James D. Madden | Unidentified Flying Hyperobject, The Uber-Umwelt, & The Cave

00:08 The planet's puppet masters almost surely have them There clearly may be something there beyond the realm of man And until you've thoroughly tested every last closed chested view I find nonetheless, you really... We'd be without THC! We know they're lying to us just don't order THC! The higher side chats show Grad Carl wouldn't come for me Serenity now, people. From the Sunshine State I'm Greg Carlwood and the mystery behind UFOs and high strangeness events is one of the most talked about subjects around here but i don't know how much closer we've come to any real answers some say the little green pilots have these strange crafts or biological drones working in the explorational front lines for some cosmic beings we never see directly others think they're demons doing human experimentation on their quest engineer sustainable physical vessels

01:12 And some even conclude these frail little creatures are just us from the digital dystopian future where our physical bodies have atrophied or that we're dealing with an aspect of a breakaway civilization. But if you've read enough cases, these common ufology tropes don't even apply to half of the truly strange things that are reported in these bizarre experiences. Mantid beings, reptilians, balls of light, implants, body marks, dead relatives, tours of odd fleshy biomechanical crafts missing time and downloads of information that sometimes take years to unpack Well, as the disclosure door cracks open wider and wider in the mainstream public square more and more deep thinkers from various disciplines step up to the plate to take their crack at this seemingly unsolvable enigma that is the UFO and the beings behind it.

02:01 And for us today, that is James Madden. A PhD in philosophy, lifelong athlete, martial artist, fitness coach and award-winning professor of philosophy at Benedictine College He's the author of Thinking About Thinking Mind & Meaning in the Era of Techno-Nihilism Mind Matter and Nature a Thomistic Proposal for the Philosophy of Mind and Unidentified Flying Hyperobject, UFOs, Philosophy and the End of the World. Which tries to take a step back from the dead-end conclusions about the UFO we have so far, and instead takes a fresh philosophical approach to what we could be dealing with. It's a book full of new ideas, and new ideas are certainly needed, so let's do the damn thing! The UFO question tackler, uber umwelt educator, and philosophical approach taker James, welcome to The Higher Side

02:53 Thank you, Greg. I appreciate it. Feel free to call me Jim. Will do! Well thanks Jim for doing this Yeah, right. You bet just don't call me dr Madden Fair enough you wrote a great book with unidentified flying hyper object and I've been doing this awhile So it's hard to find truly fresh takes as to what all this might be about But you cover some of my favorite people in the space today Jeff Kripal Diana Pasolka Whitley Strieber and Jacques Vallee mainly And you pair their ideas with the insights from the great philosophers of history To put forth some ideas that do feel new and unique, you mentioned being a latecomer to the UFO question but that quote the problem of the UFO has a great deal of resonance with the philosophical problems. You have spent your professional life and personal life pondering for the last 30 years And that sounds like a good way to get into this house so how are they similar? Sure

03:51 I mentioned in the introduction book that I'm sort of a UFO late comer, as you mentioned. And I'm an almost cliche Gen X guy and so when my kids were mostly in high school it was time to show them the X-Files. As you do? As you do yeah. Anyone serious about educating their children is going to show ... Do the whole 10 season run with the X-Files. And I had never really been into the UFO question seriously okay for me it was sci fi entertainment But I remember we were watching the X-Files end of season one, exactly when that first big Pentagon briefing happened. And it was like whoa! So apparently Fox was right or I'll admit it and I'm almost embarrassed to say is that when the government said it was okay to think about UFO's, I was like oh wait this is something interesting right? At the time I was writing one of the books that you mentioned Thinking About Thinking and it struck me that a lot of the same questions

04:53 about cognition that I was considering in that book might have carry over for how we would think about the UFO. Okay? So, a lot of my work in philosophy of mind is about what it's about human thinking that makes it possible for us to experience a world and then my particular approach to this... The way and it's not just me, so I'm drawing on very important figures like Martin Heidegger or people in the Pittsburgh School of Philosophy you can talk with all that if They all see that the way the world becomes available to us is that we limit our options, okay? That we have to limit our options for perception. And that would mean though there's a whole lot out there that we just normally are not attuned to and it's then not surprising if that is

05:45 very often we bump into things that make no sense to us whatsoever because the way we mostly get around the world is by grossly oversimplifying it. And so there probably are far more interesting, complicated things that we just don't perceive because they're not relevant to how we get around and so then it's not surprising that we would bump into things that don't make sense to us." Then when I took that sort of thinking about cognition and started thinking about UFO bells and whistles went off for me because it seems I'm not surprised now that something like the UFO phenomenon is a persistent part of human history because of the way I think about cognition. On top of that too, in addition to philosophy mind, I've done a lot of philosophy religion stuff and so the whole status of miracle or the status of the anomalous has always interested me from an epistemology standpoint

06:32 Yeah, I love that more people are connecting the history of miracles and that kind of stuff with ufology. I think that's way more exciting than visitors from a planet because if you're in a materialist box, that's the only place you can go and I don't think we should be in a materialist box As for the meat of this thing, you write about the limitation of the standard ideas of aliens or angels and demons. And you propose an idea you call the uber umwelt terrestrial hypothesis which is going to need some explaining but help us out here. Sure okay so it's uber umwelt Okay So the umwelt is a German word It typically gets translated as environment

07:19 I don't like that translation so much, and I think it's mainly because we don't really have a really good English word for this. But the notion of the umvel first shows up in early 20th century behavioral biology and then it gets taken up by phenomenological philosophers like Martin Heidegger who I talk about quite a bit in the book. And then later now contemporary cognitive scientists like Andy Clark The idea of the umwelt is that in fact, organisms the way it's often put make an environment for themselves. Now that doesn't mean literally that it's an idealist view where we sort of think the material objects around us into existence. It's more subtle. It's more like what Russ was talking about earlier. The famous example on this... Andy Clark uses this and I use it every time I talk about this as there's a certain kind of tick okay? And this tick

08:07 It's whole perceptual and then ultimately cognitive package is just built around three things. It can sense the amount of mammalian skin acid in its direct surroundings, I think it's butyric acid. It can sense the differences of heat signatures on the surfaces of things and it has a way of sensing when it lands this tension on the surface so it can figure out where the skin is stretched tighter as how I understand And that's all it has. That is its whole means of accessing the world, are those three senses. Interestingly we don't have any of those and this tick it's so good with those that it can time its jump on you when you're walking by and then very easily find a vein and stick its needle in there and suck your blood

