 Today, we welcome Gordon White back to Skeptico. Gordon is, of course, the creator and host of the very excellent Room Soup blog and podcast, as well as the author of several really cool, interesting books. You see him there on the screen. Starships, the Chaos Protocols, and one other, what is it? Pieces of Eight? That's the one. That's the other one. He's been a popular guest on Skeptico, and I always look forward to welcoming Gordon back to talk about all sorts of goings-on. So Gordon, welcome back to Skeptico. It's an absolute pleasure to be back. Okay, I need to ask you a favor right off the bat. One of the things I think is really cool about Room Soup, the podcast, is you have this opening question, and everyone knows this by now, but you ask people, were you a weird kid growing up? And I thought, wow, this is cool. I have to do some kind of question. So I've started this question, and I cannot get it right. So you're going to have to help me, coach me, show me how to do this. But here's the question that I guess I think is relevant to Skeptico, and I want to ask people, and I want to find the right way to ask it, but I want to tune into the first experience people have with knowing in kind of a science-y, logic-reason standpoint, and how that can be transformative, and also how knowing from a spiritual, if you will, standpoint, and how that can be profound. But maybe I'm just stretching it out there and doesn't have the simplicity and the punch. I think not being a scientist, that one, maybe we would, because I think I know how I'm going to answer it, but maybe that needs to be rephrased to, like, when did you first realize that we can learn things via empiricism or reasoning? Like, when was your first, like, oh, wow, I can actually do a thing and learn something as a result of it? And I guess for me, that one, we have a small crustacean in Australia called a yabi, and it's basically a small freshwater, kind of like mini lobster. And as a child, I think, because I had, I still have rural cousins and they had them in their dams, and we had a couple of them that I sort of kept as pets for a while. So as a kid, maybe about five, I suddenly realized that you could, I was aware looking into this kind of fishbowl with these things, and I could feed them certain stuff and keep them alive at different temperatures and have them grow. That there was a sequence of things that I could do to observe an organism. The other one, at about 12 or 13, I won a science award to do with, like, looking at peripheral vision. And that turned out to be a kind of hop, because it was funded by a chemical company, well, a hydrocarbon company, and they funded this statewide competition for people to design science experiments. And the winners got this really bizarre prize, which was you got to spend a three-day weekend at essentially a youth camp where you would, you visited a nuclear facility, and the games that we would play had reps from the company there, and they were asking questions like, who would you invite to, out of anyone in history, who would you invite to dinner, and getting people to test different little bottle rocket stuff, and I'm like, you guys are actually eyeing off who you might actually want to pay for going through university, and I kind of worked that out at about 12 and I misbehaved, so they didn't pay for my university. But I'm like, this is odd. I just did a little science experiment at school, and all of a sudden I have to spend three days with, like, oil company executives having them ask weird questions. So those are the two from a science perspective, but the one that sticks with me is the idea that you can, there's a body of knowledge that you can apply to keep an animal or whatever alive. The spiritual one is easier, and I guess it stretches spiritual. I think this want to be good. This is a good question to ask people, because mine would have been sleep paralysis, hag attacks, which I've had since I was about four. So unbidden entity contact, some of which may or may not have been a screen memory of even weird things, but I was a kid that that happened to. So my first spiritual experience was not that pleasant, frankly. And I had a sequence of them, and the science one, I think, maybe if we talk about it, is when did you first realize you can use reason, or you can reason out how we can know things about the world. But those are my two answers. I like it. I like this is a very skeptical double question to start with. I really like the way you kind of are moving that. And it is because science part throws people. And I like the way you just kind of recast it there at the end, because I think that is the experience I'm trying to tap into, is that that idea that I can, through reason, have some control over things, even if it's just knowing and extrapolating from that, that I could know other things, you know what I mean? It's kind of like the first launching point to knowing more. And I think the spiritual thing is kind of interesting, too, because I've always had a very frightful kind of first experience that is kind of like a sleep paralysis thing, but it was kind of this, I forget the term for it, but it's like this, when you feel your body is misshapen, you know, kind of like really in extreme exaggerated kind of ways. I remember experiencing that and going, whoa, what's going on? And it really kind of freaked me out. Were you a kid at the time? