 Greg, we just wrapped up our interview and I thought we had an awesome conversation. I wanted to share it with the skeptical audience. We did part one and we're going to do a part two and I'd love to share both parts with them. So as way of an introduction because we didn't really plan on completely doing it that way as kind of a swap cast kind of thing. Can you let people know a little bit more about, you know, who is Greg Moffat, your background and what you do? Just to keep it brief, Alex, if people go to legalize-freedom.com, you can spell legalize with an S or a Z. They'll find a bio there and that's where I host most of my current work podcast I've been doing since 2012. There's over 300 shows there, Inquiry into Life, the universe and everything. If people are familiar with Skeptico, I think they'll find a lot to interest them there. There's also a series of free articles. So legalize-freedom.com with an S if you're in Europe with a Z if you're in the US. That's about it I think. Hello and welcome, Alex, and thank you so much for joining us today on legalizefreedom.com. Great to be here, Greg. Alex, today we're going to talk about your new book. It's going to be out shortly. It's entitled Why Evil Matters, How Science and Religion Fumbled a Big One. Before we dive into that, just tell listeners a bit about yourself. You are, of course, host of Skeptico podcast, which many listeners will already be familiar with. And just a little bit perhaps about how the book came about. Well, you know, the book came about really is just a product of me doing these interviews on Skeptico. And the Skeptico thing is always, I've been doing it for a long time, long, long time. And it was really just a passion project for me. Like I always tell people it was kind of my Trojan horse for getting a chance to talk to really smart people like you and like other people. And I sense that same, you know, vibe in your work too is that you want to have the conversations and you can frame them up however you want. You want to call it a podcast. You want to call it a book, a magazine, article, whatever, you know, you want to have the conversation. And same with me. So that's how it came about. And then in particular, this book is really just an extension really of a book that I wrote before. Why science is wrong about almost everything. And it's that's really a book about consciousness and how if you fall for the scientific materialism, you are meaningless, you are nothing kind of meme, then that is not only, you know, crippling philosophically and personally, but it doesn't make for good science. So this latest book kind of says if you take that into the what I call extended consciousness realm of, you know, near death experience, out of body travel, DMT, however you want to go, aliens, wherever you want to go with that. If you take that into the extended realm, then you're even more lost if you want to stick to this. You know, hold on to this really, really literal materialist stupid, stupid, falsified idea. And then the evil thing is just that I think evil might be our lens, you know, our kind of our entry point into waking us up out of how ridiculous that is and the consequences of the materialistic. You are meaningless idea. Well, as you alluded to a lot of your inquiry and a lot of the material you produce podcast in particular, you're looking at you and your guests are looking at the reality through the these overlapping lenses, shall we say, science, religion, philosophy that many people for a long time and still today, regard is completely separate and mutually exclusive in many ways. Of course, that's a feeling in itself because they're kind of like three prongs of the same fork really in my mind. But you've come up against this the question of evil multiple times as I have. Call it what you will, you know, evil is a name for something, you know, because we tend to think in terms of language, we have to name things and you say the word evil and people have preconceptions about what they think it is or what they think it is. Not whether it exists or not based just on everything that they've gathered in their mind and their consciousness about evil up to this point. But you said evil could be a lens there a moment ago. And I think I understand what you mean. It's something that's when you look into it is it's almost the other areas of inquiry in the three disciplines. I mentioned they all have their their their limits, it seems. And but the question of evil seems to be one of those issues that's pushing us further to look at some of the some of the matter some of these overlaps to look at the whole idea of extended conscience consciousness, for example, that you speak so much about. That actually could be it could be the key to unlock this particular mystery in itself. And it's almost like these issues come along to prompt us. It's almost like we're being prodded and pushed. I've thought this many times to to understand more to keep going with our inquiry. And when we're not looking in the right place that we get almost like a school child getting a wrap over the knuckles, you know, with a ruler by a stern teacher. You know, like, or maybe a torch is being shown in another corner and we're being enjoined to look over here. So that's what I thought of when you said evil could be a lens. Yeah, and I take that even further because I really like your point and your analogy about overlapping lenses. And you know, there's a really interesting point that you made there about we have the the trident of science, religion and philosophy, you know. And you pointed out how, hey, how curious that is that they want to stay separate. And boy, I mean, that has been one of, I guess, my fundamental realizations, findings in all this stuff is that that's preposterous. And it's hard to believe that that isn't somewhat by design. I mean, there are only two questions. Who are we? Why are we here? The only questions. Think about it. All three of those are realms. Science. Who are we? Why are we here? Philosophy. Who are we? Why are we here? Religion. Who are we? Why are we here? Why would you want to separate those? Why would you want to pretend this game, you know, when you get into religion that it's it isn't fundamentally intertwined with those. Science, you know, pulled themselves out and said, hey, we're going to rescue you from that crazy religion and all the rest of that. But the interesting thing about consciousness and the reason that you and I are both so interested in doing and do a lot of shows on it. And like your interview recently with Bernardo Castro is consciousness. As you said, is the wrap on the knuckles that pulls us back in and says, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute now. Everything you're kind of making here has some assumptions on it. And ever since you left that old double slit experiment, which I always like to tell people because like this is like such a great little entry point into some of this stuff. Double slit experiment, double slit experiment. We all know it. You can stop