08:58 And so the idea is that ticks Oomph! out, right? It's full experience of the world. The world that's available to it is cashed out solely in terms of skin acid heat differences on surfaces and surface tension. That's it. Now, the tick is getting the world right. I mean, that acid is in the room I'm in right now it's in the room you're in right now like there's heat differences all of that they're there those are real things okay but what it gets though is just a small...I like to put a caricature of the world. It has carved out part of the world that is relevant to it and its survival strategies and basically it's evolved in a kind of dialectical relationship between those elements so they can sense and its ability to sense them and back-and-forth

09:44 So, the tick gets the world right but it only gets the world right as it's available for the tick. It's its oompho. Now maybe the distressing thing about this is like well humans are no different. We have a certain sensory package that makes the world available to us okay? But that's a caricature right there's maybe infinitely many other attributes of the world that are available out there as it were that we're just basically ignoring because they weren't really relevant to our survival strategies And so that's the idea of the umwelt. Now, as I mentioned earlier it seems to me that entails that there is a massive uber-umwelt or super... So umwelt means around world literally but there is this super around world then right? There is this whole rich world of things that we're just not set up to deal with and if you think about when the tick senses Greg

10:43 and jumps on him and crawls up his arm, all that. The tick understands in some sense something about Greg but just a sliver of it like you're infinitely greater. Okay? But we have to admit then that we do the same thing to the tick right? That what we get about the tick is a caricature of the tick. And whatever the tick really is withdraws from our perception as infinitely greater. I think the very notion of an umwelt entails an uber-umwelt. And if you accept the existence of an uber-umwelt, then you should expect the world to be unexpected now at the edges." Okay? So what does that have to do with UFO? And I understand too... You know, I'm very much simplifying prior Ufology and always want to say this is, I don't think it's good for academics to come in to say Ufology or any other interesting fields of study that you talk about on your show

11:41 I don't like it when academics come in and say, well the professionals are here. We're going to clean this up for you because there have been very smart people who probably renounced what could have been perfectly good academic careers and it cost them a great deal to become ufologists for the last 70 years and to act as if they academics is just going to come in and show them what's up. I really want to resist that but there are tools of academia too so kind of the standard ufology picture if I can indulge that is it's this extraterrestrial hypothesis, the idea that what UFOs are they are literal pieces of machinery that come from a distant planet et cetera, et cetera. Standard Hollywood and it's interesting I didn't realize till I got into this is already by 1970 you have people like John Keel saying that's a really really facile way to think about this right? And he's referring to people from the 50s if you read Operation Trojan Horse

12:40 that already by 1970, the really smart people doing ufology are really not into the extraterrestrial hypothesis. And then you get Jacques Vallée's stuff in the 70s... Well he's already writing in 60s but like if it is a college et cetera, there too, he's resistant to the idea that this is literally extraterrestrial and what's the problem with it? Well okay so the extraterrestrial hypothesis would explain the data right? So people see certain things okay and the actual terrestrial hypothesis would explain the data But, it would require us also to address the probability of something traveling to us from a distant star system or something. It would require us to address the probability that these beings when they're encountered are bipedal and their eyes are in front of their head. Okay? So all these things that you wouldn't necessarily expect another species that evolves on another planet to share in common with those, these things seem to have in common

13:37 To make sense of that, people will say well maybe they're avatars trying to look kind of like us so that we can start to understand them but they don't want to complete like us because they want us to be surprised and things like that. That's fine but what did you just do? You packed more information into your hypothesis and thereby you've lowered the probability. It's like the more I claim, the lower the prima facie probability of my hypothesis and then the stronger the evidence would have to be. So this is a very important point And this is basically what Valet does with the extraterrestrial hypothesis. He says, what are the chances that someone could fly here? What are the chances that they would look like us? What are the chances et cetera, et cetera, et cetera and that seems to become this probability suck on the extraterrestrial hypothesis. So then people like Valet and Hal Puthoff and Kiel I mentioned go then for ultra terrestrial of some sort or you know, Valet will mention extra dimensional stuff like that. Okay, that's great but

14:34 Now, if they're ultra-terrestrials you've got to make sense of the fact that we mostly don't see them. Okay? That there are this massive technological society that goes undetected by us et cetera, et cetera and it seems like you're going to have to pack a bunch of stuff into that story that's going to lower the overall probability of the hypothesis which is always a problem now what I'm proposing with Uber-Umbel terrestrial hypothesis is actually, I'm saying well we've already got concepts that are used in phenomenological philosophy in cognitive science that have very good explanatory value over there. So I'm not asking us to add a new thing right? We can take things that are already fairly well verified from other disciplines and use those to explain all these weird questions you might ask about ultra terrestrials

15:26 Why don't we see them very often? Why don't we see traces of their history, et cetera, et cetera. Well because they're in the Uber-Umwelt and we would expect that there are things in the Uber-Umwelt that just are not on our perceptual radar given our evolutionary history." So that's the proposal I'm making and the idea is this would be a way of getting out of the way of some of this sort of probability difficulties that you have for a standard ultra terrestrial hypothesis. Mm hmm. I like it a lot. For context, we also have to fold in the definition of a hyper object. But I really like the Pizza Hut analogy you have in the book conventional cultural simplified

16:09 analogies really work good for me. And this Pizza Hut one is quite fun because it explains how something can be somewhat known, but also unknown in a different kind of context and an umbrella kind of term context book talk to us about that a little bit. Sure so the pizza hut example comes from another philosopher named Graham Harmon and he's of the founder, kind of the central figure in a school thought called object-oriented ontology. Triple O is what they call themselves and I'm pretty much a fellow traveler with all that and you know, the object oriented ontologist is something similar to what we said already is to say that objects show up for us given how we have a take on them but they're always greater than just our take right? There's... The object always withdraws to some degree from our perception of it and

17:04 Harman thinks that we need to take all objects seriously, that they're all on par with each other. And I'm going to kind of backtrack into some metaphysical stuff if that's okay here? Sure. So this is one of the central sort of debates in philosophy going back to Aristotle. So Aristotle is an interesting... He's a ancient Athenian philosopher, Plato student and Aristotle He was very impressed with the fact that the objects that we perceive are all composed of finer physical objects. Okay? So I can take this desk and we could break it down into like sheets of wood, and screws, glue and such but then those things could be broken down, those things can be broken down. But he figured out ultimately there's going to be some alternate constituents right? The elements... And for the Greeks given their first try at chemistry was earth air water fire

17:57 And then the question for Aristotle comes up, why would you think that there's a desk? That that's a real thing in addition to or over and above the earth air water and fire. Why not just say it's just earth air water and fire? More importantly, why wouldn't you say about a cat that it's just the earth air water and and not something else called a cat. Why can't we just have a story at the very basic level? You mentioned materialism early, and really what Aristotle was worrying about was something like a very radical form of materialism which interestingly was the older view so that most early philosophers were some kind of materialist like that. Okay, so Aristotle then says well I think... We'll use example with the cat is a real thing

