Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion & the Nature of Belief | Lex Fridman Podcast #149

the following is a conversation with diana walsh basulka a professor of philosophy and religion at uncw and author of american cosmic ufos religion and technology this book is one of the most fascinating explorations of the interconnected nature of technology belief and the mystery of alien intelligence quick mention of our sponsors element electrolyte drink grammarly writing plugin business wars podcast and cash app so the choice is health grammar knowledge or money choose wisely my friends and if you wish click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast as a side note let me say as i did in the recent video on how many intelligent alien civilizations are out there that the nature of alien life intelligence and how they might communicate with us humans is likely stranger than we imagine and perhaps stranger than we can imagine what is most fascinating to me is how the belief in the communication with such civilizations changes people's understanding of the world and as diana argues the technology we create technological innovation itself seems to manifest the mythology in our collective intelligence that turns the seemingly impossible into reality just a matter of years through the belief of individual humans that carry out that innovation the nature and power of this belief in both technology and extraterrestrial intelligence is mysterious and fascinating perhaps holding the key to us humans understanding our own mind our consciousness and engineering versions of it in the machines we create if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review it on napa podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter alex friedman and now here's my conversation with diana walsh basalka you are a scholar of religious belief or belief in general so the fascinating question uh what do you think is the difference between our beliefs and objective reality what is real period sure what is real easy question so first let me start with belief so belief is generally there are different definitions of belief just just as there are different definitions of what is real okay so for belief in my field it would be attitudes toward something that dictate our actions okay so we believe the sun is going to rise tomorrow therefore we act as if it will rise tomorrow all right beliefs can be wrong for a long time people believed and actually some still do that the earth was flat okay well that's obviously an erroneous belief so beliefs can be wrong now the bigger question that philosophers ask is um is this belief accurate toward what we consider to be objective reality so now let me go to objective reality so what is real i don't think we can actually obtain a correct understanding of what is real and in that sense i have to refer to a philosopher again and that would be emmanuel kant so emmanuel kant is one of the he was uh basically in the 1750s he wrote critiques of reason and things like that so he said well if you're a philosopher or have any kind of understanding of western history you know who he is um he had this idea that we can actually never get to the thing in itself okay so he called that the numenol the thing in itself he said this let's take this table for instance that you and i are talking across so this thing is a table you and i both know that we assume it's real we believe in it because we put our water on it and our water stays on it okay um however can we know this thing um in and of itself as a table um so that would be what he then would call um the phenomenal how do we know that that phenomena exists as we know it is okay how do we know we use our faculties so we use our senses and things like that but again even our census can be wrong so i've been on committees just recently this year last year for hiring professors in my department who are philosophers and every and we're hiring metaphysicians and you know people who are thinking about the nature of reality and basically what what i've learned from them yeah they're very loved to attend those faculty talks metaphysics professors what's funny is that right for each one of them i'm convinced each time they all say different things but they're so convincing i'm like yes hire that one right is it like historical philosophy no particular type of no they're they have an actual belief they're practicing facilities yes so what they do is they come and they're usually excellent philosophers from harvard or you know usc or whatever you know they come and they give what's called a job talk that's what floss well every academic does a job talk in order to get it they talk to us about a department about what they do and so it so happens that we need him as metaphysician and now we're hiring again for one and so i've i've learned a lot about metaphysics in the last year and this is what i've learned um that they use physics as a basis for understanding what we can know about what is real and what is real is really difficult to pin down and so your question is what is belief well belief does it correspond to reality that's the question i would ask and first we don't even know what is real so the table they would say how do we know that the table even exists well how do we differentiate it from the floor for example so these are the questions that philosophers are asking no one else is of course but philosophers are asking these questions and they have different answers for it so i would say that it's very difficult to know what is real and in fact what i do usually is i paraphrase my friend and colleague brother guy consolmano he's a jesuit priest he's also an astronomer and he's the director of the vatican observatory and so he says this he's a very smart person he says well truth is a moving target you know so so basically to know what is real out there like gravity or something like that you've got to approximate it and as human beings you know we have um senses to tell us what at least so we don't get hurt you know we're not going to fall off building or something like that we have eyes to see and things like that so we can approximate what reality is but we're never going to get to it um unless we develop better senses okay and i think that that is what we are in the process of doing we're developing better senses we have telescopes we have microscopes we have you know extensions of ourselves which are now called technology and we can get to a better understanding of what reality is and what the objective world is and therefore our beliefs can be honed so we can get better beliefs more accurate beliefs but can we get beliefs that actually correspond to reality um not in any precise way but in approximate ways so i hope that's not like too big an answer to your question what do you think beliefs are in themselves can become reality i mean so you've now adapted the in this little bit of a conversation adapted the metaphysician view of reality which is the physics yes but you know we humans kind of operate in the space of ideas very much so like we've kind of in the collective intelligence of human beings have come up with a set of ideas that persist in the minds of these many people and they become quite strong and powerful like in terms of like impact on our lives they can have sometimes more impact than this table does than the physics yeah and in that sense is is there some sense in which our beliefs are reality even if they're not connected to physics yes even if they're not real yeah even if okay so yes absolutely so um our beliefs are tremendously they uh they create social effects absolutely um there was a belief that i'm gonna use this example uh-oh there was a belief back in the day and we're talking about when i say back in the day i'm a historian so i'm talking about like a thousand years ago right that women had no souls okay so look i don't know if human beings have souls i can tell you this though that if human beings have souls probably animals do too that's my own personal belief that's not a professor belief there um but there was this belief among the catholic uh magisterium which is runs europe that women had no souls so they had to have this big meaning about it you know did women have souls but that belief had consequences for women i mean women were treated and have been treated as if they didn't have souls um okay so there's and the soul was really the essence of the human being it was it's the it's called the animus right it's what is the the essence of what is eternal you know when women were eternal here's another example okay this is an example from my own research all right so there in the catholic tradition there's this idea of purgatory hell and heaven and these are three destinations that people can go to when they die and if you're great you go to heaven automatically and you're considered a saint if you're okay you go to purgatory right and you suffer for a time and then get back into heaven um if you're terrible you go to hell right okay well there was a place that the catholics determined and this this was a belief for a long time like a thousand years or more and it was called limbo all right and limbo comes from the latin limbus and it means edge and it was either on the edge of hell or on the edge of heaven no one really could determine which it was no historians are like well this person says it was on the edge of heaven well listen um this was a terrible first of all there is no limbo anymore in 2007 um benedict the then pope got rid of the idea that there was limbo okay so catholics kind of went crazy because they didn't really know they forgot that limbo existed and they thought it was purgatory and they said how could you get rid of purgatory but actually he just got rid of this idea of limbo oh so that's a distinct thing from purgatory it was by the way people should know they have a book on purgatory that came before your uh american cosmic yes i wrote a book on purgatory yeah anyway so limbo is a distinct thing from purgatory yeah and the the the types of people who go to limbo happen to be virtuous pagans okay like socrates or somebody like that um and children who weren't baptized so think of this think of for that like more than a thousand years mothers and fathers gave birth to babies who weren't baptized and couldn't be buried with their family in these burial and you know they then they couldn't be reunited with them in heaven think of the pain as suffering that that caused and that was nothing limbo's nothing yet the belief in it caused untold suffering and that's just a small example and that was as real to them it was absolutely real i mean the effects were real let's put it that way the place itself not real but the families themselves do you think they really believed it they totally believed it the table is real yes i've read but listen we have trigger warnings today right so don't read this it's going to make you upset okay history primary sources no trigger warnings okay so you're going through like you know somebody's diary from 1400 and you hear the suffering and pain that they went through there were times in my research where i'd have to put my primary source down you know and just basically go outside and take a walk because it was so horrific i knew it was true because they wouldn't write something you know they're not gonna write in their diary something that's not true and it was horrible so yes these people went through untold suffering for nothing for you know because they had an erroneous belief but they didn't know it was erroneous so it's real to them yeah uh so i don't know if you're familiar with donald hoffman he has uh this idea that in terms of uh the distance we are from being able to know the reality which is there the physics reality is we're actually really really really really far away from that yeah so like it's uh i think his idea is that we're basically like completely detached from it yes uh what what's your sense how close are we to the reality we'll talk about him a bunch of ideas about our beliefs in technology and and beyond uh but in terms of what is actually real from a physical sense how close are we to understanding that pretty far i'm going to use examples from what i do okay so this idea that we're suspicious of what we actually think is real is not new of course it goes back a long time thousands of years in fact and philosophers i i'm not actually technically a philosopher but i was one i'm a i'm a professor of religious studies yeah what do you introduce yourself at like at a bar when the bartender asks what do you do i never tell people what i do especially on airplanes it's a bad idea okay so generally if they push though i say you know i'm the chair of philosophy and religion although i stepped down last year so i'm no longer the chair but um i i've i have like a master's degree in philosophy and i was a philosophy major and i've studied a lot i still study philosophy so i integrated into my research um all right so this idea that we can't know uh we're suspicious of what we know it's called external world skepticism that's the official philosophical name for it um our faculties and our senses don't give us accurate perceptions of what is there okay especially at a quantum level or a molecular level i mean that's just obvious so yes so i think that you're the person you mentioned is correct in that i think we're far away from it i think you're talking about our direct senses but you know we have tools measurement tools from microscopes to all the tools of astronomy cosmology it gives us a sense of the big universe and also the sense of the very small do you think there's some other things that are completely sort of other dimensions or there's ideas of pan psychism that consciousness permeates all matter that that's there's like fundamental forces of physics we're not even aware of yet like oh absolutely i do think and this is why i write about technology and um i i mean that's actually what i specialize in is belief in technology with respect to religion so in my opinion thank goodness for think for technology because where would we be without it i mean frankly i think that it's like marshall mcluhan was the person who said technology is like an extension of our senses and i absolutely believe that to be true i think that we're lucky that we you know that prometheus gave us technology okay and that we use it and we're making it better and better and better and better and that makes us more efficient it makes us more efficient as a species and like my point is is that i think that our instruments i mean i don't want to be a religious technologist you know but our our uh our instruments will save us i mean they're already making life better for us you think it's important that they also help us understand reality more directly more deeply i think directly as a is better than deeply i think directly more directly is probably a more accurate term for what you're trying to i think ask me you know can we actually i mean i think you're asking me that question that kant basically was trying to get at was can we know the thing in itself can we know that can we have like some kind of like intense knowing of it it's almost mystical um and i would say that that's where religion comes in okay that's where we talk about religion um and if i may also go back to emmanuel kant this idea that he just before he died just as he died he was working on he did this critique of reason where basically he believed he he basically um talks about can we know what's real he basically has this long you know that question can we know it's real and then you know a thousand pages later no i'll just give you the rundown okay so okay yeah yeah exactly um then he does this other uh critique and um okay so he does like three critiques then he does this critique of judgment okay well judgment is this other thing altogether and i think that that's what you're getting at so how do we know things how can we know things really intensely and intimately and i think that he thought that judgment was the idea that we can actually um know the thing in itself and he was working on that as he died and then he never finished it hannah arendt another philosopher of the 20th century took it up took up the critique of judgment and tried to finish it oh why the word judgment because judgment think about it when you see a work of art who judges that to be decent okay so there's a there is um a group of people who come to the decision that that's rotten or you know that's pretty good you know like um i noticed that you like to play guitar well you choose music that i happen to like too okay so you and i both have a you know sense of judgment it's a sense so he said there's a sense that some people have why do certain communities have a similar sense what what dictates that and so he was working on that he thought it had something to do with the knowledge the intimate knowledge of the thing in itself um yeah so another um philosopher that philosophers actually don't like at all but religious studies people do is martin heidegger so martin heidegger has some great essays one is called what is a work of art and again he gets to you know he talks about van gogh and van gogh's shoes you know that picture the the painting van gogh shoes it's really a really intense picture it's just shoes it's you know it's but it's a it's an amazing painting of shoes and i think everybody can agree that's a cool picture of shoes right and so why you know the question is why is that a cool picture of shoes you know what kind of knowledge are we accessing to determine that indeed that that works right and in fact we still like it so basically the the nature of knowledge and what does it represent it can operate in the space of that's detached from reality or can it ultimately represent reality i guess that's the is that that's the space of metaphysics is that is that yeah so what can we know is actually called epistemology but metaphysics is is basically what is the nature of reality right and those intersect absolutely yeah a lot of things intersect in philosophy we just have fancy names for them another non-philosopher that may be considered a philosopher since we're talking about reality is ayn rand and her philosophy of objectivism what are your thoughts on her sense of taking this idea of reality calling her philosophy objectivism and uh kind of starting at the idea that you really could know everything and it's pretty obvious and then from that you can derive an ethics about how to live life like what is the what is the good ethical life and all the virtue of selfishness all that kind of stuff uh so you talk to a lot of academic philosophers so i'd be curious to see from the perspective of like is she somebody that's uh taken seriously at all uh why is she dismissed as i see from my distant perspective by serious philosophers and also like your own personal thoughts of like is there some interesting bits that you find uh inspiring in her work or not okay so i'm rand um i've had so many exceedingly intelligent students basically give me her books and basically say please dr basulka read this book and i'll tell them yes thank you i've read this book before and then want to engage in you know let me put it this way they're religious about ein rand okay so to them ayn rand represents some type of way of life right her objectivism um now why is she not taken seriously by philosophers in general well let me put it this way um philosophers in general tend to get pretty i guess you could call it they're they're s kind of scientists but with words i always call philosophy when i describe it to someone who's going to take a philosophy class i say it's basically math problems like word math problems okay so that's basically what it is so they take words very seriously and they're very formal and definitions very seriously yeah so they all want to get on the same page so they're not so there is no confusion so for ein rand to basically say you can know everything and you know and establish ethics from that i think philosophers automatically say no now that doesn't mean i say no um in fact we even we have at my university a wonderful business school and when you walk into the the uh dean of the business school's office ein rand is everywhere so it's so i want to say that not all academics are anti-iran um and in fact i don't think philosophers are either except that they don't teach ein rand okay so in one one sense you could say that because they don't teach her they're being exclusive in what they teach or very particular perhaps is another way to put it yeah it's hard to know where to place people like her because um you know do you put albert camus as a philosopher so i guess what's the good term for that like literary philosophers or whatever the term is it's annoying to me that the academic philosophers get to own the word philosophy because like it's just like people who think deeply about life is what i think about is philosophy and like to me it's like all right so i know nietzsche is another person that's probably not respected in the philosophy circles because he is you know full of contradictions full of uh i love nietzsche he's just my favorite philosopher oh really yes i absolutely love nietzsche so he's definitely