calling it a double slit experiment. The framing up of that as some time of a photon measurement experiment. It's not. It's a consciousness experiment. That's what it is. It's an experiment that says, does consciousness exist? Is there such a thing as an observer effect that we have to worry about? And the answer is yes. That is the wrap on the knuckles of science. But what science had to do really to pretend there to defend their turf and also maybe for some other reasons was they had to do the shut up and calculate thing. And I say, well, no, no, that's not really what it's about. Come on, let's just kind of work out these equations over here and see if we can build some iPhones and stuff like that. So that's kind of, that's where I go with your overlapping lenses, which I think is a much bigger point than, you know, we could spend an hour talking about that. Well, it's like the placebo effect. I'm reminded of that when you mentioned the double slit experiment. It's like it's been given a name. And therefore in science, quite often does this, even when it doesn't understand something, it names it like dark matter, dark energy. Oh, OK. We didn't know what all that stuff was. It's dark matter. But that doesn't mean that you know what it is. You just call it something. So the placebo effect is this amazing thing with incredible implications, basically mind over body implications like the double slit experiment, which by the way, if listeners are not sure what that is. It's a famous experiment in quantum physics, which has been repeated again and again and again and tweaked and varied. And the implications are vast, but it's with quantum physics in general, it's always been not always has increasingly been changing. But often it's not, you know, mainstream interpretations have been that well, there are no implications. And if there are, it's purely in the realms of shut up and calculate, as you say. And for me, the shut up and calculate thing is like would be, I don't know, like just chopping vegetables in a kitchen and never make it any stew. It's like just keep chopping vegetables. But when are we going to have something to show for this? You know, what are we doing this for? And of course, one of the reasons that a lot of people, well, they're satisfied with that is because of the byproducts of a lot of scientific inquiry. And you mentioned the iPhones and just think since the scientific revolution and then the industrial revolution, which was able to put a lot of that into practice on a wider scale. Just think of all the benefits, you know, the material benefits for people's lives and, you know, health and welfare material benefits. Just our general standard of living has changed so much because of the benefits of science and industrialization. But you mentioned the Trident. That was your phrase, which I like, because like any Trident, you go back down the prongs and you get to the handle, which is one. It's the three, you know, it's all one piece of metal, if you know what I mean, or whatever it's made of. And I think that the thing that you said about science rescuing us, you know, from the sort of religious, you know, Paul of ignorance, that is it's all been like a bit of a pendulum swing. I've made this analogy before, is that it was a relief to be able to have the scientific revolution, the Renaissance, just to free up people's thinking and their consciousness and their lives from this sort of the drudgery of living under religious oppression. But then we have a tendency, I think, as a species to ritualistic behavior and routine and ways of seeing the world and going too far with one thing. The whole idea of the Renaissance man was supposed to be, you know, scientist, philosopher, you know, spiritual dimension as well. But I think that kind of got lost. So now we've been living in a scientific age and it's been all about that. And anything to do with spirituality at best is seen as a very private matter. Religions are just seen as like either just irrelevant or actually a source of ongoing problems. And so when you perhaps try to bring together some of these disciplines, then people are very resistant because you try and bring spiritual dimension or some other word, let's just say extended consciousness dimension into science. People are worried about God getting in again by the back door. Oh, hang on a minute. This sounds a bit too religious for my liking. I don't like it. You know, the universe popping out of nowhere from nothing and no, I don't like the sound of this at all. Sounds like I used to hear in church when I was a kid. Dinner with philosophy, which is regarded as like a pleasant sort of a relevance. You know, if somebody says, oh, I'm a philosophy professor, it's like, oh, that's nice. You know, why don't you try earning a living? You know what I mean? I've met people with that sort of attitude. Well, there's like, there's like 10 points I'd like to jump on. But I got to go back to all the way at the beginning because Greg, your point about placebo effect is so, I think profound. I know for so many people and so many people that listen to my show and I'm sure yours too, they get it on one level. But I really think what you're saying is much, much more powerful in practice than we realize. The placebo effect, just take notice for how it's used. I'm just repeating exactly what you said. It's like, oh, well, the results didn't achieve anything greater than placebo effect. Or, you know, what we're finding in science now is there's a degradation towards the level of the placebo effect, right? So we're finding these major medical studies that show some miracle drug to be efficacious. But the more we test it and the more we repeat the test, it becomes closer and closer to a level of the placebo effect. But you're the brilliant point you make is that the whole game is the placebo effect. What's staring us in the face is that we've totally misunderstood the relationship between mind and body, which is really a relationship between consciousness and body, right? Mind is consciousness, because what they will tell you what is embedded in that, even when they say mind is body with the fastball that they're trying to slip past you, is that, yeah, it's your mind, but that's still within the materialistic, scientific framework of your brain. But their own, if you unravel logically, philosophically, let's just go with logically, the placebo effect, what they're doing is they're contradicting the mind equals brain, you are 100% a product of your brain, your biological robot, meaningless universe. It is an implied contradiction of that by using the term placebo effect. But you are so right that once you label it, it allows you to dismiss it, step over it, say, don't you really just want this new iPhone? Let's forget about who you are and why you're here for a minute. Don't you really just want another Netflix streaming up your bandwidth? We'll get your more bandwidth, you can go faster. So no, I don't know if you have any more on that, because I think it's such a powerful point. And it does