Joshua Cutchin | Ecology of Souls: A New Mythology Of Death & The Paranormal

00:04 The planet's puppet masters almost surely have a plan There's clearly maybe something there beyond the realm of man And until you've thoroughly tested every last close-tested view I find the more you think, you know The less you really do without THC Cause we know they're lying to us Just don't know to what degree Where were What a world, what a world. From the Sunshine State I'm Greg Carlwood and our current culture does a great job of preoccupying itself with mundane human affairs political drama and entertaining distractions while remaining blissfully ignorant of the larger than human world, the complex layers of consciousness and deeper reflections on what it even means to live

01:07 We don't know much about the deep lore of the fairy folk, the long history of visits from tiny frail beings or the detailed instructions for navigating death laid out by those who came before us. Yet some of us are occasionally plucked from our simplistic existence and shown scenes behind a curtain like stuffed animals in some cosmic claw machine only to have our minds blown momentarily before we're tossed back onto the pile Others see things at the edge of the woods that defy what we've been told about reality. Some experience a kaleidoscope of psychedelic colors and conversations with dead relatives when you eat the right mushrooms, and occasionally one might barely survive a car accident only to be transported to some other plane and taught the lesson that there is no such thing as death and they will be waiting for us on the other side when we're ready."

01:54 You would think these things would be worthy of discussion, but we have allowed the very mild threat of ridicule to keep us quarantined inside a culture of silence. But fear not dear listeners because today's returning guest Joshua Kutchin just can't take it anymore and has laid it all on the line with yet another masterwork to add to his growing collection with his latest two-parter titled The Ecology Of Souls A New Mythology Of Death And The Paranormal It clocks in at over 700 pages of Fortean goodness and provides one of the best comparative explorations of all things fringe, and how they overlap with death consciousness and the human spirit.

02:32 Longtime listeners should know that Josh and I have done the dance several times before. Originally in 2016 to talk about his book, A Trojan Feast! The Food & Drink Offerings of Aliens, Fairies and Sasquatch Again in 2017 going over his book The Brimstone Deceit An In-Depth Examination Of Supernatural Scents Otherworldly Odors And Monstrous Miasmas Another time in 2018 upon the release of Thieves In The Night a brief history of supernatural child abductions And once more in 2020 with his co-author Timothy Renner to talk about their work Where the Footprints End, High Strangeness and The Bigfoot Phenomenon. He's absolutely a leader in the Fordian field taking a genre that was sadly withering on the vine and nursing it back to a flourishing tapestry of mystery curiosity and ripe fruits of insight much needed in our hungry and ignorant world

03:24 Let's get into it. One of my favorite people on this island Earth, the strange stuff soil restorer paranormal seed sower and high strangeness horticulturalist Joshua Kutchin welcome back my friend Thanks so much, Greg. I really appreciate the intro. I do what I can! It is great to talk to you again my show is only as good as the guests that come on and so I'm lucky to have you The Ecology of Souls is a mind blower A book that Chris Knowles calls a foundational text Mourning of Magicians Passport To Megonia Cosmic Trigger And Operation Trojan Horse all wrapped into one and multiplied by ten I don't know if it gets any better than that

04:06 Even I get a few references in the footnotes, which means I can die happy. I guess even though it seems like you source every piece of content you've ever consumed. Yeah, I am an avid hunter of whatever facts I need wherever they come from and I just track everything down that I can so it's always a bunch of books there is my library You can use Google Books to your advantage if you know where to look You trawl through the podcasts and you also poke through some academic journals, and voila on the other side. You have way too much work ahead of you. Yes! So this comes just a few episodes after my second interview with Whitley Streber, and he expressed some boomer opinions about politics in some subject matter that triggered a good number of listeners but that has nothing to do with his experiences with visitors

05:03 and the deep thinking he's done on that subject. Our initial interview was largely about his book, The Afterlife Revolution which he quote unquote co-wrote with his wife Anne after she passed Ever since he zeroed in on that quote of Anne's, that these visitors have something to do with what we call death. I've been mulling it over because it is an avenue that isn't as common as the others or wasn't until this book but I understand you too were inspired by that very same quote and insight of Anne! Yeah, you hear that the first time you hear it and it really just gets stuck in your brain and Won't go away. At least that was my experience So the death connection was something that has been alluded to for decades in ufology I mean You can find some issues of flying saucer review from the UK That talked about connecting UFOs to death as far back as the 1950s but as with a lot of my other work

06:03 It was only mentioned in passing or in a paragraph, or maybe someone might devote a chapter to it. But nobody had ever really said well what can we pull out of this? How can we pull this thing apart And that's the exact sort of thing that I like to do is take something that people have taken for granted or think is too niche or too broad, to really examine in depth and say okay well let's see if maybe this tells us something greater about the phenomenon. And...I had no idea when I started pulling on this thread that it would turn out to be as

06:42 as long, the thread and the books as long as it ended up being. But once you start tugging on that, you start to see that a lot of these topics do keep on coming back to that final moment that we all share like one of the few universal human constants, you know, are born, we all eat. We all go to the bathroom and we all die." And maybe that's part of why there are so many connections is that it is a universal human constant but the profundity of some of these connections just really ended up sticking with me. So I was going to write a quaint book about UFOs and death, and it became readily apparent that you needed all sorts of background to even begin that discussion or else you'd constantly be putting things in parentheses or having digressions. So I was like okay well volume one is the background and volume two is more or less the UFO book

07:36 Mm hmm. Yeah, that's a great way to get us started and as I mentioned you are largely known for the comparative work you've done between people who experience aliens and the older stories of people who experienced fairies and showing just how similar they really are how this is probably a continuum of contact, but now let's add death to that stack. How often are people seeing dead relatives in these ships with the aliens or down in fairyland when they're whisked away? That's a good question and that was sort of the other thing that inspired this project was you know Passport to Magonia 1969 I think did a great job

08:17 through the work of Jacques Vallée, of illustrating how much the modern alien slash extraterrestrial slash UFO contact experience looks like the older fairy mythologies. But the question that always stuck in my mind was, well what would a 13th century version of Passport to Magonia look like? And given the connections that people have always made between fairies and the dead it would probably make that connection. It would probably say hey these fairies look a lot like these dead people so through the transitive property what does it say about the UFO phenomenon right? So Yeah prior to the rise of Theosophy in the late 19th century when people in Western Europe especially but an argument can be made worldwide amongst indigenous populations whatnot But especially in Western Europe people tended to think of fairies In terms of being at least tangentially related to the dead so if you go back through all that older literature You're constantly finding references to people who have died and become fairies people who

09:17 are seen with the fairies after they die. I mean, the number of stories that involve the food taboo which was the topic of my first book a Trojan Feast, the number of stories involving that food taboo that include a dead relative or dead neighbor being the one who is among the fairies warning the person in fairyland not to eat or drink those stories are legion so it's an extremely common Again, fairies are complex. They're not just one thing but there often is some sort of connection to the human dead now the alien question is a little bit more difficult to answer I

