is largely indebted to Philip K. Dick.

• 1:50:45AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:50:46Speaker 03

  Um, I think a lot of later science fiction ideas are basically Phil Dickian ideas. And uh, he did attribute these ideas to this, this VALIS, this, this supermind.

• 1:51:01Speaker 03

  But I don't think Hollywood knows what to do with that. You know, they, they love the, the earlier Philip K. Dick.

• 1:51:07AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:51:08Speaker 03

  But they don't know what to do with the later Philip K. Dick, who was like, "That was Philip K. Dick. That's who he really was."

• 1:51:15AJ Gentile?

  My early ex-Jesus. There's films in there, but how, how do you make them?

• 1:51:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. I, and it's, I mean, I talk to Josh about this sometimes, Josh Boone, the, the X-Men director. And he loves the later Philip K. Dick too, you know? But it's hard. It's hard. How do you, how do you do that? How do you make a film based on basically a religious idea of the future? And of course you can do it.

• 1:51:47Speaker 03

  Like Days of Future Past, for example, is all about the future. It's all about precognition, the whole thing. But it's turned into, into fantasy and science fiction, of course.

• 1:51:58Speaker 03

  What happens when you think the science fiction is real? Which is what Dick thought.

• 1:52:03AJ Gentile?

  He thought it was real.

• 1:52:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, oh, he thought, you know, Dick is so interesting. I, you know, I've called the Exegesis, I think it's one of the finest pieces of mystical literature in English. And the reason I say that is, it's really funny.

• 1:52:20AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:52:22Speaker 03

  He had a wonderful sense of humor. He could step out of himself. But you could see him interpreting this experience in various ways. And he never lands. He never lands, because he doesn't know. And the profound sense you get out of the Exegesis and the later novels is that maybe, I'll remove the maybe, that the paranormal is about inspiration. It's about interpretation. It's not about landing. It's about creating another worldview or creating another story. And that's really what Dick was about.

• 1:53:05Speaker 03

  He just, story after story after story after story. And that's ultimately what killed him, by the way.

• 1:53:10AJ Gentile?

  Yep. I mean, I think Eric has said that every paranormal event can be connected to something that has to do with time. Certainly makes sense in PKD's life.

• 1:53:23Speaker 03

  It makes sense. Eric makes a lot of sense of a lot of writers, actually.

• 1:53:26AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:27Speaker 03

  But PKD in particular. And I keep telling Eric about Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche. I mean, he would love Friedrich Nietzsche. He doesn't know anything about Friedrich Nietzsche. But Nietzsche was all about this too. And it was before there was science fiction, you know? There was just weird German philosophy at this point. But this notion of time is circular and knowing the future and all, that's all in Nietzsche, you know, early on. And then, but it gets articulated and thought about differently in the 20th century in science fiction, for certain.

• 1:54:04AJ Gentile?

  I've heard you compare Nietzsche to Magneto.

• 1:54:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:07AJ Gentile?

  How does that connection work?

• 1:54:09Speaker 03

  Well, if you just listen to Magneto, it's Friedrich Nietzsche. It's pure Nietzsche.

• 1:54:14AJ Gentile?

  The Holocaust survivor?

• 1:54:16Speaker 03

  Um, the angry, the anger at humans.

• 1:54:20AJ Gentile?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:54:22Speaker 03

  And the affirmation of the mutant or the Superman or the superhuman. It's pure Nietzsche. And certainly, the Holocaust stuff, the anti-Semitic Holocaust survivor stuff, that's really a correction, I think, of a particular reception of Nietzsche, which I think is just wrong. Nietzsche died, by the way, in 1900 and went into basically a psychotic state in 1889. So he really wasn't even here.

• 1:54:54AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:55Speaker 03

  From 1889 on. And the Nazis definitely loved Nietzsche and read him in a particular way, which I think is a profound misreading. And so I think what Magneto is, is a kind of reclaiming of Nietzsche that is extremely powerful, actually. And the two, actually, the two kids who invented Superman in 1938, both Jewish kids, they were thinking of Nietzsche. That's who invented the Superman, was Nietzsche.

• 1:55:30AJ Gentile?

  Is that your theory or do you know that?

• 1:55:35Speaker 03

  Um.

• 1:55:36AJ Gentile?

  Because that's a great story.

• 1:55:37Speaker 03

  Well, Ubermensch, it means Superman.

• 1:55:39AJ Gentile?

  Right, true.

• 1:55:41Speaker 03

  And Nietzsche was already being talked about in American English in the early 1900s, so 1903 and later. I mean, George Bernard Shaw, who I know is English, he writes a play called Man and Superman in like 1903. So it's in the, it's in the cultural lexicon already 35 years before the comic book character. And, you know, they just came up. I mean, they didn't, they didn't really know it. They were kids, you know, kids from Cleveland. And so I do, I do, I really do think a lot of the Superman myth is basically the Ubermensch.

• 1:56:21AJ Gentile?

  I'm going to reread it now with Magneto in mind.

• 1:56:24Speaker 03

  Whoa, yeah. Magneto is Friedrich Nietzsche.

• 1:56:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:31AJ Gentile?

  Um, you have Whitley Strieber's letters. Have you looked through those?

• 1:56:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. Those are amazing, actually.

• 1:56:39AJ Gentile?

  Tell us about one that stands out.

• 1:56:41Speaker 03

  Well, one of the reasons I say they're amazing is a lot of them are illustrated.

• 1:56:45AJ Gentile?

  And these are letters that he received?

• 1:56:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, so basically what happened was, Whitley Strieber was a, or is a well-known and famous horror and science fiction writer. And in 1987, he published a book called Communion, in which he relates his own alien abduction experience in very graphic detail.

• 1:57:09AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yeah, this is a horror.

• 1:57:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. And Whitley made the mistake of putting his address in the back of the book, because he thought, oh, doesn't people want to write?

• 1:57:20AJ Gentile?

  Oops.

• 1:57:22Speaker 03

  And Communion became a bestseller on the New York Times list. And the numbers differ, but they probably received about a quarter of a million letters.

• 1:57:35AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 1:57:35Speaker 03

  And Anne, his late wife, Whitley's late wife, whom I knew, I knew quite well, she took it upon herself to read through them all. And she did, and she kept 3,400 of them. And those are the letters we have in our archive. And you can see Anne's notations, you know, over them. And of those 3,400 letters, probably 50 of them maybe are illustrated with drawings or paintings or ink drawings. And so people didn't, and when you read through the letters, what the sense you get reading through, first of all, they're about a lot of things other than just abduction.

• 1:58:19Speaker 03

  They're about a whole bunch of things. But they recognized Whitley's Communion as a book that was deeply supportive of what they had experienced. And a lot of times, they experienced the very entity on the cover. They were shocked by that.

• 1:58:39Speaker 03

  And when you read these letters, they're basically letters asking Whitley to call them or to write them back. And of course, he can't, because there are a quarter million of these.

• 1:58:50AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:51Speaker 03

  But, but this is the profound sense you get from the letters, is this, this human desire for, I don't want to say communion, because that's too cute to me, but there's some kind of community that, there's some kind of cross-cultural transmission that's going on there. And, you know, the other thing about Communion that I think is so significant culturally, it's really the origin of the icon of the alien.

• 1:59:22AJ Gentile?

  It is.

• 1:59:23Speaker 03

  Um, I mean, we see that around here, but that didn't really exist as such until Communion came out. And, and basically, though, the cover is this painting. By the way, the painting's only about this big. It's small. And it was done by a portrait artist who was basically painting a crime scene. And Whitley originally went to the psychiatrist to basically figure out this crime scene, because he was basically bleeding from the anus. And so, again, very serious kind of traumatic experience that he was trying to figure out.

• 2:00:07Speaker 03

  And he was relating this, this entity to the painter who was then trying to paint it, you know, to try to figure out the, the person who had basically committed this crime. And it turns out it wasn't a person, it was the entity that he calls the visitors in the book. And the thing about Whitley's books is he doesn't really land on the alien hypothesis directly. He calls them visitors. And, and Communion itself really begins with this line about the human mind. And so you always, he always leaves open the door that, that this is some aspect of the human mind that is, that is interacting with this. But, and then he goes back and forth on that through multiple books. And we wrote a book together later.

• 2:00:52Speaker 03

  I wrote a chapter in Mutant Semantics all on Whitley, on the visitor, where I called the visitor corpus. And then later, we wrote a book called The Supernatural together. So I, I know Whitley well.