lead to this larger, you know, I don't want to dance around this, because what I'm saying is that there is an underlying conspiracy and a lot of people don't like that term and they immediately get turned off, you know, I'm like, oh my God, here we go, you know. But it's like, that is the implication of this, is that this isn't completely organic. This language, this messaging, this misstepping, misinformation, oops, always scientifically bungled it again. That after a while, it doesn't look like an accident. And I think part of our, you know, our job, you and I, what we're doing is to probe that and try and pull that apart. Because sometimes it is an accident and sometimes, you know, scientists make mistakes, sometimes philosophers make mistakes, but sometimes there's another agenda behind some of this stuff. And we have to make sure that we're exploring those possibilities because we've been taken down those paths so many times. Yes, we definitely should explore some of those possibilities. Maybe you can start us off with that in a moment and that'll take us, if you want to, certainly into some of the material in your book that we mentioned. But I did spend quite a long time, I started reading about quantum implications back in the 1980s. I spent quite a few decades wondering what the major resistance was to, if not acceptance of some of these implications, but at least explore them, at least look at it again. And I mean this right across the board from scientists engaged in this work through to lay people reading popular science books. And initially, as I mentioned, it was maybe they're worried that some kind of religious connotations in all of this. If we go down this route and explore these things, then we're going to have church people saying, ah, I told you so, or whatever it happens to be, consciousness is the mind of God. But then I started to look for other reasons. And I think, oh, well, obviously some scientists are worried about loss of prestige. They built their whole careers around a certain worldview. Maybe they did some pioneering research and that made them want a Nobel Prize and they just have to stick to this. And that reminds me of the old adage about science progressing one funeral at a time. But increasingly, and I think this is what we definitely have in common, I've started to think it must be more than that. It can't be that straightforward. So perhaps you'd like to, the point you made just before I started speaking, maybe you could get started on some of your ideas there. Well, one way to explore that topic is to look at three interviews that you've done recently and kind of dive into those a little bit more because there's some great crossover between your work and mine. And I think we'll wind up in the same place. Like, first off, I have just a ton of respect for Bernardo Castro. I can't tell you how many times he's been on my show. He's a super popular guest. I consider him a friend. I've met him personally. He's a great guy. Go to his website right now and read his open birthday letter to Bill Gates. I'm congratulating Bill Gates on his birthday and saying, you know, the one thing, Bill, you've been a great, great gift to mankind. The one thing I wish you'd look at nuclear power a little bit because I think we can get some good clean nuclear power. And I think it can help our overall environmental situation. Bernardo, Bernardo, where have you been, buddy? Have you kind of looked into Gatesy there in the corona thing and Moderna and his all sorts of his other shady connections? Have you looked into his connections with Epstein and the Brownstone project in his long time interest in that? That goes that there's a lot of smoking gun stuff there. So Bernardo is super smart, super intelligent, but he's not a conspiratorial guy. Which on one hand, we want to give somebody a badge for that and say, oh, gosh, you get a shiny badge because you're not conspiratorial. I look at it the other way. I look at it and say, if you're closing yourself off to that worldview and driving diving deeply into that worldview, then you're really going to be missing the picture in a lot of these situations, not in all of them. Bernardo's work is still his phenomenally powerful work, but he is going to be blindsided by people who are rigging the game and he doesn't realize it. Bill Gates is a classic example. But I'll give you two more and then I'll kind of let you respond. You did a show, kind of a one off one person show on David Ike. And I thought there were so many interesting jumping off points for our dialogue here on that, Greg. Because I interviewed David not too long ago and published it. And a lot of people really kind of pushed back like I had jumped the shark there and said, oh, you know, that's the crazy lizard guy. Man, I lead with that. I lead with that. I go, who is David Ike? Who is David Ike to you? And even people who don't know go, yeah, he's the lizard guy. I go, that's right. He's exactly. He's the lizard guy. Now, let me tell you what he wrote on the relationship between consciousness and science. It's brilliant. It's the most succinct, clear and a crisply written attack on how science as part of a social engineering control. XIOP would be against any kind of extended consciousness understanding. Right. So you can go read that in the interview we did. It's it's brilliant. Go read David Ike. This is like basic shit. But how many times have you sat through my numbing discussions where people don't do it? That is David Ike talking about God, the God. What does he call it? The God program David Ike calls it. He said, look, it's all the same. It's it's go to a Christian and he says, oh, yeah, I'll tell you about God. I know all about him because I have this book because I go to this guy and he's dressed in all these robes and he allows me to talk to God. He tells me what God is saying. He's tells me how to be. And then he says, and then I go to I go, I go, well, that doesn't sound right. So I go over to a Muslim guy and you go, what can you tell me about God? He goes, oh, I can tell you everything. I got a guy. He stands up there in the front and he wears this robe and he tells me just exactly what God is all about. Okay, so then they go over to a Jewish guy and I go to synagogue and he goes, oh, no, I'll tell you what it's all about here. We have these books and then here we have these guys in robes and they go tell us. Go tell us what God says and then you can follow what they say. This is again, I mean, I'm not saying it's like some brilliant insight. But how much time do we spend placating people who have these protected religious beliefs that are clearly much more in sync with what we understand to be cultish activities? And we don't know all the relationships between those but then anything else. And yet we give them their little spot in the square in the public square and we say, okay, no, go ahead and talk. And we won't ever really raise our voice about how absolutely ridiculous your cosmology is because we'll let us, we'll let you talk. And if you look at what