09:53 I had every intention of going down to Rice University, to the archives of the impossible. To sort of sift through the communion letters and try to find as many of these cases as i could but it was you know vaguely post slash tail end of the pandemic was like late 2021 when I started doing this research So, you know between all the restrictions and whatnot. It didn't seem like the right time so I assume that if I went down to the Archives there and look through all the letters that Whitley and Anne received in the wake of communion I'd have found just way too many and maybe some ways it's good because I think my obsessive-compulsive disorder Probably would have meant that I just wrote You know three more books that are just lists of those encounters so maybe was for the best but having said that even with the sort of

10:41 comparatively limited resources at my disposal, I still had to not include cases that i kept finding because they weren't you know quite odd enough. So Ecology of Souls is two volumes there's also a companion volume which includes the end notes the bibliography and three appendices and I filled the first two appendices with encounters of people either aboard UFOs or during periods of heavy UFO contact where they meet the dead And it's common enough to not be ignored, I think would probably be the best way to put it. I wouldn't say that it is necessarily expected during what we would call alien abductions but It's definitely not an outlier and then when you sort of broaden that understanding to include things like just general soulcraft and out-of-body experiences

11:35 stories of reincarnation and past lives and even pre-birth memories, which for the longest time I didn't know what to do with in the UFO phenomenon. If you broaden that sort of definition to include just general preoccupation with the soul then yes it's absolutely one of the focal points around which this UFO phenomenon seems to orbit. And just as the motifs of fairies and aliens are kind of cross-compared a little more often than some of the other subjects in the book. We also have psychedelics and NDEs that are often talked about in the same circles, and it just seems as if death has a sequence of events that

12:18 are involved in that process. And of course, a lot of people don't come back so with NDEs and that kind of thing and psychedelics we get a glimpse at what it might be it seems like those experiences start to trigger before the mushrooms wear off or the paddles bring you back to life whatever happens but a lot of it involves flotation bright white lights whether it's a orb or a tunnel and dead relatives. A lot of times people are saying, well I saw an angel a tall blonde beautiful angel And then my dead grandpa and they said everything's fine come with us or you know You have to go back that kind of thing but these are like the first chapters of a story that happens when we die that we sometimes get to look at and I've never really seen that box of experience

13:12 compared with the same sequence of events that seems to happen with alien encounters. Like there is a checklist there and sometimes they do overlap, but do you have like a go-to quintessential story that involves death with UFOs that you'd like to use as an example? That people just might not be aware if they're just used to the nuts and bolts ET hypothesis stuff I'm sure i do, I just can't remember off the top of my head. I will say that if there is a certain amount of utility in sort of what I tried to do with Ecology of Souls and yes if anybody listening is wondering if I'm stalling to find an example...I am! But I think that some of the utility in the book is the fact that you had other people involved

14:06 you know, the sort of UFO near-death slash Fortean realm who have compared, you know, oh well the near death experience looks a lot like alien abductions. That's something that Kenneth Ring talked about at length and you had people like Eddie Bullard who came along and said hey look these shamanic initiations or just general Rites of passage for people who become spiritual leaders of their particular population These look a lot like alien abductions and you know, you have people who say well You know the interactions in fairyland look like alien abductions, but I don't think anybody has ever really Tried to make these things play together if that makes any sense So yeah, that was sort of part of my goal is to say look at the end of the day It kind of starts to all look like the same realm or something to that extent now whether or not That's objectively an afterlife. I think it's probably another question entirely But it does seem that there as a threshold that we cross in a lot of these different experiences so one of my favorite stories involving the dead and

15:07 alien abductees seems to have a real verifiable, veridical component. Now I'm not sure exactly how much follow-up has been done on this case but it's interesting because the individual who was seen during the UFO contact was not known to be dead by the person who is the primary witness so this was around 1963 in Massachusetts there was an abductee who claimed that they had gone with some grey aliens to this crystalline pyramid city. Again, that's something you see in near-death experiences and fairyland stories and all that but during the course of these repeated interactions on one occasion she recognized a couple of people but there was someone who introduced herself as Ingrid Swinson And I don't believe they knew each other But in any case

15:57 The researchers who followed this individual's case looked into Ingrid Swenson because they wanted to find out if she was an alien abductee as well. And they discovered that this Ingrid Swenson lady was actually dead. And she lived in South Dakota, not Massachusetts. The two had never met yet the abductees description of this lady matched how she appeared in life. So I like that story again. I'm sure that it probably has some problems if you poke around for long enough in terms of how valid it was or maybe it doesn't. I'm not entirely sure but it does seem to have that sort of tantalizing hint that there is something verifiable happening in these experiences.

16:42 Yeah, I've heard a couple of stories where they say I saw craft come down and there were two gray aliens and My dead uncle and it's just strange. It's something I've noticed over time I don't know if it's the majority of cases I assume kind of that it isn't but it is like you say it happens enough that we should note it. I've also noticed a They move away from describing the greys as cybernetic type beings, and I more often hear them described almost like mummies. Frail, skinny and dehydrated. The term dehydrated has come up several times, and I also hear that with men in black encounters that they just seem

17:27 not only like they're out of time, but they seem kind of dehydrated or pale skinned. Like they've been drained of their blood and also when you hear about people with black eyes or just empty holes where the eyes should be that also kinda speaks to the dead so I really think your onto something here that has always been mentioned but just no highlighted enough So those are all excellent points and the thing that I sort of used to get people to this sort of jump onto this idea is, I asked them how would you draw a gray alien skeleton? And I ask that question because it would be very difficult to really differentiate it from alive gray aliens. Right? I mean they're so skeletal to begin with they've got these heads that are a little bit oversized admittedly but you know the black eyes do resemble empty sockets The noses are almost always vestigial

18:21 In some cultures, the dead were depicted with small mouths or no mouths which is something that you often hear in these great alien descriptions. I mean even As I point out, the ufological establishment made this exact mistake back with the Roswell Slides incident of several years back. They thought that they had proof of an alien body when in reality it was the body of an indigenous child that they mistook for a gray alien so obviously there's enough similarities there to beg the question now Of course this gets a little bit more complicated when you introduce other ideas that we just don't talk about in our culture anymore there was once this idea that you found it was quite widespread, I dare say even universal that the dead could shape shift into any number of forms. So the question becomes well are the greys shapeshifted human beings? Are the more fantastic looking aliens shapeshifted human beings and you've got a lot of these aliens that seem to be hybrids of...I mean they basically look like hybrids of human beings and animal right so you've got avians and reptilians and mantids and what's interesting is that all