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So my sequence, so I had classic heart attacks where it would be sleep paralysis, and I'd be sort of slowly become aware that there was an entity in the room that was waiting more or less at the door until I became aware of it. And then it would come right up close. And I wouldn't be able to move. And I couldn't open my eyes. And it was right there. And it was clearly a thing that delighted in and was probably feeding off the fear. But the other thing that I think is potentially a screen memory has a body shape change to it. It starts off as sleep paralysis, but I would get microscopically small to the point where the fabric of the bedsheets were thick as ship ropes. There would be, I had memories of, and as a result, so hypodermic needles became huge. And I had a vision of like an experience of them really large needles being near me. And then also a Romulan dideridex class for the nerds out there, Warbird, as a thing that was there. And this is, oh, and a figure that had a biped. So this quite clearly looks like some sort of screen memory of the thing. But it's interesting you mentioned the body shape change, because I knew this particular one was coming on because I still have sleep paralysis. But my impression was I shrank to microscopic size. So you still have sleep paralysis, huh? No, I haven't, not since, actually, not since I found magic. But I have, so they all kind of went away at about 13. And it's the thing about however they work, the thing about simple house protection and sort of bedroom protection stuff that you find everywhere around the world, is that they really do work. And you really don't need any skill in it. Like, because I was a kid, and I'm reading out of these, you know, wicker books and sage and some salt around and yeah, and I don't know what to tell you, it works, which rather suggests that however we, you know, use these terms or define them, a lot of whatever is going on is mind, right? But yeah, it cleared up for me. That's one way to interpret it. I think that's really, that's really interesting. And maybe that leads us into kind of how I framed up our little talk today, because I heard you've done so many awesome interviews, but one that you did recently was with our friend over at Forum Barry Alice Al. And what I really liked about his interview is he went back to the Starships book, which I think is as much as it is appreciated by folks, I think it's underappreciated. And I think it had a couple of interesting little guideposts that I still follow. And I find myself quoting all the time on Skeptico. And one is this idea of the data versus the interpretation of the data. And it's a rather simple idea with profound application that winds up being fitting in so many more places than we usually talk about it. But maybe just explain to people, I always like how you talk about it and the dig, because we can really understand the person who's digging is not the person, but go ahead and just explain what that means. Absolutely. So one of the things Naseem Taleb said in his most recent book that I really, really liked is you don't ask the carpenter who built the roulette wheel for gambling advice, because it's not, they might have domain expertise over here, but that's not necessarily that doesn't imply that they have domain expertise in something that happens to be separate or even adjacent. So when you're talking about it from an archaeological perspective, absolutely there is a skill set involved in digging and cataloging and doing the carbon-14 tests and all the other stuff that goes with actually generating data from a archaeological project. How we interpret that data is a completely separate skill set. It's philosophical, I mean you can certainly, you might actually be good at both, but it doesn't necessarily follow that you would be. Another example I used in Chaos Protocols which I like is a dentist might be good at making money, but it doesn't necessarily follow that he or she would be good at keeping money. It is a different skill to generate money and to invest it. And we very often conflate these things. And when it comes to the kind of stuff that we talk about on our respective shows, we're both rather, I mean my previous job was Global Data Director, it's literally in my title. So I rather like data and I rather like interpreting it and I've spent a lot of time thinking with how data are generated and what interpretive modes are the most useful and who has good ones and so on. So I really like, and I think if you focus on this it does allow you to swim in some stranger waters. This is a very Chaos Magic perspective I suppose. It allows you to swim in some really strange waters because there are no data that aren't irrelevant. It's just how you manage the kind of in and out and who you listen to and including yourself in that in terms of interpretation and data and so on. And I think it's a really good yardstick for digging into topic areas that are, I mean you've got the ancient aliens picture on the screen here, digging into topic areas that might be kind of like low quality if you will, but there is still quality in there. There are still good data and it's looking at whether that interpretation that comes from say the ancient aliens program is the best one for looking at the anomalies that we do in fact find in history and probably not at least as described in that show. You know let's talk about that for a minute. I think ancient aliens is a phenomenal show and I think if we're just to apply the fair standard across the board in terms of how academia is dealing with the data versus how they're dealing with the data to me they're their heads and shoulders above no matter how poorly they do it they're so far ahead you know we did the interview together with John Brandenburg and I think you did it and we broadcast on Skeptico. He's on there all the time and he's brilliant. I'm constantly watching him on there and I'm like wow this is super insightful and not everyone they have on there is just exactly right yeah and but back to your point I think you know the tricky thing the dirty little secret about the data versus interpretation in my experience is therein lies the problem is the never ending interpretation filtering there is no end point