18:42 Because even though the cat is composed of the earth, air water and fire it has powers that the earth air water and fire don't have. Okay? So like the elements don't hunt right? The elements don't chase other cats for reproductive purposes right? The elements don't grow hair etc.,etc.. Okay so he's not saying like the cat some spooky thing in addition to the elements, he just saying it's not the same thing as the elements Moreover, he says look the cat is constantly exchanging its elements with this environment. It sheds its hair but it grows new hair and eats tuna and incorporates tuna itself. It lets yesterday's tuna remains go in the kitty box all that stuff." Okay so clearly it's changing elements over but it remains the same cats. So we saying the cat isn't just the elements. So Aristotle impressed then that some things have powers that their parts don't have

19:37 And some things, they have a persistence that their parts don't have. And so that kind of in the history of philosophy sort of becomes then the standard for saying a thing is a real substantial entity. Does it have its own powers and does it persist under its own conditions? Make sense? Yeah like agency. Agency yeah I like that. Agency and persistence. So Aristotle though thought that pretty much applied to organisms and nothing above that. So Aristotle would say okay so the elements are things And then the parts of organisms are things, like the organs they're things in a way. Okay? Then the organisms are... But then he doesn't go on and say like a population of cats is a thing or he doesn't say that a city is a thing and the way human as a thing. He cuts it off so that for Aristotle, the real things are what I call or following another philosopher, there's a middle-sized dry goods

20:36 They're the things that are like kind of medium sized. They're not as fine as elements, they're not as big as cities. There's things like the cats, the other human beings, the tables and chairs, the things that we can get our hands on." Now you can see right away where one might worry about that. Well wait, that's to say the real things are the things in our Umveld but wait isn't there more to the world than just our Umveld? And someone like Graham Harman and I'm really following Graham Harman on this will say well wait what about Pizza Hut okay so But right now, if you go to your local Pizza Hut all the workers there they could all die. Be replaced by new workers and you'd still have the same Pizza Hut. All the machinery there could wear out and be replaced by a new machinery. All the customers could come and go over generation but you'd still have the same Pizza Hut. So it looks like that Pizza Hut store has persistence that is over and above its parts. Moreover Harman would point out that Pizza Hut

21:37 We all behave differently when we're at Pizza Hut than we do other places. The franchise exerts a certain kind of control over the people that work there, et cetera, et cetera." And so it looks like Pizza Hut has powers that its parts don't have. So Harmon would say... and I think he's right then ... In a similar way that we think that your cat is a real thing over and above its parts, so is Pizza Hut. It looks like Pizza Hut is an object on it's own doing it's own thing and were parts of it." And then Harmon will push it further. Okay well then you've got the corporation Pizza Hut. The people who work there they all behave differently in virtue of working there. The corporation could survive all of them. So it seems like you have to say that Pizza Hut Inc is an object now

22:26 And now look, as we do this our objects are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And they're also getting further and further out from what you and I can really comprehend it understand." Like really does anybody know what the hell is going on in a multinational corporation? No right? And then Harmon will point out like he'll say the civil war while the civil war or what is it? It's something composed of a bunch of human beings and machinery and things doing stuff But nobody ran the Civil War. The Civil War really ran itself ultimately, it certainly survived the replacement of a lot of its parts. A generation of young men got changed over unfortunately in that war and all other people so now it looks like look, the Civil War looks like it's an object in the same sense that your cat is an object or you're not. It's doing its own thing. It's running on its own steam. It has some kind of control over its parts et cetera, et cetera. And then people like someone named Timothy Morton

23:22 They came up with the idea of a hyper object. Okay, and what is a hyper object? It's an object that in its very nature only kind of dips its toe into our own belt We just get a little bit of taste nothing it just vastly vastly vastly Outstrips what we could possibly fathom he has in mind things like the environment or global warming Or you talk to like all the plastic in the world What does that really up to okay because Tim is a an ecological thinker right I think he's right about this. And so economies, histories, extended events, these all seem to be a kind of hyper object that we aren't running and in fact they're running themselves and we may be run by them. Yeah. I love this stuff and that's a lot of foundational context

24:11 It's important to lay that foundation. I can't believe we're already a fourth into this thing, but i do love thought exercises about giving agency to things we might not typically think of the civil war is a good example like what is that? Is it alive our ideas alive like these sorts of things are pandemics things. Yeah, on several levels people around here ask that question so a colleague and frequent guest Gordon White once used the example that if a banana wants to get to space it better make itself appealing to humans and I love that's another one of those things like

24:51 the agency of all things. And one of my favorite obscure subjects is Magonia, the sky realm and the beings that supposedly are in it- Greg may I interject something real quick? Yes! I never heard that example before if a banana wants to get to space it should make itself appealing humans 100% That's awesome. I'm going to quote that because here's the thing is In this kind of object oriented thinking this hyper objective thinking there's a kind of anti humanism I'm not saying anti-human, I'm saying anti humanism. So I don't hate human beings but the way this thought is going is it's seeing this humanistic notion that the idea that we run the world and the world is here to serve us and ultimately we're in control of things and we can assure ourselves whatever outcome comes as soon as you admit that there are hyper objects... And then for all I know, the desk I'm sitting at might be a hyper object right?

25:49 Then this humanistic thing is done. Right? Like the human perspective isn't a priority to the objective world, it's just one perspective of many. Yeah and maybe the bananas ran that space program right? Exactly! That's where these things go and so to bring up Magonia It's just such an interesting bit of writing. And of course, Valet is the one who introduced me to Magonia and you have a chapter in the book, Magonia as Hyperobject The Organic Control Hypothesis and the Re-enchantment of the World. It's a chapter title bordering on perfection but talk to us about this chapter and how this foundation we've laid applies to something like Magonia? Yeah okay so if you admit

26:37 That Pizza Hut's a real thing, if you admit that there are hyperobjects. Let's kind of talk about the UFO then. Is it entirely surprising to you that there could be this entire even like nuts and bolts technology system that has taken off on its own? That is independent from us now, that sort of shows up occasionally on the edges of our own belt? That does not seem surprising to me, right? Who knows what systems are out there operating as objects that we're not aware of So, then the UFO thing sort of makes sense. But then so do fairies and goblins now. Okay? So do various religious apparitions. So to all these things... And then you're right Jacques Vallée calls this Magonia which is the medieval word for sort of the fairyland. By the way I never thought I'd be on a major podcast coming out for fairy land but here I am. Right here we are thank you for bringing me on. Of course! Yeah, I'm coming out for fairy land because we can now see