19:24 all of those quite terrestrial animals often have death symbolism attached to them as well. But the question further complexifies when I, you know, I mentioned that earlier story about the lady who did not recognize the abductee as being a dead person and if there hadn't been that follow up investigation would she have ever realized that person was dead at all? And I think it's an important point to consider because we have plenty...I mean argument can be made that perhaps even most of these encounters involve beings that look like human beings. I mean, I know that's Micah Hanks' stance these days is that the UFO occupants often look like human beings and if you didn't know those human beings when they were alive how do you know these UFOs aren't literally being piloted by dead people? Now of course, you know i'm sure some people have a nuts-and-bolts UFO persuasion out there will say well it's absurd that dead people spirits would pilot a mechanical craft

20:20 I understand that there's discussion to be had there. We're not having it right now, um right now we're just making the assumption that the UFO is something physical or non-physical and that it does have something to do with the dead and there does seem to be an abundance of stories where the dead show up in the wake of UFO contact of all varieties so yeah the entities themselves...I have a whole chapter basically dedicated how a lot of these UFO occupants not only resemble the dead both literally and symbolically, but also how you know A lot of the communication vectors that they use are identical. People have gotten alien communication from Ouija boards and electronic voice phenomena In fact some of their earliest EVP pioneers thought that they were picking up transmissions from space So you've got this long history of the two topics intertwining You know How odd is it? That they still might seem to have something to do with each other Yeah

21:13 I'm with you. And we've mentioned shamanism a couple of times, that is an overlap that i've been really interested in because it's very occult adjacent and It really was aliens and magic in the occult that was a major overlap that I started to look at couple years ago because i liked that, In the realm of magic these encounters are triggered rather than being random. You say the incantation you draw the pentagram you get out there at 3am and have the experience These beings come. Well, these beings clearly would be more multidimensional but I would hear more and more stuff that sounded like gray aliens or sounded very similar and then I'd start to think well maybe there's some universal law that there must be X number of shamans To be liaisons between the two worlds And we just don't have that in our culture anymore so these beans are coming to our side and saying you

22:15 You're going to have this experience. You are now touched with the light and you are now a shaman, oh and also you can heal people so go forth and do that! And we're just gonna keep picking people out that might be why there's lineages of people and there's some kind of genetic family tree component to it it's like... We lost the knowledge of who the shamans were and so you have a guy in 2023 who doesn't know anything about his great-grandma, who gets visited in the night. Shown all this crazy stuff and then it's like now you're a shaman dude get ready for your new life I guess you could go back to your job at H&R Block You're gonna have to figure out how to work that out but you're also a shaman now because we need that

22:57 Yeah, this is an idea that I'm quite sympathetic to. And the first time that I heard it described was in Mike Collins' work. I can't remember who he was in conversation with but the basic idea was that there's almost this as you alluded to shaman quota and I'm using the term shaman very generally here specifically that should normally apply to Siberian peoples but I'm just using the term for just intercessors between the human world and the spirit world The idea is that yes, there is a shaman quota and if the universe... If they're not provided by human beings the universe will provide them. And of course we don't have a framework for that in our current world and you know in some cultures you know the initiatory experience or the aftermath the initiatory experience would often seem like madness to an outsider if there wasn't that framework to incorporate them into a dialogue between these two different worlds

23:54 So I do think that there's something there to that. And again, you know, the death connection continues to loom in this scenario because so many of these different initiatory rites involve symbolic rebirth sometimes, you know, in some cultures shamans are literally shaman candidates are literally buried underground and exhumed. I mean, you can't get more explicitly death or rebirth that way so now at the same time it's a bit reductive to say that every you know shamanic initiation is some sort of near-death experience Gregory Shushan who has done a lot of work with indigenous near-death experiences goes great lengths to point that out but it does seem

24:31 there is an effort to push you into the same realm that you might get from a near-death experience. So it's a slight but sort of critical distinction The other thing, I'm wondering hearing you talk about noticing the different types of entities that are creeping through i think the important thing that people also might need to hear to separate us from the idea that the dead are visiting us Is that we don't really know...I suspect That's the better way to put it. I suspect our attributes fungible or quite malleable on the other side of death. When what I mean by that is, yeah you could come back as a gray alien manifesting before someone you could come back as perhaps an animal or bird and this idea that we all go into sort of this pool of consciousness in bits and pieces are pulled back out again A good example what i'm trying to drive at it's not only the way

25:27 The dead sort of evolved or were conceptualized as fairies in a lot of these different cultures, but also the way that we think of demons. Like very rarely today does anybody entertain the idea that demons were living human beings They're almost always conceived as beings that are sort of immortal, that have been in the service of hell since you know beginning of existence or perhaps even before existence. But there were a lot of cultures that would bury someone perhaps someone who had transgressed the local community they'd bury them at the crossroads and then they they'd be known as the evil dead, not in the movie but just evil dead spirits. And over time as people sort of forgot the precise events of that person's death they sort of transformed into a perhaps a spirit of the place or sort of a negative fairy and then they might eventually literally evolve into being conceptualized as a demon or a devil you see something similar going on

26:22 in a positive light with a lot of revered medicine men, medicine women and cunning men etc. In these different cultures where they are revered sometimes this might not only be you know sort of spiritual intercessors of the tribe or whatnot, but also might be chieftains or war heroes. They would be interred at a specific spot and over time their direct living memory of people who interacted with them would fade and after subsequent generations they'd become a folk hero and then they sort of become the genus loci of place they've become the spirit of the place. The work

26:59 Former Sorbonne Professor Claude Lecouteau, he writes great books. I strongly advise anyone out there listening to check them out. I tell people that they're my favorite UFO books even though he never mentions UFOs! Claude Lecouteau describes this exact mechanism in one of his books and you can also see this in certain cases with I believe it's Buryat shamans who are buried in a certain place for a time their caskets or their bodies are exhumed and then they're reburied at a place specifically to become the protecting spirit of that particular area, of the forest or geographic feature landmark etc. So I think the idea that we just... and it's very much tied to our personal egos right? Like i want to stay Josh after I die you want to say Greg after you die but I'm not sure that the reality necessarily lines up with that and it does seem like we might be able to take on different roles and even different identities or aspects once we cross

27:57 Yeah, you know the one psychedelic serious breakthrough I had. I definitely was out of body and I felt like oh this is my natural state this feels more normal than being in the shell of that body but my inner dialogue was preserved and i think for me that's what I care most about. I want to hold on to the inner dialogue and the memory and I don't care what I look like or the shell but I don't think you get to keep that either sadly so I'm way more interested in the life forms that seem to be something else entirely than I am the dead. It doesn't even seem that interesting to me, that you die and then you're on this other side of the veil and then you sometimes can come over or you can communicate it seems like yeah i kind of take that for granted but i want to know what these things are that seem to have