David Ike is really saying directly, he's advocating disintermediation, right? He's saying, yeah, there's God, go, go, go there. You don't need a book. You don't need an intermediary. You don't need anything. If there is this extended realm and if there is this Godhead there, go there. Other thing that I point out about David Ike and the reason we're talking about, I think we're talking about David Ike is because this is someone who was banned. He was wiped off of the electronic infrastructure that we live in, banned from YouTube, banned from Facebook, banned from Twitter, banned. Greg, if we were having this conversation five years ago, we would not have even, we would have never believed it if one or the other of us said, oh yeah, and then people will just be banned. Unilaterally banned across all these quote unquote independent platforms. So David Ike is banned. And you know what David Ike's message is in this world that we live in with Antifa and Proud Boys and Black Lives Matter and guns in the street and riots. David Ike's message is, no, don't go for any of that. It's about love. It's about seeing that we're all connected. It's about not cutting off your thumb to spite your fingers. That's his message. That's his message. It's all about love, acceptance, forgiveness and pursuit of the truth. And this is what's banned. This is what's banned. So the reason they say he got banned was because David sometimes is not so good with the science part. And even though he saw the bigger picture of the pandemic for what it is a pandemic, he kind of got in this little whirlpool of there is no virus kind of thing, which is unfortunate because scientifically, that's not a very sustainable position. It's kind of a flat earthy kind of sciencey kind of thing, but he was listening to the wrong people and, you know, but I look at somebody like David Ike. And I say, batting average, hall of fame, hall of fame batting average gets so much more stuff, so much more right, so much more sooner than anyone else that that we need to give him wiggle room for when he makes mistakes and not not forgive him and call him out. Like I did in the interview, I said, David, I don't think you really mean that. You know, but at the same time, we have to say, No, this is this is a major, major important person. And if we're going to ban someone, let's ban frickin Neil deGrasse Tyson for standing up there and saying consciousness is an illusion. That's something someone should be banned for. Hey, you want to ban people? I got a whole list of people we can ban, but I don't want to ban anybody. But that's, I guess, my, my take on David Ike and why I think he's so important. And, you know, the other thing that I'll just throw in and I'll shut up about it. Shapeshifting lizard people. And people. Oh, okay. So we're, we're in an after disclosure period here, right, folks? I mean, we are AD after disclosure, New York Times, every major news outlet. Now we've seen the videos finally, they're admitting it. So we're after disclosure. Some people haven't fully grok that, but we are. And who's piloting those. Craft that are moving at unbelievable speeds at G forces that are impossible for humans to survive. The ET is clearly in play here. So now take, like, if you will, the, the, the accounts of, you know, I had this woman on. She's a professor from my, I think Montana State University. Her name is already six color Clark. And she has kind of an unusual name because she's Native American. And she went around and collected all these stories from Native American people, not only United States, but Central America, South America, whole thing collects their stories. And she's anthropologist, right? So she knows how to collect stories and do it. Does it in a scientific way? You want to hear about shape, shape shifting all over the place. You want to hear about aliens all star people all over the place. You want to hear about reptilians all over the place. You want to hear about shape shifting reptilians. They're right there in her research. So you can dismiss her research. That's fine. You can say she faked her research. That's fine, but you better go prove it. She's a respected academic, a respected anthropologist who seems to have done things correctly. But don't just because you're going along with your buddies. Don't scoff at this stuff until you've looked at it or better yet, go ahead and scoff at it. Just follow whatever people are trying to jam down your throat and tell you is the way to think. End of rant. Well, I was pretty interested to hear your perspective on Ike there. Because I think we do agree to a greater extent. Just to backtrack slightly to Bernardo. I've never met him personally, but I have found him to be in every other way exactly. As you say, I mean his research is incredible. He's building, he's standing on the shoulders of giants. I'm sure he did met himself, but I've never seen anyone bring it together in this way. And what he did for his last book, The Idea of the World, which he published all the chapters separately in peer-reviewed journals by scientists. He was all combed over and gone through every storm turned by all sorts of different scientific bodies and publishing organisations of manner of academia approved for publication. And once he had achieved that and all these were all separate publications, he then brought them all together and put them in one book. And basically was able to get a scientifically, rigorously scientifically peer-reviewed book in kind of under the radar, so to speak. So it was very clever. And I've heard somebody say, oh, that was a bit underhand, you know, because they didn't know it was going to be brought. What difference does it make? Each chapter has an idea. I mean, you could take all the get all the different magazine articles, photocopy them and then staple them together. And it's the same thing. You know, that's all he's done. So I think that was a brilliant move when, and I'd urge people to check out your interviews with him. I've done many over the years. If you're interested in the idea of extended consciousness of consciousness, being the underlying reality of the universe, basically it makes sense of so much of our experience and our reality and everything that we see around us with our senses and all the tools and measuring devices that we have that reach beyond our five senses, all of the data coming in that we don't understand and we can't quite put together. His work brings so many things into a new light. When I read his article about nuclear power and Bill Gates, I, like you, have not had a chance to speak to him about it. I was a little bit mystified at first because I kind of got the thing about nuclear power. I'm not an advocate for it, but I do, I have listened to serious people who have said, if we want to keep the lights on in industrial civilization in anything like the form we currently have going forward, that may be the only alternative. Sure, but Greg, the point really is Bill Gates. Oh, yeah, exactly, which I was going to say, the Bill Gates thing. You