• 2:01:02AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:01:05Speaker 03

  But he's really, he's careful about...

• 2:01:12Speaker 03

  He's careful about the alien hypothesis, but he also is very explicit about what happened to him. And you know, my, my line that you've probably heard on other podcasts is, Whitley's main sin is that he just told, he said too much.

• 2:01:29AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:31Speaker 03

  And, and I don't mean that as a condemnation. I, I think that's remarkable, but if he wouldn't have said everything, he wouldn't have been attacked the way he was. But then we wouldn't know. We just wouldn't know.

• 2:01:43AJ Gentile?

  No, he changed everything. Do you think he regrets?

• 2:01:46Speaker 03

  Do I think he was right?

• 2:01:47AJ Gentile?

  Do you think he regrets some of the details he put in communion?

• 2:01:49Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:01:51AJ Gentile?

  It doesn't seem to.

• 2:01:53Speaker 03

  I don't think he regrets it. I don't think he could do it today. It's just like, I couldn't write Callie's Child today. But do I regret it? No.

• 2:02:00AJ Gentile?

  You don't.

• 2:02:00Speaker 03

  No. I think he was absolutely right.

• 2:02:02AJ Gentile?

  Good for you.

• 2:02:04Speaker 03

  But I couldn't do it.

• 2:02:05AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:02:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I think regret is a difficult, difficult

• 2:02:13Speaker 03

  category. I don't think writers regret what they wrote.

• 2:02:18Speaker 03

  But they, they understand well that some things are possible in certain moments and, and at other moments, they're not possible.

• 2:02:26AJ Gentile?

  When you're going through John Max files, did you see, um,

• 2:02:31AJ Gentile?

  similar stories to Whitley's?

• 2:02:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:02:33AJ Gentile?

  Show what you did.

• 2:02:34Speaker 03

  Yes, I did.

• 2:02:36AJ Gentile?

  Cause this would be, well, I guess.

• 2:02:38Speaker 03

  Let me, let me just tell you one story, cause I'm not sure I tell this in the books, but one of the people who had an abduction experience very similar to Whitley's was, was Kerry Mullis. And Kerry won the Nobel Prize for genetics in 1993 for the polymer race chain reaction. It basically made possible the Human Genome Project. And Kerry, Kerry's no longer with us, but Kerry told me this story in person. Kerry was a genetic geneticist, um, some at Berkeley, I believe, somewhere, somewhere in the Bay area. And he had a home, he had a cabin up in Northern California. And so he drove up there

• 2:03:24Speaker 03

  one night. And he got in about midnight. He had to pee like, like we, we do when we drive a long time and drink coffee.

• 2:03:35Speaker 03

  And so he, he takes a flashlight and he goes down to his outhouse. It was an outhouse because it was a cabin. And this raccoon, this glowing raccoon says, "Good evening, doctor." Perfect English. And that's the last thing Kerry remembers for the rest of the evening. And then he wakes up, he comes to, and he's walking down, um, the road to his cabin at like 6:30 in the morning or whatever time it was. And his clothes are not wet. So he wasn't outside. He wasn't, he doesn't know where he was. So he had some kind of abduction experiences and he, he, what happens is his daughter

• 2:04:21Speaker 03

  calls him and says, "Dad, I want you to read this book called Communion."

• 2:04:30Speaker 03

  "This happened to me on our cabin property." That's what she says.

• 2:04:34AJ Gentile?

  Whoa.

• 2:04:36Speaker 03

  And she didn't know about her dad. And so the dad and the daughter meet through this book again, through this communion book over these two abduction experiences that happened on their cabin. And the daughter directly related what happened to Willie to what happened to her, because she was gone as well for some time. And then her dad told her the story, obviously. And he, Kerry writes about this in a whole chapter in his memoir.

• 2:05:04AJ Gentile?

  He does?

• 2:05:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. It's called No Aliens Allowed. That's the name of the chapter. It's in a book called, um, Walking Naked in the Minefield.

• 2:05:13AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:05:14Speaker 03

  He, he writes about it. And basically what Kerry says is, um,

• 2:05:20Speaker 03

  he says, "Look,

• 2:05:22Speaker 03

  you can't do science with this, but it happened.

• 2:05:27Speaker 03

  It really happened. And that to me is that third space again. No, you're not gonna do, you cannot do science with this. And, and the reason you can't do science is that you can't replicate it. You can't do it over and over again and measure it or control it. But that doesn't mean it's not part of our reality."

• 2:05:48Speaker 03

  So.

• 2:05:50Speaker 03

  And then Kerry has a whole story about a Japanese colleague who abandoned the conference and went back to Japan because of, because basically the hitchhiker effect, basically.

• 2:06:03Speaker 03

  So I just, I just have heard so many stories like that. It's just after a while, you're just like, okay, okay. This, this has happened.

• 2:06:15AJ Gentile?

  But you don't know what it is though.

• 2:06:18Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:06:18AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:06:19Speaker 03

  And Kerry would never say, I mean.

• 2:06:21AJ Gentile?

  No, but it's, it's something.

• 2:06:23Speaker 03

  It's something, something powerful.

• 2:06:25AJ Gentile?

  Could it just be processing trauma?

• 2:06:28Speaker 03

  It doesn't explain things. I mean, that's an easy. I think it's, is related to trauma, by the way.

• 2:06:37Speaker 03

  But I think that's our language. I don't think we know what trauma is, you know, you know, cause trauma can be a portal or a door to some kind of experience. It, it really comes down to whether you see these things, you see the brain as, as, as producing everything or you see it as a receiver. You know, of, of, and that there are certain moments like trauma, for example, that make the, the brain and the body more receptive to, to other, other realms.

• 2:07:09AJ Gentile?

  When I'm doing a story on Poltergeist, the first thing I'll do is go back in the home and see who's having a hard time.

• 2:07:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, so would I.

• 2:07:18AJ Gentile?

  Which, which is.

• 2:07:19Speaker 03

  Okay, let's take Poltergeist. So. Okay. I was once at a parapsychology institute in, in Germany, in Freiburg, actually. And we were talking about Poltergeist. And I was talking to some psychiatrists. And they go into a Poltergeist home, a haunted house. And the first thing they do is family therapy. And the family's like, "What the fuck are you doing? We brought you in because we have a ghost and you're talking about how I feel about my father." And the psychiatrists are just adamant, "No. If you deal with these emotional and sexual, um, processes, this will go away. If you do not deal with it, it will not go away."

• 2:08:05Speaker 03

  So again, the Poltergeist stuff, yes, there's this emotional, sexual component to it, but things are still flying around.

• 2:08:14AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:08:15Speaker 03

  So

• 2:08:17Speaker 03

  what do we do with that? You know, I mean, bodies are still getting scratched, curtains are still catching on fire, things, vases are still, still exploding, you know? So somehow the mind can exteriorize itself through these traumatic moments.

• 2:08:37Speaker 03

  So we can understand the trauma is what I'm trying to get at, but we can't understand the exteriorization or the relationship between mind and the matter, mind and matter.

• 2:08:45AJ Gentile?

  But it, something's happening.

• 2:08:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:08:48AJ Gentile?

  Doesn't, does that go against the filter hypothesis, the receiver hypothesis? Or can they?

• 2:08:53Speaker 03

  I don't, I think the filter hypo, so, so you know, um, the filter hypothesis is a way to theorize a lot of this stuff, but it doesn't explain like psychokinesis.

• 2:09:05AJ Gentile?

  No, it doesn't.

• 2:09:05Speaker 03

  It doesn't. It doesn't work for, for every situation. So I, I think anything we come up with doesn't work though, for, for particular cases. And so what I think people do, particularly, particularly debunkers, what they do is they say, "Well, this didn't happen." And I'm like, well, it did happen though. And if it happened, it has to be part of the world too. And it has to be part of the, the science too, you know? I mean, a scientific mind is, is, is going to think about all of reality, not just some of it.

• 2:09:38AJ Gentile?

  It doesn't have to be ghosts, but, but something happened.

• 2:09:41Speaker 03

  I think once we theorize it, I don't think it is ghosts, by the way.

• 2:09:44AJ Gentile?

  I don't either.

• 2:09:45Speaker 03

  I think it's living human beings. I think it's people. But I think people are way more than they think they are.

• 2:09:53Speaker 03

  I think we're, we're capable of stuff that scares us, frankly.