really into how far it can be interpreted so it's almost like one of those axioms that we can never you know get past because we are constant it's just a reminder that we are always interpreting and the interpretation is always open to change given when we find how those filters need to be changed so why don't you like ancient aliens? It's not um it's not that I don't like it I think you have uh when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail and so bouncing up and down the historical record looking for buildings that are impressive and saying aliens must have done that whether it's India in the 1400s or whether it's Gobekli Tepe or whether it's the Maya or what have you is insufficiently nuanced to take the discussion or the analysis or the interpretation to that next level now my background is in uh I have a background in in multi-channel televisions or an ex-discovery channel and one of the problems is one of the problems with multi-channel from a commercial perspective is they don't have very they they aim for evergreen programs so they aim to to build a program that is the same every time and is popular and when I was at um Discovery Channel it was deadly as catch because it doesn't change every season it's a bunch of guys on a boat with big waves and people loved it and and the trouble with a long-running program like ancient aliens is exactly that um the the the majority of the the money that a multi-channel broadcaster makes is in long-running programs that they can sell to other networks and so on right so ancient aliens is a victim of its own success uh which is it can't ever change because it's hit a formula that allows people to watch it and unfortunately that is where you get into variable levels of quality because yes Dr. Brandenburg's amazing um I would suggest instead that people maybe read his book uh and and get like some some pure john uh because I I have friends who I who've either been on it or um turned down being on it or have been on it and going I regret that I'm not going to do that again uh and it's largely because you sort of sit in front of a blue screen and you kind of have to I'll arrange the question so you say a thing and get a sound bite that then they'll they'll kind of sequence so it's you know it's an ambitious and uh obviously it's a very fascinating and valid area to cover it's just whether a long running multi-channel program can deliver sufficient quality over time and I don't think it can is why okay I I want to move on because I have so many other things I want to talk to you about but I will not move on I will persist one thing that I guess I'd push back on is your first point I think the nail that they're pounding on is the correct nail and given the mountain that they're they're trying to climb the the predominant view that they're up against and throughout academia just and it's so pervasive that this couldn't possibly be true and especially concerning how long running the show is yes that we do need an alternative explanation for why the pyramids look the same as the pyramids over in Central America and to the larger question is why do keep people look up to the sky you know why is there that instinct why do the dogan tell us that you know that hey they just tell you straight up yeah we don't have any contact with the outside world because the syrians came down however many hundreds thousands of years ago and told us we're from the star people I mean to me it's almost like they they have to pound on the same nail because it does seem to be the best nail at the moment it's the Occam's razor kind of thing it's the simplest most parsimonious answer to the question of what was the inspiration for these ancient cultures to look up and to be fascinated with the stars and star gods and all the rest of that I so I'd kind of say that and I'd also defend the show in that deadliest catch yes for a while but if you look at what the show has done recently in the last couple years I got to take my hand off to him I think they've done a fantastic job their show on AI and on advanced technologies I thought was fantastic I think there are shows where our buddy there has gone out on the road what's his name Zucolas or George yeah George yeah George are my Greek compadre there you know I think his his it's very very great you know you're getting them out there on the road talking to people it's no longer the blue screen he's down feet on the ground kind of doing stuff we never would have imagined I don't think that we would have this kind of mainstreaming of these ideas so I'm a I'm a big cheerleader go go go you know well fair enough okay good I'm not I did write a whole book about it I don't think it's the best explanation we shall we shall we shall return to that because you know best explanation well well let's let's stop right there what is a better explanation today given the data we have and you can't default to Jacques Valais because that's not really an explanation it's just a call to broaden the interpretation possibilities so that when you talk about the similarity between pyramids if you include Gunon Padang in that which is in the book and I think you should you're dealing with a pyramid building project that is that happened multiple times over about between 15 and 20 thousand years so if they're the inspiration for it how many times did they come down and where are they there is a better there is there has to be a better understanding of what human interaction with off-planet is that allows for these kind of ideas to occur over time because they absolutely do and it doesn't necessarily require physical Syrians landing in West Africa and talking to the dogon when we have no evidence of that but we do absolutely have evidence for telepathy and you know distant like non-verbal communication when we do these kind of things so the Syrians don't actually