28:51 I guess lives outside of this, they just seem like they're specifically designed to be liaisons between the worlds and i just don't get what their existence is like. You use the term psychopomps in the book which i rarely hear used really but it probably is a better term for the characteristics of these things than space aliens. But talk to us about psychopomps, these beings that really are just guides to the deceased and some of the categories they exist in and some of their qualities? Well, a psychopomp is a great example of a word that not a lot of people know but everyone actually knows quite a bit about. If that makes any sense? So you know if I said the Grim Reaper everybody's like oh okay i understand that concept and that's what psychopomps are they're these characters that lead you across the threshold of death

29:45 from life into death. They are not Death Omens, although some people erroneously call them Death Omens and their appearance can perhaps imply that someone's about to pass away but they are not specifically Death Omens in and of themselves the way we might consider other superstitions like anomalous lights or you know perhaps even certain birds or the Hound of the Baskervilles style familial haunting. They're not death owens in that sense but psychopomps are folk figures, deities sometimes shamans or dead loved ones or ancestors or animals or natural phenomena depending on the culture

30:24 that escort people over that divide. So an example of a folk figure would be something like the Grim Reaper or the Anku of Brittany, and examples of a deity would be something like Anubis or Hermes or some very specific indigenous psychopomps like Barnum Beer amongst certain Indigenous Australian tribes An example of natural phenomena would be things like the sun and the moon, which have this sort of death-rebirth cycle encoded into their natural comings and goings. Or even the aurora borealis for some cultures that lived in the far northern hemisphere. Depending on your culture you might have your ancestors leading across the divide, you might have magical practitioners or shamans or cunning men, cunning women those sort of characters leading you to the other side

31:14 The one I think surprises people the most is the animals, leading people to the other side. But it's such a common motif and you see it across so many different cultures and the animals that you see time and time again, Mircea Eliade points out a lot of these different similarities but some other people who have delved into shamanic practices worldwide also have noted this as well. The animals that you see time and again are dogs horses and birds And of course, these animals all to some degree embody the qualities that you would want in that transition. Right? So birds can reach far flung places that human beings could never reach because they can fly there

31:52 Perhaps something about their migratory cycles and codes that sort of transition into death as well Horses could take you know ancient human beings places that they wouldn't be able to go very quickly So there's that concept in there. And of course, we all know why dogs would be loyal leaders into the afterlife But what I find especially interesting and significant about that is that all three of these animals do indeed have very robust ties to UFO experience the first livestock mutilation was Snippy the horse, it wasn't a cow. Birds and UFOs are a thing is probably the most succinct way to put it you know the work of Mike Cleland illustrates that owls were a psychopath too great many cultures themselves specifically and there are lots of different sightings involving dogs in UFOs I know Whitley has talked recently about this sort of second

32:45 Or I don't know how many entities he's described at this point, but you know third or fourth order of visitors that he has compared to small dogs running around. You go back to the contactee era and you've got Buck Nelson talking about Big Bo the Venusian dog. Not that i necessarily believe some of those contactee stories but thematically it keeps coming up time and again So, these animals are all seen in conjunction with the UFO phenomena and they're all the most common psychopomps. And even if you go to that sort of second tier of psychopomp animals, you find more animals that are associated with the UFO phenomenon. A great example is deer depending on the culture. The deer which is also a fairy animal very common fairy animal would be viewed as a psychopath as well. There's an infamous case

33:29 involving an abductee that Bud Hopkins studied by the name of Virginia, who one of her most prominent memories in regards to UFO phenomenon where she actually supposedly had these memories retrieved after hypnotic regression of actually boarding a UFO were following deer into the forest. And that was all that she remembered before you know, she was regressed is that she had followed a deer into the forest that has this sort of eerie quality about it so its just you start to look at this and it starts to become so dadgum parsimonious, I think is the best word for it. Things start to look really tidy and it does seem that what is more of a transition than being taken into this other world that the UFO seemed to take us to? A primary example in one I'm quite fond of making is

34:16 People are also familiar with a psychopomp Karen not Karen the lady's name, but ch Aron who leads the dead across the river Styx you know in a ferry right F er ry and spell everything right now But it leads them across the river Styx in a fairy and this idea of the boat or the ship is a common thing death symbol and by extension a common psychopomp symbol. We're all familiar with Viking burials, some of the earliest coffins in China were actually literal canoes that were used In fact there's some speculation that small canoes and whatnot were actually sort of served dual purposes in a lot of ancient cultures as being either boats or coffins

34:56 And so the symbolism in that is apparent, right? The boat can take you across the horizon. It could take you to a distant land think about the end of The Lord Of The Rings where Frodo and friends don't exactly die but they kind of die. You know and what is the UFO if not a technological modern reinvention of the psychopomp's boat with a technology that so beyond our comprehension, that it might as well appear magical. And it accomplishes the same thing. It takes you to another realm because everybody who talks about UFOs is transportation obsessed right? Like where did it come from? Where's it going? Why are they here? Where are they taking me? You know those sort of questions So I think that looking at a lot of these encounters through that sort of psychopomp angle

35:47 is one that has not been explored enough. Yeah, I agree and i do love the description of UFOs as modern ferryman vehicles to take us to the other side! I think that's great and psychopomps are interesting they seem to be guides that you can trust to do your right and god bless them for being there for us in our time of need when we're ignorant of the death process and have no context but so many of these stories are mischievous. I mean, you know you're the guy who wrote Thieves in the Night! These beings are maybe some psychopomps but they also seem to have their own agendas that are varied and

36:30 Maybe they've let the power go to their head, like hey I could take these people to where i'm supposed to take them or I could just steal their soul and pregnant their women. Take the fetus and do all this other stuff! I don't know why they've decided to change the game but one of my favorite subjects that has been talked about with guests is the soul trap hypothesis, the idea that the natural process of death whatever it is has been hijacked and there's some kind of being that has come in and said we can grab people at this moment when their soul leaves their body

37:08 and we can do whatever we want or impart this new process that keeps us nourished, whether it's an energy farm. Some people talk about the souls going to the moon somehow or that there is a frequency broadcast from Saturn that keeps us locked in a vibration that they can control to some degree. What are your thoughts on those sorts of themes, that whatever the natural process was maybe it can be hijacked and manipulated? And maybe these mischievous beings have cracked the code. Well you know I think there's something to it. Very rarely do I think there is nothing to something. I often think there's something to a lot of different ideas

37:57 In terms of, you know the UFO mythology and I say that with all the love in my heart realizing that i do believe it has an objective reality to it but the UFO mythology Nigel Kerner was a researcher who talked about this at length. And he believed that the greys specifically wished to sort of intercept our souls and that the tunnel was not something that you should Travel down it was actually sort of like a soul vacuum that would sort of suck the heavier souls off the path and in some ways I think that this is an expression of Some these older ideas especially this northern Scottish belief that Every seven years. The fairies would harvest souls of the dead to fulfill a debt that they owed to the devil