• 2:10:00Speaker 03

  But that's a theorization of the phenomenon, you know, it's not, it's not the experience itself. Like I don't,

• 2:10:09Speaker 03

  how do I say this?

• 2:10:12Speaker 03

  I don't think the experiencer is the authority over their own experience.

• 2:10:17Speaker 03

  If I can put it that way.

• 2:10:18AJ Gentile?

  How do you mean?

• 2:10:21Speaker 03

  Well, like take a near death experiencer.

• 2:10:25Speaker 03

  I don't think the afterlife looks like that. Certainly for everyone. It looks like that for that person. That person had that near death experience. They experienced it that way. But that doesn't mean that's what the afterlife is.

• 2:10:38AJ Gentile?

  You're acknowledging the disaster afterlife at all?

• 2:10:42Speaker 03

  I'm saying that those experiences, those near death experiences happened.

• 2:10:46AJ Gentile?

  They do.

• 2:10:47Speaker 03

  They are part of our reality.

• 2:10:49AJ Gentile?

  They are.

• 2:10:52Speaker 03

  But whether that's the afterlife, I don't know.

• 2:10:56AJ Gentile?

  I don't know.

• 2:10:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, to me, that's an interpretation. And that's what I mean when I say the experiencer is not the authority over, over his or her own or their own experience. Is I don't, I think they need the theorist to come in just as much as the theorist needs the experiencer. You know, I, I don't think theorists are omniscient or, or infallible either.

• 2:11:23Speaker 03

  Listen, I know, I know that. I can tell you that.

• 2:11:27Speaker 03

  But, but, but the experiencers don't have the theory either.

• 2:11:34Speaker 03

  You know, they, they, and they want it.

• 2:11:36AJ Gentile?

  They do. Or they just want someone to listen.

• 2:11:41Speaker 03

  Well, they want that. I mean,

• 2:11:45Speaker 03

  so I, I, I know a lot of experiencers and a lot of people have told me stories and

• 2:11:51Speaker 03

  I know from these conversations, they desperately want

• 2:11:57Speaker 03

  someone to listen, someone to say they're not crazy.

• 2:12:03Speaker 03

  But they don't have control over their own experiences. You know, generally. And they don't, they don't understand, like this is what the series is about, the television series, they don't understand either how all of these things were probably connected. Like, how is the abduction experience connected to the near-death experiences, connected to the telepathic experiences, connected to the precognitive? I think they're all connected.

• 2:12:28AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:29Speaker 03

  But once we go down that road, or we go down that rabbit hole, then, then we start to theorize this and we'll come into conflict, I think, with, with individual experiencers. But that's the nature of all theory. That's the nature of all, all models.

• 2:12:48AJ Gentile?

  Speaking of the, of the television series, you said something that made me laugh a while ago. Is, someone asked you about Skinwalker Ranch? And you said, uh, smart people stay away, but dumb people go in and say, I'm gonna study this. And you know what? Let's make a television series. And then you made a television series. How are your cameras different than what's going on at Skinwalker?

• 2:13:14Speaker 03

  You know,

• 2:13:17Speaker 03

  so first of all, I'm not sure where I said that.

• 2:13:23Speaker 03

  Skinwalk, the, the television series, Skinwalker Ranch is too scientific.

• 2:13:27AJ Gentile?

  Too scientific?

• 2:13:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. They, they think

• 2:13:32Speaker 03

  that series in particular thinks that if you can prove something scientifically, it's real. And I don't believe that for a second. I think a lot of this stuff escapes our scientific net completely. And I think that's perfectly fine. So I would say that what this series does, that, that the Skinwalker Ranch series does not do is it doesn't do that scientific thing. It doesn't, doesn't, it doesn't do, it just doesn't.

• 2:14:05Speaker 03

  But it doesn't do the religious thing either, the literalist belief thing. It, it, it holds back and it tries to say, how are these all connected? Which again, I think requires a kind of model that, that we don't have.

• 2:14:22Speaker 03

  And what I think, what I think is happening here,

• 2:14:27Speaker 03

  this will go down a lot of different rabbit holes.

• 2:14:31Speaker 03

  What I want to say most of all is what we should do with the experiencer is listen. You should just listen. Don't, don't reduce that story to your secular scientific worldview or to your religious worldview. Just don't do that. Just listen.

• 2:14:48AJ Gentile?

  For people who are gonna watch Archive X looking for answers, they're not gonna get them.

• 2:14:52Speaker 03

  They're not gonna get them.

• 2:14:53AJ Gentile?

  But you're gonna get stories about people.

• 2:14:55Speaker 03

  They're gonna get theories, though. They're gonna get, they're going to get ideas that will provoke them, but they're not going to get clear answers. Because there are none.

• 2:15:07Speaker 03

  You know, as I, and I, as I joked with you earlier, people who are certain scare the hell out of me.

• 2:15:10AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:12Speaker 03

  People who don't have a sense of humor scare me. And I, I, I'm sure they're not right.

• 2:15:20Speaker 03

  And so people are going to get a sense of wonder and a sense of awe, but also a sense of humor and a kind of capaciousness from the series that, but they're not gonna get certainty. Don't, don't watch it if you're looking for certainty.

• 2:15:36AJ Gentile?

  It's, it's really great. Um, you said that when you watched the first cut, you cried.

• 2:15:41Speaker 03

  I did.

• 2:15:41AJ Gentile?

  What was on, going on on screen?

• 2:15:45Speaker 03

  Uh, this was the telepathic autistic daughters who were interacting with the mothers. And it's just as a parent, I just, I just found it very moving.

• 2:15:54AJ Gentile?

  It was?

• 2:15:56Speaker 03

  I had the same reaction, by the way, for the abduction one, which just, which just dropped yesterday. I, I found those stories deeply emotional. And the, the filmmakers, AJ, kept me away from the experiencers, by the way. I did not interact directly with the experiencers.

• 2:16:17AJ Gentile?

  I wanted to ask you about that because I noticed it, that you were not on screen with any of them.

• 2:16:21Speaker 03

  No, but I said, I wasn't there. They were talking about their story at Rice, by the way, they flew them in and, and they were, I set up the founder's room. I mean, I, the, the filmmakers were there because of me, but I, they didn't want me there with the experiencers. A, I think they didn't want the experiencers distracted by having to deal with Jeff.

• 2:16:48Speaker 03

  But B, they wanted me to interact with the researchers about the experiencers, but they wanted to maintain a certain distance. And

• 2:16:58Speaker 03

  I don't think ultimately that distance between the theorist and the, and the experiencer is true, but I understand that. I understand how that works for, worked for the filmmakers.

• 2:17:13Speaker 03

  But, but, so when I see the episodes, you know, and I see these stories, and I say, I cried, uh, I, I mean it. I mean, I'm not exaggerating. I mean, I think that they're deeply emotional stories. And what I, what I really think that's happening, AJ, with a lot of these experiences, is that

• 2:17:35Speaker 03

  okay, this is my theory of the paranormal. Basically, what is happening is that the person lives in a particular story, a particular worldview, and that story is no longer working so well. And the experience is happening to basically push that experiencer out of that worldview and to tell a different story. And it's up to that person or the culture to tell a different story. I don't, I don't think the phenomenon cares or knows what that story is. But that story doesn't work. Doesn't work anymore. And you see this over and over again in these experiencers. The experiencers will say things like,

• 2:18:19Speaker 03

  well, I, I didn't believe this. This just didn't fit into anything that I, I thought. And I think that's the point of the experience, is to show you that your own worldview is limited. And then it's up to you or up to the, the theorist and the, and the experiencer to come up with a different story. And, and so that's what we're trying to do in the series, is come up with a different story, essentially.

• 2:18:44AJ Gentile?

  It's really well done. Let's take a quick break and I have some more questions about the show. All right, I've got a question for you. You still get up at four, 4:30 every morning?

• 2:18:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do.

• 2:18:55AJ Gentile?

  Wow. So

• 2:18:58AJ Gentile?

  you're either reading or writing or doing something? What are you doing lately for that first hour?

• 2:19:03Speaker 03

  That? I'm either writing or I'm what I call reading to write. Um, I think those early hours, first of all, it's not a virtue.

• 2:19:13AJ Gentile?

  It's not?

• 2:19:14Speaker 03

  No, I, I get the same amount of sleep as everybody else gets. I go to bed early around eight, you know, so eight to four, I'd say eight hours. I mean, it's, it's, you just shift.