need to get here to tell us this stuff and what if it's the actual stars themselves like this is coming back to Dr. Sheldrake right when if he asked like the implications which neither was like this but it's it's the correct way of describing it the implications of panpsychism is the sun has some form of consciousness now neither was a panpsychist for very good reasons but that's what I mean like rather than having something for which we have no evidence we do have evidence for these psych capacities and it seems like that's a better place to start with that was sort of the whole point of the book rather than having aliens keep showing up that I just wonder if I agree like this is the cool thing about talking with you and having this kind of exchange because I feel like we can immediately go to the kind of what I was called the level three kind of thing beyond the you know oh this can't possibly be true beyond the beat back at the skeptics beyond the oh yes tell me please tell me the answer and just hash out you know the real discrements and not discrements but possibilities because that's really what we're talking about so I interviewed guy just recently is a fantastic interview because I love when these interviews go in totally different directions than I anticipate so the guy's name is Steve Briggs and I know him through my friend Rick Archer at boot at the gas pump because they both for 20 years were following around Maharishi and doing whatever he said in the TM movement and for 20 years this guy was training some of the top corporate leaders in India on trans and general meditation and then meditation techniques and he was highly advanced and he's meditating for seven eight hours a day and except when he goes on retreats and then he's meditating for 20 hours a day for long periods of time and he's traveling through India and he's meeting these unbelievable sages and mystics and he needs one and the guy says he's he describes him as just beautiful beautiful man like like features are beautiful but he also has this glow about him and he goes to talk to this guy and the guy says yeah you know I'm like 105,000 years old or whatever the hell these crazy Indian stories are but then he gives them some really practical advice he says look here's what you can do to improve your meditation practice and you've already been meditating for 20 years but you're so pretty far along that you can just do these simple things and the next thing he does is write what you were saying he says and here's how you can astral travel and astral travel better and here's how you can gather your internal energies and travel so he travels and he travels to Syria to the syrian star system and he needs so this is the interview right so i'm interviewing this guy and first let me say that this guy is kind of like a very conventional guy in a lot of ways nba tennis uh x you know played tennis at a at a national level in college through for a scholarship that's when he had his first spiritual slash psychic experience was on the tennis court when you know it's kind of the michael jordan effect everything slows down and i can see the tennis ball boom boom boom and he's like 14 years old when this happens and he wins the match and he's like nationally ranked and all this stuff so again there are all these elements to the story that tie us to a reality that we can all accept and now he's going to tell you he travels to the syrian star system and now this story gets even wilder because he said they have all these different planets and they have all these different technologies and his explanation just to throw this on the table for the starships for the ufo's is they're like why not yeah we could we can and do show up psychically but it's fun we show up in starships sometimes too and that's the way we do it and why wouldn't we do it and we like interacting and you know the whole thing so it's trippy but it's like in another way i've thought about that many times since it's like that's a very fucking reasonable explanation i love it i love it i'm here for it i think that's great like that's that's not that far from what i kind of think is going on absolutely which is you're right you're right that is not contradictory to what you're saying it's again taking the interpretation part of the formula and saying you know we're talking about interpretation well we can really kind of wad that up into a ball and throw it into a waste basket too because all bets are off we can interpret it just about every way you could imagine and and this guy i haven't listened to that show i've been you know as you can see i've been out and about fleeing bushfires but i i don't see what he described isn't that far from what i do just mean in starships about what i actually think is going on like in the universe like that that level of purpose of interaction is like why the fuck not like that relationality i think is what's going on i think that's what's going on spirits aliens whatever you want to call it i think it's just if you've ever been scuba diving and you see different you know fish species and other organisms that are in there they're all just kind of like checking each other out like what else is there to do like we exist let's interact and i i think that is good you know that is somewhat of a lead into the next topic that i was going to toss on the proverbial table being at the powerpoint screen here because it is a perfect lead in isn't it to magic and to how we might understand the extended consciousness realms and what's going on there because there is all this confusion and like you and i were talking was it on air or was it not when you're saying you know throw a little sage or burn a little sage and throw a little salt on the ground and i don't know it just seems to work over and over again and you know why not and and then how far do you