38:48 It's not as widespread as some people would have you believe, but it does appear in the fairy literature. Which of course itself is born out of this conflation between demons and fairies which was exceedingly common in that part of the world. But you also have even older ideas like this idea that when your heart was weighed after death in Egyptian mythology if it was judged to be heavier than a feather you'd get tossed right into the jaws of Ammit which is this hippopotamus, crocodile lion hybrid that would eat your soul and you would just cease to exist. So I see all these sort of as an expression of the same idea. And it's interesting in the writing of the book my wife kept on asking me she was like Josh does anybody really want to read a book about death? What i kept trying to emphasize to her was that it actually ends up being a life affirming

39:38 experience to read about death as much because you do realize that there are things worse than death like the idea of having your soul sent to the moon or abducted by abducted by gray aliens in perpetuity is a lot worse than just simply dying, but I do think there's possibly something to it. I don't like to think about it too much because it leads me to really dark places but You do see this sort of preoccupation with the soul and now that's something because you know, you alluded to sort of the interference with reproduction that these beings seem to have as well. It's not accurate to simply throw the title psychopomps on whatever these things are and walk away and this is something that my editor Barbara Fisher emphasized late in the project she said, You know it's not about death right? It's about death and rebirth reincarnation all these things I'm like yes so where i've sort of landed Is that These things which may or may not all be the same thing

40:32 I am convinced that whatever the fairy lore is describing and a lot of the modern alien abduction lore is describing are the same thing, but these things that may or may not be the same thing seem to play some sort of role in that endless cycle upon which we are constantly turning. And I do suspect it's not out of the realm of possibility that there could be factions or subspecies if you want to get all taxonomical about it Seek to jump in and interrupt that process for whatever their own ends might be. And as to what those are, your guess is as good as mine You know maybe they are the evil dead? Maybe they're...

41:14 the evil dead that has become something else. Maybe there's something that has persisted, you know since the very start of existence itself but I do think it's possible that something could seek to interrupt that because i mean really what could be a more powerful and greater transgression than to actually sort of break that cycle that seems to dictate everything on this planet? Oh, very true. Very true and I do like the general shape of some of them being like the ferryman and there is a quote that i have here from the book we say once upon a time we were preoccupied with dying well numerous traditions the elusinian mysteries of ancient greece the egyptian book of the dead the medieval ours mori endy not only prepared us for

42:02 but provided clear instructions to navigate its perils, how to traverse paths, cross rivers, thwart demons or endure trials in the other world that so many souls appear lost suggests more are ill-prepared. And That kind of right there says, yes some of them are the ferrymen to help you get across and there are perils. Some of them are there to take you! Some of their...them are there to keep you from getting where you need to go on the other side. Thwart demons will write there but I'm curious if you've read all these texts or if you've read a good amount then how much overlap is there within that

42:45 Maybe these are guidebooks to the afterlife and they all have some similarities because I do get conspiratorial surprise, surprise about this sometimes. Like in whose interest is it to have us all intentionally ignorant of the death process and unaware of these detailed texts that are already hundreds of years old? Clearly it's in the interest of The Big Machine to keep us rooted and physical reality, and our jobs in the big paper chase. But maybe it's also in the interest of some other beings on the other side to keep these texts away from us? How much cross-contamination is there in these texts that are separated by not only geography but also time? Did they all seem to speak up the same sort of stuff

43:34 Well, I'm going to say something that sort of runs against my natural instinct as a comparativist because for the longest time i've said things like you know well it doesn't matter whether or not one story or another story is true what matters is sort of the gestalt of all these different stories having similar motifs and that's what I really cared about. However with this question specifically I think it is important to sort of take a look at which one seems the most accurate and which one seems to sort of conform to these other states of consciousness. And this is my own personal cognitive dissonance showing, but even as a practicing Christian the text that does seem to have gotten this right in a lot of ways was the Bardo Thodol, The Tibetan Book Of The Dead

44:23 And you know, this is not solely my opinion. I'm sort of basing this off of folks like Carl Jung who said that he... You know, you read the Book Of The Dead and you're like it sounds like they know exactly what they're doing based on what he learned about near-death experiences. Gregory Shushan, whom I mentioned earlier said the exact same thing that it just conformed so closely to that near death experience it does seem to be more of a travelog than it does of a map. And so the fact that that seems such an accurate representation and that it does seem to conform to some these other modalities of extended consciousness make me think that if you're really looking to know where you're going, that might be the best idea. Another part of me thinks that all that you really need to know going past that threshold is that there IS something there and that there ARE

45:16 perils that might come your way. And you know, how you get there and how you sort of suss that out is completely up to you and might do it through meditation, you might do it through psychedelics but yeah I think just the awareness that they're in awareness that you should be attentive and alert when you make that transition might be the most important thing. Something that Terrence McKenna said, he said both the psychedelic dream and the waking psychedelic state acquire great impart because they reveal to life a task to become familiar with this dimension that is causing being in order to be familiar with it at the moment of passing from life. And that idea of... Wow!

46:00 Try to work. I try to work in my Terrence McKenna impression every time and since this Well since this book takes, you know inspiration from st Terry of McKenna as he's depicted on the cover of volume 1 And also the title ecology of souls is directly plucked from one of his lectures I thought was appropriate but The point that I guess I'm trying to make is that there are opportunities just sort of scout the path ahead and it behooves us to sort of make use of those opportunities. I think that was kind of an answer your question in a way Sure. Yeah, I just love all this stuff and as i was reading your book and getting into it, I was also thinking well what about the UFO crash debris? And you do get into that! You write over the decades bits and pieces of curious metal and metamaterial have surfaced accompanied by dubious accounts of crashed flying saucers ironclad proof of extraterrestrial visitation we are assured

46:57 Admittedly, many such objects exhibit anomalous properties prompting proclamations that they cannot be replicated with human technology. Yet few ever question whether not replicable on earth actually means not replicable using publicly available technology the mundane explanation or more prudently Not replicable in our reality. The ecology of souls has always left behind tantalizing artifacts conforming to our understanding of the other, we find tiny fairy boots flags and chalices some still displayed today Shamans extract spirit darts and Christians have long received blood, tears and gifts from saints. Relics, statuary an even the Blessed Virgin Mary herself! Many of these are fakes some saint's relics

47:47 demonstrably so from scientific analysis, yet they nevertheless hold supernatural pedigrees and manifest genuine anomalies. Perhaps UFO crash debris is best understood in the context of these artifacts which in turn resemble a port found in poltergeist cases objects seemingly manifesting from thin air without provenance The earliest UFO debris, angel hair—a wispy material sometimes collected at UFO sites—hinted at this imaginal state as it always evaporated into nothing even in sealed containers.