• 2:19:26Speaker 03

  I really believe in writing. And I think those, those early hours are the best time to write, at least for me. And they're the best time to write because it's the earliest to get into, it's the easiest to get into a trance.

• 2:19:40AJ Gentile?

  Is it?

• 2:19:40Speaker 03

  For me. I mean, a mild trance. I don't mean a meditative trance. I don't mean a serious trance.

• 2:19:47AJ Gentile?

  No, but I'm always looking for tips to how to be more efficient with my writing.

• 2:19:52Speaker 03

  I think getting up early works for two reasons. One is it's easier to get into a mild trance state, but also nobody will bother you.

• 2:20:01AJ Gentile?

  I'm usually doing it at night when no one will bother me.

• 2:20:05Speaker 03

  Well, other people have other bodily cycles, you know, some people are night owls and I, of course, I recognize that, but the early morning really works for me just because of that, you know? And I've managed to be productive over the years. So it's worked. You know, and also editors are really important, by the way, you know, to have a sympathetic person to bounce ideas off of and to write for is like really important, particularly in my world.

• 2:20:37AJ Gentile?

  Speaking of editors, for your Esalen book, you had a, an appendix that you cut, didn't you?

• 2:20:44Speaker 03

  Probably.

• 2:20:45AJ Gentile?

  Do you, do you remember that?

• 2:20:48Speaker 03

  Sort of.

• 2:20:50AJ Gentile?

  I forget what it was.

• 2:20:51Speaker 03

  It's on the X-Men, though.

• 2:20:52AJ Gentile?

  It's on the X-Men. That's what it was.

• 2:20:54Speaker 03

  I published it in a place called Alter Ego, which was a comics fanzine.

• 2:21:01AJ Gentile?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:21:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:21:03AJ Gentile?

  Why did you cut that?

• 2:21:07Speaker 03

  It was probably too long.

• 2:21:10Speaker 03

  You know, when you write books, what, what you, what you are told or what you learn very quickly is it's all about length and, and page numbers, because the bigger something is, the more they have to spend to copy edit it, and the more it costs to publish it. And then the, the sales rates go down because it costs more money and that kind of thing. I mean, it is a problem.

• 2:21:34AJ Gentile?

  For, for you?

• 2:21:36Speaker 03

  Also, that, that appendix is probably, um,

• 2:21:43Speaker 03

  You know, one of my, well, my Dr. Muder, my dissertation advisor in graduate school was Wendy Donniger, and Wendy used to say that she's like a mother hen, and there are multiple books in her at different stages. And I found that to be true. And this appendix, which I cut, it became then mutantismistics, you know. So you, I'm working on, what I find is that I often write stuff that's not for the book I think it is, it's for a future book. That's what I'm trying to say.

• 2:22:21AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:22:22Speaker 03

  And there are multiple books happening all at once.

• 2:22:25AJ Gentile?

  Um, I thought, I saw you say you were reading John Mack again recently. Why were you reading John's work?

• 2:22:35Speaker 03

  Well, one of the things, I don't think this is a secret, one of the things that Karen wants me to do, and that the Mack family wants me to do, is finish John's last book.

• 2:22:50AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:22:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:22:52AJ Gentile?

  How far did he get?

• 2:22:53Speaker 03

  He wrote a book after Passport to Magonia, which came out in 99, called...

• 2:23:00AJ Gentile?

  Passport to...

• 2:23:02Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, Passport to the Cosmos.

• 2:23:04AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:23:05Speaker 03

  It was based on Passport to Magonia. Passport to the Cosmos. Then he was working on a book called When Worldviews Collide. And the way the book is set up, the first half of it is very much about John's trial at Harvard, and then the second half is where he thinks we're going. And so When Worldviews Collide is this, this reference to the scientific psychiatric community that's reacting against John, and he calls his experience a passion play. I mean, he uses Christian language to talk about this, even though he himself was very Jewish. And so When Worldviews Collide is very much about this collision of these

• 2:23:49Speaker 03

  two worldviews. And then the second half of the book is this third worldview that he thinks we need to go to. We're not going to go to, to the traditional religious worldview, but we're also not going to go to the materialist, reductive, scientific worldview. We're going to go to something else.

• 2:24:07AJ Gentile?

  Did he articulate what that was?

• 2:24:08Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:24:09AJ Gentile?

  He did not?

• 2:24:11Speaker 03

  Well...

• 2:24:12AJ Gentile?

  Well, that's a big lift, then.

• 2:24:13Speaker 03

  So the thing about, the thing about, and I've really spent a lot of time with Mack. The thing about Mack's earlier work in abduction, well, first of all, he was a, he was a nuclear activist in the 1980s, and he was writing about Lawrence of Arabia, and he was really interested in intercultural understanding, or kind of cross-cultural understanding. And he took Lawrence of Arabia as a, as a really powerful example of this. And then he was interested in this anti-nuclear activism, and then he got into UFOs and abductions.

• 2:24:50Speaker 03

  And if you read his early work, it's very much a kind of psychoanalytic listening. And what he's really struggling with in abduction, and then Passport to the Cosmos, is the, is the fact, and it is a fact, that the experiencers usually begin with some kind of terror, and then that terror morphs into transformation. So he called it, uh, human alien, alien abduction and, and transformation. And it's putting those two together that is the real challenge for him and these books. And I think for When Worldviews Collide is,

• 2:25:29Speaker 03

  how do we think about those two things together? And how do we, well, how do we do that? That's, that's the question of the book. And so the reason I'm so involved in John Mack is to, is to, and they want me to, and by they, I mean Karen and Danny and the Mack family, they really, they want me to bring it up to the present. They, they, they don't want the book just to sit in 2004, or whatever, wherever he left it. They want it to speak to 2027, or whatever, whatever year it comes out, or 2028. And so that's what I'm doing now, is I'm thinking about, certainly a lot about John Mack, but also about our present

• 2:26:14Speaker 03

  moment, where we're at.

• 2:26:16AJ Gentile?

  But you don't really like to define that.

• 2:26:18Speaker 03

  No, but neither did Mack. If you, again, if you read Mack, I, I, I share a lot with John Mack. I mean, um, he really foregrounded the experiencer, but, and he was convinced that there was not a psychopathology involved, and that he was really convinced by the comparative patterns that he saw. And, and so am I. And these books are filled with discussion of sexuality, and hybridity, and penises, and vaginas, and orgasm, and it's very, very psychoanalytic. And so this hooks into all of my earlier work on sexuality, which I,

• 2:27:00Speaker 03

  I think is absolutely central here. And, and we don't understand that again. And, and we're moving towards some kind of transformation that certainly involves all of this, but is not just this. So I, I actually, I really like John's work. I, I think it's fantastic. But it, it certainly deserves a, a bringing it into the present.

• 2:27:24AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:25Speaker 03

  And my other, my other conviction, AJ, is that people don't read anymore. I mean, we get into this, you know, I mean...

• 2:27:32AJ Gentile?

  People would read this?

• 2:27:33Speaker 03

  They'll read this?

• 2:27:35AJ Gentile?

  You finishing John Mack's work, yes.

• 2:27:37Speaker 03

  That's great.

• 2:27:38AJ Gentile?

  You don't think so?

• 2:27:39Speaker 03

  I am always...

• 2:27:41AJ Gentile?

  Are you not surprised at how many people you talk to that know John's work, and Jacques, and all that?

• 2:27:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. I am always struck, though, by how a lot of the conversations, particularly around the UFO, is just ignoring the earlier literature. It's just, it's just not aware that we've been here before. We've had this conversation before. And can't we, can't we acknowledge that conversation? And, and, and move, move, move the conversation forward? Or, apparently not. Apparently, we, we, we have to reinvent the, the wheel, as it were. And I don't, I don't think we have to reinvent the wheel. I think the wheel's already been invented.

• 2:28:23AJ Gentile?

  So you think we've been this far, as close to disclosure, mainstream, mainstreaming UFOs? I don't think we have.

• 2:28:30Speaker 03

  My view about disclosure and ontological shock is that human beings have always been ontologically shocked. And disclosure is a perfect translation, by the way, of the apocalypse. And apocalyptic thinking has been around for millennia, not, not the last 10 years.