you know i i love people that are full of ideas even if they're full of contradictions and nietzsche absolutely and iran is also that i'm able to um look past the obvious ego that's there on the page and uh the fact that she actually has in my view a lot of wrong ideas uh but there's a lot of interesting tidbits to pick up and uh the same same goes with nietzsche and i'm i'm weirded out by the religious aspect here on both the people who like worship iron rand and people who completely dismiss her i i just kind of see as oh can we just read a few interesting things and get inspired by it and move on as opposed to no have a dogmatic is there something you find about her work that's interesting to you um or her personality or any of that oh i think she's fascinating um i don't dismiss her um she was a woman who reached a level of success with her mind at a time when that was difficult so i mean she's definitely um worth looking at for for even that reason um but also um her idea i guess part of the situation with rand first of all i think that um her work is you have to it's misinterpreted okay and i think that's the same with nietzsche like a lot of people think that i mean in fact it is the case that nietzsche's writing before the 20th century so he's got that you know he's somewhat his rhetoric is sexist and racist and you know of the time period right he was a educated philosopher of that time period however um his books are amazing and nietzsche's philosophy is incredible and i think that i think that's what you're saying about rand too and i agree i mean i think that that um we get caught up i mean likely we should and we should contextualize these thinkers in the time period within which they are we should not forgive their you know because there were people during nietzsche's time that were you know uh feminist and and not racist and things like that and you know so but uh each has mary i mean i would say nietzsche is and i you did ask me to talk about some of the books that made the largest impact on me and the nietzsche's gay science is one of them it's one of the best books ever in my opinion i do think nietzsche was uh i don't know about exactly sexist he certainly was sexist but it felt like he didn't get laid much in his life no it felt like he was extra sexist i was like his theories on women are like all right he's pretty angry he seems frustrated yeah like all right calm down buddy uh the fate of philosophers i just ignore everything he just says about women [Laughter] so can we can we talk about myth and religion a little bit yes i mean can we start at the beginning which is like myths how are they born there's this collective intelligence amongst us human beings and we seem to create these beautiful ideas that captivate the minds of millions how is such a myth born great question okay so that brings us to terminology again in um in my field we we definitely i think try not to distinguish between religion i this is going to be controversial i think between religion and myth because we call other cultures religions myths right and then we call our myths religions and i guess myth has a bad connotation to it that it's not real yeah now what's interesting is that um people like plato who lived thousands of years ago 2 500 about um basically made this distinction himself within his own culture which was greek right so plato's a very famous greek philosopher and he would say things like this he would say that um he would make a distinction between the reality of the one god or the one he would call it he didn't call use the word god but he's referencing a divinity of okay and he believes in the soul okay so but he would also say that the gods and goddesses of the greeks are just myths so even he would make that distinction again you know he would say the population is not too bright so they believe in these gods and goddesses but he himself is talking to his students and he's basically talking about forms you know so you know there that live and seem to live in these other dimensions like this table let's go back to this table that we're talking um around right now he would say that this table is the instantiation of the form table and that there is this table that actually exists somewhere it's where this place where numbers exist like the number two okay so there we use the number two mathematically therefore it exists but have you ever seen a real one have you ever seen the real two no no okay so but where does it exist so he says that tables so he was also talking about things that you know he says are real making a distinction between the people and and by the way he got this from socrates is his um mentor who was killed by athens because he would say such things people don't like to be told that they what they believe in is not real right yeah by the way his idea of forms is just he's just making me realize how like incredible was that somebody like that was able to come up with that i mean that idea became a myth that the idea of forms right that permeated uh probably the most influential set of ideas in in the history of philosophy in the history of ideas yes yeah i mean plato we know him for a reason right yeah so let's say that we're not it's a gray area between religious and myths and maybe not even it is gray yeah uh so what how's that idea with like little plato start and permeate through all of society oh how does it happen okay so there are different ways that religions work um so a lot of people would call the ufo narrative today like uh and this is what i talk about in my book like a myth right the ufo myth but a lot of people believe in it okay so how do these things work well what i did was i took um there's a ann taves at um uc santa barbara she's a pretty well-known academic who studies religion and she has this building block definition of religion like it builds okay and so she says there are there's there are no religious experiences or mythic experiences there are experiences and then they get interpreted as religious or mythic okay and so i i use that with the ufo narrative so i take um and i compare it to the religious narrative so basically what happens um what happens is this is that a person generally has a very intense experience um it could be with something that they see in the sky a being you know that they see um you know like moses in the burning bush or something like that they tell other people okay and those other people believe them because they say that guy let's take you okay alex okay so you're playing you know some of your music jimi hendrix shows up out of the blue so jimi hendrix who's who does electric church stuff right the electric church movement so he shows up i was i'm sorry for a small attention i was i'm not aware of i apologize if i should be i'm just know how to play all of the songs uh electric church is this oh yeah yeah it's jimi hendrix's thing yeah so that was like a philosophy of his or what yes yes so he thought he was it was like a mission for him like like he was a missionary and he was like doing the electric church it was through his mission of music that he was actually impacting people spiritually and i think you have to agree that his music is really spiritual yeah wow that's so cool to know that there's like a philosophy there yeah i wonder if he's ever written anything he's spoken about it many times interesting yeah i actually do some some research here wow that adds another level of depth that's awesome okay so okay so say lex is playing yeah 100 one of his songs he shows up what's your favorite hendrick song by the way oh that's a hard one i like castles in the sand it's a sad one but yeah i i like it so i'm playing something yes i show up and also boom just like elvis does for people yeah hendrix shows up all right and then you're amazed and then he tells you something that's very very significant and he says you need to tell other people this okay so then like okay i go on social media yes and you start and because people believe you and because you are a person of um you know credibility people believe you and so all of a sudden a movement starts okay and it's the hendrix movement it's hendrix ii or something like that you know we call it something uh the next iteration of hendrix right hendrix lives but he lives is this vibration and only lex can like you know can can manifest this vibration okay so like this is this is how religion starts you know excuse your audience who are religious i'm actually practicing catholics so um this is how religion starts they start with first off a contact experience not i mean not all of them but a good portion of them um some person has an experience that's transcendent sacred to them and they go and they tell other people and then those people tell other people and then something gets written about it okay and then it becomes because it's a charismatic movement people become affected by it and if if too many people are affected by it um an institution steps in and tries to control the narrative uh so this is what you'd call the beginning of a religion or a myth a very powerful myth and so it's almost like a star right a star is born okay yeah when you say institution do you mean some other organization that's already powerful doesn't want to become uh overpowered by this new movement yes absolutely is this usually governments it's usually yeah so i have a couple examples so i use the example of the christian church in my book because i'm most familiar with the history of christianity and you know christianity you know was started by this jewish man and it was a movement that you know he was a very powerful charismatic person other people believed in him and then his followers talked about him and then other then you know usually early christians before the 300s were generally people who were disenfranchised because he had a pretty radical idea that you know humans should have dignity and this was pretty radical during that time so women who didn't have dignity and you know slaves who didn't have dignity at the time um converted christianity in droves and so what happened was that all of a sudden um it became this belief system that was under current and then constantine who was an elite had an experience and made christianity a state religion and by that time there were different forms of christianity probably hundreds of them well most likely and constantine and the people who were powerful with him decided that their idea this is the council of nicaea now decided that there was one form and they called it universal the one form of christianity and this should be it and so they they kind of took out all the other denominations of christianity and different forms of it so you can see that a very very powerful set of beliefs put a culture on fire right and so how did they they had to deal with that fire somehow and so they narrativized it they decided how do we interpret this and they interpreted it as they wished but that wasn't the only interpretation of christianity i have another example i'm in a catholic church um a lot of times and i'm going to use the example of faustina she's um she's a nun and she's polish and um i think it was in the early 20th century if not the 1800s that she had a very powerful uh many experiences actually of jesus and she saw jesus with rays coming out of his his heart and basically she called this his divine mercy and it became a devotion in poland and it spread the catholic church was not not into this at all okay and so they did everything they could to try to suppress faustina's influence which was growing and growing and growing and growing okay and so they were very successful in trying to keep her quiet and she died okay years later john paul ii polish sainted her and created the divine mercy devotion which is worldwide now and millions and millions of people but do you see how they they you know completely controlled so fascinating that it uh that it just starts with a single so like you said contact experience yeah experience is the key word and is your sense that those experiences are legitimate so it's not yes that's artificially constructed yeah i think for the most part there are legitimate experiences that people have why would someone want to put themselves through what they go through like why would jesus want to get crucified i mean that's a pretty nasty way to die you know why would faustina bring this upon herself um the people that i meet who've said that they've seen ufos that most of them don't want to be known because of the ridicule that goes along with it so i honestly think that you know there are people who are maybe not stable and would like the attention but for the most part normal people don't want this attention so you mentioned building blocks uh you didn't mention the word god or sort of the afterlife are those essential to the myth so there's a contact experience is there some other aspects of myth and religion which makes them viral which makes them spread and captivate the imagination of uh people yes is there a pattern to them i think that for each era it's different and people have first let's talk about the definition of religion if that's okay because most people assume the definitions that we in the west are familiar with which is that you know that of christianity islam um judaism you know monotheistic religions and there are that's not i mean those are just some religions there are so many different types of religions some religions have no god at all zen buddhism for example is a religion that asks you to take away your belief structures like to kind of like in fact i would call that a kantian type religion right and that it's it's basically telling you to get rid of your concept concepts of what you think about things so that you can actually have the experience like you were talking about earlier of the thing in itself and they call that satori so there are people who believe you know they try to they call it meditations and meditation um and it's fairly radical actually um in some monasteries i don't know if they still do this but they'll whack you on the head if you appear to be um not focusing and you know that kind of thing you know they do things to basically take you away from your conceptions of reality and bring you into a state of all that is which is what they call satori and that has nothing to do with god i like this religion anything that involves sticks and whacking in order for you to focus better i'm gonna have to join a monastery so okay so this so uh digging into definitions of religion so like what is what do you think is the scope that defines a religion oh okay so in my field we have a but a few different definitions of religion as you can imagine just like philosophers have different definitions of what is real um so i take this definition and it comes from john livingston and it's um religion is that set of beliefs and practices um that determine that is inspired by a transformative what is perceived actually to be a transformative and sacred power can you say that again yeah so religion is a set of it's not just belief it's also practices it's both belief and practices because you won't have the practices without the belief so you have those together okay and it's inspired by what is perceived because we don't know if it's real or not what is perceived to be of sacred and transforming power so perceived by the followers or is this connected to the original sort of experience no no it well it's it's perceived by the followers that's a really good definition so and that's the governing idea is that there's something of great power yes perceived to be of great power to which you can connect yourself either emotionally or intellectually somehow in order to explore the world that is beyond your own capabilities yes and is there communication also involved or generally yeah yeah that's a great definition okay so within that falls everything that we've uh we've talked about so far including technology and um alien life and so on do you think ultimately religion is good for human civilization let me uh maybe phrase it differently is what's religion good for okay yeah that's a great question thanks for asking that most people don't ask that and i think it's the question to ask why do we still have religion that's the question right because scientists and others scholars um humanists even thought that there's this thing called the secular secularization thesis and it's this idea that the more um we progress rationally and we have better instruments for understanding our reality the less religious we will be but that's been found to be untrue we're still very religious okay so why why is it around well it's adaptive in some way in my opinion most many people would not agree with me but i kind of see it as an evolutionary adaptation now think about religions okay think about christianity again for one um here comes this idea when you have this ruthless empire called the roman empire which litters its its roads with crucified bodies to let you know don't mess with us okay all right here all of a sudden you have this guy saying god is love okay all right well that's weird okay so why why does this take off well it takes off because we're becoming a um a colonial power that means we're going into other countries we're conquering them we are you know how do we survive together as as cultures that don't clash well we have to have a belief structure that allows us to and i think religions function that way frankly so these religions help us in from us richard dawkins meme idea it allows us to explore space of ideas um and that in itself is the um so it's like evolution of ideas and we're just a powerful tool for uh it is for ideas because you know if if i believe that men have souls do they yes they do okay we're still trying to figure that out you know why still in terms of souls do believe cats don't have souls but we'll never we'll never uh we'll never be able to confirm that maybe if we get better instruments you know the soul instrument you need to come up with that one please for cats yeah not just for cats but for all animals and people in general you can put them in like a little you know soul machine and find out what's the status of their soul [Laughter] that's funny i hope will become a scientific discipline of consciousness and consciousness is in some sense connected to maybe what the meaning of the word soul used to be and i i think it's a fascinating open question like what is consciousness and so on that maybe we'll touch on in a little bit but yeah anyway back to our religions being adaptive i think that christianity probably helped us um become better people to each other as we moved into a more global society and i also this it goes along with my book which is basically making the argument that belief in non-human intelligence or ets or ufos uaps whatever you want to call them is a new form of religion and how does that work with the the scientific method do you think there's always this role of religion as being in his broad definition religion as being a complement to our sort of very rigorous empirical pursuit of understanding reality there's always going to be this coupling we'll always define redefining new eras of civilization of what that religion actually looks like so you talk about technology and so on being the modern set of religious uh beliefs around that is so is that always going to is religio is religion always going to kind of cover the space of things we can't quite understand with science yet but we still want to be thinking about oh i see what you're saying that's a great question when you say religion i would i would use the word religiosity uh because i think that we're moving out of the dogmatic types of religions into more of a i hate to put it this way but an x-files type religion where we can say i want to believe or the truth is out there right but we don't know that it's out there or we don't we don't know yet what it is but we know it's out there so there's this um this kind of built-in um capacity for belief and something that we don't have evidence for yet and that's a sort of faith so i would say yes to that question absolutely i think it's adaptive in that way we're moving into a new i mean heck we've already moved into this culture most people have not caught up with it yet i see that in the school systems you know and i think that um i'm hoping we can catch up fast because really it's moving faster than we are so i mentioned to you offline that i'm finishing up on the rise and fall of the third reich i'm not sure if you have anything in your exploration interesting to say but the use of religion by dictators or the lack of the use of religion by dictators whether we're talking about stalin which is mostly a secular i apologize if i'm historically incorrect on this but i believe it's secular and hitler i think there's some controversy about how much religion played a role in his own personal life and in general in terms of influencing the using it to manipulate the public but definitely the church played a role um do you have a sense of the use of religion by governments to control the populations by dictators for example or is that outside of your little explorations as a religious scholar it's not outside of my framework absolutely not um i think that