see, I did take exception to what he was saying. I said, oh, you can't just take Bill Gates as one little dimension of his personality or look at Bill Gates bio on his own website and say that that is Bill Gates. So I agree, that was the point of contention. If there was anything in that that I'd like to take up with Bernard, it would be that. I'd imagine his response would be, I think you're right. I don't think he's a conspiratorial kind of guy, but I'd imagine his response would be something along the lines of yes, but, you know, everybody's either attacking Bill Gates or they're in Bill Gates camp and you don't hear them say anything other than agree with Bill Gates. So he probably sees himself as some kind of impartial observer and he'd like, wouldn't it be good if Bill Gates considered this? This is the way you see a lot of people open letter to the American president, you know, open letter to Vladimir Putin or whatever it happens to be. Did you ask Bernardo about COVID? Because I kind of got into it a little bit with him. It wasn't where we were. I did in my last interview with him, which was freedom from fear. We touched on a roundabout way about what's happening in the world, but we know we did not talk about the specifics of the pandemic, you know, origins, how that's playing out. Right, so he's playing it from what I can tell and tell me if I'm wrong. He is taking the COVID-19 thing straight on. I mean, he's taken the direct dose of the mainstream at this point to me completely illegitimized kind of thing. I mean, there is so much that they completely jury rigged the science. This is a global warming version 7.5 or whatever. And Bernardo from what I see Bernardo is not showing the ability to kind of climb out of that mess. He is going to, it seems like he's going to stay right down the path of if you're writing a letter with Bill Gates, open letter to Bill Gates and you're fawning all over him, then you're lining up for the vaccine and saying, stick me in, you know, we'll have this kind of global, you know, medical kind of system that they're going for. Because let's have a little discussion about this. I don't want to get into the whole COVID thing because it's a waste of energy cycles. But the part of it that I think is interesting and is relevant is how we come to understand science and spirituality and philosophy and all the things that we're talking about. And I think in the case of Bill Gates, just like in the case of Bill Gates, we don't need to read too much into what he's saying because he's saying directly, you will all need to be vaccinated multiple times and we will need to be able to, his big thing is we're going to have to be able to track who is and who isn't so that we can control that. He wants the one world control of those medical things. This is not some wild conspiracy. This is just exactly what he says and this is what he says. I guess Bernardo's letter was about nuclear power and you're not wrong to express your take on it the way. Yeah, but I guess his letter was about nuclear power and it's almost impossible at any given time to tell what most people think about anything important. Because most people don't, depending on the context of when they're speaking, expressing themselves will quite often say something other than what they actually think. This makes it very complicated. For example, we just had a US election that made it very complicated for pollsters to actually establish what the picture was out amongst the public. Let me interject, Greg. It's just that the evidence suggests that that is not what happened. The evidence suggests it is that they intentionally allowed themselves to be deceived by the polls in the same way they were deceived by the polls four years ago. There's actually one guy who got the polls right consistently last round in 2016 and was pretty much spot on this time as well. A Tefligar group, or I forget the name of it, but you can easily find it. I never followed it because I'm not into politics. I'm apolitical, but I kind of followed it this year because of the science angle was interesting. What he pointed out is he said their methodology is flawed. He said specifically how it's flawed. He said the idea that you're going to call somebody up and they're going to answer a series of 20 or 30 questions and during which they're going to be completely truthful with you and transparent and then they're going to give you their answer on who they're going to vote for is a poor way to collect that data. What he found is a much more effective way is to build in some degree of anonymity. He said if you create a very short text with people, you're much more likely to get a more accurate answer. He has other techniques and other questions that he asks around this. What will your neighbor vote for? The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. This guy was much more accurate in predicting in 2016, much more accurate in predicting in the midterm cycle in the United States in 2018 and much more accurate in predicting in 2020. He is in the business of doing polls. That is his financial. That's his livelihood. It's not like people will get into this and they'll get political. He's a Republican. It doesn't matter what the heck he is. He's either going to have people that are going to pay him to do polls or he's going to have people who are not going to pay him to do polls and the fact that he's more accurate in his prediction is all we should really care about. But again, what it suggests is that it's not really what it seems, that the polls from CNN and NBC and AP and all the rest of them, they weren't real polls. They were just an attempt to influence the vote by offering an opinion. Otherwise, they wouldn't so consistently be so unbelievably wrong. Oh, yeah. I mean, I got onto that because I was talking about Bernardo. How do we know what he really thinks about what's happening with COVID? And so as you've confirmed, most people in certain contexts won't speak up about what they really think. And I think this is what you're driving at. It does leave the door open for people to be influenced by what they think other people think in the absence of other people saying what they really think, if you see what I mean. So you're being told, oh, well, everybody thinks this. Everybody's going to vote for them. So the pollsters have called for so-and-so. Or everybody knows that this idea of the scientific idea is being debunked. Everybody knows that this idea of lizard people is complete nonsense. It's been proved or whatever it happens to be. And people are influenced by that. Because again, people don't want to stick out amongst their peers. One of the reasons why they don't say what they think. And if you believe that you're in a minority, that's what people are encouraged to feel in many areas of life, is that if what you think doesn't fit with the ruling paradigm, then you will be in a minority, even if it's a minority of 51%, which is most people. But back to Bernardo, and I certainly don't want to pick on Bernardo, but he's still