• 2:28:52AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:28:53Speaker 03

  Um, so I think this is ancient, and, and, you know, this, all this conversation around, and I know you had this conversation with Diana about religion and traditional religion. I think a lot of religion is just one ontological shock after another. I think that's what creates a new religion. You do deny the, the earlier ontological shock, and you have another, and you have another, and you have another. And so I think that's where we're at, as, as a species, is we're, we're becoming aware of all the ontological shocks that we've had. And I think the alien stuff is just, really just another way of, of talking about ontological shock. And to the extent we don't keep in mind these earlier

• 2:29:38Speaker 03

  ontological shocks, I think we do ourselves a disservice.

• 2:29:40AJ Gentile?

  Do you think Jacques was right about his control theory? And UFOs manifesting based on what's in the zeitgeist?

• 2:29:51Speaker 03

  I think religion has always been about control.

• 2:29:54AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:29:56Speaker 03

  I think human beings have been controlled for as far as we can see back. Um, you know, one of, I, I know I tell a lot of bad jokes, but one of my jokes is, the greatest conspiracy theory of all time is called the humanities. If you want to be suspicious of everything forever, just study the humanities. You will never believe anything ever again.

• 2:30:20AJ Gentile?

  That's true.

• 2:30:21Speaker 03

  And so I think being suspicious of the cultural narrative, whatever it is, is just part of being an educated person. I think that's, and I think what the conspiracy theorists do is they, they shove this suspicion of the cultural narrative, and they become certain of a particular answer to that. And I think that's just nutty. I don't think there is a particular answer to it. But I think the humanities, or intellectuals in general, have been very suspicious of cultural narrative for a long, long time.

• 2:30:56AJ Gentile?

  Well, I think that's the, the struggle with finishing John's book is, is no definition. I mean, was he trying to define it? I would consider him more of a believer than you.

• 2:31:14Speaker 03

  John, he wasn't a believer in the... It depends on what you mean by believer.

• 2:31:24AJ Gentile?

  Well, I mean, just sitting down with the girls at Ariel School.

• 2:31:29Speaker 03

  He was very receptive to the religious narratives and the understanding of the experiencers. But what's, again, what's striking about the abduction book and Passport to the Cosmos book is how they integrate psychoanalysis and a kind of suspicion of those cultural narratives as well, and aim at a kind of theorization of some third worldview that is on the horizon and that isn't yet apparent. So, yes, I think he definitely listened to the children at the Ariel School, but I think he also would have asked questions about their experience. And I think we should.

• 2:32:13Speaker 03

  I'm not... You know, I'm a historian of religions by training, and by that I mean, I'm interested in the broad comparative conversation, not a specific answer to it. So, I'm not actually interested in Mahayana Buddhism, or Vaishnavan Hinduism, or Roman Catholicism, or whatever you want. But they're all part of this painting that I think is like really important, and I don't think we've had that conversation yet. And the thing about this... This might surprise you. The thing about the history of religions from my own training, it has a deep connection to writing,

• 2:32:58Speaker 03

  and a profound connection to fantastic literature, or what most people would think of as science fiction, that there is this awareness that the magical is real, and that writing about a worldview is itself part of the process. It's religious in nature. And so, when I say I'm a historian of religions, I don't mean that in a secular anthropological sense. I mean that in a weird, fantastic, science fiction sense.

• 2:33:36Speaker 03

  But it's that whole picture, AJ. It's everything back to the cave paintings, you know? And it's evangelical Christianity today, and it's childhood's end, and it's everything, you know? It's not one thing. And again, I don't know where that one's going.

• 2:33:59Speaker 03

  And maybe where that's going is, we don't know. I think about AI here, and I don't mean to be popular with AI, but I think AI gives us an ability to do this broad comparative thing in a way that hasn't been possible before.

• 2:34:17AJ Gentile?

  It's good for pattern recognition.

• 2:34:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And I think people have... The thing about the study of religion, it's come a long, long ways in 200 years. We know a shitload about pretty much everything. But individuals don't know much about everything. But we do. So, it's that species-wide scholarly or comparative reach that fascinates me, not the individual expertise.

• 2:34:52AJ Gentile?

  In the other religions, I mean, growing up, New York Italian Catholic, I'm aware of all the miracles, and certainly of Teresa and Copertino, all of those. Do you see those stories in the other religions as well? Levitation and...

• 2:35:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I grew up, of course, Roman Catholic too. And, you know, at least the story I heard was that Roman Catholicism is true because only miracles appear in Roman Catholicism. Well, that's just bullshit. That's just nonsense.

• 2:35:20AJ Gentile?

  That's what I was told.

• 2:35:21Speaker 03

  I know, that's just nonsense. Miracles happen all over the world, in every tradition, in every culture. So, to me, the main comparative sameness is, in fact, the miraculous or the paranormal. And the content, or the revelation, or the scriptural is, in fact, what's different. And so, that's why I'm so interested in the impossible or the paranormal. It's not because it's cool, although it is. It's not because of podcasts, because there is. But it's because of this global similarity that I think is ancient and global, and very human.

• 2:36:03AJ Gentile?

  I agree.

• 2:36:06AJ Gentile?

  Third volume of your trilogy is... I've heard you say "The Soul is a UFO" or "The Soul as a UFO." What's the actual title?

• 2:36:13Speaker 03

  "The Soul is a UFO" is the way the title is, yeah.

• 2:36:16AJ Gentile?

  "The Bomb, Technology, and the End of All Things."

• 2:36:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:36:21AJ Gentile?

  So, you say "The Apocalypse and Disclosure" are the same word?

• 2:36:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:36:24AJ Gentile?

  I guess "The Apocalypse" means disclosure.

• 2:36:26Speaker 03

  It does, means uncovering.

• 2:36:28AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:36:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, what people don't understand about, first of all, the trilogy, I mean, I should speak to that.

• 2:36:38Speaker 03

  The trilogy is about the new story that I think is, in fact, forming, and it's forming around science. And I think we... You know, the first volume's called "The Physics of Mystics." It's about physics and cosmology, and the Big Bang, and quantum physics, and the fascination that the quantum theorists had with mystical literature, by the way. And I think there's a reason for that.

• 2:37:05Speaker 03

  Then the second volume is...

• 2:37:06AJ Gentile?

  For what reason?

• 2:37:08Speaker 03

  Well, I think that they saw very clearly that there was a role for consciousness or subjectivity, even in physics.

• 2:37:14AJ Gentile?

  John Wheeler certainly did.

• 2:37:16Speaker 03

  There's a kind of idealism, or the idea that consciousness is fundamental to the natural world, which they saw very... I think they saw that very clearly. And that was weird, by the way. That was weird for a physicist to see that, to think that.

• 2:37:31AJ Gentile?

  It was weird.

• 2:37:34Speaker 03

  Well, John Wheeler was weird. There's a lot on John Wheeler, by the way, in the Physics of Mystics book, and...

• 2:37:40AJ Gentile?

  He's the best kind of weird.

• 2:37:41Speaker 03

  Wheeler himself was very anti-paranormal, by the way.

• 2:37:47AJ Gentile?

  He was?

• 2:37:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:37:48AJ Gentile?

  Yet consciousness is fundamental, but not...

• 2:37:51Speaker 03

  I know, I know, I know. It's ironic. But physicists in general are often very anti-paranormal, but their ideas are crazy batshit. And they're often very paranormal ideas. And so, you know, one of my jokes is, "Why do the physicists get all the good stuff? And why don't scholars of religion take that stuff back?"

• 2:38:17Speaker 03

  I really think that. And because the stuff the physicists say, it's just so idealistic, and so mystical, and so potentially useful here, but they turn it all into physics, and into cosmology, or science. And so, that's the first volume. And the second volume's called "Biological Gods," and it's on this idea of evolution, which is really key to a lot of people's understanding of religion and spirituality today. And the third volume's called "The Soul is a UFO," and it's on the nuclear bomb again, and technology, and the end of all things. So, it starts with cosmology and ends with what we call eschatology, or the doctrine of the end.

• 2:39:02Speaker 03

  And I don't know what you want me to talk about there, but...

• 2:39:08AJ Gentile?

  I want to know what you mean by "the end of all things."

• 2:39:11Speaker 03

  I mean, the apocalypse. I mean...

• 2:39:13AJ Gentile?

  But does the apocalypse have to be the end?

• 2:39:15Speaker 03

  Okay. Remember, it's the end of all things.

• 2:39:18AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:39:18Speaker 03

  It's the end of all separate things.