27:40 Jacques Vallée's Magonia really is just the same thing as the Uber-Umfeld. It's this world that transcends the basics of human experience and we would expect scientifically now, we would expect that there would be such a thing. And Vallée couples this with this notion of a control hypothesis. He says all we know about the UFO is it seems to be trying to manipulate us. It seems to be trying to run us. It seems to be trying to have certain effects on human beings And it's interesting in valet, and I think this is really important. It seems to do this by what I call a process of mythologization and demythologization. It seems to show up in uncanny ways that then introduces a kind of story we tell ourselves about things okay? And then a little later comes back and sort of takes that story back gives us another one so there's always this kind of cycle of mythology de-mythology going on

28:32 Although I would kick it to historians to correct me on that, but that seems to be what's going on. And Valet seems to think that seems to be a mechanism of control. It looks like we're being regulated and we're being regulated by cognitive manipulation. What I do then is I say, well look, that sounds like maybe were involved in a hyper object that we think of maybe as a kind of organism right? That What do organisms do? They regulate the behavior of their parts by releasing hormones and then lowering those hormone levels. So maybe what's going on here is we are involved in some hyperobjective reality that's beyond our ken, and occasionally this thing... We get out a whack, right? The hyper object catches a cold and it's going to regulate things by sending these messages downstream to sort of get the parts back in line, to get the parts participating again so the whole can work

29:26 So that's what I mean by it, the organic control hypothesis. It's taking Vallee's control hypothesis and interpreting it through the metaphor of an organism operating as a hyperobject. Mm-hmm. I like it. It's kind of like a metaphysical control conspiracy. This whole show started with conspiracy in mind. Obviously, the umbrella has widened and widened but just the idea of unseen influences, manipulations... Why do we do what we do? And think what we think It's not always human puppet masters. There might be hyper object puppet masters as well." Yeah, I think that's an important point Gregg. So as I said earlier who really runs Pizza Hut? The CEOs that run Pizza Hut... That supposedly run it they're just as much victimized by Pizza Hut as the people eating the poison right? Their lives are dominated by this thing too. Right

30:19 And they think they have control but they might not cuz they can be swapped out to a ceo can be swapped out and the thing is still the thing i mean this kind of makes me think about the idea of topaz and egregores. And just ideas than non physical aspects of reality are ideas alive did they have agency you talk to diana posolka in a really good conversation that i listened too and In it, you quoted her book where she said something to the effect of deities exist as information. And that kind of gets into this realm of archetypes and are they real? Like people do see visions of Jesus and Mary but they don't see visions of Batman. Batman is a well-defined archetype that has been chiseled

31:11 down to a set of characteristics over a long period time maybe in two thousand years from now people will see batman maybe it takes awhile for ideas to actually develop some kind of physicality to him. What, I just thought that was really interesting deities exist as information are using prometheus characters constructed from the human mind and given shape over time or were they swirling around in the non physical until they were. Detected and then you fold in what is saying about myths and being a control system and it gets really weird like,

31:47 what's going on the ethereal plane and what does that really mean to unpack deities existing as information to you? Yeah. So this is kind of where I'm thinking of taking this inquiry in the next step, it was cool to see like... It was on Diana's mind too. And so one when you said using example of Zeus and Prometheus You said, well are Zeus and Prometheus out there swirling around in the Uber-Umwelt on their own or are they just constructions of the human mind? And I don't mean this snotty Greg but I want to say that's a false dichotomy. One of things we need to get over. So the things that show up for the tick are real and the tick doesn't make them up. The things that show up for us are real and we don't make them up all right so

32:36 There are things in the Uber-Umfeld, and let's say we bump into them in a new way. Okay? So now what do you have? You have a new relationship and that relationship itself can become an object it can take off on its own. It can be running. Even if we said something like Prometheus... Because our technological obsessions that we have though I think humans always had technological obsessions right? We can talk about that but see the Prometheus is You have this idea of a technological society that we all desire and that idea is taken on life of its own. And now, we're being run by that idea. That ideas become an objective thing on it's own that's greater than us. It's like deity or some sort." Fine. But that presupposed that there was something we entered into a relationship with in the real world, in the Uber-Uber in the first place for that thing to get out of hand. So I would say yeah, the fact that we are runned by that deity

33:36 is a sort of emergent phenomena of our behavior, but we had to encounter something beyond us to make the change that now is running us in a new way. So you would say that these deities aren't inventions of the human mind but maybe discoveries that we bumped into along the way? Yeah and now the relationship between us and those things now has taken on this hyper-objective thing that maybe transcends both of us So how does your idea differ from like a multi-dimensional stack? Cause that's common too. That's a trope, like fairy world while there are kind of rules to fairy world you don't eat the food and drink you're offered or you get stuck there they come and try to take children. There is overlap with what people talk about happening in

34:29 a But that sounds very similar to the idea of a multi-dimensional stack of civilizations or beings living in the same space that sometimes bleed in to each other's realities. Is there a distinction I'm missing, or is it kind of similar? I think maybe this very same idea. Yeah, I think it's very similar. Okay. Two people I like on this... So Bernardo Castrop just had published an article on the UAP

35:15 And he referred to some of his earlier work in that article, and he referred to what he did in a book. He called Meaning In The Absurd okay? But he didn't refer to work that he did an another book called Brief Peaks Beyond where he gives hypothesis the UFO there it's very similar to what you are talking about here is like different systems out there in the world that are beyond the human can and occasionally we bump into each other and form a new relationship. And now you're going to get like all these overarching hierarchies, right? Second person I want to mention this...and William James is what I'm talking about here really influenced all of my thinking on this is William James thinks if we experience something and that experience can be shown to follow articulable patterns as it's sort of there's a law-like character to experience

36:04 then James thinks it's just our own biases that would lead us to not say that was real. On a very interesting paper that James wrote, he actually quotes someone else approvingly and the guy is saying yeah like your dream world is perfectly real because there's a sort of law that governs the dream world. It's not the law in the physical world right? So I have no problem saying that this Uber-Umwelt is sort of this realm of interlocking hierarchies, of different sets of laws. Right? Different sets of norms and then what happens is once we encounter one of these things there's no norm that carries over from the one Umwelt to the other and that's why we get the tension anxiety that's associated with it.\ That's an interesting idea.