it's done routinely um propaganda is done routinely especially there's nothing more powerful than religion to get people to act i think i have my mother's jewish my father is was roman catholic okay from irish extraction and so both um members both both great-grandparents came here under duress because they were being um what would you call it uh there was an act of genocide on both sides being done by other cultures okay so on the one hand obviously we know about the holocaust okay so they came the great grandparents came here to avoid that and they made it um on the other hand uh there was an english um genocide we just have to say it of the irish um it was called a famine but it wasn't one it was a staged thing and so um millions of irish left ireland on coffin ships is what they called them because they usually wouldn't get here mine happened to get here okay so those that's the context that i'm coming from so in each case for one thing irish weren't considered you know there was catholics weren't considered they were considered to be terrible and there was a lot of anti-catholic rhetoric here in the united states which is kind of strange because one of the in fact the most wealthy colonial family were the carols in maryland and they were catholic so when you look at the united states our history and you see the separation of church and state do you want to know where that came from that came from those guys they convinced george washington and thomas jefferson i mean they couldn't vote yet they had they had they have their names on the constitution is that not a strange contradiction so here's here you can see how you know propaganda works there was anti-catholic propaganda there was anti-jewish propaganda um and all of and a lot of it was that you know these people weren't human they weren't human beings um another thing i'd like to say is that when the irish did come here and they were indentured a lot of times indentured servants um but that's a that's terminology then what is an indentured servant slave pretty much so in that sense religion can be used derogatorily yeah derogatory as a useful grouping mechanism of saying this is the other and you know it's powerful too because behind it is a force of um you know what people can tend to be sacred a sacred force right so you know it's up to god to you know decide who's you know so you have to go along with what god says of course well that's basically um that's not the contact event you know the contact event is is usually some type of very specific legitimate event that a person has with something that is non-human or considered divine but when when religions become narrativized i would call it by different institutions that's when you're in danger of getting propaganda you said nietzsche one of your favorite philosophers he said uh famously one of the many famous things he said is that god is dead yes oh what do you think he meant do you think he was right okay good i love this question no one asks me about nietzsche and i love nisha okay so um first actually i do think and i could be corrected and probably will be in all the comments yeah well first nietzsche it's true wasn't the first to say god is dead i think hegel said it okay no one reads hegel he's like so difficult to read that it's impossible same with heidegger as you mentioned yeah he i love him but yeah he's really hard to read um so nietzsche basically said god is dead and let me give you the context for him saying that he also said this he said there was only one christian he died on the cross okay so um he despised christianity and he said that and and the people who practice it absolutely yeah but again he believed in jesus and he believed jesus was he didn't believe he was a divinity he believed jesus was a good man and he died on the cross okay so he believed in the morality yeah he absolutely did yeah he did um and nietzsche basically was making a historical statement about god is dead he said and he was right he was basically saying that in this in the century in which he lived um and he died i think in 1900 again i could be wrong about that so i just want to say that i believe he died in 1900 okay so so he's writing in the 1800s and he's basically saying um god is dead and we killed him okay so he's making a historical statement that at that point in time with science just kind of getting better and industrialization happening um the idea of um this this thing beyond what we know as material reality is dead so this the substrate of western civilization is dead that's what nietzsche nietzsche is saying if that makes sense yes and he's basically says with that comes the ubermensch okay which is the superhuman and he says there aren't many of them he says but they're going to come and he also talks about the philosophers of the future and he's speaking and writing to them is my belief so he's basically telling you and me because we're now the philosophers of his future yeah he's basically telling us this is what's happening now and look what it has done he says now everything is is possible all manner of terrible evil because no one has the belief in god anymore the belief that there's uh that there is an afterlife you asked about an afterlife so with this kind of belief in a morality comes this belief you know you can have morals without god okay people do but what christianity is this idea that you will reap what you sow so if people don't believe that anymore what will happen and so that's what he's basically saying is that the the basic anchor for western society is now gone do you think he was right absolutely absolutely right but then again what do you think if we brought him back to life and he read american cosmic your book um and he wrote he tweeted about it right writing a review maybe for the i don't know what they post for new york times he'd be an editorial writer uh with a blue check mark on twitter uh what do you think he would say about this idea that you present that's a grander idea of religion and you know like religiosity like yeah yeah wouldn't that kind of reverse the idea that god is dead yeah because it would bring up this idea of external intelligences that are not human which is basically a lot of religions talk about that right there are bodhisattvas there are angels there are demons you know there's all these types of non-human intelligences that religion makes space for so what i'm basically saying in american cosmic is these new things are within the realm of ufos and uaps so with no i think that well i think nietzsche would say that that's a progressive adaptation of religion is what i would hope he would say nietzsche however is unpredictable i think i i couldn't predict him so i would say that it would be my hope that he would say this is an accurate representation of a move into a new type of religion and it's adaptive therefore progressive he would probably be uncomfortable reading a book by a brilliant female professor who happens also to be short [Laughter] i don't know if you read that no yeah he said some pretty nasty things about short women oh my god yeah i need you he should be canceled no no please don't cancel nietzsche you have to take people in the context of their time although i'm pretty sure in his time he was also an he was but are people too okay just bad ones [Laughter] uh you wrote the book american cosmic ufos religion technology what was the goal of writing this book what uh maybe we'll mention it we have already mentioned it many times but in this little space of a conversation can you say maybe what is the key insight that you found that lingers with you to this day from the process the long process of uh putting this book together sure just like with my book on purgatory um i went into the research thinking that it would be something that it was entirely not it ended up being something completely different and i think that's good i think that people who do research need to are very excited actually when their research surprises them so i was happily surprised by my purgatory book to learn that it was a place you know and and so um i went into american cosmic being a non-believer in ufos entirely and i came out being agnostic okay kind of believer yeah so agnostic sort of uh open to the mysteries of the world yes and i didn't think that first of all i knew that the government was was part of the situation i just didn't know how much and so i learned that quickly and acclimated to it um accepted it and noted that indeed horatio the world is much more mysterious than we think it is it's more mystery there are more mysteries in this life than your philosophy provides for so as a sense american cosmic is about the mysteries of the modern life as encapsulated by this the the realm of technology in the realm of alien intelligences yes i think that um i think that i mean i'd have to go off record as a professor and talk personally as a person i do think that um there are mysteries of which we have an inkling and if it's something as powerful as non-human intelligence whether or not it's from another planet extraterrestrial or it happens to be from like another dimension or something else i think that this is going to um get the attention of institutions of power and indeed i think that's what has happened and um although probably he people have had interactions with these things it appears to me historically uh for a long time as long as humans have existed i would imagine that indeed um this is something that's quite powerful and could change the belief structures of our entire are civilization basically so it's the same way that you're talking the belief structures were strongly affected by religious beliefs throughout history yes in the same way this has the potential uh it it uh serves as um a source of concern for the powerful because it can have very significant effects on the populace yes is there some broader understanding of how we should think about alien intelligences than um like little green men yes that that you can maybe elaborate on and talk about yes this comes directly out of my research in catholic history what i found was that let's take for instance this idea of an angel okay so we all think we know what an angel looks like why well we've been told what an angel looks like we see what an angel looks like throughout history people have painted angels and they all look pretty much the same but actually if you go to the primary sources on you know either in hebrew or in greek or you know in whatever language and in latin and you look at experiences that people have talked about you know where they've written down their experiences about angels um angels don't at all look like what we think they they don't look like little cherubs with wings they don't look like tall you know strong [Music] anthropomorphic you know human looking things they don't they look really weird and sometimes they don't look at all a humanoid and they look like strange spinning things right with like you know eyes and things like that they they communicate telepathically with us okay so what does that mean for the idea of extraterrestrials or what we consider to be aliens like um i do think that they're first if we are if listen is i'm not the first to say this if we're in contact with non-human intelligence we're most likely in contact with its technology because think about us um do we send human beings to mars yet some people say yes but let's put that aside so no we don't we use our technology we send our rovers to mars okay okay so if there's an extraterrestrial civilization is it sending are they coming by themselves are they coming to see us or are they sending their technology most likely they either are technology or they are sending their technology yeah there might be a gray area between what is technology and what the aliens are yeah so but you're saying like uh basically a robotic probe that would be the equivalent of us our human civilization created technology way more way more uh advanced than what we could believe to be a probe all right it's kind of funny to think about like if uh whatever a sort of um extraterrestrial creations have visited earth that were we're interacting with some like dumb crappy drones yeah that's true and we're like like we're like building these like myths and so on from like an experience with some like crappy drone made by some crappy startup something that's correct when the actual intelligence is like something much grander um yeah that's that's that's the more likely uh the situation is that's what i like to tell people i'm like no it's probably a lot weirder than you think yeah oh boy so uh but what forms can it possibly take so yeah okay i really love this idea that um i tend to be humble in the face of all that we don't know and i tend to believe that the form alien life forms would take and the way they would communicate is much more likely to be of a form that we can't even comprehend or perhaps can't even perceive directly so like you know uh it could be in the space of you know we don't understand most of how our mind works it could be in the space of whatever the heck consciousness is like maybe consciousness itself is communication uh with aliens or like i don't know uh it could be just our own thoughts is actually the alien life forms communicating like i i know all that sounds crazy but i'm saying like i'm just trying to come up with the craziest possible thing that doesn't make any sense that could very well be true and you can't say it's not true because we don't understand basically anything about our mind so it can be all of those things uh everything from hallucinations all the things that are explored through uh through the different drugs that we've uh talked about in this podcast in general joe rogan loves to talk about dmt and all those kinds of hallucigenic drugs all of it including love and fear all those things that could be aliens communicating with us memes on the internet that could be pretty sure humor is alien communication no i don't know but uh so is there some way that's helpful for you to think about beyond the little green men oh absolutely it um it occurs exactly with how i think actually um so i'll explain um i liked in american cosmic i attained the status of full professor so i was like okay i can pretty much write this book like i want to do it and i did so i used a lot of quotes from cool artists like david bowie okay so david bowie opens the book okay and he basically says and so does nietzsche by the way david bowie and nietzsche boom two two awesome quotes right together that's how he opens up no better opener yeah do you remember the quotes yeah of course so the first the quote by david bowie and that's what i'm gonna concentrate on in response to what you just said which i think is absolutely correct um david bowie said the internet is an alien life form okay and if you've not seen david bowie's interview where he says that i highly recommend it he's so brilliant okay so david bowie is actually quite brilliant about the idea of ufos he's also brilliant about the idea of technology okay and most people wouldn't think that but i mean he's pretty darn smart okay so all right so i started to think about it and uh i also early on in my research met jacques valet okay so he's a technologist uh he has a phd in information technology from computer science basically from northwestern and he got that back in the day you know when i say back in the day i'm not talking a thousand years ago i'm talking like in the 60s okay so he's back when computer science wasn't really even the future yeah you can get a degree yeah he has a phd in it and he's french he's from france but he lives in silicon valley and he worked on arpanet which is the proto-internet uh he mapped mars he's also an astronomer i mean he's just this all-round brilliant guy right and he's also interested in ufos and most people take those two interests of his as separate interests and i remember being at a very small conference and listening to him being in awe of course because he's an awe-inspiring person and then thinking wait a minute why do people compartmentalize those two things about him they're one and the same okay so when we talk about ufos and uaps and stuff we have to talk about digital technology and things like that now if we're going back to what i so if i were to say what if i were to believe in and i like i said earlier i was agnostic boardroom on belief most likely a believer in these this extraterrestrial or not extraterrestrial let me put it another way non-human intelligence that's communicating with us i'm going to tell you how i think they communicate with us and i go back to the greeks again okay and the greeks had this idea of muses you know the muses so okay so there are these things called muses and we tend to think of them as metaphors right but what if they're not or if they're actually non-human intelligence trying to communicate with us but we're so stupid we can't like understand like so only people with like you know in super amazing um capacities like poetic creative you know intelligent mathematical whatever you know because they tend to do this symbolically they tend to communicate with us in symbols form and so music you know symbols we've got math that are you know it's a symbolic language and so what so okay so muses are probably a good idea for me of what this would be now would muses have spaceships you know or those things that we call physical counterparts to what they are um that's another question altogether but if you know i i now why would i think this because if you look at the history there are space programs both russian and american you're going to find some pretty weird stuff pretty pretty weird history there lex um so you want to get an idea go back to tchaikowski and read a little bit about what he has to say if you look back at the history of our space programs the viable space programs are both russian and american and each has an amazingly strange history because uh the founders of the calculations that got us up into space the rocket scientists basically were doing some pretty weird rituals and doing religious things right they weren't necessarily like jack parsons on our side i was out in the desert with people like elrond hubbard and doing really intense rituals believing that they were opening stargates and things like that okay that's awesome and they were really doing that okay so then you go to um the russian side and they had a very specific non-dogmatic according to catholics or orthodox christianity idea of what christianity was and they believed that they were interacting with angels okay non-human intelligences so if you look back and you see muses you know you can contextualize them within this tradition and so when i started to talk to people who were actually in the space program and who were in these programs that now the government has said oh yeah we do have those programs and they have the same belief structures they believe that they were also in contact with these non-human intelligences and they were getting what they called downloads of information and creating sometimes with tyler d in my book creating technologies that were real and they were selling them on nasdaq for you know a lot of money like you know say a hundred million dollars or something like that undisclosed amounts um but a lot and these things are viable technologies that we use now and and they make our lives better and we progress as a species because of them now that has nothing to do with the scientific method as much as i know as much as anybody's going to get angry at me for saying that but you know sorry those were strange encounters that created our ability to go into space i don't know if they're real or not but these people believe they were real right so there's a they have a power in actually having an impact in this world in um in inspiring humans to create technology which enable us to do things we haven't been able to do before yeah and these i like how we we're putting like angels alien life forms aliens and technology all in the non-human intelligence camp which i i really like that because this that's very true it's this other source of uh wisdom intelligence maybe a connection to the mysterious yes i was really surprised by it can you speak a little bit more to the connection between aliens and technology that jacques valet had in his own one individual mind that's very tempting to kind of separate as two separate uh endeavors why did you come to believe that they are one and the same or at least part of the same uh intellectual journey thanks for asking that again because nobody asks me that question and it's central to my project so jacques was a huge influence is a huge influence on me um he taught me a lot um i had he gave me access to some of his information that's that he keeps um but a lot of his information is actually there out there for everyone to read he has an academia.edu page and he just so he didn't have this unfortunately when i was doing my research in 2012 and 2013 so i had to go back and do microfiche type stuff you know what i did was i began to read everything that he wrote and he actually gave me a lot of his books too and he told me i remember he dropped me off from this is actually quite interesting if you allow me to