want to go with the why not thing but the the larger question if i can pull back without totally confusing everyone is i want to apply this data versus interpretation meme to magic because i think the challenge is as i was just kind of stumbling through is we get so many different sources of data depending on where we look for magic whether we look in christianity which is a point that you've always made i think quite eloquently in and in a way that kind of jolts people into a realization that they have to have this broader understanding at least of what our connection to this extended consciousness magic realm is but let me step back and any initial thoughts on data interpretation as it applies to magic uh it's definitional um i've always wanted to ask you what your definition of unexpanded consciousness is um for a start yes but it's definitional but bingo no i you let me roll over and play dead because i think that is an indication and the other one is um and and you learn this like talking about dr hunter for instance um mutual friend jack hunter when you look at some of the things that are available like separating data and interpretation or um theory and practice is itself a practice so what um disciplines like anthropology have sort of worked out over the last 30 years is that even if we try to split it as experiment and then results or data generation and interpretation as two separate things they are in fact one continuous process they are in fact a behavior that um western is coming out of an empirical mindset do and when we want to start doing comparison and this is what the anthropologist did we drop down to that level and realize we are we are a kind of continuously embodying or from an embodiment or bodied perspective this is how we organize the world and it's at that level that we approach um non empirical cultures because they're kind of going along this organizing and interpreting of the world splits into visions of things like data and interpretations well they look very different if we drop if we jump up to a level where we try to look at their data and then interpret it we actually haven't got out of their own heads to do it so um unexpanded consciousness we'd need to define magic we'd need to define and we'd also just need to hang a lamp on the fact that when we split things like this and we try to look cross culturally and in a kind of Jeff Kripel comparison mode we have to be really careful that as we do it we aren't actually just still being Cartesian as as we jump into non Cartesian cultures because it just breaks on impact when we do it so that would be where I begin with it um if we want to define magic um I always define it this way and I think it's the kind of best opening gambit it's it's a culture specific way of describing uh the psych capacities of of a human at least so because the the powers that magic has is conserved across culture and we have them and this is the Dr. Raiden stuff right like and we have observed them in an empirical um fashion to both yours and my satisfaction that they exist so over the last 120 years um how they um how they present and how they are experienced and embodied outside of our culture um is very different around the world but that's that's kind of what I mean like we it's so fraught uh on the first step it's actually easy it's actually a really easy step to go okay so we're going to jump down here I get that and then all of a sudden these these kind of cross cultural relational activities like the Syrians and the humans uh just why not for the fuck of it um become available to us in a way that isn't extractive or um damaging so it's actually really really easy but it's so easy that we sometimes miss it and that's what I really really like about what's happened in anthropology in the last couple of decades that they've had to they had further to go in in getting that right because anthropology is of course the discipline that has literal skeletons in its closet in in Amsterdam and London and Chicago that they have to kind of sheepishly give back to like the Maori and the Aborigines and whatever so they have actual skeletons and so they've done a lot more of that soul searching work and there are some really good techniques about how we do this relationality that I think has um tremendous use when it comes to the kind of stuff we do in our shows which is that what can we learn from what life ways are interacting with us and what does that mean for our life ways oh so cool so awesome there's so many things to pull apart there and I always want to kind of jump right in with the adversarial kind of point and why not that's my nature I love what you're saying on so many levels and let's start with the extended non extended so spot on but your point is super well taken and if anyone missed it the idea that I think you're trying to get across is we can't really talk about extended consciousness realms without defining what the consciousness realm in its entirety is we can't start putting these arbitrary dividers up especially when those dividers wind up being brick walls that are 20 feet high that no one is allowed to jump over unless they have certain academic credentials or some other credential like you're the super shaman that wears the beaded feathered cap on then you can jump over but no one else can and neither one of us kind of like those kind of limitations I would suggest that I punch back a little bit that the definition that you give of magic has the same limitations when we talk about psychic psi capabilities because in the same way when we start defining what is psi and we start differentiating it from our everyday experience in some ways that makes sense and we can understand it but in other very ordinary ways we come to understand that there is no separation so absolutely that's absolutely correct uh so I start with that as a