• 2:39:20AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:39:21Speaker 03

  I don't think things are separate. And I think what the UFO phenomenon is showing, and what a lot of mystical literature implies, is that things are not separate. So, it's the end of all things. Things as objects, as, you know, separate, you know, separate things. But it's also the end. I think the apocalypse is the end of a world, you know? It's the end of a particular secular scientific worldview. And I think that's what the UFO phenomenon is about. But it's also the bomb. You know, I grew up in the 60s and 70s, and I grew up, actually, in the anti-nuclear movement, and that still could end the world.

• 2:40:06AJ Gentile?

  That's how I grew up. We thought Russia was going to send a nuke every day.

• 2:40:09Speaker 03

  Well, that could still happen. And, you know, entire cities can be wiped out. I mean, entire hemisphere can be wiped out. I mean, entire ecosystem can be wiped out tomorrow. And so, to me, that's the real danger. And, you know, everybody wants to say how positive and wonderful science is and techno... I'm like, "Yeah, but it created the bomb."

• 2:40:35AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:36Speaker 03

  It could end everything instantly. Why is that a good thing? Why is that... I just don't get it. And I grew up imagining, you know, I know you were born in 72, I think. I was born in 62. I just thought there was going to be a nuclear exchange, and that I wouldn't live to be 40.

• 2:40:59AJ Gentile?

  Of course, 40 was an old man. There's no way to see 40.

• 2:41:01Speaker 03

  Well, that's 2002. I mean, I didn't think I would live that. I assumed it would end in the 90s or the 80s. And I mean everything. I don't mean it would end. I mean, it would just be gone. And that's still a possibility. So, I think if you go up with that nuclear fear, I think the UFO thing makes a lot more sense. A lot of my own UFO dreams in particular are really about the end of the world. They're not about anything else. You know, it's ships appearing in the sky to usher in the end of an age or the end of the world.

• 2:41:45Speaker 03

  And I think that's the case with a lot of these apparitions and a lot of these appearances, particularly around nuclear sites. I think that's what it's about fundamentally.

• 2:42:00AJ Gentile?

  So you think about the end of the world?

• 2:42:02Speaker 03

  I do.

• 2:42:02AJ Gentile?

  As a real, as a practical?

• 2:42:05Speaker 03

  Okay, okay, so that's a good question. So if you study the history of religions, people have been talking about the end of the world for a long time.

• 2:42:13AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:42:13Speaker 03

  And it's never come.

• 2:42:15AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:42:16Speaker 03

  So when people talk about the end of the world, I'm like, oh, here we go again.

• 2:42:22Speaker 03

  But we have the technological ability to do that now. I think that's fundamentally changed things.

• 2:42:30Speaker 03

  You know, when they talked about the end of the world in the first century of the Common Era, there were no nuclear bombs. There are nuclear bombs now. There are thousands and thousands of nuclear bombs. And we could, we could end everything. So

• 2:42:45Speaker 03

  I'm really

• 2:42:48Speaker 03

  concerned isn't the right word, horrified by that.

• 2:42:54AJ Gentile?

  Was it Marakumi who said that deep down, everybody is expecting the end of the world to come?

• 2:42:59Speaker 03

  Of course it does. You know, one of the things I often say is we're organic beings. We all die. The world ends for all of us.

• 2:43:11Speaker 03

  That's the, I think that's the origin of religion, you know, is this, this, this focus on death and destruction and disease and

• 2:43:21Speaker 03

  and we just end. And, you know, I often get asked, you know, well, what about the soul or what about the person?

• 2:43:29Speaker 03

  AJ, I don't actually believe in the person. I don't believe in the soul.

• 2:43:33AJ Gentile?

  You don't believe in the soul?

• 2:43:34Speaker 03

  I do not.

• 2:43:35AJ Gentile?

  Do you separate that from a consciousness?

• 2:43:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:43:37AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:43:38Speaker 03

  I think immortality is collective. I do not think it's individual or personal. And I think souls do last. I think they, there definitely is communication after death. But ultimately, I don't think so.

• 2:43:53AJ Gentile?

  We're just, we go back to the ocean as it drops?

• 2:43:56Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 2:43:56AJ Gentile?

  I think so too.

• 2:43:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, but that's a fundamentally different view of the afterlife than, you know, I'm gonna see grandma or I'm gonna see...

• 2:44:05AJ Gentile?

  I don't think so.

• 2:44:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, you're not. You're gonna go back to the ocean.

• 2:44:11AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:12Speaker 03

  So, well, like one of my favorite lines in this, this book, I just finished this book called The Physics of Mystics, and there's this great line in it by Erwin Schrödinger, who was a quantum physicist. And he was asked if dogs or maybe horses, if dogs have souls? And he said, of course not, neither do human beings.

• 2:44:37AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:38Speaker 03

  But he meant, but what he really believed was that human beings return to the light, return to this, this, this ocean, you know? And I think he was right about that, actually.

• 2:44:51AJ Gentile?

  That's what my instinct tells me.

• 2:44:53Speaker 03

  And that is a religious notion, by the way. That's extremely common in a lot of, a lot of religious worldviews. This, this idea that souls go back to, to some kind of super soul or some kind of ocean. And intellectuals often land there too, by the way, you know?

• 2:45:12AJ Gentile?

  Do you think there's a conscious purpose for us landing in these bodies?

• 2:45:17Speaker 03

  I do.

• 2:45:18AJ Gentile?

  I do too.

• 2:45:19Speaker 03

  I do.

• 2:45:19AJ Gentile?

  Do you think we choose it ahead of time?

• 2:45:21Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 2:45:21AJ Gentile?

  Do you think we choose it ahead of time?

• 2:45:25Speaker 03

  Maybe, I mean, certainly there are, there are people who believe that we choose, you know?

• 2:45:31AJ Gentile?

  But what do you believe?

• 2:45:33Speaker 03

  I don't believe anything. And by that, I don't mean nothing. I mean, I don't, I just don't know. I just don't know.

• 2:45:45Speaker 03

  But I definitely think human beings, I think we evolve. I think human beings have some kind of purpose. I don't think we know what that purpose is. I think we're part of each other. We're, we're connected, you know, in a, in a, in a profound way. And I think there is something we can call God, you know, something we, you know, people often say, well, you're an atheist and, and...

• 2:46:10AJ Gentile?

  I've heard you say you believe in God.

• 2:46:12Speaker 03

  I do, but I believe it in this collective.

• 2:46:15AJ Gentile?

  It's not a man with a beard in the sky, no, it's not.

• 2:46:18Speaker 03

  No, so I think I am an atheist in relationship to a lot of images of God that people have. Like, yeah, I don't believe in that God. That, that God

• 2:46:27Speaker 03

  sucks.

• 2:46:31Speaker 03

  But I, I'm not an atheist, you know, in the sense that I, I don't believe that there's something ultimate or... So, and people have a hard time, that's that third way again.

• 2:46:39AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:40Speaker 03

  You know, I, I think people have a hard time with that. But I'm like, okay, but that's just, that's just being honest. You know, I mean, okay, that's, you have a hard time with that. Okay, so what?

• 2:46:53AJ Gentile?

  What's, what's the most common criticism that you get from your work?

• 2:46:58Speaker 03

  I don't get a lot of criticism for my work today. I get a lot of love.

• 2:47:02AJ Gentile?

  You get a lot of love?

• 2:47:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:47:05AJ Gentile?

  Well, that's nice.

• 2:47:05Speaker 03

  It is nice.

• 2:47:08Speaker 03

  I don't think, AJ, I don't think people realize how radical I am. That, that sounds selfish of me or narcissistic or something, but like I think a lot of this stuff is, there's a profound sexual element to it. And I don't think people see that. I don't think people realize what I actually think. Cause I often don't say that, I suppose it's my fault.

• 2:47:35Speaker 03

  But bisexual, I don't mean biological or instinctual, you know? I mean, super sexual. I mean, something's going on that is really dramatic and biological and evolution, evolutionary in some, in some way.

• 2:47:54Speaker 03

  And I don't think people realize how skeptical I am of all these religious answers, but also of all the scientific answers. I'm skeptical of everything.

• 2:48:03AJ Gentile?

  Well, I know that.

• 2:48:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:48:04AJ Gentile?

  People, you, people don't think you're skeptical?

• 2:48:08Speaker 03

  Again, I don't, I'm so used to being, um...