tell you a little story please okay and it also includes ayahuasca so great every star includes a great story okay so i was at a conference and it was a small conference um of very interesting people in california on the pacific ocean and jacques was there and um this is actually opens my book this is the book this is the i uh go i the preface to my book i go on this ride he takes me through silicon valley i've lived there right my grandparents grew up in the same place that he raised his children in belmont and so um but we were there with robbie graham who's a great ufologist in his own right and um and film theorists i highly recommend his work um so we were together and he was taking us to san francisco where i was going to meet my brother who is going to take me home and so he took us on this long journey and he talked to us and as we got out of the car um he gave me several of his books and one in particular he gave me he said read this first i was like okay i definitely will read that first okay so this is how the ayahuasca figures in so um we were i didn't take it nor have i taken it okay so we're at this place and um in california and alex gray and his wife were there and they were talking about their experiences with psychedelics you know he's an amazing visionary artist okay so he he believes that there's this place that you can enter and he and his wife would enter this space with either you know ayahuasca or lsd or something like that and they would not talk to each other but they would be having the same exact experience so they would it was almost like having the same dream right okay so so somehow that whole event with jacques there and them talking about their experiences in these realms of which religious studies people are quite familiar by the way because visionary experiences are what we study so all of this seems super familiar to me and i recognized that immediately that jacques that it hit me like you know very obvious that ufos and these experiences and technology all seemed they were all uh meshed together and i knew that i had to take them i knew i had to read everything jacques ever wrote and the best stuff he's written by the way is the st his little essays that he wrote in the 1970s and there were peer-reviewed essays about the beginning of the internet and how a lot of it was based on um basically like um neural connection with the internet like somehow psychic connection through the internet with others and things like that so the mind the brain is a biological neural network there's a uh this connection between division neurons and so on and that's what ultimately is able to have uh memories and has cognitive ability and is able to uh perceive the world and generate ideas and those ideas are then spread on the internet even from the very early days to other humans so it gets injected or travels into the brains of other humans and that goes around in there and then spits out other stuff and it goes back and forth so it's it's nice to think of the network that's in our mind individual mind as i mean um very much even deeply connected to the network that is the connection between humans through the internet and so in that sense jacques saw the internet as this as this powerful um as a source of power and wisdom that is beyond our own exactly that's external to us like a non like you know if you could call it autonomous ai right right it's non-human intelligence in a sense even though humans are a part of it yes or we're invaded by it or you know whatever you want to call it yeah right just the chicken and the egg right so if i can go on to experience this oh yes yes i'm not done with that yeah so and this is so this is where i come to this idea that um we're in this space we're in now a new space of religion of religiosity so what happens is then i and it's like a biosphere and i'll talk about that in a minute so we so so jacques takes us back we get to san francisco and my brother who is your straight lace person you know army guy and everything like that um i get into his car and the first thing he tells me is i took ayahuasca and i was like what he goes it's gonna save humanity that's great yeah as i mentioned to you offline i talked to matthew johnson he's a hopkins professor on he's a really a scholar of most he's he's starting most drugs he's also really deeply studied cocaine all those stuff and negative effects and he's focused on a lot of positive effects of the different psychedelics it's kind of fascinating so i'm very much interested in exploring the science of what these things do to the to the human mind and also personally exploring it although it's like this weird gray area which he he's he's masterful at which is he's a professor at john hopkins one of the most prestigious universities in the world and and doing large-scale studies of the stuff and until until he got a lot of money for these studies even in uh hopkins itself there's not much risk it's not even respect it was like people just didn't want to talk about it as a as a legitimate field of inquiry it's kind of fascinating how hesitant we are as a little human civilization to uh legitimize the exploration of the mysterious of whatever the definition of the mysterious is for that particular period of time so for us now there's like little groups of things like i would say consciousness in the space of like computer science research is something that's still like i don't know maybe let philosophers kick it around for a little longer and then certainly extraterrestrial life forms from um in most formulations of that problem space uh is still the other it's still the source of the mysterious except maybe like seti which is like how can we detect signals from far away alien intelligences that would be able to perceive yeah it's uh and psychedelics is another one of those that's like we're starting to see okay well can we um try to see if there's some medical applications of like helping you get like he does studies of help you quit smoking or help you in some kind of treatment of some disease and he's sneaking into that i mean it's like openly sneaking into it he's doing studies on it of like how can you expand the mind with these tools and what can the mind discover through psychedelics and so on and we're like slowly creeping into the space of being able to explore these mysterious questions but it's like it sucks that sometimes a lot of people have to die meaning sorry uh they have to age out like it's like faculty have a and people have a fixed set of ideas and they stick by them and in order for new ideas to come in then the young folks have to be born with the pot with an open mind the possibility of those ideas and then they have to become old enough and get a's in school and whatever to to uh to then carry those ideas forward so you know the acceptance of the uh exploration of the mysterious takes time it's kind of sad it is sad i agree maybe to go into my source of passion which is artificial intelligence what's your sense about um the the possibility uh like pamela mccordick has this quote that i like i talked to her a couple years ago i guess already in this podcast that that artificial intelligence began with the ancient wish to forge the gods so do you think artificial intelligence may become the very kind of gods that were at the center of our the religions of most of our history yeah there's a lot there so i'm gonna start by addressing this idea of artificial intelligence being separate from human beings okay so that i don't think that's actually that might happen okay i mean it's already happened but let's put it this way like you're talking about super artificial intelligence like autonomous conscious artificial intelligence okay yeah something with artificial consciousness first of all i i think she's correct okay but also there's awesome an awesome quote um i'd also like to bring up this uh writer of fiction actually i'm ted chang and his one of his essays he writes short essays one of them was the basis for the movie arrival which if you haven't seen it it's a really great movie about uh ufos and it has a very creative way of proposing an idea of how they might be able to communicate first of all how they appear to us second of all how they may be communicating with us humans exactly and the author ted chang has a lot i recommend his his writings his short stories um one is very short and it appeared as it appeared in nature about 20 years ago and it is called i think it's called getting eating the crumbs from the table or something like that and it's basically this short essay and i hate to to do you know to to do a spoiler here but it if you don't want to know what it's about don't listen right now yeah spoil alert yeah okay so this is what it's about so basically it's about human beings uh becoming two different species okay and one of them is created they're called meta-humans and they start bio-hacking themselves with tech okay sound familiar so they do this and they become meta-humans and another species right and you know just kind of another fork um such that humans can barely understand them um because they're so far removed so in a sense are they gods right no they're meta-humans they're super humans they're enhanced humans okay i see that hopefully on the horizon frankly i hope so not that we have two species but that we can use our technology or we can we can become so integrated with our technology that we can survive okay we can survive the radiation in space we can't go places now because of the radiation in space perhaps we can develop our bodies such that we can survive the radiation in space so there there's this idea of these meta-humans now there's also this idea that technology is just another form of humans we've created it right and so maybe it is bent on surviving thereby using us you know kind of as a meme or a team some people are calling them teams now these self-generating uh they're replicating themselves through us okay i see that also and i don't think that's terribly bad maybe it's just the way that we are evolving it doesn't mean that the you know we're evolving all the time like we're taller than we used to be you know we have different skills and you know so i don't see that as as a bad thing i think a lot of people see it as if we're not how we are now it's a tragedy but it's not a tragedy how we are now is actually a tragedy for most people alive yeah and we might be evolving ways we can't possibly perceive like you said that uh the humans have created twitter and twitter may be changing us yes in ways that we can't even understand now currently like from a perspective if you look at the entirety of the network of twitter that might be an organism that this now the organism understands what's happening from its level of perception but we humans are just like the cells of the human body we're interacting individually but like we're not actually aware of the big picture that's happening yeah and we naturally somehow or whatever the force that's creating the entirety of this whatever uh one one version of it is the evolutionary process like biological evolution whatever force that is is just creating this greater and greater level of complexity and maybe somehow not other kinds of non-human intelligence are involved that we're calling alien intelligences yes so just to step back and we'll come back to ai because i gotta i love the topic but um through american cosmic and in general you've interacted with much of the ufo community you mentioned ufologists by the way is it ufologists or is it ufologists it's ufologists you follow jesus yeah so first of all wood is a ufologist and second of all um what have you learned about this community of ufologists or else as you refer to them as the invisibles or the members of the invisible college or just in general people who study ufos from the different all the different kinds of groups that study ufos sure generally what i found is that they are okay so people who are interested in ufos from like being a kid you know and seeing some cool movie like star wars or something and then they become interested and then they study it as best they can ufos or uaps they're generally an honest group of people who are using their tools there are generally two types of them um there are those who believe in nuts and bolts like the physical craft and they believe in that these are things from other planets okay so that's like the e t h hypothesis uh you know um i'm sorry et hypothesis eth is what we call it yeah sorry about that so this is like there's an actual spaceship like a phys like something akin but much more advanced than the rockets we use now yeah and uh some kind of not necessarily biological but something like biological organisms that travel on these species so this would be like what to the stars academy is trying to decipher like how you know how do they do it you know maybe we could use that technology the propulsion and things like that they look at the rocket technology okay so there are those and then there are people who believe that it's more consciousness-based okay so these are your two types of um ufologists who are known and these are people who we know about then i found that there are people who are quote unquote i call them the invisibles because jacques vale in the in the 70s he and um i think actually alan hinek his colleague quoted this is a francis bacon thing by the way it goes back to the early modern time period when scientists could be killed for basically trying to go outside what the church or the government institution determined was dogma and so they had to be really careful so they caught he called the invisible college so heinek took that term and returned reused it or what do you call it um repurposed it so that he repurposed it so that they were still talking to each other though so what i found to be the case was that there was a group of people who were scientists but were not on the internet you know people today and students of mine in particular and my own kids actually they think that you only exist if you're on the internet or something only exists if it's on the internet and that's of course untrue and so what i found was that there are most people who are the most powerful people of our society and are doing things are not on the internet you're not going to find any trace of them so a lot of these people are what i call invisibles people who are studying at least their work is invisible you might find them on the internet but you're going to find that they're part of the bowling league or something like that right you will not find that they are actually engaged in research about this topic okay and so i called them the invisibles because i was surprised to find them and i thought well this is no longer the invisible college because these people are not even talking to each other and that's why i reference this movie fight club in it you have an invisible okay and his name is tyler durden and he's incredible he does incredible things um he's like a person who should not exist right because he does so many things that are amazing and so i found a person like that and i call and he's a real person um he's partially on the internet but nothing that he does around that topic of ufos is on the internet so i decided to call him tyler d after tyler durden and so these people i've turned the ufo fight club because they work together but they don't know in fact his boss doesn't know what he does they don't talk to each other because you know the first rule of fight club same as the second yeah exactly yeah you don't talk people no you don't do it why do you have a sense that um there's such a i don't want to say fear but a principle of staying out of the limelight i think there's something real and i think that the use of it could be um dangerous for people oh sorry you mean like something real like there's actual technology i don't what's the right terminology here to use it alien technology ideas about technology that are being explored that are dangerous have made public that may be become dangerous so i wouldn't cut you don't alien technology you can call it ideas about alien technology because i don't know if it's actual alien technology or not i honestly don't know but i do know for a fact because it's a historical fact that jack parsons and um constantine tchaikovsky who's russian believed in these things and believed that they were downloading this information whether or not they were i don't i mean they definitely created the rocket technologies that's true how they did and whether their process was exactly what they said it was i don't know so this is the same thing today so we've got some powerful technologies going on here and you know of course we have a military and we have a military for a reason every almost every government who needs a military has one um and so they're going to um keep these the way they should be kept in my interpretation i mean think about it everybody accepts the fact that we have a military almost everybody does why are they so upset then that the military keeps secrets yeah well that's that's the nature of things and we can get into that whole thing i i i tend to i've spoken with the cto of lockheed martin on this um i obviously read and think about war a lot it's such a difficult question because this space this particular space of technology there's a gray area that i think is evolving over time i think nuclear weapons change the game in terms of what should and shouldn't be secret i think there's already technology that will enable us to destroy each other and so there's some sense in which some technology should be made public this is the same discussion of um you know uh between companies which part of your technology should you make public through like for example academic publications and all that kind of stuff like how the google search engine works page rank algorithm or how the different deep learning like there's pretty vibrant machine learning research communities within google facebook and so on and they release a lot of different ideas it's an interesting question like how dangerous is it to release some of the ideas i think it's a gray area that's constantly changing i do also think it's super interesting i wonder if you could elaborate on a little bit that there's this gray area between what's actually real in terms of alien technology and the belief of it when held in the minds of really brilliant people that they ultimately may produce the same kind of result in terms of being able to create new technologies that are human usable like is there um in your mind they're one and the same as like believing in alien craft and uh actually being in possession of an alien craft i don't think they're the same no belief is powerful okay um in new age communities you know people think thoughts are things okay that's been said you know thoughts are things you can make them happen kind of thing believe in them enough it is true that if i believe i can run a 540 mile i'll do it okay and i probably will do it and i've done it before actually um much younger but i did it so but my coach is the one that instilled that belief in me right and so but can i run like a one minute mile no okay so i guess does that answer your question like there's only so far belief goes in generating reality well yeah i mean i guess that's what uh just having listened to jacques valet it seemed like reality is not was not as important for the scientific exploration of the concept of alien technology i could be wrong but this is what i think jacques is getting at there are other ways to access places in reality other than what we consider to be physical right that's what is consciousness okay so in like i said so religious studies is among other things it's it's looking at visionary experiences all right so people do have visionary experiences they did without drugs you know they did with drugs they do with drugs they do many have them without drugs today and oftentimes those visionary experiences um correspond to each other now how do we how do we make sense of that so you know do these places actually exist in a sense i think they do and so i think that you know like let's take that very famous case of a virgin mary apparition in fatima where i think there was like a lot of people thousands and thousands if not like i think 50 000 or something like that a lot of people gathered to see what's now called um the miracle of fatima which was the spinning of the sun well a lot of people saw different things but they all saw some kind of thing okay so they all saw different things but it was something happened okay so i guess the question is um what are these places where we access non what i'd call like non-physical realities okay where we actually do get information we get like who could say that jack parsons didn't get information from doing these rituals and accessing these we have to say that he actually did because we see the results of physical results the same thing with tyler and that's why i put tyler in this camp with this tradition with jack parsons i say that tyler is is getting these what he calls downloads and you can see the results of them physically he sells them on the nasdaq he makes millions of dollars from them he they help people i've seen people who they've