saying we respect the heck out of his work and the brilliance of publishing all those peer-reviewed papers, which I think is important. Some people want to crap on peer review and go, oh, yeah, it's no. It's better than the alternative. It's better than someone just spouting a bunch of crap that isn't reviewed by your peers. And a lot of times on these peer-reviewed papers, a lot of people don't know. The review part of the peer review is published. So you can see what someone said. And if someone is just going along and not doing deep analysis, you can go read that. So I respect, in general, the peer review process. I think it's a very important part of the scientific process. And I respect his rigor in that regard. What I'm pointing out, and I'm making a big deal out of it because I think it is a huge deal, is that if people don't get this conspiratorial angle and Bernardo doesn't, fundamentally, he doesn't get it. He doesn't get it with COVID. He doesn't get it with consciousness. He really doesn't get it. He doesn't get that the system is not just willfully ignorant, but it's gamed. It's gamed to look away from the evidence for extended consciousness. It's gamed to look favorably on the evidence for scientific materialism. And it's more than one funeral at a time. It is one funeral at a time, but it's more than one funeral at a time. That's my hypothesis. That is my opinion. But Bernardo is having none of that. So that's okay. Maybe he's right and maybe I'm wrong. But to draw that out and say which I am, and I'm saying, hey, that's a big part of this. Getting to the bottom of the conspiratorial thing is a big part of it because it always comes into play. Like we're just talking about polling. And I get you're just using it as an analogy. But my point about the polling was there's a science behind that. And if you go look at the science, what it reveals is a conspiracy is that, oh, the poor guys at ABC knows they got it wrong again. Gosh, darn it. No, no, they intentionally got it wrong. And they never acknowledged it. And they never admitted it. And they continue to produce falsified data with a poor protocol for getting it. And here's a guy who's saying, I'm showing you exactly where your protocol, how it's wrong because my mind's always right. So that is conspiratorial. And if it's not made clear and explicit and talked about as a conspiracy, then it takes on a different meaning. It takes on a, well, let's just read the, the Bill Gates letter is just about nuclear power. You know, I'll finish the rant here, but I just an interview with a, no, I'll leave it at that. Cause I go all the time on all these side trails. I'll leave it at that. Well, what you're driving at partly there is what I kind of want to get to with what I'm doing at the moment. Cause I think we find ourselves in a similar juncture and that is if there, if it is gamed, if all of this is gamed, then it's like, how can we say that happening? Where should we look for? What are the indications of that happening? What are the telltale signs? And as always, what for to what end? And I've, over the last few years, I've done particularly good interviews with, you may or may not be familiar with some of these guys. Sorry if they're in your archives and I've not stumbled across them. Paul Levy, he's an American author. I think I have him. Yeah, a couple. He says his book from years ago was dispelling with Tico. He has published since then. That's a night in sort of Indigenous people's view of, you know, of evil. Recently, a couple of great researchers, again, U.S.-based, Colin E. Davis and Melissa Murray. We've done great work on the shadow side of the species and on Jungian psychology and psychoanalysis and also a guy I respect greatly, a guy called Mark Stavish. And all these people have been on with me recently actually since the outbreak of the pandemic because I wanted to talk to them all about this and with the deeper layers behind this. And we've been talking shadow. What I've been doing is what I've said a moment ago. I've been trying to, what evidence are we looking for here? There's other layers going on here. If we've got as far with Bernard's work, we've got to a certain point and there's something else going on. If there's still, what's missing here? What are we not seeing? Then what should we look for? What are the signs? And then what for? What's this driving at? Well, you know, and I might not have interviewed Paul Levy. I'm just familiar with that book and I think I'd really like to have him on. So have you interviewed him? Yeah, twice when the spelling Wateko came out and then more recently, because if you go to his website AwakeningTheDream.com, he's got a whole series of articles, just coronavirus articles. He's got a special subsection and that's all about the deep psychological levels here. Because he takes a sort of Jungian approach to this. Again, paraphrasing Jung as I did in my interview with Bernardo, actually, more or less, that which is denied within us, within our subconscious, within the psyche, manifests itself in the world as an event. And those are the dimensions of what we're undergoing now that I'm most interested in. Where is this coming from? What does it mean? Because it isn't the literal reading of it, you know, 3D world perspective whether there's a virus, some people are getting sick and we're reacting to it. That's a sideshow. Well, see, here's the interesting part of that and we'll maybe sidestep partially the COVID thing because we're also kind of burned out on the cycles with it. But you know they said the same thing about global warming, right? So, same thing, you know, Jungian, Earth, Gaia, Revenge, all that stuff. Except science reveals that they're full of shit, right? There's no global warming. We have one measure for global warming. It's sea level. That's the only measure, right? That's the only measure that they ever talked about as being meaningful. All these islands are going to be flooded and stuff like that. And then if you go and, you know, I think the best go-to person on this is probably Judith Curry, PhD, head of the climatology department at Georgia Tech University. And I don't even know where you come down on global warming, but she did this extensive kind of peer-reviewed analysis of sea level because sea level is the issue. The ice is in the glass. If the ice melts, the level of the water in the glass goes up. If you freeze it, then it goes down. We can measure ice levels and water sea level levels for tens of thousands of years. We just go to the ice core and we can get all that data. They've gone up and they've gone down. They've been higher. They've been lower. They've been much lower, but they've even been higher up to six feet. But right around where you live and where I live, you know, they've measured sea levels for hundreds of years. They essentially have not changed. They haven't changed because there hasn't been any global warming to speak of, tiny bit, but nothing enough to make a difference. My point is the science, and a lot of people are going to reject