36:49 I like this hyper object premise, but when i survey the hundreds of high strangeness stories. I've read you do hear everything from little people randomly coming out of a ship to collect dirt two giant worms that bring flowers manted beans that bring people to some foreign space just to explain some deep weird cosmic history before putting people back where they found them or just close door they found him and even electric talking raccoon beans that sort of wide range of diverse bizarre creature encounters in my mind is only really a match for two things dreams and psychedelic trip reports and even those might be essentially one thing. And i find it weird that so many people and you follow g historically would say no no no no can't be spontaneous streams are shamanic journey

37:44 this stuff is real, or even experiencers say that wasn't a dream it was real. And it's like every dream feels absolutely real until the trigger of waking up so I don't know if we're the best assessors of what is real and what's not and I don't even know if that terminology is right to categorize things but it seems like the diversity of encounters is just so strange I'm coming more to the conclusion that it's a match for dreams and that our reality is more dreamlike. And there isn't a distinction of real and unreal, but maybe sometimes dreams bleed over? Maybe sometimes dreams can get very physical and very scary. Even if you talk to people who have near-death experiences, that is similar to a trigger of waking up from a dream because people

38:39 Like there's a famous example of a woman who was struck by lightning and she is really eloquent talking about what that near-death experience was like, but suddenly she's looking at her own body humped over on the ground. And it was like huh I guess I wasn't that body? I guess i'm still myself and i'm now experiencing something else That's so close to the waking up from a crazy dream So i'm leaning less towards them being real I should not use the term real, I need to get better language. But some kind of society or species that has some objective reality outside of the encounters? That's the other thing that I always get stuck on is what are these beings doing when they're not encountering human beings because all the encounters seem so focused on the individual and it's like I don't see any ideas that they experience joy outside of interacting with humans or mating or love

39:35 Like, they don't seem to have lives outside of this scene. The scene of whatever the person is noticing." But what are your thoughts on that? The idea that if we really want to understand these bizarre encounters, we should do a better deep dive on dreams and the contents there and how they might be similar. 100%. Going back to Carl Jung's canonical book On the UFO, right? Flying Saucer is A Modern Myth Of Things Seen In The Sky. I read that with students in a class last year and they were, they're a little surprised that it's the book is like two thirds dream analysis. Right? And I think he makes progress to understanding it by doing the dream analysis. You know, okay. Bunch of cool things you said there I'd like to riff on if that's okay. Sure. So this is a little off color but fair enough so... A lot of people experience this when you get into UFO thing. Okay. I can buy the UFO deal but I'm not going to go for the abduction thing

40:31 And I'm not doing Bigfoot, like Bigfoot's always a line for people. So for me what brought me beyond that was actually the first time I started reading and listening to Whitney Strieber and I was struck by when Whitney had his initial encounter abduction event... Okay? Which he's careful not to say aliens right? Apparently, he went to see his own physician the next day or soon thereafter. And if I understand right, the doctor was sort of well... Dude, I don't know about what you're talking about but you were clearly raped. Yeah so it has this dreamlike quality but it left a pretty detectable physical trace on this man's body.

41:17 And Whitley, if you're here now I'm sorry. I shouldn't snicker it's not funny okay? This was a terrible traumatic thing and I'm sorry okay but it's true so it seems like something about this phenomenon is making us question now the dream and how you struggle for word reality distinction okay? It's making us question that in a way and you mentioned psychedelic drugs or near-death experiences And a lot of times the way people want to debunk or disregard the evidential value what people experience under those conditions, they say well look when you take whatever psychedelic drug or I would say plant substance. Okay right? Maybe drugs is wrong word there. There's a chemical thing going on in your brain and we're going to write that off to chemistry okay? Or near death maybe there's this endorphin rush to keep you from panicking or something and we're going to write that off for the chemistry but

42:10 Right now, my ability to see this cup is mediated by the chemistry of my brain. I am not going to see this cup under my bodily conditions without the chemistry operating in my brain. This cup is no less a construction, right? And I say it's just a construction but it's no less of construction of my neurochemistry than what anybody might've seen on a DMT trip." Right, right that's a great point. The term that gets used there often as baseline consciousness. Are ok with saying baseline consciousness is real but anything that strays outside of that is unreal and and thats kinda the problem because there's many different. Wavelength search channels on the consciousness radio you can turn to a different mechanism some natural some completely just with breathwork some with taking up plant

43:04 sometimes just by monitoring that weird liminal space between awake and asleep. There's the hypnagogic state that's right in there, that there's been a lot of bright minds that kind of found ways to keep themselves in that state and found that answers emerged from problems they were trying to solve much like Diana's Tyler and his protocols for receiving downloaded information. And it's something we have to remember too our baseline consciousness That which structures our umvel was designed basically to get you laid in the Paleolithic period. I mean, that's it right? You know what I mean? It's there for reproductive success ultimately okay? There are other priorities that one could have and experience in the world than reproductive success do you see what I'm saying? And so like they say somehow we're going to make the norm of consciousness what we were evolved for

44:02 is, I think very myopic. Because what we were evolved for was something like very narrow. But who says the world isn't much broader than that? Who says there isn't an Uber-Umwelt? Leaving aside the colorfulness of my example, you see my point, right? Mm-hmm. So I do like the Uber-Umwelt idea but I guess my thought I would expect the encounters, even if they're bizarre to be somewhat more standardized. Like you talk about even a shark in the book, the example of a shark is given and if a shark sees a person in the water it might not know about the totality of what a person is but it knows its meat. It's just an interesting shape of meat. And the same could be said for a seagull. You know there's a flying creature wow! I didn't know there were creatures that could fly

44:54 From the shark's perspective, it's like that's just another shape of meat and I will consume it in the same way. But when a shark encounters a human or a seagull, it may be foreign and bizarre but it's still kind of standardized whereas the UFO experience is so diverse like creatively diverse that I would expect if this was something that we somewhat encounter and we can't really conceive of, that it would just have a more standardized appearance like a craft. But the craft is a trope that isn't even really encapsulating all these high strangeness experiences and if we're gonna talk about evolution...I have some issues with evolution. Some people think the whole theory of evolution even though there's obviously truths in it that are provable

45:44 The idea that we came from apes is to try to subvert God and make everything just a meaningless universe. You know, you don't know the whole thing but from an evolutionary perspective wouldn't there be some advantage to sensing this hyper object if it disrupts our lives so much? And can be so bizarre I mean why would we filter that out when it does have effects on us and there'd be some evolutionary advantage to sensing it This is a really good question, Greg. I appreciate this after that one circle back to the dream thing too. So say this shark and seagull thing they're pretty foreign to each other but they're also pretty close right? Use sharks and humans because like probably we encountered our first shark pretty late on okay you know maybe...I don't know. I would still say though sharks eat meat, we eat meat

46:42 Sharks breed sexually, we breed sexually. Okay? So there is probably more common ground there than there is complete uncanniness but that doesn't mean there couldn't be things that were just completely irrelevant to our evolution that are out there and let's say we encounter now because we travel to different places that we don't normally travel Or because of television or radio or something like that, we're now keyed into wavelengths of light and sound and things that we weren't before. Because I'm proposing is the initial Uber-Umber hypothesis to say look what if there were things that were completely aloof to us in terms of our basic evolutionary past? We didn't eat them they didn't eat us right you know like we weren't competing for any resources at all