helped okay so do you think psychedelics that i just mentioned earlier have a possibility of going to these kind of same kind of places of exploring ideas that are outside of our um more commonplace understanding of the world um in my yeah i think so absolutely however i think we have to be really careful about those because young people or people in general i should say absolutely can get hurt by them i mean but we get hurt by alcohol you know we drive our cars and we get kill each other um but psychedelics are really interesting because i know that within the history of of our country um we have used psychedelics in various capacities for our military in order to try to stimulate ideas and access places and information that can't be accessed normally this is all fact yeah i talked to matt for like four hours so we ran out of time being able to talk but i wanted to talk to him about mk alter and um ted kaczynski there's so many mysterious things there there's like layers of what's known and what's not known it's fascinating but i think what is interesting is psychedelics used that were attempted to be used as tools of different kinds that's the point so like we think of technology as tools to enable us to do things in that same way that psychedelics like many drugs could be used as tools some more effective than others absolutely i don't think what you i'm not sure what you can do effectively um with alcohol although somebody i think somebody commented somewhere on social media that uh i don't know why everyone gives is so negative about alcohol because uh i think the person said that um it's given me some of the most incredible it enabled me uh to let go and have some of the most incredible experiences with friends in my life and it's true we kind of sometimes say alcohol is dangerous it can make you do what but the reality is it's also a fascinating tool for letting go of trying to be somebody maybe that you're not and allowing you to be yourself fully in whatever crazy form that is and allow you to have really deep and interesting experiences with those you love so uh yeah even alcohol can be used as an effective tool for exploring experiences and becoming uh expanding your mind and becoming a better person so um what the hell was i talking about uh so yes so so psychedelics and oh yeah and mk ultra is there something interesting to say in the in our historical use of psychedelics i mean think about it when did we start doing that when did we start using those that's true it's quite a long time ago right but okay but true but when did our government start experimenting with them with us okay our government is the united states government yeah okay so that happened in around the 1950s okay after quote unquote the 1940s where we have 47 and we have you know this you know this roswell type stuff going on okay like crash sites and things like that so i think that um i think there might be a correlation there i don't know what it is okay but i do think fascinating actually yeah there's a lot of interesting things started around that time period yeah yeah and so aldous huxley would say we opened the doors of perception okay and what flew in [Laughter] oh man that was beautifully put it'd be interesting to get your opinions on certain more concrete sightings that are sort of monumental sightings with alien intelligences in the history in the recent history that at least i'm aware of i'm i'm not uh very much aware of this history but the most recent one i've spoken with david fravor on this podcast i really like him as a person he's a fun guy but also he's gotten the chance to um he's described his account of having experience with the what he and others now termed the tic tac ufo what do you think of that particular sighting which is captivated the imagination of many in particular because there's been videos released of it yes of these ufos but i find the videos to be way too blurry and grainy to be of interest to me the personally uh to me the most fascinating thing is the first person account from david and others about that experience but what are your thoughts those videos have been out for a while actually much i think in the mid 2000s they were out but what you have is you have kind of like this corroboration from a group and also the new york times involvement in 2017. my opinion about the tic tacs is that um first i believe the people who have had the experiences i know some of them like you know some of the radar people and things like that they saw them and they're not i don't believe they're making it up okay um i do think that this is being this is being used uh as a spin okay and i'm just gonna say that and the reason i think that is this is because at the time it was released i was still in touch with many people who were among the ufo fight club and so they had intimate knowledge of these things and the first thing they said was um we have satellites that can read the news on your phone when you're reading it so we've got better footage than this and this is not good footage at all therefore they believe that it was authentic footage that had been doctored up now why i don't know why um so i so i honestly don't know if it's accurate or not i mean i believe the people absolutely but was this something out there to fool these people perhaps i don't know um is it spun um the people who i know who are part of the ufo fight club believed it was real okay and said this is badly done but real okay i see but so there's some kind of when you say spinning there's some parties involved there oh yeah there's a never tried to leverage it from the for funds probably for funds for financial interest yeah i think so nevertheless it has inspired a conversation and just a lot of people in the world that there's something mysterious out there that uh we're not fully informed about and i was certainly grateful that the new york times ran the story right before my book came out we'll see but there's the financial interest that to me as a person who uh doesn't give a damn about money actually i don't like money uh is um except for when it's used in in the context of a company to build cool things but like personally i don't know i find the financial interesting side off-putting um especially when we're talking about the exploration of some of the most like money is a silly creation of human beings i agree and it's it's uh used to provide uh temporary like the unfortunate thing with money is that it um helps you buy things that too easily allow you to forget the important things in life and also to forget the difficult aspects of life to do the difficult intellectual work of being cognizant of your immortality of like fully engaging in life in a life of reason too of thinking deeply about the world all those kinds of things if you get like a nice car or something like that and just like i don't know all the different things you could do with money is it can make you forget that anyway as a there's a long way to say that yes yes it's very nice that it coincided nicely with the book but also it uh i think it i mean like i said i think it inspired quite a lot of people that you know maybe there's a lot of things out there that were like it reminded a lot of people there's things out there we don't know about lex i can agree with you on that but can i push back on two things okay let's do it all right the first one is that i was happy to receive money from the book because of the new york times article that's absolutely false so i published my book with oxford which is an academic press and you don't get paid with an academic press okay so money was not it for me what it was was recognition that my research was being validated so you know because then people called me and said well maybe it's more than interesting okay and they did okay the other thing about money is just as you say that now i agree with you there i'm upset about money too i think there should be universal health care uh a universal income all you know i don't think people should be in poverty especially because we are so wealthy as a species frankly um okay that said think about this if you are if you don't have money you can't have a life of the mind either right 100 so i'm not espousing that like money is the devil i just think that there is money can be um a drug or i would compare it to like food or something like that where like you really should have enough to nourish yourself yes right and uh too much could and too much can be a huge problem uh so that that's where i come from with money and i'm just uh aware i'm fortunate enough to have the skills and the health to be able to earn a living in whatever way uh like i wish of him being in the united states and being able to speak english so at the very least i could work with mcdonald's and my standards are i told you i made a mistake i told joe rogan that i've always had a few money and people are like oh lex was always raised no no i was always broke what i mean by uh i've always had fu monies my standard what it takes to have a few is always very little i'm just happy with with very little but yes it's true that uh money for many people and including for myself it's just a different level for different people is freedom yes freedom to think freedom to do to pursue your passions it just so happens i am very fortunate that many of my passions often come with a salary if i wished right so everything like me i love programming so even just like working as a like basic level software engineer would be a source of a lot of joy for me and that happens in this modern modern world to come with a salary so yeah it's it's definitely true i just mean that it can be become a dangerous drug so i'm glad i'm glad you are in this pursuit that you are in for the love of knowledge and uh but it's true yes uh people should definitely buy your book i won't be making money off of it today oh yeah this rocks yeah absolutely maybe my next book yes yeah your sense is there's something as there's some groups of people that may be trying to leverage this for financial gains and you know probably good financial i mean they may have good reasons for this too like okay let's take the study of ufos okay maybe many people in government that decide who dole out the money let's put it that way they think ufos aren't real so they're not going to give these programs money so how do these programs make money um they're going to have to find a way to do it so maybe that's how they do it okay so it's fascinating this is a way to raise money for for doing the research yeah i think so so let's take a step back to roswell we talked about a little bit what's your sense about that whole time roswell and just area 51 and the sightings and also the follow-on mythology around those sightings um that's with us today all right so where do i get started well i mean it is a mythology here right the mythology of roswell it's it's very religious like in the sense that if there's a pilgrimage to roswell people make and they go to there's a festival there as well like a religious festival um you could get little kitschy stuff like you can get at a religious festival there so it's very much like a place of pilgrimage where a herophony occurred and a herophomy is basically contact with non-human intelligence okay so non-human intelligence is thought to have contacted humans or crashed at this place in roswell new mexico now what's fascinating is that i begin my book by going out to a crash site in new mexico i have to get blindfolded with um my well to tell you the truth the story is that i'm with tyler who's an invisible and he wants to show me a place in new mexico where a crash happened and he says that he thinks that i need to see physical evidence because i don't believe and so i said i'll go but i'm going to bring a friend of mine and he said no you have to go alone he goes it's a it's a place that is on government-owned property and it's a no-fly zone and when you go you'll be blindfolded and i said i definitely need to bring a friend so he said well who do you want to bring i just had met this university scientist who's very well known and i call him james in my book and i asked and i had a feeling james would definitely want to do this and i asked james and he said i'll go tomorrow okay so i suggested this to tyler and tyler said absolutely not you know and i thought i know he's going to look up james and he's going to say yes because if anybody can figure out what this material is that we're going to go look for it's going to be james he has the instruments and so tyler did in fact look him up and finally said okay i got you can go. so we both head out there and we get blindfolded and tyler takes us out there it takes about 40 minutes outside of a certain place in new mexico so in terms of roswell this is what i can say is that according to tyler there were about seven crashes out in the 1940s in new mexico in various places um we went to one of them according to tyler i at the time i was completely an atheist with regard to anything that had to do with ufos so we were out there we had specially configured metal detectors for these metals and we did find these okay and they've since been studied by various scientists materials scientists so forth and um i believe jacques talked about not those particular ones but others on the joe rogan show um there are no anomalies so there are we scientists don't i'm not a scientist so i can't weigh in on whether i just i just believe the people these people i believe because they're well-known scientists what do you mean they're not anomaly so no they are not they are not anomalous oh and almost in terms of the materials that are uh naturally occurring on earth yes okay so that so there's some kind of inklings of evidence that uh that something happened in roswell in terms of crashes of alien technology now what else is there to the mythology so there's some crashes right right yeah i mean that's kind of epic it's pretty epic yeah and uh what else like what um what are we supposed to take away from this right yeah so it's weird okay so um there's this okay so in religious studies like i said we call it a herophony which is the meeting of a non-human intelligent thing whatever it is an angel a god whatever a goddess with or an alien with humans and that's the place okay so the place is new mexico so we so new mexico becomes folded into the mythology of this new religion is what i call a new type of religion of the ufo and it becomes ground zero for this new mythology just like mecca is the is the place where muslims go they have to go right at least once in their lives it's a pilgrimage place now so this is so in my book that's how i i tell it now what about roswell in the public imagination um obviously according to annie jacobson who's good you know she's a great author investigative journalist she's written about roswell too i don't agree with all of what she comes up with but part of it is that there's a lot of military stuff going on there that is classified and there's a reason why you can't get in and nor would you want to right so um so there's a lot of experimentation going on there um i don't believe that it's has to do with et's frankly but in the imaginations of americans roswell is that place but i went to a different place and apparently there are several places in new mexico now strangely enough i travel back to new mexico at the very end chapter of my book but it's not it's i don't i don't go there physically i go there through the story of a catholic uh nun who actually believes that she bilocated to new mexico uh in the gosh in the 1600s so she yeah it was very strange and i was at the vatican at the space observatory when i made that connection that she probably went to the very well she believed she went to this very place that i had gone can you uh can you elaborate in a little bit like what does it mean to go to that place yeah for for her i mean so we're kind of uh breaking down the barrier between what it means to be at a place in time right right i agree with you this is the field of religious studies so and again i don't say it's true in my book i just say it's a very strange coincidence that i'm at the vatican observatory in fact i'd finished my book but while i was at the vatican observatory i was there with tyler and we were looking at the records that can't they're called the trial records but they're the canonization records of these two saints each was said to have done amazing things one was joseph of cupertino who levitated okay or is said to have levitated the other was maria of agrada from spain their contemporaries in the 1600s who was said to have been able to buy locate which is to be in two places at once okay so this is a belief in catholicism that certain very holy people can do these kinds of things like levitate which by the way is also associated with ufo abductions you know people get levitated out of their beds and things like that so we were sent there by a billionaire who was interested in levitation and by location and since i could get into the vatican and i knew the director of the vatican observatory both tyler and i were able to go to the secret archives and look at the canonization records and then go to castle gandolfo which is about an hour from the vatican where the first observatory the space observatory of the vatican is the second one is in arizona and it has a much larger telescope so we went and we and brother guy gave me the keys to the archive i said look at anything you want i got to see a lot of stuff by carl sagan by the way i know you talked about yeah it was awesome so they have a whole section on extraterrestrial the search for extraterrestrial life and they don't by the way how awesome is that it was awesome yeah so we got to stay there they have a scholars quarters yeah and so they had two and so tyler stayed in one and i stayed in the other and brother guy probably shouldn't have been so nice to me and given me the um the keys because i i when i got home we were there for two weeks when i got home i got this frantic phone call from him and he basically said diana he goes do you remember where you put the original kepler and so i had this kepler right and so i misplaced it [Laughter] luckily i remembered where it went i was like oh gosh thank goodness i found it but he'll probably change the rules of the vatican observatory after my visit so maria is um she's actually in the history of our country in that she first wrote a cosmography of what she said was the spinning earth and this was in the 1600s and she that's her first book and she wrote that and then she said that she was transported on the wings of angels to the new world and she said that she met a culture of people and she basically told them about the faith of catholicism okay and then what happened was that the people that and she described the fauna she described the people and everything like that and so there were actually missionaries there and when they went to try to um convert some of the people who already lived there um apparently they already knew a bunch of stuff and they said how did you know this stuff and they said uh this lady in blue came and told us and they said did it look like this and they showed them they obviously didn't have a photograph but they had a picture of a sister a nun and they said yes they she wore similar clothes but she was much younger right and these guys were you know thought that was weird but when they went back to spain they found that this woman had been doing that in her mind had been traveling i mean i don't know what to make of it there's so many things that are sort of uh forcing you to kind of go outside of um you know i'm of many minds i have a very most of my days spent with very rigorous scientific kind of things and even engineering kind of things and then i'm also open-minded and just the the entirety of the idea of extraterrestrial life forces you to think outside of uh conventional boundaries of thought scientific current scientific thought let's put it that way and your story right now is so exciting it's freaking you out yeah that's okay that's a nice way to put it uh what do you uh just another person that seems to be a key figure in this in the mythology of this is bob lazar it'd be interesting maybe there's others you can tell me about but um uh bob who's also been on joe rogan but his story has been told quite a bit that he's got i think he said that he witnessed some of the work being done on the spacecraft that was in you know that was captured and so on in order to try to reverse engineer some of the technology in terms of the propulsion and so on what are your thoughts about his story how it fits into the mythology of this whole thing and the broader europologist ufologist community okay so regarding bob lazar with respect to his claims um again i have no way to adjudicate whether or not he actually you know encountered this i do have friends who are and the people that i know who know his story some know him um believe him and they have said to me that the most important thing that they think he has said in fact one of them i think made it made a meme out of it or something like that was basically he said uh maybe the public you know i regret making it public maybe the public isn't ready for this kind of information