• 2:48:15Speaker 03

  For, for, for a decade or so in my early career, I was attacked for

• 2:48:22Speaker 03

  for not believing anything, which was totally wrong. And now

• 2:48:30Speaker 03

  you know, occasionally there's a occasional debunker, there's an occasional evolutionary biologist that comes after me, but it's very occasional. And I think people see correctly that I'm basically trying to change how we think about the human, if I can put it that way. I really want to push the conversation forward. And I, I think people detect a lot of affection and love in my work. And I think they're correct to do that. Cause it, it's, it's all about, it's all about positive movement or positive conversation. It's not about deconstruction or criticism.

• 2:49:10AJ Gentile?

  It's not. And, um, you know, after your first episode with the telepathic autistic children, halfway through I said, uh-oh, here come, there's gonna be criticism and comments about this. And, and it was such a positive episode, it was very human.

• 2:49:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:49:27AJ Gentile?

  And to tell the stories of these mothers and their daughters, but, um...

• 2:49:32Speaker 03

  I, you know, I think the, this is where Diana and I,

• 2:49:38Speaker 03

  Diana Pasulka and I really worked together on this. There's this positive nature of things that gets erased. And the, the debunkers or the skeptics in particular, it's so predictable. I know what they're gonna say.

• 2:49:53AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:49:54Speaker 03

  It's, it's so boring, it's so boring. And we've integrated all of that. I get that, that's all correct.

• 2:50:03AJ Gentile?

  It's priced in.

• 2:50:04Speaker 03

  It's like, okay, but we get that, that's part of it. It's like, okay, now how do we, how do we talk about the autistic children now? Or how do we talk about the, the abductees? Or how do we talk about the precogs, you know? That to me is a much more interesting conversation than

• 2:50:23Speaker 03

  taking this apart. And, and often the debunking strategies, they're so unbelievable. It's not just that they're boring, it's that they're completely unbelievable. You have to believe A, B, and C, which is total bullshit, as opposed to X, Y, and Z. It's like, what? That doesn't, that doesn't work.

• 2:50:45AJ Gentile?

  I don't mind the debunkers as long as they don't wanna shut down the conversation.

• 2:50:48Speaker 03

  Of course, they always wanna shut down the conversation.

• 2:50:50AJ Gentile?

  Shut it down.

• 2:50:50Speaker 03

  That's what they wanna do. And that's my problem, that's my problem with it. And that's why they aren't on the show, by the way. I mean, that's because of me. I, I take full responsibility for that.

• 2:51:02AJ Gentile?

  But did the showrunners wanna put skeptics on there?

• 2:51:04Speaker 03

  Originally, we were talking about the skeptical voice because, and I was like, don't do that. That's just so, it's so ordinary and it...

• 2:51:13AJ Gentile?

  And look, I have, I have my skepticism about, about the, the telepathy, I do.

• 2:51:19Speaker 03

  Good.

• 2:51:19AJ Gentile?

  But, which is fine.

• 2:51:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:51:21AJ Gentile?

  But why put those mothers through that part of it? There's no reason for that.

• 2:51:26Speaker 03

  The, the experiencers are so used to being dismissed and demeaned.

• 2:51:30AJ Gentile?

  Cause she reads it every day, that mother. She gets the emails.

• 2:51:34Speaker 03

  And I just, that dismissal and that demeaning, I, it's just wrong. And the experiencers themselves are very, I think they are really having those experiences and they're just telling us like it is. And it's up to us now to theorize or interpret that. And the skeptical questions will come in and they're important and they're part of the conversation. But they're part of the conversation, that's the point. Let's have the conversation, let's not shut it down. And what, what a lot of the skeptics want is to shut down and to stop the conversation. And whether they know that or not, that's the effect of, of those strategies. And that is what I object to, is that shutting down.

• 2:52:19Speaker 03

  Not, not the, not the reasons themselves, which of course I think are one, are great. But just as part of the conversation.

• 2:52:28AJ Gentile?

  You know, I would think that in, in those 150 boxes of Johns, there's plenty of cases where he didn't buy it. But this can't be a single case where he was dismissive of anybody.

• 2:52:38Speaker 03

  Yes, well, and so was Jacques. I mean, if, a lot of those, a lot of those case studies basically is messengers of deception. It's basically Jacques showing that the particular religious movement or the particular cases is, didn't happen or, or not so. And that's just baked in. That, of course.

• 2:53:01AJ Gentile?

  Of course, I want him to do that.

• 2:53:04Speaker 03

  I love, I love that.

• 2:53:05AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:53:06Speaker 03

  I love messengers of deception. And Jacques nailed a bunch of stuff in that book before it even happened. And I was like, that's fantastic. So let's do that. But so with Jacques, you know, Jacques thinks that there's a there there, you know, in the UFO phenomenon, and so do I. Um, so the question is always, how, how do we affirm that they're there? And do the, the criticism or the, the debunking? And of course you can do both, but, but you can't study something that you say didn't happen. I can put it that way.

• 2:53:40AJ Gentile?

  That makes sense to me.

• 2:53:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:53:44AJ Gentile?

  So you and your mom really saw that UFO, you think?

• 2:53:48Speaker 03

  Uh, mom and dad?

• 2:53:50AJ Gentile?

  Well, you were five.

• 2:53:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was mom and dad who stopped the car and.

• 2:53:54AJ Gentile?

  I didn't know your dad was there also.

• 2:53:55Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. And so was my brother. I asked Jerry about it. I asked Jerry about it. He's like, dude, I was three.

• 2:54:05Speaker 03

  And I was like, yeah, that's probably right. I, I don't remember it, but yeah, I think mom and dad really stopped and really.

• 2:54:12AJ Gentile?

  Did she tell you more of that story? I only heard you mention it in passing.

• 2:54:17Speaker 03

  No, she didn't. And we, she told me that story. We were watching, um, a bad Ford commercial. They were, it was a, it was a UFO on a, on a string that they were hovering over some kind of Ford pickup truck or something. And, uh, she said, well, Jeff, do you remember the time we saw a UFO? And I was like, what? I'm like, no. And she, why, she told this whole story about going up to Yankton, which of course I remember. You know, I, of course, the cousins in Yankton, um, and through Northern Nebraska and, and, uh, she saw, or they saw, or we saw a rectangular UFO that just hovered there. No, I have no memory of that, but.

• 2:54:59AJ Gentile?

  And that didn't become part of the family lore?

• 2:55:01Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:55:01AJ Gentile?

  They didn't talk about it?

• 2:55:02Speaker 03

  Until that bad commercial, you know, in 2010 or so.

• 2:55:07AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:55:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. And then it just came out. It's like, what? Yeah.

• 2:55:15AJ Gentile?

  I just have a couple for you.

• 2:55:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:55:20AJ Gentile?

  So you tell your rad students that they shouldn't study comparative religion till they've lost at least two worlds.

• 2:55:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:55:29AJ Gentile?

  I guess yours were Catholicism and what?

• 2:55:33Speaker 03

  Uh, Hinduism. I mean, the tantric Hinduism I lost too. Uh, but I also lost secular science and I've lost many worlds. Uh, and I, I mean, personally I've lost many worlds, but I think I've seen this in many people. If they don't lose a worldview at all, they'll never become scholars of religion. Cause why would you? Why would you study another religious? Well, they don't come comparative scholars of religion.

• 2:56:01AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:56:01Speaker 03

  They might become scholars of that religion and they would just want to lift up or, or, or affirm that particular worldview. But they don't really become comparatively because there's no reason to. Um, and if they've lost one worldview, which is usually a religious worldview that they were born into, they probably just jumped into another worldview. It's probably secular science. They think now that evolution or biology or physics or whatever the, the sciences has the answers. And I just, I just don't of course think it does. And, and, and when they lose that world, then they become real comparatively in my, in my mind. By which I mean, they don't have answers.

• 2:56:46Speaker 03

  They, they, they're really about comparing many worldviews and not assuming the truth of one.

• 2:56:54AJ Gentile?

  I didn't expect that answer. It's a great one.

• 2:56:57Speaker 03

  Well, that's the answer I always give.

• 2:56:59AJ Gentile?

  It makes sense.

• 2:57:00Speaker 03

  Makes total sense. That's the thing. When you talk and you, it, it makes a lot of sense.

• 2:57:12AJ Gentile?

  Next episodes, we've got near death experiences coming up.

• 2:57:15Speaker 03

  So the next episode is precognition.

• 2:57:18AJ Gentile?

  Precognition, okay.