that I know because they get all bent out of shape. The science suggests that it's not on solid footing, the idea of man-made global warming due to carbon output. And yet, Paul Levy and those types were offering a Jungian explanation for it. So this is the failing of philosophy, and I know he's not strictly a philosopher, but this is where philosophy has failed. They've been swamped by science. They can't process the science and they know they can't, so they just throw up their hands and they randomly take one position or another on science and then they build some kind of understanding based on what is often crappy science. That is very opinionated. That's my take. So good. What's your take? Well, on global warming, clearly climate changes. So I don't like to use the word global warming. In fact, lots of globalists didn't like people using that after a while because when the temperature took a dive, then it was an opportunity for people to say, what global warming? Yeah, so the climate changes over long periods of time. We can see that, records of that all over the earth. And even we have in the era of modern humans, we know we have all the myths and legends and anecdotal stories passed down to us about at the ice ages and global flooding, the flood, the deluge is a global myth. So it seems clear to me that everything points to the large changes in climate and other geological factors that take place over long periods of time. Large scale changes in the earth generally don't take place very quickly. I think that human activity can affect climate, particularly locally. I think you can definitely, you can see that when you go into, I go from here and go into London, it's warmer straight away once you get in. And in terms of pollution as well, I think a lot of pollution in China, for example, in concentrated area can definitely affect climate. But as far as the whole global picture goes, the way it's presented I don't think is the case. Certainly, as you say, we'd be expecting to see some more evidence for it now. But again, that we could talk about that all day. But as far as your point you made about some other people offering interpretations of, let's say, great. You can remember the run-up to 2012, there was going to be this great earth change, this consciousness shift that was going to happen. And people were offering all sorts of interpretations about why it was going to happen. Some of them were scientific, some of them were pseudo-scientific, some of them were philosophical, some of them were psychological, psychospiritual. There were all these people saying, and this is the reason why this shift is happening. And then nothing happened, apparently. So I think that's natural. And if you have someone who, and David, I could certainly be counted in this camp. If you have someone who's bringing their perception to bear on the world around them and trying to interpret it and give a bit, as they say, a better reading of what's going on than we're mostly being offered. Of course, they will, because as you say, not everyone's an expert in everything and David's been guilty of this, they will apply their templates or their interpretation to something that turns out to be on a false basis. If you see what I mean. So not everyone who was interpreting global warming projections on a deep depth psychology basis are necessarily wrong in everything they're saying. It's just, as you say, maybe they didn't understand the science or they got that particular thing wrong. Or maybe they're in the habit of interpreting every single thing that occurs in their consciousness through that lens. I've often found including people that do it on stuff that's incredibly culturally specific. Like here in the United States, we have a complete egocentric kind of a view of our country. The whole world right now is going through an election crisis. No, it's really just in the United States, folks. It's not the entire world. There might be larger implications one could make. But it's just one of the annoying things for me particularly because back to the placebo effect kind of thing and back to the conspiratorial things. These things are being rigged into the system and were constantly being played. So I just pull up on the deep psychology young in shadow side of COVID-19. Pump the brakes minute. Let's figure out whether it was a virus that was engineered in a bio weapons lab in Hunan. Let's establish whether that is true or not. That might have a bearing on, you know, your whole thing about deep psychology kind of thing. You're going to have to work that into your speech there. So give it a pause. Well, I mean, if consciousness is the ground of being and everything's within consciousness, then who knows what form that can take. I don't see how that disallows an engineered virus in Wuhan. That's an event playing out. Yeah, but it doesn't. It is, you can't get there from here, right? I mean, if you're going to say, look, you know, I interviewed, did you ever interviewed Donald Hoffman? No, no, the name rings available. He is really a brilliant guy. He's a Caltech physicist and a heavy duty physicist and highly respected. And he's somebody who kind of completely but politely kind of destroys the scientific materialism. And when he and I talked, we had an awesome moment when we were talking then about spirituality because he's really all about science, you know, and he's all about the numbers. And he said one day he was giving his presentation to a relatively large group and talking about his rigorous mathematical model for consciousness. And again, this is consciousness beyond materialism. And some guy set up and said, yes, but Dr. Hoffman, the only language of God is silence. Everything else is ignorance. And he said, okay. He said, okay, actually, I like that. He said, I go into silence every day. I'm into meditation. And if you were to stop there and not say anything else, I could agree with you. He said, but invariably, people who say those things then have a thousand other things to say and a thousand books to reference and all their great sages and they want to bring in all the quotes and they want to do anything other than be silent. He said, so if we are going to speak, let's speak with precision. Now to Dr. Hoffman, that precision means mathematics because he believes that mathematical models are elegantly precise. And they are in some ways. I'm not sure everything, but I get his point. I want to say that to Paul Levy. I want to say that to so many of these other young Ian. You know, I'm all about the imaginary, no, being imaginative and creative and all the possibilities, the limitless possibilities within all the realms of consciousness. But I am going to ask for precision. And when you're wrong, you have to be held accountable. So if you go down the path of global warming and that's Gaia's self-protection mechanism and it kicked in in 1990 and then the science proves you're wrong, then you got to take it on the chin. And I'm not saying you, Greg, because you didn't do that. But I'm saying you got to take it