and basically they've they emphasized that to me and they emphasized it so much that they wanted me to know right so that is somewhat creepy to me so i think okay this poor guy bob lazar so many people you know this is what happens to people who have experiences like this they're questioned their reputations are put on the line in some instances their their reputations are manipulated on purpose to make them look uncredible to me as a scientist it's just inspiring that it kind of gives this kind of i'm not even thinking of it is there an actual spacecraft being hidden somewhere and studied and so on i'm thinking of it like i don't know it's a thing that gives you a spark of a dream you know to as a reminder that we don't understand most of how this world works and then we can build technologies that aren't here today that will allow us to understand much more and that it's kind of like almost like a feeling that it provides and it inspires and makes you dream that's that's the way i see the bobbles our story i don't necessarily people ask me because i'm at mit people ask me like did babazar actually go to mit and so on i don't know and i personally don't care like it's uh that's not what's interesting to me about that story to me the myth is more interesting not interesting actually but inspiring yes because inspiring you're suggesting that the myth inspires you to create reality yes yeah i think that's that's true so even if it's like not real it doesn't matter i mean in some sense just like you said it does in some sense it uh it doesn't so a lot of people know how much i love 2001 space odyssey so i got all these emails asking like uh hey bro uh do you know what's up with the monoliths in like the middle of the desert or whatever it was i don't i haven't been actually paying attention i apologize uh but um you kind of mentioned offline that this is kind of cool and interesting what what do you make of these models and in general are you um are you a fan of 2001 space odyssey where monoliths showed up do you have any thoughts about either the science fiction the mythology of it or the reality of it yes okay no okay and please say more right so first of all kubrick's films are not ever easy for me because they're so weird right and i don't actually enjoy watching them but yeah it doesn't take away from their incredible brilliance though and their visionary uh merit so a 2001 space odyssey is incredibly visionary and of course all those things that people say i don't have to restate them um in terms of what i've it's a subtext to my book by the way i i didn't mean it to be but it's almost it's almost a character in my book 2001 a space odyssey and when the monoliths started to appear again everything went crazy with my everything internet social media phone what's up what's going on right is this disclosure and i thought well you know i'll tell you one thing is it's let's look at the timing of it it's a cool if it's an art you know and then copy art and things like that it's actually happening at a really interesting time when all of us are forced to go online when all of us are forced because of kovid right we're completely now invaded by the screen or we're invading the screen like we're leaving our infrastructure now is completely changed so the monolith basically if art is supposed to like show us life it certainly has if that's an art project somebody did an awesome job with it but apparently that monolith was there for a long time right i mean that's the thing it's been there for a couple years so they said okay all right that said um if your audience is interested i think the best theory about the meaning of the monolith is um is robert eger or robert ayer i think it's robert eger um he's got a website where he does analyses of films and it's called collative learning or collateral learning and he does the meaning of the monolith everyone should go look at that because i fully agree with him one i studied meet different meanings of the monolith in 2001 a space odyssey i was fascinated okay so what is this about uh his i accepted as soon as i listened to it sue and watched it so basically he says that the monolith is okay can you pick up your your phone here what does that look like [Laughter] looks awfully a lot like a monolith yeah okay so basically that's what he was saying was that kubrick was basically the monolith was technology or the screen in particular and he basically was saying that the cinema screen we're being you know completely and if you think about it look at all this we live in a screen culture we have computer screens uh iphone screens or you know phone screens we have tv screens everything is something you know and now that kovit has come we're forced to go into these screens and we're forced to live a different material existence than we live have lived before so in in my sense i think that if it's an art project it's a really good one for that so it's just i like that uh that meaning of this it's a screen and the screen could take all all kinds of forms i mean uh our perception system in a sense is a screen uh between reality and our mind this the screen of the computer is the screen the the virtual reality worlds that we might be one day living in it there will be an interface i mean ultimately it's about the interface that's interesting it's an interface to another another world of ideas it's also a material change it's a change in our material i mean when people talk about augmented reality i say we already live in augmented reality yeah don't we because this isn't the this isn't our grandparents existence yeah like i sometimes you know you have to pause and remind yourself how weirdly different this reality is than just even like i mean 30 years ago the internet changed so much and social media has changed so much about actually just the space of our thinking wikipedia changed so much about the offloading of our knowledge the way we interact with knowledge i mean it offloaded our long-term memory about facts onto digital formats so in the sense that expanded our mind it's kind of interesting i'd i'd be curious to see if he has just one interpretation i wonder if he corresponded with him yes so over the years he and i have corresponded um and i told him i said look i'm going to be using this in my book so i think you should read what i say and he was he of course wanted to see it so what do you think about your book then you get it yesterday yeah oh yeah so um he is a non-believer in alien intelligence and ufos but he and that's fine but i i still agree with him that the meaning of the monolith was the screen but that doesn't mean the screen isn't like what david bowie said right so it's not exclusive so i could still use his theory but differ from the conclusions in terms of non-believer and believer there's um when you say believer you also are kind of implying this um the the idea that aliens have visited or had made direct contact with humans in some form there's also the the exploration and the idea of just alien intelligent intelligence is out there in the universe you know the drake equation estimating how many intelligent civilizations may be out there how many have ever existed how many are able to communicate with us i mean when you just zoom out from our own little selfish perspective of earth and look at the entirety let's say the milky way galaxy but maybe even the universe does the idea that there are intelligent civilizations out there something that you're excited about or something that you're terrified about that's a good question so basically i would say i'm not so keen on it um i think that our relationship with technology as it is and as it as i hope it will go will help us survive okay um i don't think we're equipped to do it as we stand now but i think that if we can up our game or let's just put it this way if technology is an extension of ourselves which it actually is it will help us because it'll probably be smarter than us okay it'll help us survive in the ways in which it determines best okay that said um if there are non-human intelligences out there and they have more advanced you know obviously technologies than us and they actually come um uh the history of human engagement with you know other cultures has not gone well for cultures that are less aggressive so you see what i'm saying like it's not a good idea well i wonder where we stand on the where humans stand the full spectrum of aggression well heck where are we now lex i mean we're not too great here we're still aggressing against each other no i know but that that will give us a benefit right like oh oh you're saying i thought okay i see i just have a sense that there may be a lot of intelligences out there that are less aggressive because they've evolved past it we can't assume that no i know we can't assume that but like if we can't assume it then i'm gonna assume the worst [Laughter] well that's that's uh uh despite the fact that i'm uh russian and think that life is suffering i tend to assume not the best but i i tend to assume that there is a best core to uh to creatures to people into creatures that ultimately wins out i think there's an evolutionary advantage to being good to other living creatures and so uh ultimately i think that if there's intelligent civilizations out there that prosper sufficiently to be able to travel across the great expanse of space that uh they've evolved past silly aggression that uh it's more likely in my mind to be deeply cooperative so like growth over destruction like growth does not require destruction i think but if you see the universe as a ultimately a place where it's highly constrained in resources that are necessary for traveling across space and time then uh perhaps aggression is necessary in order to aggress against others that are desiring to get access to those resources i don't know i tend to try to be optimistic on that front i think i'm emotionally optimistic and intellectually non-optimistic uh yeah i guess i'm that i'm there with you i i tend to believe that the uh happiness and deep fulfillment in life is found in that emotional place the intellectual place is really useful for building cool new technologies and ideas and so on but uh happiness is in the emotional place and there it pays off to be optimistic i think you said that technology might be able to save us uh you know that's also kind of optimistic too it might kill us there's uh talking to you offline a little bit that there was a sense that you know that we humans are facing existential risks that uh it's not obvious that we will survive for long do you have um is there things that you worry about in terms of ways we may destroy ourselves or deeply damage the fabric of human civilization that technology may allow us to avoid or alleviate yes i think that any you can choose anything actually and it could destroy us okay so you know uh pollution um you know here we're in a pandemic okay um a meteor okay so we can use technology or the thing is that we we say we use technology but actually that's not a correct way of putting it in my opinion um so there is a term used by others uh coined by somebody i don't know and i'm sorry to not give credit where credit's due but it's called technogenesis and it's this idea heidegger actually had this idea but he didn't use that term and it's this idea that we co-evolve with technology that we don't actually use it most people think it's like a tool we use okay let's use technology to do this well actually when we engage with technology we actually engage with it and it engages back with us and we engage with it so it's this co-evolution that's happening and in that sense um i think that as we create more autonomous intelligent ai it will help us uh survive because it you know if we co-evolve with it it will need us as much as we need it is my opinion um how that happens or if that if that bears out to be true um we'll see but i don't think the idea that we use technology is is a correct way to put it i think that technology is something so strange the way it is today like digital technology i'm not talking about hammers or things like that those kinds of tools okay is technology is so far removed from that and our environment is so now conditioned by our technology and the infrastructure we live within the material structure i think that um it's going to it's not i don't think it's going to be a frankenstein i think it's actually going you know like a mary shelley type idea of technology i think it's actually going to be more promethean in the sense of you know think about it we create children and then we get old and we rely upon our children to help us okay well i feel like that about technology we've created well we've created it right and so it's kind of growing up now [Laughter] uh or maybe it's in its uh teenage years and we'll see uh what what do you think about in terms of this co-evolution of um the work around brain computer interfaces and maybe uh neurolink and and elon seeing neurolink in particular as uh its long-term mission as a symbiosis with artificial intelligence so like giving a greater bandwidth channel of communication between technology ai systems and the biological neural networks of our human mind what do you think about this idea of connecting directly to the brain right in ai systems i mean okay i've i've listened to your podcast with elan i've listened to elon before he's very intel obviously super smart guy um i think this is already i mean not in the specific ways that he is doing it but i think we are already doing that okay and i can give you some examples um and there are really trivial examples but they do make the point and this is one of them so before i started this research on ufos and uops and technology i actually was looking at the effects of technology and in in particular media on religion and what i did was i was lucky to be asked to be a consultant for various movies and one in particular i learned a lot from and that was the conjuring so i was a history consultant for the conjuring it happens to be my field it's catholic studies right and you've got these people who are real people and they're you know exercising demons and things like that okay so i thought wow this is a great example for me you know i didn't do it for the money it doesn't pay well but i did it to learn right so i work closely with the screenwriters who i work with now all the time with i work with them all the time now and what i found was this i found that as the most interesting part of the creation of this movie was the editing process because they would use the it would go through editing and they would use test audiences and a lot of the test audiences um would be like you know there's like these things where they test their flicker rates and things like that the eye flicker rates and so and the uh and when it goes really intense they go to uc irvine and they do this thing called cognitive consumption which is basically um or i'm sorry cognitive consumerism where they basically hook test audiences up to ekgs and they read their brains yeah and they figure out which scenes create the most arousal yeah yeah and so they cut out all the other scenes okay so what we're getting is we're getting like this drug when we go to the movies or when we do video games when we watch we're literally physiologically responding to our technologies so we're already there we're already interfacing with them physiologically so that's my example now the the kind of thing that he's doing uh musk is doing with neurolink i say go for it that's awesome i hope he does it you know i'm fascinated i want it to happen um why do i want it to happen because i think that well first it's inevitable that's it's going to happen um i also want to point out that jacques valet was trying to get this done back in the 60s and the 70s he was writing papers about in fact the arpanet the proto-internet um was called augmentation of the human intellect so we've been doing this for a while okay so um props to elon musk but we've been thinking about this for a good time um we've even been visioning it okay so there was a really interesting jesuit priest he was french uh tell your deschardon i don't know if you know who he is if not he's fascinating he was a he was actually a soldier uh before he became a priest and so he believed he also saw what he called a biosphere now this guy is talking in like the early 20th century like the 19 17 19 you know that time period and so basically he he said and wrote about this thing called the newest sphere and he basically said there will be a point when we merge with our technology and it's going to be somewhat like some kind of a biosphere we have this atmosphere and then we have the stratosphere and it's going to be this biosphere and we're all going to be hooked into it mentally so we'll be able to communicate in a way in which we don't communicate now so you know that sounds so similar to the singularity so after i read him many many years ago but when i read the um kurzweil's book about the singularity to me it read just like um religious language like it read like you know because he in fact it's so much like revelation to me when i read it that i even assign it to my students in my classes i'm like this is this is it you know this is like a really great book of the singularity you know the coming singularity and um this religious event because it seems like it when he writes about it he says i felt it before i even understood it you know he i mean kurzweil kurzweil yeah chris what i mean what are your feelings about my feelings thoughts feelings too about the idea of the singularity do you think it's ultimately the thing that echoes throughout the history of ideas is this like moment of uh revelation like this this almost mythological religious moment or is there something uh more physical to this idea of concrete concrete about the idea of there'll come a point where our technology there'll be like a phase shift between uh the the basic fabric of like humanity of how we interact you know how evolution brought us to be this biological interaction that our technology uh crosses some kind of line of capability that the world be more technology than human to where it will leave us behind sort of oh yeah i don't think it's going to leave us behind i think it's going to take us along but it will be i mean i guess the idea of the singularity first of all isn't the idea of the singularities like we can't possibly predict what's on the other side of the singularity these are the senses like this is like the world will be fundamentally transformed yes okay so right and then it was you know um this was characterized in various movies like lucy and stuff like that uh you know lucy being the first human that right we so kind of replicating and this is going to be the next iteration of humans is the singularity um i actually don't believe that um frankly however and the reason i don't believe it is because we're material beings and technology has to have a host so we're not going to you know become something super abstract like there's it's just impossible to do there's nothing like that well people would be listening to this podcast a hundred years from now and laughing at it because they'll be all existing in a virtual reality we'll be all information uh as opposed to material meaning connected to some kind of concept of physical uh physical reality i don't even know the right words to use you see that's because there are none because there's no place from there's no view from nowhere there's no non-material like we have thoughts but they're connected to us right they're in our you know they're somehow okay as far as as far as you know listen platonic forms i think is about as as you know close to what we're talking about as possible like this place where these things exist and then there's like a physical instantiation of it nope the question is from the perspective of the platonic form what does our physical world look like you know what i'm saying like uh you know if if say you're a creature existing in a virtual reality like if you grew up your whole life in a virtual reality game like what is it and somebody in that virtual reality world tells you that there actually exists this physical world and in fact your own you think you're in this virtual world but it's actually you're in a body and this is just your mind putting yourself and there's a piece of technology like how will they how would they be able to think of that physical world would they would they sound exactly like you just sounded a minute ago saying like well that's silly who cares if there's a physical world it's the the entirety of the perception and my memories and all of that is in this other realm of um of like information it's just all just information i why do i need some kind of weird meat bag to contain so there's a great again i always you know return to something for your audience to read or you um there's a great very short article online for free by david chalmers do you know him he's the philosopher of consciousness yeah interviewed him on this podcast yeah yeah yeah he's cool um i used to i was friends with his best friend for a while when in when i was in grad school um he probably has some weird friends he does he's a philosopher okay so um i like his