definition because it's like land and coordinates to to situate the discussion because if you actually look at say Eduardo Cohen's work in a marvelous book called how far us to think we need to situate that we need to shock ourselves and it it's just baked in there it's a difference between extended and unextended I know that you don't actually have when you start to think about it a model that allows for some sort of artificial divide between consciousness is experienced when you're at the supermarket and when you're astral traveling it's it's a it's consciousness it is what it is right so if you start with the siphon you can situate yourself of going okay this is in fact how far this way of being in the world can sort of extend and once you go to non-enlightenment cultures and and experience their life ways and and kind of compare them to your own and that sort of cry for less quay you find that there is no difference between the dream realm and the spirit realm and and all and so their model of how their flow model of how reality works has a much cleaner is the wrong word it is the wrong word and you're going to keep coming up no but you're going to keep coming up with the wrong word and that's one of my my concerns when we look at you know I've thrown up on the screen a slide from one of my just favorite movies of all time in brace of the serpent because I think it captures this interplay between these two different magicians the one magician who is the evil colonist that comes and chops people's arms off when they don't produce enough rubber but he is truly a magician and his ability to wield that hatchet in this most unbelievably wicked way is eventually in this movie we're not sure whether that conquers or defeats the magic of the shaman who I thought they would did an awesome job of portraying as being truly lost and truly challenged by his beliefs because everything he thought he knew about how the world works has now been called into question by these guys who just come in with their fucking hatchets and just chop people's arms off but at the same time we're introduced to this shamanic way of knowing and being in the world that that pulls us apart in another way and let me digress into a short story because I had a fascinating interview with a woman who approached me on to do a skeptical show and you know that is when people approach you and you're always like oh yeah fantastic fantastic work i i listened jam i heard it jam and the old change so so you know jan is has a bookstore in seattle and this russian guy comes and says hey i've been working with these people the old shape people the original shamans in this remotest of remote area of uh russia and here they are and i'd love to do a talk does a talk and subsequent to that for the next 20 years brings over these shaman leaders mainly women just so happens to be but one or two men and they come and so you know the the way i kind of titled that or the way i really kind of poke jan and she's awesome awesome uh researcher and woman but you know where's your fucking iphone shaman you know where's your fucking iphone and i thought her pushback was just awesome too and she's like yeah you know that's uh that's a good point so they they do not have that and they like coming over to washington and being able to order chinese food and have it show up at the door they think that's absolutely fantastic she says but i still struggle with understanding how when we were in a locked room and inside hiding from the weather elements of washington they made the wind blow all the papers in the room around in a big circle or how we could go out in nature and they could make animals come up to us just like they were in a petting zoo just out of the forest so how do we how do we interpret that how i'm really glad to ask because my my response is i think better um you were correct that in you know amongst the Siberian shamanic culture they do not have a government surveillance device that causes cancer and is made by suicide slave labor um so and they use these devices i'll tell you when you're getting in story in a minute but my i guess question back to the question would be how come your iphone can't call serious yeah um yeah but how come it can't so like this device contacts people how far can it get and how many towers does it need because i can talk to serious not me personally but that would be the pushback um and so if you situate and it's coming back to the idea of what level we do uh cross cultural comparison on and if we do it in a flow model it allow which is why these sort of devices can be joyously absorbed into the life ways of say you know non-western culture because if you approach it on a on a this is a thing that western culture did as it's going along then at that level you can look at them and i absolutely agree that the sort of technology share that would happen prior to shall we say the industrial revolution but like arguably prior to the rise of cities uh happen like we have the archaeological evidence oh you make a better basket or you make a better bowl like that sort of thing as do techniques like meditation move because they work better and so my um my father grew up in New Guinea and my aunt is actually in New Guinean and so he kind of has an understanding of where a good understanding of where different things from a quote unquote western culture can be useful and helpful in non-western sense so every time we growing up we'd go to the islands every year because he missed it and we he'd sort of we'd get to Sydney and he'd go into like a tourist tax store and he'd buy a whole bunch of like five dollar like i heart australian t-shirts and all that kind and he'd take them and he'd take hats and he'd take thongs and we'd go and visit um different you know outlying communities and whatever and not in like a weird christian way like we