48:24 Man, that is well said. I'm super interested in these artifacts, these leftover pieces of physical evidence. I was lucky enough once to be shown one from a person who has recurring experiences and they said hey that Invisible College metamaterial that you always are talking about? I can show you an image of it. And it was wild! It looked like shattered metal that was then put into like a little ball. It did look weird, I don't know how to analyze metals and I'm only looking at a photograph but this is the kind of stuff that I just am really excited by because it's clearly not in people's heads. Do you have any favorite artifacts that have been left behind from the other world? And can you elaborate on just your thoughts of these physical artifacts left behind and how to make sense of them in this new context?"

49:18 Well, so this is I don't often get this opportunity but i've recently met some folks and. I could say some really interesting stuff right now but do it now i'm gonna play the game and just keep my mouth shut but i will say that there should be some papers published forthcoming that reveal the contradictory nature even further of some of these artifacts and this is the most common bit of pushback that i get from you know, a lot of the people who were into the extraterrestrial hypothesis is, well okay if this is spirit phenomena then where does this physical manifestation come from? How do we get these radar returns? Thoughts don't leave radar returns. This has been addressed really ad nauseum but people just

50:03 I guess they just haven't read enough of literature or something, but you know Terrence McKenna pointed out in an interview with believe it was with Jeffrey Mishlove how Carl Jung has talked about that certain things might be able to occupy the psychic realm and the physical realm in this sort of in-between never Neverland that we don't really have the tools to explore. And if people have sort of trouble wrapping their heads around that example that I always give is you look at something like the Bigfoot phenomenon, right? As people are probably well aware by now I'm not convinced or i'm no longer convinced is probably an accurate way to put it that we have a big monkey tromping through the woods. You know my inner 12 year old still wants that to be the case right because that's just what I grew up with but if I look at sort of the data I'm not convinced of that any longer but again the pushback is like okay well ghosts don't leave footprints and I'm like wait hold on

50:50 Have you read any of the early parapsychological literature? Because that was the primary way that people would ghost hunt before you got all these fancy doodads and whatnot. You would spread, you know talcum powder on the floor and wait for footprints to manifest so obviously we have something that's intangible that's capable of interacting with the physical and quartz are a good example of that these saints relics are a good example of that So I think there is some room for exploration in there if you look into it enough, does seem to start to suggest that our idea of spiritual and physical is sort-of a false dichotomy. Or even honestly even physical and mental as a false dichotomy if the site research holds up to be true which some of its performed at such level of rigor that I can't see that not being case there's some legitimacy to that as well So all that being said If I have a favorite one

51:46 Honestly, I think my favorite one might be one that you alluded to in your little excerpt there which are these fairy artifacts because you know i always go back To the fairy stuff it's not as sexy as modern meta materials but they still occupy the same space In this time and cultures where they appeared right? And these were indeed Little things like little boots right and the analysis. Just as we analyze metamaterial today with all our fancy spectrometers and stuff, they would analyze things like fairy chalices and fairy boots and fairy flags... I'll never forget there's a pair of fairy shoes i can't remember where it is or if it's still on display but they examine it and they determine that the fairy boots were indeed made of mouse leather which....I love that idea of someone actually like skinning and tanning mouse leather! I have no idea how you'd go about doing that

52:35 But again, it's an example of something that conforms to the expectations of the culture in which it appeared yet sounds you know patently absurd so I do love how these things seem to Flatter our expectations. I guess would be the proper way to put it and so yeah every time I see the metamaterial discussion You know, I kind of go well There's something there There's something to this that's physical but I think the fact or the appearance for the presence rather of these bits of crash debris and whatnot are not indicative of extraterrestrial visitation so much as they're indicative of a deeper, more widespread problem that we have where we have siloed off one aspect of the human experience into the physical and one aspect of the human experience into the spiritual or mental.

53:29 Man, complex stuff but well said. And one of the joys I have doing a show that talks about so many different subjects with so many different types of people is sometimes there are little clues like When trying to unpack the idea of a being that can be physical and non-physical, I think about the secret science folks or the electric universe folks that I talk to who have no interest in fairies or aliens but they talk about Tesla technology. And there seems to be a real relationship between gravity and electricity electromagnetism it seems like the earth produces a negative charge

54:12 make a device or vehicle that also has negative charge, it just repels gravity in weird electromagnetic sense. It's the type of physics they don't want us to know about apparently but when you watch any ghost hunting show they're always trying to use some electrical means identify these things to at least capture a signature of them, there seems to be an electric quality. Either they talk through radios or your mom dies and now the lights are flashing that relationship is well established but if you just go one degree over to the relationship between electricity and gravity or frequency and weight I mean it seems like there's something there like that's a mechanism that they can make themselves more dense through

55:03 I've heard plenty of stories about these indigenous cultures who get in these drumming circles and these rhythmic chants, and through this vibration they can levitate stones. And there again it's just kind of the reverse here is taking something heavy and dense and removing its mass and density and floating it up to the top of the monolith or whatever so A lot of these things are in the wheelhouse. They they are things that would be on the strange stuff bingo card But they're just not ever really connected to living I guess living, living is a term that's weird but sentient intelligent beings from the other side and how things could go from weighty to not so weighty and weave between these worlds. I think electricity is a big component because I just think that our paradigm of gravity and mass and traditional physics is leaving a lot out for

55:59 various conspiratorial reasons, but it also might give us less context for the stuff that you write about too. Well you know there's this concerning issue that I completely forgot the train of thought that i was going to say... Well I love concerning issues so I hope it comes back to ya. Give me like 15 seconds here Yeah, so this sort of reminds me or puts me in the mindset that we have so much admiration for science and rightfully so that we don't realize there are some gaps in our knowledge. And there are some things that are quite mundane that we just do not really have

56:42 Good grasp on I mean sleep is an example, you know You say to some people there's no scientific consensus on why we sleep they say well Yeah We know that it repairs your cells and that you need it for survival in this and the other one. I'm like yeah But we don't know why we do sleep Like we don't know why sleep is The state that's required for that And what I think a lot of people Do as they often throw the baby out with the bathwater? I mean then Newtonian stuff is great for Getting me across the country in a matter of hours through the application, you know an aerospace technology and it's great for Talking to you in several hours away here on over-the-internet but like It's only a partial picture so it's better than live reality that is perhaps for all encompassing model what's going on? And You know to that extent some things we don't quite understand We still have a good answer for us. I mean sounds

57:36 Kind of like parapsychology ghost hunting apologetics 101, but we don't have You know There's the law of conservation of energy and We all you know acknowledge that there is some sort of energy within us yet. We don't really have any good grasp on what happens to that at the point of death so The fact that there might be something like energy or like electricity work I mean You know, who knows what lurks in the borderlands of what we've discovered. There might be another entirely invisible force that's sort of dictating a lot of the things around us that we don't have any name for yet and so I really think that people should try to make more room for those question marks in their lives and especially when approaching these topics than they currently do mm-hmm

58:23 Yeah, and there's a lot more people talking about plasmas in this context too. If you read Dr. Greg Little's book with Andrew Collins, Origins of the Gods that's a big part of it there Joseph Farrell's new book he gets into plasma as a bit They might be made of plasma, these beings or maybe they use plasma as a mechanism. But according to Dr. Farrell 99% of all matter in the universe is plasma it's not liquid solid or gas so maybe it's something akin to the ether but that's a lot to be leaving off the table of science and

59:01 And it might be a mechanism involved here you do mention ley lines in the book and fairy lights these orbs of light. These are things that I think might be if you could look at them under the microscope, be comprised of plasma That's just another thing. Not only do we not know enough about the human soul and the human body and the life-death process, but also don't know enough about Earth and its environment and what the hell Ley Lines are? Does it produce energy? Does Earth have imagination or consciousness of its own? These are all things that probably should be examined a little deeper but what are your thoughts on plasma and its potential role in all this?