47:30 They were just irrelevant. But then humans develop to a point where we start occupying more space, metaphorically speaking than we had in the past and then you see something like that. So I think if that kind of experience happened it would be all bets are off for making sense of it. You're just going to take it and throw into whatever available category is hovering around in your unconscious right? And I think that makes sense for why in the 1950s suddenly people start seeing these as militarized aircraft. Well, why? Because we just won a war with militarized aircraft and we felt threat of militarized aircraft so that was like kind of hanging around in the unconscious. This is why again say in the middle ages it was seen as a different kind of thing because there were other things hanging around in the unconscious that you could use to make sense of this

48:20 There's an example of the Hudson Valley UFO. Actually, this comes up in the conversation that Diana and I had where you have one person saw it as like classic...I think little gray aliens getting out of a ship. Another person saw something completely different and it was the same appearance or it was the same event. That to me seems that kind of makes sense. If this really is something that we're not designed to deal with then we're going to essentially sort of subconsciously make up something on the spot to make sense And I think that makes sense of why it's so irregular in these ways. And then, I think Valet's point still stands is okay... So where we might look for regularity and understanding at the UFO then is not in its appearances to us but it's an effect on our behavior. Maybe we can get a better sense of what it is by what it causes us to do how it causes us to behave because maybe that's its intention is to change our behavior

49:19 I love that. And in terms of changing our behavior, another idea that's really interesting because we know that our senses are limited like we see less of the visible light spectrum than we know exists. We don't hear as well as even other animals here but when you start asking why would our senses be limited? you know, you can say evolutionarily we got what we needed. But there are some researchers who go deep into the oldest writings we have from the Sumerians who write about the Anunnaki this godlike council in the ancient past and some of these researchers interpret the text to suggest that we have been engineered not to see them not to see our own masters and that's really interesting like if they existed in a particular

50:09 frequency or light spectrum that we once maybe could see and then they were like, you know. Maybe we got too rebellious? We didn't like our masters. We didn't like all this so they had the power to genetically tweak us and they kind of capped human senses within the bounds of our new cave that they made for us to use a philosophical Plato's Cave analogy. But what do you think about that idea? Obviously, it's just speculation we don't know what the hell humans were like before the Sumerian texts but it is a lot of guesswork and assumptions of how humanity developed based on little pieces but there's an interesting idea there especially given that the oldest writings about

50:53 Other beans are pretty complex like there's an assumption that human cognition over time has gotten better but like when i look at older text and stuff my man these are some pretty complex ideas that were still talking about today trying to understand you're talking about them in samaria it's interesting. That's interesting. Look, the speculation train ended at like minute... We left on that at minute two of this thing so you don't have to apologize for me. I'm a philosopher. I get paid to speculate wildly right? Okay. So I liked that you bring that up because once again first of all it hits the anti-humanism trope that I think is the important thing to take from all of this okay is like hey what makes you think humans were evolved or designed whatever way we want to think about

51:41 to get the whole picture. Maybe we weren't, and I think that humility and all the dark questions that come with humility are very important especially at this moment in history I think are very important for us. Whether we come at it through an evolutionary story or mythological story a supernatural story, I think all of those views should lead us to think that we may well not be set up right? To get the whole story and we have to account for them. We have to account for the fact that When we look at the world, we are not going to get it very easily without putting our dirty fingerprints on it because we have to get a hold of it. And I think we have to always be asking what role are limitations doing in this? And I think when you start going control hypothesis with LA and I guess with me now... Something like what you're suggesting

52:36 that maybe there's like a cosmic conspiracy to keep us in the dark about something. Cannot rule that out, that's the thing when you admit this is unknown and you admit this is a paradigm mover, you forfeited your ability to presume a happy ending to it right? And I think that's important if we're going to be serious thinkers about this I agree. And, and I think this also gets really interesting when you fold in technology. I know you've given presentations on AI and the human soul, and you talked to Diana Pasulka about Prometheus. We've had conversations in the past year about the trickster element applied to technology. So first off, a lot of people who are the inventors of this stuff

53:18 They will admit, Hey the idea came to me in a dream. I had a download experience and then there's many people who probably won't admit that and it could still be true but i like the thought of A trickster being seeding technology and us thinking that It's a good thing when really its like a dirty trick some could say from a luciferian perspective Most technology takes us further away from God slash source, slash nature. We get the TV and our imaginations wither away we get the cell phone and we stop remembering phone numbers. We get the GPS and we lose our navigational abilities. We outsource everything and we think this is progress but from another perspective were only weakening ourselves food technology is another great example we make highly

54:12 technical and well-engineered foods like the Cheeto that plays with our senses and sensations, but none of the engineered food can touch the nutritional value of an orange or a carrot. So it is more of an illusion of progress than anything else I think there's some really interesting stuff there is like, are these ideas seated in people to screw with our society and take us further from ... When I say God, I just mean nature or our natural abilities. I remember phone numbers from when I was 10 years old still today but I don't know my wife's phone number. I have to look it up under wife in my phone. These sorts of things. Under wife? Our wives have become digital files. Exactly. That's a really good example Gregg.

54:58 When it comes to technology, I think there is an irony built into human nature. As you mentioned we already see this in Prometheus myth and I suspect there are other myths from other world traditions that have a similar view because Prometheus he's famously in trouble because he stole the fire from the gods and gave it to humans. And if you really read at least the version of the myth that you get in Aeschylus which I think is the most interesting one in Prometheus bound Prometheus is the creator of humanity. In Iskallus' version, the humans were not distinct from other animals before Prometheus pulls them up into technological being because Iskallus counts mathematics language all crafts everything that's technology it's a way of humans manipulating their environment to prosecute their interests and i agree with him

55:54 So, Prometheus is seen as the origin. I think we should read the Prometheus myth... This is a story about human origins and human distinctiveness. And in the beginning of Aeschylus' version of it, Prometheus has been nailed down to the rock and ironically, the deity that's nailing him down points out you're being nailed down by bar and chain. You're being nailed down by technology. Technology is undoing you, Prometheus And he mocks him like, your name means foreknowledge. That's what Prometheus means and you didn't see this coming." And later in the play, Prometheus says I saw it coming and I knew it. I just wanted to do this. Okay? I just wanted despite the gods by creating humans. But so humans are... In this myth they're just kind of a victimized play thing or Prometheus in his attempt to spite the other gods.