• 2:57:19Speaker 03

  Which leads into a whole bunch of rabbit holes. And then there's talking to the dead. And then there's near death experiences. And then finally there's angels and demons, uh, a kind of religious interpretation, I think of, of, of these experiences.

• 2:57:36AJ Gentile?

  That's something that's happening a lot more lately is attaching spirituality to the, to the phenomenon.

• 2:57:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. You know, my, you, you, I'm sure you've heard this on, on other podcasts, but one of my comments is that I've never met a demon who didn't look like a suffering human being.

• 2:57:52AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:57:54Speaker 03

  So I don't like the demonic reading. I think people have negative experiences and they have demonic experiences for sure. But I think ultimately demonic interpretations just ends up putting judgment and suffering upon suffering. And I think we need to like, stop that. Um, and, and pull back and, and stop, stop hurting each other. And I think a lot of paranormal experiences, we talked about this, I think is because of trauma. I think people are hurting other people and people are being hurt by life and, and.

• 2:58:37Speaker 03

  But the, the, this suffering acts as a kind of portal into, into these other dimensions or into this, this greater reality. So it's not that suffering is, is, is inherently bad. Sometimes it's, it's, it results in good things, but it's still suffering, still trauma.

• 2:58:56AJ Gentile?

  I, I've, I've talked about it as, um, if we're this universal consciousness, that the suffering is a tear. It's just a tear. It's a, it's a wound. And that's why things will manifest because we're all part of it.

• 2:59:11Speaker 03

  You know, my, my example of this is always the near death experience. I mean, the, the fact is that near death experiences are inherently traumatic because you almost died.

• 2:59:20AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:59:21Speaker 03

  But you've also seen and had this astonishing experience because of the trauma.

• 2:59:31AJ Gentile?

  Right. And now you don't fear death anymore.

• 2:59:33Speaker 03

  Now you don't fear it anymore. So you can't reduce the, the near death experience to the trauma, but the near death experience would not have happened without the trauma. And I think that I think is the key. And I think it applies to all of these experiences. Like, like, I don't think you get telepathic children without autism.

• 2:59:52AJ Gentile?

  You don't.

• 2:59:54Speaker 03

  I think autism is really significant. It's a significant form of trauma or suffering that results in these telepathic children. I mean, children can have telepathic experiences. I mean, human adults have telepathic experiences all the time. But I don't think we generally talk about them. And I think they get suppressed for a lot of reasons. But I think something like autism, um, is a particular form of, of trauma that results in these, these phenomena.

• 3:00:29AJ Gentile?

  You had one mother on that I hadn't considered what she said was, um, once we learn language, we lose that ability. And I thought it was interesting. These autistic children can't speak, so this is a, a survival mechanism.

• 3:00:43Speaker 03

  This is, this is, you know, the thing to talk about there is the children who remember previous lives, the, the court cases. Generally memories of previous lives appear around three or four. Uh, the acquisition of language, but they're gone by five or six. So they depend on the acquisition of language to, to vocalize them. But they also depend on a particular stage of life in which they're, they're then suppressed. And, and I think the, the autistic telepathic, um, kids are a lot like this, although that autism never goes away in their case, you know?

• 3:01:27Speaker 03

  They, they don't, they don't have language. So I, I do think there's this relationship between language acquisition and, and, and these, these, these anomalous experiences.

• 3:01:38AJ Gentile?

  It's a good study waiting to happen, which would be what parts of the brain are lighting up?

• 3:01:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:01:43AJ Gentile?

  With these children versus the language centers. I, I bet a correlation would be found.

• 3:01:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. And again, I, to go back to my critique of science, science is always this third person external, you know, a, a study of this, but it's not this first person experience of it. And we need to put those together somehow, you know?

• 3:02:08AJ Gentile?

  I don't know how to do that.

• 3:02:09Speaker 03

  I don't know. I mean, I think there, there are beginnings of that, but I don't know how to do that.

• 3:02:16AJ Gentile?

  Um, Archive X Unexplained is on AMC Plus. Everyone should watch it. It's great. Last question for you. So you had your one night. Um, I had one day. Most people don't get one at all. You spent over 40 years chasing that one night. Is one enough?

• 3:02:35Speaker 03

  I think so. But I tried to recreate it, tried to have it back, like I'm sure you did many times. So whether it's enough or not, I mean, it, it, it doesn't come back. I mean, but some people are just set up though, to have it many, many times. It's like unfair.

• 3:02:55AJ Gentile?

  It's not fair.

• 3:02:56Speaker 03

  It's not fair, but they'll say, part of, part of me, you know? One, one of the views in religious studies is the once born and the twice born, which is from William James. And the, the once born are those that are always happy basically, and life is good. And the twice born are people basically are fucked up, but who have some kind of religious conversion experience. And they see, oh my God, this is amazing. And so I think I'm much more like the once born. Uh, and I think the twice born are the, the people who have many, many experiences like this. So it's, it's okay. And I'm very Buddhist about this too.

• 3:03:41Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't think it matters frankly. I don't think it matters that I don't have these experiences.

• 3:03:47AJ Gentile?

  Jeff Kripal, thank you for coming in. This has been a lot of fun.

• 3:03:50Speaker 03

  Thank you. Thank you, AJ.

• 3:03:51AJ Gentile?

  Bye, everybody. That was Jeff Kripal. We covered go karts, a Hindu saint, the X-Men, a talking raccoon, and the end of all things. And I looked up all of it. The archive is obviously real. Rice keeps over a million documents on UFOs and the paranormal. Jacques Vallée's case files are in there and some of them are sealed until 2031 at his own request. And Jeff thinks a lot of it is Jacques Dupree. Bunkin' Cases, and I'd pay to read that box. Now the raccoon. Jeff says a Nobel Prize winner lost a night to a glowing raccoon that said, "Good evening, doctor." It's in Carrie Mullis's own memoir, Dancing Naked in the Minefield, 1998. Jeff got the title a little wrong, the raccoon is exactly right. The X-Men story I can't check. Jeff says a screenwriter handed his book to the whole cast at the wrap

• 3:04:35AJ Gentile?

  party, and I can't find anyone from the movie saying so on record. We have to take his word for it. But his word has been good all day. Is one night enough? He says yes, and admits he spent 40 years trying to get it back. I had one day like that, and I can't get back there either. So I believe him. I'm not neutral, but I admit it. Archive X: Unexplained Phenomenon is on AMC Plus right now. I just started watching it. I think you'll definitely like it. It's also on Sundance TV. Jeff's books are at jeffreyjcripple.com. That's K-R-I-P-A-L. And everything I mentioned is link below. Until next time, be safe, be kind, know that you are appreciated.

• 3:09:05Speaker 04

  How to sell your car. First, go to carmax.com, then-

• 3:09:08Speaker 05

  Wow, this offer's great, but is this just an estimate?

• 3:09:11Speaker 04

  Nope, it's worth real money.

• 3:09:13Speaker 05

  Oh, I like that. Hold on, is my phone gonna ring off the hook with sales calls now?

• 3:09:17Speaker 04

  Not at all. You have a week to think on it, pressure free.

• 3:09:19Speaker 05

  Okay, but then I have to drop it off?

• 3:09:22Speaker 04

  Or you can just schedule an at-home pickup.

• 3:09:25Speaker 05

  That is kind of amazing.

• 3:09:26Speaker 04

  Get a real offer today at carmax.com. Offers are good for seven days. At-home pickup not available in all locations. Distance restrictions and a fee may apply.

• 3:09:34Speaker 06

  In this life, you can't win. When the world gets you down. No! Escape to Pluto TV.

• 3:09:40Speaker 05

  This is objectively fantastic.

• 3:09:42Speaker 06

  Relax into the movies and shows you already know and love, all for free.

• 3:09:46Speaker 05

  Shwing!

• 3:09:46Speaker 06

  Even our news is uplifting.

• 3:09:48Speaker 05

  You stay classy, San Diego.

• 3:09:49Speaker 06

  Watch School of Rock, Crazy Ex Girlfriend, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The X-Files, Wayne's World, and so much more. We're not worthy! The best things on TV really are free. You just have to know where to look. Escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never. Nationwide is so much more than a great insurance company. They're one of America's largest financial services companies. Just like I'm so much more than quarterback Peyton Manning. I'm also Paintin' Manning. Insurance and financial services together? It's a masterpiece. Paintin' Manning does it again. For your insurance and financial needs, Nationwide is on your side. Nationwide Investment Services Corporation, member FINRA, Columbus, Ohio.