59:41 Oh, I think it's definitely still on the table. You write something like Ecology of Souls and people are like okay that's it Josh thinks he has figured out this is what he's going to talk about from now on evermore but I think the idea of living plasma or some sort of fundamental plasmoid being is an idea that is still very much worth considering In fact, one of my upcoming projects that I've committed to too many but one of the upcoming projects is tackling the unexplained light phenomenon with a friend of mine. So i think it's still something that's worth considering there and to that extent like sometimes I wonder and I play with this idea in passing in the book but I still find it really attractive to me Is the idea that a lot of these anomalous lights like you alluded to

1:00:29 might indeed appear as lights in their unskinned, most fundamental form. The analogy that I use is if anyone's ever played a video game on PCs and they've had one of the text files that's corrupted, you know. You'll no longer see a picture of a wall as a brick wall say...you know, you'll see some sort of placeholder texture in there maybe it's just a big rectangle of pink or some other color or just black but like that's sort of like the default form before texture is applied and sometimes I wonder that if not all, a lot of these entities that we encounter

1:01:06 sort of do look like balls of light if you could catch them as an unbiased, distant, uninfluenced observer. If that makes any sense? But the problem is we do bring biases and cultural expectations and our own fears in what were aware of to the table so once that happens Then you know whatever this intelligence is sort of rifles through the Rolodex of our brain and says, uh Looks like they've got a good point of reference for Bigfoot Let's put on our bigfoot suits today And then we'll tromp around as Bigfoot or you know oh it looks like you know this person saw a UFO Documentary back when they were five years old so we're gonna be great So yeah, and I kind of wonder because you do get these stories right about these beings literally shape-shifting from a humanoid configuration into or out of

1:01:58 a ball of light. And this is extremely common amongst a lot of indigenous cultures, where there's oftentimes very little distinction in UFO reports at least of anomalous lights and the beings I mean there's a wonderful story that Marty Sixkiller Clark collected from a Native American witness i can't remember the particular tribe right off hand but she was speaking with this star person for a while, and then at the end of their conversation the star person coalesced into a ball of light dropped to the ground then ascended into the sky where it joined other balls of light and became you know a triangular UFO. And that to me checks so many boxes for the way that I sometimes think this phenomena acts that there is no distinction between

1:02:42 what we perceive as a quote-unquote craft and what we perceive is just the ball of light, and what we perceive as an entity. They're all sort of the same thing that sort of shifts depending upon circumstances including the disposition of the witness. Mm hmm yeah man well said! And bringing this all together I guess i would ask you in summary What do you hope people take away from The Ecology Of Souls most? What is the core message that you hope spills out into the wider understanding of High Strangeness overall Primarily two messages. One is selfless and one is selfish, I guess the selfless message is The same thing that a lot of these experiences seem to teach us and it's that die-to-death message by which I mean Stop letting fear of death control you while your life this seems to be the message that was

1:03:35 put forth in the Yellow City and Mysteries, it seems to be the message of a lot of psychedelic encounters. It seems to be the message of alien abductions and near-death experiences. Krypton Encounters is a little bit less so but you know sometimes it does still engender that sense of wonder So that's the first one Die to death Realize that death is not the end And allow that to liberate yourself To do good in the world And be compassionate to people Because Holy hell, we need that more than ever nowadays. The other thing the selfish sort of hope is that the ecology of souls model not that it's even necessarily robust as a model but just this sort of possible connection to death would someday stand alongside more popular ideas like ultra terrestrials and breakaway civilizations and the extraterrestrial hypothesis as a possible working

1:04:24 concept of what the quote-unquote paranormal is and what more specifically UFOs might be. That would be sort of my real hope for it. I like it, you heard them people live damnit! And yeah, It's never seemed sillier to have all this in a UFO UAP military Pentagon context after reading Ecology of Souls so I would say for me that's a big win and John Josh, I'm just very grateful when the brightest minds in this space are willing to give me some of their time. It's an absolute pleasure and I hope we run into each other out there in the world now that we're at least in the same region of the country! Any links or more info about other projects that the fine folks at home should have before we go?

1:05:11 I try to stay up-to-date on all the information that's needed at joshuacutchin.com, J O S H U A C U T C H I N dot com. Ecology of Souls is available on Amazon, you know much to my chagrin we all have our reasons for disliking amazon but it is self published its available on amazon either as an ebook that contains both volumes or it's available as volume one and volume two split simply for size considerations You will see advertisements for, or links rather for an Ecology of Souls companion that exists in physical form just in case you're a completionist like myself. If you buy volume 1 and volume 2 the entire companion the exact same content just rearranged is on my website and that contains the appendices end notes and bibliography for both volumes if you buy the ebook the end notes are already in there but you can still visit the website for the appendices

1:06:08 I will say that depending on when this goes up, in mid-June Amazon is raising the basic cost of all self-published books. So this will mean one of two things, it will either mean that the cost increases and I get the same amount that i have been or it means that I dropped the costs so that it's the same as it is now and I get less which quite frankly I'm inclined to do the latter just because I want to keep this project affordable to people you know? I could have split the ebook into two but that wasn't the point, the point was to get the message out there So if anyone's inclined to pick up a College of Souls better sooner than later either for your pocketbook or for mine But either way just cut Amazon out as much as you can so amen to that

1:06:53 Yeah, all our best tools are tainted and why shouldn't they be? If they're going to be the best tools it's because they have the full weight of the big machine behind them. And thus we feel a little hypocritical using them but that's life so man you are truly one of the best! You are right up there on my high strangeness Mount Rushmore and I wish you the best take care thanks so much Greg appreciate it And boom goes the dynamite, the modern master of Fordian phenomena. The great Joshua Kutchin nobody does it better and few do it half as well So impressive that he's finding yet another under-explored avenue to go down and I really liked it

1:07:41 That's the great thing about all of his books is they're not stretching to make connections that aren't there. They're just highlighting all the underreported aspects of these stories, the details and through all this exploration I think we get closer. I don't know how you could read Ecology Of Souls and not add death and consciousness and the soul to your analysis of whatever is going on in The High Strangeness world And this is kind of a sidebar, but I've always struggled with a quick and simple line to explain the full scope of THC topics.