56:45 He's a trickster. The joke is on us ultimately." Right, very parallel to Lucifer in some ways. Yeah well in Paradise Lost the Lucifer character is based on Prometheus. So yeah so out of our modern imagination about what Lucifer would be it's from Prometheus and there is a claim in the Iskallos play that in the 13th generation the descendant of a human is going to knock off Zeus in service to Prometheus you know? It's predicting the death of God So, here's what I take away from that though is to be human is to be technological. But then ultimately it seems like there's a risk that we're going to undo ourselves with this. That human nature is this incredible thing that we can make an umbel for ourselves. We could decide how it's going to go in a lot of ways unlike other animals because we can technologically manipulate our environment and make more kinds information available to us and more kinds of thinking available to us but from the beginning Prometheus said that's going to get out of hand and we're going to get nailed to rock by our own technology

57:43 So, I kind of see this the way Martin Heidegger sees this is that yes we are on rails to something... Some kind of overcoming a humanity. Okay? And there's no getting off the rails. Maybe there's some hope on the other side of it but we're going to be undone by this. Right. There's the Joe Rogan quote that humans are the sex organs of the machine world I like that, you know we are basically designed to put them together. Like we only exist as a pathway to the technological development that really wants to emerge kind of like the banana cozying up two people to get to space. Like we had to be here to put the machines together to birth AI or whatever comes in the future and those are fun ideas and

58:28 So before we run out of time, we have segued naturally into talking about philosophy and broader life stuff. But I did want to ask you a broad philosophy question because I think there's a lot of people looking around at culture today and lacking any sort of pride in it or pride in themselves. And some people are going back to the Greeks for guidance. There's all kinds of Twitter accounts that are somewhat anonymous yet they're just really pulling out philosophy re-examining the nature of virtue and the best ways of being in this world by looking at ancient teachers. And I know you went through a radical physical transformation from being overweight to basically being Vitruvian Man, and UFOs are fun but let's leave people with some actual advice from a PhD philosophy professor regarding trying to live a virtuous life in the modern era and or the best practices to find inspiration

59:25 in an uninspired world if we feel stuck or unhappy with our current condition? Oh gosh, that's a great question. That's a very good question. Yeah I want to be careful holding myself up as an example but using that one point you make like I'm 50 now when I was 30 I weighed over 300 pounds and had the guts to get on scale but I know I lost a lot of weight at that point I was down like 275 And I lost all that in my early 30s. And like, I walk around now at 180 pounds and so I've kept it off for 20 years. So for me, I really did realize that I was living at odds with the stuff I taught because I was teaching philosophers talking about the virtues of moderation and temperance and the necessity of seeing the body as an image of the soul. And I just wasn't owning up to that. And that was something that became important to me from my own children too. Was I going to be some kind of a hypocrite?

1:00:26 And I think really what did it for me is, I got into myself psychologically and kind of got to why I was doing that to myself. So I think the answer your question... Okay so the Oracle Adelphi where Socrates claims to have gotten his mandate and we're all like the insightful news comes from in like The Great Tragedies. The Oracle, their motto was know thyself. So I think we all have to begin with that notion of shadow work Like what does really go on inside of us? Really, what does make us tick? Why do I actually do the things that I do? What are the real reasons for that?" And I think until you can ask those dark questions there's a risk that your living a sham life. That your just doing what was handed to you or your just doing whats convenient to you given how you would prefer to think about yourself where you're always letting yourself off the hook etc., etc..I think you have to be willing

1:01:31 to not just question the world, I agree. But I don't think you're in any position to question the world until you've questioned yourself and till you've really kind of got to the bottom like what are my motivations? I say I believe X and Y for this reason but is that really why I believe it? I say I have this or that problem for these reasons but is that really why or is that just a convenient story?" I think that kind of self-criticism is your first step, I think for everything because I can't say hey, I'm not going to believe all these things... I'm going to liberate myself from all these conspiracies that are trying to manipulate me until I can trust myself because otherwise, am I just choosing my preferred conspiracy? And you can't trust yourself until you've really put yourself into question. So what I counsel people is... and this is what philosophy should do. It should be about self-knowledge in a critical way

1:02:25 is put your most cherished things up against critical scrutiny. Get in that habit and I'm not saying you're going to lose those things but for all you know, they could be a sham and a lie until you're willing to do that Yeah, man. I think that's great advice especially for a conspiracy audience. A lot of us have had to wrestle with the idea of trusting ourselves versus trusting the system and we're so frustrated with the people in our lives that have blind faith in the system even though there is extreme corruption and it's known too you ask a regular person does the media lie to you? Do politicians lie to you they say yes and then you say okay what do they lie to you about

1:03:07 And then you find that they swallow every single thing thrown at them. And it's like, they don't apply the broad idea to individual situations and especially in the last few years they've been really challenging with like man can i trust what's being said through the fear box or do I need to trust myself And then because, yeah we can't change the system. We're always kind of counter-cultured thinkers. We're not really going to be able to impose a new system out there. We have the one we have. The big machine is running regardless so what can you do? You really can only take the reins of your life in very serious ways like that's why it's been a joke here recently that farming has become punk rock like truly alternative

1:03:55 And it's exciting to be like, no I am gonna take my own food and sustenance and my family stuff into my own hands because I'm not happy with the products that are given to me by this big machine. They're insufficient they're not nutrient dense But are you really going to take that on? You can intellectually recognize that the system is not serving you, but so many people pretend it is because it's very difficult to take the reins and really do the physical work that your thought process takes you towards. People want to stop right there and just kind of get stuck in what I say is like a

1:04:33 intellectual circle jerk about like, let's keep talking about what they're discussing at the World Economic Forum and what's coming. Let's just keep talking about it because for some people they think awareness is some kind of action but it really isn't you have to then do the hard work once you realize you're being screwed. Awareness without actions just complicity there you go and you've probably had this happen where I'll get together with like-minded people and we just sort of play... I liked the circle jerk, right? It's the outrage circle jerk. Right? Gee! Aren't the schools bad?" Yeah they're bad man." Yeah it's bad." You know, gee isn't the government bad?" Yeah it's bad," right? Whatever side in the political spectrum you want to go, we just get together and we just do the outrage thing

1:05:21 I get so tired, I know the schools are bad. I know the government's bad. Okay fine we've established that it feels good to say that but what are you doing with your life now? That's an important move and a great point. Yeah my whole job here this container is about talking so its really easy to get stuck in the tendency just talk but I hope people take the insights they gain and go forth and better their lives Man, this was a real blast. I think your book contains a lot of great ideas and analysis of the ideas that are good that have come before it. The people you include in it are some of my favorite and I'm thankful that you've taken the time to talk to me. Give the people any info you'd like about your website, the sub stack, the courses anything they might want to follow up on after hearing this? Sure excellent yeah so My website is JDMadden.com