on the chin. You can't keep spinning it like maybe it's true, maybe it's not. Same thing with COVID. If you want to stick your neck out there and say that Gaia produced a virus that would, you know, do what it has done to the population or whatever, that's fine. But if we later find out and prove that it's a pandemic, then you got to take one on the chin. You got to step aside and go, I was wrong. You got a course correct. You got to own your thing. Again, that's not directly at you because you didn't say any of that stuff. I'm being kind of provocative. That's fine. If it was a pandemic, that still wouldn't mean ultimately, if you drill down deep enough that it wasn't, you know, Gaia because Gaia is the one... Right, so my point is take Gaia out of it. Quit saying anything about Gaia because we can't say anything meaningful about Gaia. We don't know what that means. So take it out of the discussion. As soon as you say, well, it could be or could not be, then you can't say anything about it. So about precision, then what does that look like? Because that sounds just like science and doesn't leave room for anything else because, you know, there's that old adage, again, you either know something or you don't know something. There's no question about belief and in which case we know nothing, really. And I know that's not like that's a bit of a cop out as well, but it's just something to think about. What does precision look like in different disciplines? We're talking about science, philosophy and religion and different modes of apprehending reality. So when you say precise, you know, does that look different in different contexts or is it always more or less the same thing? I think that's an awesomely beautiful question. To Donald Hoffman, precision means mathematics. He's clear about that. It doesn't mean that to me. I, you know, we had an interesting chat both before and after the interview with Donald Hoffman. How precise is that song that brought you to tears? It's precise as hell, man. It reached into your heart and brought you to the depths of your humanness. That's pretty frickin' precise. It doesn't have anything to do with mathematics. How precise is the philosopher that points out the logical impossibility of nihilism? That's pretty fuckin' precise to me. So the point really is just there's a lot of different ways to be precise, but there's many, many more ways to be imprecise and that's what I'm kind of fighting against. Let's, let's, I'm all in it. Let's engage. But let's, you know, be willing to kind of, kind of go at it a little bit in order to get to a little bit of precision. You know, the catchphrase for Skeptico is inquiry to perpetuate doubt. I think doubt is a very spiritual thing. I think doubt is what I constantly want to move towards because in moving towards doubt, I find myself settling in on things that feel more like something I would call truth and I know there isn't really anything called truth, but it nudges me in that direction. And can you have precise doubt? In all the ways we're talking about here, right? I mean, Hoffman can precise doubt. Absolutely. His math says your equation doesn't work. The left side doesn't equal the right size. I doubt it, right? A mathematician doubts all the time. A good philosopher will present a logical argument that is all about doubt. We'll say, I doubt your conclusion because you're, what do they say, antiseedant, president, whatever that thing, you know what I mean? So precision isn't, I sort of doesn't demand certainty because what is that? I was saying earlier about knowledge and belief, the gap between the two. Because what can we be certain about? Otherwise, if we can be certain about things and what are you and I doing? Yeah, I think certainty's out the window. I don't think it's our lot, certainty, really. It's not a lot. I like, well put. Yes. When, you know, one of the things, one of the areas of science that's driven me is the near-death experience science and we both just interviewed David Ditchfield. That's another one we could talk about. What we took away from that, who had a near-death experience, I was like his story, how he got his jacket caught on the train as he was kissing his girlfriend goodbye. It's like, is that the ultimate fear that we all have, you know? Being dragged under the train. But the near-death experiencers and other people in this extended realm, what, I don't know about you, Greg, but what they have told me is that is a state of no doubt. But it's completely different than the space, the head space that we're in here. And a lot of times when they come back, they then are in this fog again where it doesn't quite sync up. But when they were there in the light, in the love, they had no doubt. And that's where I take what you said. It's not our lot. It's not our lot in this existence to have no doubt and be, you know, functioning at the highest level, functioning at the highest level, I think down here is having doubt. Well, I love that point you just made about having that certainty experienced by people like David, near-death experiences, or as I pretty much just call it a death experience. And they, if they come back to the place we find ourselves sharing at the minute, they bring some of that certainty with them and then it begins to become, the doubt creeps in again, it becomes a bit uncertain, but they still have the spark of that certainty. And that's what motivates people quite often to change how they engage with this reality. I think, given the point we've talked ourselves to today, it might be a good point to break off. I really hope we can pick this up in the near future, not least of which, because I want to get into the concept and the reality of evil, what your aforementioned book brings together through the lens of many of your guests. I want to talk about the system being gamed. I want to talk about things being rigged, about being skewed and twisted in certain direction. I want to talk about our attention being drawn away elsewhere. Don't look at that, look over here. I want to talk about agendas. So, yeah, if you're happy to leave it at that for today, I hope we can pick it up again in the near future. If you are, give us, have you got any closing thoughts otherwise tell listeners about your website, where they can get the book, anything else they need to know. Well, I definitely am super excited about continuing the dialogue. I like how you teed up part two, so we'll kind of leave it there. Me, Skeptico, just have to spell it with a KO on the end and you'll find all my good stuff. Thanks a lot for doing this and I'll take where we came to on a couple of places there and I like that we don't have to agree but I feel like we're moving towards a space here that is really under-explored in terms of these kind of dialogues. So, yeah, let's definitely do it again and this is something I'd love to put out on Skeptico too, both part one and part two of these dialogues. If that's okay with you. Absolutely. Once again, Alex, thank you so much for joining us today on LegalizeFreedom.com