were there holidaying let's be clear we're not saving anyone but it's just he knew that we are in their lives and we bring things and they fucking loved them like we would come back a couple of years later and they're still wearing the shirts uh because they don't they don't have them they're not in Sydney you know they don't they don't have this stuff and it's a really good this has been from a policy perspective something that um brazil worked out not now they're in a quite bad way politically but a few decades ago when it was you're trying to navigate what how far at what arms length do you quote unquote hold native brazilians living in the amazon because it's like well how racist is it to keep them in a pristine state where they're all there without shoes and in loincloth in an area riddled with deadly snakes and saying for god give me some shoes some shoes would be great right now and i think that is um when we when we talk about technology share and and and how um i don't even like you word better but like how ideas that have some utility across culture move the iphone is a good example uh but so is meditation so is um the use of ayahuasca for contacting spirits these are things um they are totally but let me let me jump leapfrog this a little bit because where i'm really going and i can't usually jump that far ahead with folks is i'm worried about interested in concerned with et and et's ability to marshal technology in this forgive the term extended consciousness realm but i gotta keep using it because people know what it means as opposed to ufo's versus aerial phenomena whatever they want to call it so when we when we hear what et is doing in terms of screen memory in terms of telepathy telepathic communication in terms of long term surveillance and potentially counterfeited spiritual experiences where people come back and say oh i've had this incredible spiritual awakening i've had this healing and another person comes back goes really all's i did is got fucked by a reptilian you know it's like well where's the spiritual transfer of the body that can be i guess but so when i look at that that makes me look at the shamanic noble savage kind of thing halo that we can do that isn't like you said arms length kind of thing might not be the right approach either so i'm just wonder how we're supposed to figure that shit out and i'm not worried about being racist and i'm not worried about fair i'm just worrying about trying to understand it and not favoring one over another in a way that is going to cloud my ability to interpret what might really be going on and how much of this magic thing might be linked to a technology that we don't fully understand and when we do understand it you will have an app to talk to the Syria well i i don't so so many things there that um i think we actually need to pivot more to their understood let me let me start here instead because i was just up at a conference speaking about UFOs and contactees and and talking to the Pleiadians and all that really kind of like boomer stuff and i gave a presentation called what if we're the aliens but i'll tell you the presentation was what called what if we're the aliens and it's a transpermia talk right um but i'll tell you that i having you know spoken to a number of demons they will flat out say yeah we're trolling people like they think they're talking to the galactic federation that's us motherfucker now the argument then is in fact for more magic not less because where's your fucking iphone is the opposite when you go to cultures that never lost this um wary extra dimensional diplomacy component with the majority of shamanic practice isn't happy healing stuff it was keeping bad shit away from the fucking village the techniques for navigating the fact that the um the spirit world is sometimes deceptive but it is certainly never presented um as as factual like it what you see is never what you get in the spirit world and you have cultures that have millennia of experience of navigating that and we have an iphone so i would argue that in fact we need more of it rather than less and in the notion that any kind of contact experience is automatically a good one like oh look at me i've had a spiritual experience is a very western post-christian idea right visited by an angel or whatever like that kind of contact is quite neoprotonic the idea that oh look if um something happened to me i interacted with a star brother you won't find that level of optimism you will find awareness and and a and a hard one cynicism in cultures that just know better from more experience of the spirit world and they're like it might be that it might be something else and magic is frankly better at and i i can even shrink that down to western magic is better at navigating the the reality that this is a deceptive and enigmatic process because it has those fail safes built into it and within within animistic cultures when you say uh once we learn fully what magic is about you never will that you kind of have an open cosmology that is hyper pragmatic because you admit and understand that you will never fully know what's going on but you nevertheless have to be in the world and interact so like what techniques what what ways of being in the world kind of work in this sort of getting along together way so i would i would the same problems right i mean i you will acknowledge it that is with the same problems that you're trying to kind of get past or overcome right so no i would disagree i would because you you want your animism as an ontology i'm looking for an epistemology so i know that this the the rise of magic has somewhat irritated you over the last year and i'm sorry to bring the bad news that it's it still has much further to run than than dean raiden uh but what i'm looking for is an epistemology and you're worried that it will replace your ontology