fashion choice and his style i'm gonna hang out with him but it's a great guy okay so he wrote this article which i use a lot i love it because it's accessible to undergraduates and it's called matrix as metaphysics and basically it's it's an answer to external world skepticism which is basically how do we know there's an external world right how do we know that we're not in a matrix right now and so um basically he's using he's he's also he even references he uses a religious reference even he says you could think of the matrix of the movie as a new as the new um book of genesis for our new world right and i thought yeah that's absolutely correct because you know we don't know and we don't we won't know for sure or for certain therefore what we know is what is real to us and so he goes through these scenarios and within philosophy is called there's uh this is different from that but it's like this brain in a vat right if you're a brain in a vat and some not so kind scientist is like recreating this world for you just to see you know and you think you're this awesome rock star right and you're living this awesome existence but actually just this brain in this vat okay but there's still a brain in a vat okay so his idea in um the matrix says metaphysics kind of takes out the brain in a vat like this i don't know if this is possible so i've read critiques of this that you know what you're talking about is a non-dualism like there's like um you know or it's not necessarily a non-dualism um i just i mean information in and of itself has to have some kind of material component to it i mean it's that that that uh when taken outside the realm of human beings because dualism is kind of talking about humans yeah in a sense it's just possible to me that there could be creatures that exist in a very different form perhaps rely on very different set of materials yes that that may perhaps not even look like materials to us yes i agree which is why like information it could be even in computers the information that's traveling inside a computer is connected to actual uh material movement right right so like there is it is ultimately connected to material movement but it's less and less about the material and more and more about the information so i i just mean that there's it's possible that uh you think the singularity is basically like sloughing off our material existence well i don't know because i can tell you that this has been the hope of philosophers and theologians forever yeah well i don't i think we're living in this thing uh through a singularity i i don't think i think this world just just like as you've said already uh has been already transformed significantly and keeps continually being transformed yes and we're just riding this yeah we are big beautiful wave of uh transformation and uh that's why it's both exciting and terrifying uh from a scientific perspective that like we're so bad at predicting the future and the future is always so amazing in terms of the the things that has brought us i mean i don't know if it's always will be this exciting in terms of the rate of innovation but it seems to be increasing still and it's really exciting it's it's exciting yeah it's terrifying because obviously we're building better and better tools for destroying ourselves but i on the optimistic side believe that we also can build better and better tools to uh defend against all the ways we can destroy ourselves and it's kind of this interesting race of innovation yeah books are great of course the greatest book of all time two of the greatest books of all time are yours but besides those what uh what books technical fiction or philosophical uh had an impact on your life or possibly you think um others might want to read and get some insights from and what ideas did you pick up from them great okay i really enjoy nietzsche okay so anything by nietzsche frederick nietzsche he's a philosopher um i actually hated him when i first read him in my early 20s that's like the opposite of most people's experience right they usually love them in their 20s and then they uh throw them to the curb later yeah yeah i think he's totally misrepresented and misinterpreted he grew on you well it happened in one night so let me just describe it because it's kind of funny yeah it happened on new year's so i had friends in when i was in my twenties and they were kept they kept telling me you have to read niji you have to read nietzsche and i tried okay but again you know no i didn't like i was not into how he described the philosophical concepts he was trying to get across so but they would they weren't giving up a very um persistent friends so one of them gave me um the gay science and i had it on my book stand and it was new year's eve and i'm actually not a big part i'm actually an introvert i'm a geeky introvert okay so i don't go out and party a lot it was new year's eve even that couldn't get me out to go party so i just wanted to go to bed yeah and new year's eve hit and everybody went out and i was asleep and they woke me up and i was like darn they woke me up ah might as well read this book by nietzsche okay so i picked it up and lo and behold i turned to a page that was exactly about it was called sanctus januarius which is basically saint january and it was about new year's eve and i thought whoa what a weird coincidence and it was a really real it was also super catholic and it was a really beautiful little aphorism it's actually a book of aphorisms which are kind of religious right and so he it's really just uh the genre is religious let's put it that way but he's not so basically he says today is the day when people are supposed to make these resolutions right and he says from here on out i will will never say no i will only say yes okay i look away if something's horrible i'll just look away from it i won't get angry at it and then he also says i will be like saint january and saint january is actually the saint whose blood is in this place in italy i think it's in italy or and um and every year it turns it turns to blood again so it's like it's desiccated it's you know it's just this miracle it says my blood is now um it flows again and i was like wow that's really beautiful and i said and a strange coincidence because it just turned you know 12. so it's like new year's eve i pick up the book i read this aphorism i said strange coincidence that and then i turn the page and the page is about coincidences and i was like i said it and i thought this is weird and i felt like they was alive i felt like the book was alive and nietzsche was speaking to me i had a like experience and engagement with nietzsche yeah and so after that i couldn't put his stuff down it was engaging fascinating everything so yeah so that's one book yeah the gay science what did what did you pick up from from the gay science or from niche in general because there are some ideas yeah yeah the idea is basically that um truth he's got awesome one-liners you know so truth is a woman so okay what is what does he mean by that truth is a woman basically she's going to lie to you she looks real attractive yeah but she's not going to tell you the truth [Laughter] so okay so basically i'm not saying that that's true about women i'm obviously a woman so he's so basically what he's saying is that truth is not is like what i said uh brother guy said it's a moving target okay we started this whole conversation with what's real right so i should have just gone straight to nietzsche have it not you heard truth as a woman you know okay so truth is a woman yeah all right so that and also and you know foucault this um other philosopher french philosopher actually takes up this idea and creates his own framework called genealogy from it so the genealogy of morals so that we only believe certain things and we we sediment them into truth so we say you know truth told who said that was it lenin or stalin a truth told enough times i mean a lie told enough times becomes the truth yeah so that's basically nichian right there okay see that's nietzsche so nietzsche also is a huge critic of christianity um which i'm actually catholic i'm a practicing catholic so i appreciated his critique i thought it was actually quite accurate and he's a critique of religion in general and and he's fascinating and also i find that his he talks about altered states of consciousness and he calls them elevated states and he i think through his book you can actually experience elevated states so um yeah nietzsche [Laughter] thumbs up so what what other books yeah okay so hannah rent she is a philosopher that not a lot of people know about but she was a jewish woman during the holocaust and she was in turn interred at bergen-belsen which was uh basically auschwitz for women and she escaped she came to the united states and she had worked with heidegger even though he's supposed to be anti-semitic and a nazi and everything but they were lovers okay so she comes out and she's at columbia university and she teaches philosophy there and she writes this she writes two books which i'll recommend one is called eichmann in jerusalem where she attend attends the nuremberg trials and she basically makes this really astute observation about evil and she says eichmann is one of the people who sent the jews to the concentration camps who ran the trains okay um and she said the thing about eichmann was that he didn't seem particularly evil actually he seemed to be quite a nice guy she said what was interesting about him was he seemed incredibly thoughtless and stupid and she said and he used a lot of stereotypes like memes so she actually wrote about memes before we had them and now people just use memes and they're actually used against us even there's even a segments of warfare called memetic warfare all right so memes are something that can sway a whole population of people um so she wrote about memes before they were even in existence and that's eichmann in jerusalem and i think she also has some really amazing things to say about evil is that um when people remain thoughtless she has another book called the life of the mind which is gigantic and i don't think anybody will read it but frankly it's one of the best books i've ever read and i've read it many times and basically the life of the mind and the life of the mind she asks a very simple question she says why do people do bad things why are they evil and what she says is she wonders if it's she says that bad people sleep well at night contrary to you know how the saying how do you sleep at night well that's only because you're a good person that you're asking that question because you actually have a conscience and a conscience is this dual kind of you fight with yourself about the consequences of your actions and she says bad people don't seem to have a conscience so they actually sleep well at night and so she goes through a whole history of philosophy uh about evil and that's really a good one too but i have um i also have to recommend this one too there's one more so i know i recommended two but just from the same philosopher my friend jeffrey kreipel he's at rice university and he's in my fields right uh religious studies he wrote he's written several books i mean he's written a heck of a lot of books let's put it that way but he's um his i think his best book or the one that impacted me the most is called authors of the impossible and his book is his writing is very much like nietzsche's writing in the sense that he it's almost as if he reaches out of the pages and he grabs you and kind of slaps you around and says think about this you know and you can't help but be changed after you've read it and he's got a great chapter in there about jacques valet oh so he colors a bunch of different uh thinkers and authors that are outs that somehow are what is it renegade in some aspects of revolutionaries yeah they're thinking the impossible uh there's a great one he's written called mutants and mystics where he talks about the comic strips uh the um gosh why can't i remember the name of the person he just died stan lee he talks about the history of the comics by stan lee and they're all paranormal they all start off super paranormal and it's fascinating um on the topic of anna arendt yeah connor hannah uh so i haven't read her work but i've vaguely touched upon sort of like commentary of her work and it seems like some people think her work is dangerous in some aspect i don't know if you can comment on why that is i just it it feels like similar with iron rand or something like that yeah like this is i should say not dangerous but controversial yes it is yes they think it's controversial um this is the reason i believe um i've heard of the controversy the controversy is that she didn't i she first of all um she is jewish and she did escape a concentration camp and yet she's called she's been called anti-jewish and i think part of that was that she basically was saying something that i believe that a lot of normal people are like eichmann and evil things are done by people who just follow the rules and they don't think about what they're doing and that's one of the most pernicious forms of evil of our time so we talk quite a bit about the definitions of religion and what are the different building blocks of religion so one of the i don't think we touched on we did a little bit with the afterlife but in a sense i don't know if you're familiar with ernest becker work and all the philosophies around there about the fear of death and how the fear of our own mortality awareness of our mortality and its fears in case of ernest becker is a significant component in the psychology in the way we humans develop our understanding of the world so what are your thoughts in the context of religion or maybe in the context of your own mind about the role of death in life or fear of death in life and are you afraid of death [Laughter] we cover everything in this every single topic is covered wow okay um i so happen to have benefited perhaps from living with an older brother who seemingly had no fear of death while growing up and he did everything okay so he was he climbed mountains he was a rock climber he jumped out of airplanes of course he had to be a green beret and go into the special forces where that type of thing is a requirement right and so because of that i did a lot of things outside of my comfort zone and which probably i shouldn't have done and hope hope to goodness my kids don't do them yeah okay okay so do you so i do i fear death um i think about death a lot actually um you may not know this about me but in my field i was the head i was the co-chair of the death panel it's called the death panel though it's like it's the panel to think about death in religious studies um and i was at for many years so you've thought about it a bit a bit let's see i think that people are a little too confident i think about life in general that they're gonna kind of live all the time and not die i happen to i mean i hate to say it i'm super positive and most people would consider me to be too happy almost right and so it's odd then that i spent a lot of time thinking about death but i wonder if there's a connection there yeah i'm happy to be alive right that's kind of what the thinking about death does is it makes you appreciate the days that you do have yeah it's it's a weird controversy i i tend to believe that um the fact that this life ends gives each day a significant amount of meaning so i don't know uh it seems like an important feature of life it's not like a bug it seems like a feature that it ends but it's a strange feature because i wish it like all the good stuff you wish it wouldn't end well you know it's interesting lex and i do point this out to my students because we cover in a lot of the basic studies courses i teach we cover all religions or as many as we can like the major religions and so you take hinduism for example um now this is an ancient religion okay so you and i are here talking about how we enjoy living in life and things like that well the goal of hinduism is basically never to get reincarnated again is basically to not live okay and to get off samsara which is the wheel of life and death so escape the whole yeah exactly can think of that conditions are so different that you and i and my students are happy to be alive but they're back in the day you know thousands of years ago when they wrote when they actually didn't write it they spoke the vedas which were the sacred traditions of india they wanted off they didn't want to come back life was terrible that's what people don't have the adequate understanding of history that for the majority of people life is really hard right and you and i are and your audience among the lucky yeah that we actually life like life we want to live most of the time yeah most of the time wha what do you think uh the biggest since we're covering every single possible topic let me ask the biggest one the unanswerable one from the perspective of alien intelligence or from the perspective of religious studies or from the perspective of just diana what do you think is the meaning of this existence of uh this life of ours yes okay so all right so [Laughter] well of course i have to my philosophical training as uh undergrad always makes me think about like what's the assumption in your your question the question there's an assumption there it's like there is a meaning okay that's the assumption by meaning what do you mean by life yeah you define the terms no no but listen okay i'll answer your question i'm just going to say that there's this assumption that we should have meaning to life okay well maybe we we shouldn't maybe it's just all random okay however i believe that it's not and in my opinion and the meaning of life in my opinion is intrinsic i enjoy living i want to live sometimes i don't enjoy a living and when i don't enjoy living i change my circumstances so it's intrinsic and i think that certain things are intrinsic and like love love of your children is kind of um well it's actually physiological but it's also intrinsic it's beautiful you know there's something about it that that is intrinsically um desirable so that i i think the meaning of life is like that intrinsically desirable so it's something that just is born inside you based on um what makes you feel good no that's hedonism that's about what where do you place love love love of your children yeah so basically um love of your children by the way is not always easy because they do things that they shouldn't do you have to discipline them that's one of the worst things about parenthood to me is disciplining my children i don't like to do that i love them um so a lot of things that i do that i feel are good are not easy so there's an intrinsic sense that like okay let's take um animals okay so we have dogs and cats okay so you might not but i do i've you know i told you about them can you can you uh share their names if i share their names i will share their names okay so we have a cat and it has red fluffy hair and so we called it trump well when we got our dog we figured that it needed a companion so we called it putin so we have trump and putin that's the greatest pet names of all time i'm sorry this and uh maybe we'll be able to share a picture of your cat because this is awesome it is really cute yeah very photogenic uh i mean is this something that's uh whether la uh whether we're talking about love or the intrinsic meaning do you think that's something that's really special to humans or if there is intelligent alien civilizations out there do you think that's something that they possess as well maybe in different forms like whatever this thing that meaning is this intra intrinsic drive that we have do you think that's just a property of life of some level of complexity that we will see that everywhere in this universe in my opinion and this is just my opinion um i i do think that it is but i also think that it can take different forms so if there is like uh think of gravity right gravity kind of like makes stuff stick to it right it like tracks stuff well what is loved you that does that too right so people who are cr we call them charismatic charism it means love charism means light and love so a charismatic person is a person who attracts people to them like the sun does right like you know so um so i think that whatever this property is that's intrinsic is like gravity and most likely takes different forms in different types of life forms yeah i can't wait until like uh albert einstein type of figure in the future will discover that love is in fact one of the fundamental forces of physics that would be cool diana this is one of the favorite conversations i've ever had it's truly an honor to talk to you and uh thank you so much for spending all this time with me absolutely it's been fun thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with diana walsh basalka and thank you to our sponsors element electrolyte drink grammarly writing plugin business wars podcast and cash app so the choice is health grammar knowledge or money choose wisely my friends and if you wish click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from carl sagan somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known thank you for listening and hope to see you next time