1:08:18 I used to say conspiracy, mystery and the all-around fringe. The Greek definitely made me feel like that is the right word, fringe and it should be resurrected but i also have that Starburst logo with the impossible objects and since then I've been saying that the three main pillars are conspiracy, the paranormal and the occult slash esoteric It's not really important. I have guests on for whatever topic is just interesting to me at the time, but you do have to understand that a lot of shows are just ufology or just paranormal focused or solely magic oriented and that's fine but when COVID hit i think it's fair to say that some of the figures in these adjacent areas

1:09:03 came out kicking and screaming against shows like THC that were saying stuff about COVID that was radical at the time. But now in hindsight, I think way less so except for the truest diehards of the COVID cult. The point is I actually started to get turned down by people in these other areas because they didn't want to be associated with the COVID episodes I was doing Which made it tough for me because I didn't want things to be all COVID all the time. Anyway, Josh has always been great and he was never one of these people but let's just say that he was aware of a couple of people that were gunning for me who were trying to police their said communities and make sure nobody would associate with me basically trying to cancel me All during this stressful era of being a new dad

1:10:01 You know, I'm trying to help my wife and take care of a two-month old baby while i get on Twitter and somebody is saying that anyone who associates with the higher side chats Is part of the problem. And I just think that's a special kind of evil It's very mean spirited and no matter the taboo nature of the conversation or subject matter On this show, I'm never mean spirited so To try to pressure people to not do interviews with me hoping that I'm unable to find guests and rooting for me to fail, and essentially for me not being able to make an income and have my family punished because I had some questions about COVID. Ugh! It just makes you a scumbag in the worst way but hey i'm not trying to make more drama or

1:10:51 trying to stir up old bullshit, but just trying to add some context to why I'm extra thankful and appreciative that Josh is still willing to do interviews with me when his new works come out. Because in 2020 and 2021, I got more than a few don't contact me again replies when i reached out to people...and people IN the waters in which Josh swims! So he's a real G for being able to brush all that off And I hope nobody gives him a hard time for this. I say it constantly, but without guests this show is pretty much nothing It takes two to tango...I try to do my half of the dance as best i can But you need a good dance partner and Josh is a great one You guys know im a fan! I put Trojan Feast in my top 10 paranormal books of all time list and Ecology Of Souls is right up there with it

1:11:51 I do think things like death, consciousness and spirit get closer to the core of the issue than space aliens do. Sorry! Because even just saying that will have some ufologists trying to damage your reputation for some weird reason Some people really get into policing the ideas that people are talking about I don't know why everyone can't just do their best work and let the chips fall where they may But lots of interesting ideas weaving through this one. If you only heard the first free hour, you missed things like doppelgangers doubles and clones The question of what value seeding the extraterrestrial hypothesis perspective could hold for the elite Cross-comparative matches for other physical aspects of these encounters like implants How the beings could be trying to help but are actually hurting

1:12:48 We talked about my favorite story from the Ecology of Souls. We got into lake monsters and the symbolism of water, UFOs, nukes and plasma... I mean come on! The second hour is always deeper and more out there but it does require that small $8 token of your appreciation We keep it ad-free and we try to waste no time. Sign up at thehiresidechats.com, start with a free seven day trial add the new URL to your podcast app and get the whole enchilada stop missing the better half! And let's keep this train on the tracks you can join in with the comments section and the forum where we have a pretty decent digital community or hop onto The Meetup Calendar and make a local event where real world community is also forming slowly but surely

1:13:36 Next on deck for that we have events in Sedona, Arizona and High Springs Florida on June 3rd a Dumfries and Galloway meetup in the United Kingdom on June 10th Golden Colorado June 10 as well Stanford Connecticut June 17 Nashville Tennessee June 20th and Lancaster New Hampshire on June 21st I like it. Podcasts tend to be solo experiences and the COVID years made me feel like we should try to do something different and bring people together so anyone can make an event, it's free, it's easy, and it helps you meet new like-minded locals but that's it! We did it! I jammed three shows into the last eight days or so and...I'd say they were all pretty good this is the problem though when I get backed up

1:14:31 cram it all into the finish line, because now I just want to rest for like two or three or five days and then would you look at that? i'm behind again. But these are my problems not yours we all have jobs to do and few are as enjoyable as mine so i'll just keep that to myself some folks have started grumbling that they want me to get back into my main conspiracy lane but here's what i'll say A lot of my straight up conspiracy colleagues are still talking about COVID and I don't want to do that anymore. Plus, we all know that same template is going to be applied to climate crisis stuff in the near future. Russia-Ukraine hasn't changed much and the World Economic Forum is still pushing all this stuff they push. I don't want to say it's all the same but I don't really think there are many important blind spots in our coverage

1:15:25 And I don't think we need to keep saying the same things over and over. When it comes to something like the woke stuff, well i think the rest of the podcasting world is doing more than enough fist waving at woke for all of us right? You don't need that from me too! So just trust the process. I try to find unique and interesting angles to keep it all fresh and I think I know how to keep you entertained and informed...and I guess time will tell But if you liked this one, please let Josh know on the socials as the kids say. Because in case he does get any flack from his colleagues I would like it to be drowned out by people who enjoyed it and picked up his book as a result As I mentioned THC is listed in the footnotes three times which is just an awesome thing to have seen because he does such high level work in one of my favorite subject areas

1:16:23 But much love out there guys, that's it for me. I've done my part Your move Death Management System Operators Soul Seeking Greys and Ferrymen of the Skies... your fucking move When you see weird lights outside of you Something sits on your chest when you sleep It might be a pattern You've been through before Oh, you might have those screen memories Darling wait till we get some proof come see And baby I tried the camera easy People can't get free from mystic rays It's getting just out of We really just want to get back on with our days

1:17:42 Don't care about my wedding plan So honey now, don't walk into the skinny arm No they came from the sky from out of a star Something on my beating heart This damn life is too bizarre I can tell when they're gone cause' my memories fade But we know that it's not just her dream

1:18:30 They never put me back exactly the same way and the pain is as real as a scream. Honey arms might be the whole last sense of theme The higher side chats has covered all that we're breaking free People can't get free from this disgrace It's getting just

1:19:18 We really just want to get back on with our days Don't care about hybriding plan But don't walk into their skinny arm No they came from the sky, from out of the stars Play something I'm a beating heart I'm sure Baby this is too bizarre So honey now

1:20:29 don't walk into the skinny, oh no they came from the sky from out of the stars something on my beating heart baby this damn life is too bizarre honey i think im some kind of fart this is bizarre