1:06:17 And you'll find there, I have a link to my sub stack there and that's it. Substack is a terrible name just Jim Madden's newsletter. I got to change that. Maybe you can help me get a better title here? I'm on Twitter JDMadden3. On Twitter, I do a lot of quoting whatever I ready and like to kind of keep a log of interesting stuff comes from that so you might want to have look at that. I will be doing some courses in the coming year at Morbid Anatomy okay so keep an eye out for that's available. You can find Unidentified Flying Hyperobjects at Amazon, you could find Thinking About Thinking anywhere if you buy books, you can find that one so I appreciate people taking the time to take my work seriously. I'm really honored by it... I'm actually surprised by that and honored so

1:07:07 Right on. Well, Jim you are the man I'm glad more people like you are applying their minds to the mysteries because we've been stuck on the same old tropes for too long but thanks again and take care! I appreciate it's been great Greg anytime if you want me back i'd be honored For sure All right Jim Madden and a philosophical approach to the UFO...I like it Just the term unidentified flying hyper object sucked me right in. I had to know what it was about, I heard the back and forth he did with Diana Pasulka and thought hey maybe he'd talk to me too! But he is a great guy, he vetted me first as well and said that he liked several episodes of how I do things around here and that was nice for him to say too. I always get a little stressed talking to a college professor. I tell my wife this right before recording

1:08:02 It's like PhD level professors have probably heard it all. Am I really going to come up with any kind of fresh take? Am I really going to be able to hold my own for two hours in such a conversation or will half of it be over my head? Classic philosophy is definitely not my strongest subject! I have found a lot of things in it that i enjoy and consider very much mind expanding but there are other times when it can get so deep into the minutiae of definitions and categorization that it almost gets too fundamental. There was some famous debate not long ago maybe a year or two, that would have been a good example...I wish I could remember who it was but I think two members of the so-called intellectual dark web

1:08:52 and so many people were excited to hear them talk, and they spent the whole two or three hours defining and redefining the word truth. So that kind of thing can and does happen with philosophy but Jim's application of his expertise to High Strangeness is a lot of fun His book covers a ton of the themes and people we tend to like most I really enjoy the way he talks about Plato's cave. Is there a game behind the game, behind the game? How many layers deep is ultimate unbridled naked reality? Do we ever see it? These are interesting things to think about especially in a time when so many walking among us are completely mesmerized by the first layer of the hyper charade if i could coin a new term myself

1:09:44 So there's a lot to like here and in his book something that we didn't even get to is his take on Jacques Vallée as the Oppenheimer archetype of the digital age compelling maybe next time. The uber um belt is a fun thing to think about Man, did I look dumb right off the bat mispronouncing that? You know sometimes you read a book and then as soon as someone says the word aloud it's like oh yeah duh. I don't know why i was saying it this other way in my head It doesn't seem to hold Steven Snyder back though so...I guess I shouldn't worry about it much either but I hope we all digested some good food for thought and I appreciate Jim applying his talents to such an out there subject

1:10:30 The Plus show gets deeper into art and spiritual, some occult adjacent sorts of things. Dreams and trips missing time all sorts of great stuff become a plus member if you aren't one already the links are right there at the top of this show notes but you know this And as for the last episode with Shannon Rowan it pains me to say this but we might have the lowest score of the year so far 3.7 Man, I guess you could say that's still decent. It's a 7.4 out of 10 but usually the ratings are so generous that this is clearly not a favorite if i had to guess based on a few comments and my own thoughts rallying against ivermectin bothered a few people others felt there was a lack of depth and details maybe some of my questions didn't get answered to listeners satisfaction

1:11:31 Here would be an example someone said a lot of great info but it was a huge red flag for me when you asked her about the second two of the four horsemen of the apocalypse medical interventions and she was like i didn't really research those well then why did you put them in your book? Granted, she was quoting someone else's work but it isn't the book I should be able to ask about it. So yes, I understand the criticisms. I personally liked the book 700 pages full of good information but its probably a little hard to recall everything from books of such immense size On a positive note people really did like the idea of an herbalist emergency kit and some advice there

1:12:18 I will also say that when we were done with the interview, she mentioned that when she reached out about Shots Fired. I'd said, and I don't know we kind of did the medical thing to death. I don't know if we've waited long enough before doing a new vaccine show. And she's had fine and suggested we talk more about her book Wifi Refugee . And I guess I just forgot that we had that conversation and slipped into the old habit of focusing on the newest work And maybe she should get cut some slack because she thought we were going to be talking primarily about the EMF work. So at least 0.5 of that score is my fault You guys know I try to diversify the subject matter and not hit one thing too much, and I know this episode and Daniel Rekshan and even Tom Kenyon have a lot of thematic overlap

1:13:14 but I had a couple of cancellations. I'm hoping to reschedule them and they would diversify the lineup for sure, and Shannon was there to bring us back to Conspiracyland! I just wish it was rated higher so i'll try and adjust March's calendar a little bit to make up for that And that said, you know the last task at hand is always the meetup calendar. Find like-minded locals expand your network brace for tough times ahead with people you won't have to catch up to speed here we go on deck We got Sinspiracy number six hanging out in Cincinnati Ohio at the OTR still house February 24th Brisbane Queensland Australia at the Maramba Downs Tavern

1:14:02 Don't sleep on it. February 26th, Eugene Oregon at World Pies! It's going down! And February 9th Denver gets higher once again at Bar 404 in Denver Colorado I'm already seeing some stuff for March Mill Forth Connecticut LA Columbus Ohio Wits at North Carolina Looks like it's gonna be a good one Hop onto the Meetup calendar, highersidemeetups.com Get more information if you heard anything that sounded like it might be close to you and RSVP so the host knows what to expect It's just good manners

1:14:40 Awesome, so that's that. I hope you had a good time big thanks to Jim for his work and insight check out his book or sub stack if you want to dive deeper and i'll see ya soon with another one Your move hyper object injectors bizarre beings beyond the uber um belts and creatures beyond my simple comprehension your fucking move from space it was falling its light started calling It's making crop circles again Just as I was looking up it showed me all the hidden stuff And now i'm all enlightened and zen Nothing masses is hard Silver ship sir Now im not asleep Don't obey the elite Got a beam to the How I start to wonder Now we're not the sheep that they put us to be Got a beam to the head Now we start to wonder

1:15:56 of corruption and crime since the visitors set me straight I encouraged you to go when you see the saucers glow up awake The masses is hard, silver ship's yard Now we're not asleep Donald got a beam to the We start to wonder No were not the sheep that Now we start to wonder

1:16:40 Now we start to wonder You'll see these things up in the sky Just the system starts to die All's faded and makes trouble erase It's time we have faith Cause were not the sheep that they feed to the- Now, We Start To Wonder! Now were not asleep cause we got THC And now we start to wonder x3

1:17:40 We start to wonder