Channel: Lex Fridman

Views: 597,471

Rating: 4.8040848 out of 5

Keywords: diana walsh pasulka, artificial intelligence, agi, ai, ai podcast, artificial intelligence podcast, lex fridman, lex podcast, lex mit, lex ai, lex jre, mit ai

Id: iqBh7G4uDR8

Length: 175min 14sec (10514 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Barbafella]

I LOVED this. Her insights were thoughtful and encouraging, I regret to say I had not read American Cosmic because of my perceived notions that ufology as religion was an insult, but this conversation made me reconsider that. Very enlightening stuff.

[u/backhaircombover]

Sweet! This should be a good listen.

[u/Roadscrape]

Pasulka is well spoken. Every interview I've heard with her was very, very good. She seems to just do interviews with intelligent, well read interviewers. I just heard Rex's interview with her this morning. It ranks up there with the best she's ever done. Very entertaining! Rex seems to get the best out of his guests!

[u/TabrisSeele]

Oh snap!

[u/W_mill]

So pumped on this. I would love to interview her.

[u/K3RZeuz45]

Is the book really worth reading? Has anyone here read it?

[u/hecandbella]

I can’t wait to have three whole spare hours to listen to this!

I’m envious of all of you who got to listen already.

[u/MonstersUGrad98]

fantastic interview.

[u/zrofux]

Speculation - who is the invisible person with the patents or inventions she refers to as Tyler D.?

​

Hal Puthoff?