you're worried not totally so i i i fully agree with the point about you know more is better in this case right so a more include it more expansive understanding of those modalities for interacting with but you know we're always going to be struggling with words in this discussion this kind of inside baseball level three discussion because as soon as we start talking about spirits we don't know what the fuck a spirit is no more than we know what consciousness is it's all part of the same blob that we're pulling apart but here i would try and circle this back to my point because i'm really interested in getting your uh your insight on this because it's fantastic but did you listen to our friend greg carlwood's excellent interview with wittley streiber uh if it was in the last month or so because i've been traveling and then fleeing bushfires i'm behind in everything i'm afraid so i haven't i don't know how far back it was but it was it was quite extraordinary and it was extraordinary particularly at this one moment when wittley's talking about being uh i don't want to say abducted because he wasn't he was voluntarily admitted by his parents in this special youth program and at an air force base in san antonio where these kids were subjected to just a horrible kind of a skinner cage you know you walk in to the to the facility and these kids did and just to digress slightly streiber says i i can hardly believe that this happened except i found two other boys who were with me and one boy who wasn't because his parents when they came and told them about the special program for gifted children in the skinner box as in bf skinner said get the hell away from my house and don't come back but his parents weren't so inclined or his parents were part of it whatever so to think and he was dressed up in his sunday best every week in order to go to this camp and when he first goes in on the air force base there's these kids locked in these little cages and they said that's what happens to children who tell their parents what happens and it turns out that the purpose of this exercise is near as he could tell it i should say exercise this torture this nk ultra program is to break these people open to break these souls open in order to access this extended consciousness realm and once we do this investigation like you and i have we say totally understandable i mean in the shamanic traditions many of them have similar kind of not not that they're not culturally understood to be torturous they're understood to be rights of passage whether it's a sweat lodge or whether it's some other kind of experience or being stung by bees but that would be kind of in a different thing but anyways the point is the same that is the technology that i guess i'm talking about because certainly those folks in the air force the mk ultra three letter agency they weren't doing this from a uh a shamanic or a magic perspective they were doing it as near as we can tell is let's figure out how the fucking aliens do it and do it the same way because what i always point to is you know my friend grant Cameron and the famous wilbert smith memo where right there it's written down we've gone to the us we found that the UFOs are real and the the mental component of it is something they're very very interested in and this fits in that time frame let's see if we can break people open in order so that we might perfect this technology and that's what intrigues me Gordon is that what if there really is a technology component to this and if you look stretch technology to mean it where we they can get to some level and in that respect maybe we would look at the shamanic and the magic traditions that you're talking about just in a different perspective not worse better but you know kind of the a different perspective in terms of how developed they are and how efficacious they are at the desired result i would suspect that that again is a definitional challenge like you kind of landed on it towards the end there where it's like well how do you find technology and if you want to do that comparison you kind of have to go technique go back to the ancient greek and and i i like to use words like cultural complexity instead because it is not obvious to me although it's certainly entirely possible firstly all that wiggly stuff 100% like sure like that's that's one of the things that is alarming i would just say before we talk about the technology thing if we are comparing the clear and multiple projects there of trying to weaponize these capacities of these children that is kind of trying to break into the spirit world whereas typically and the word shaman is is culturally bound we all know that but you know what we're talking about what you will find in cultures that have this as a function within it is that the spirits choose them so you don't you don't torture all the children in a tribe you find the ones that the spirits have picked and they'll unfortunately for you my little son or daughter you're not going to have a very good life you get to be the shaman and that's that truly or horrible and god only knows what they found with these these projects but it's it's kind of a it's a military assault on the spirit world so if we want to kind of compare these two that's that's worth thinking with as to what what i think you're getting at is has it already happened or will we one day somewhere in an underground base have a device or or a machine that can bodily move you into the spirit world or teleport you via you know spirit tunnels whatever you want to call them to like other points in the galaxy can will a will the underground bases have a military version of some of the capacities we find in cultures that never lost magic because that's one question but here's the second question that i want you to answer at the same time i want to use your term cultural complexity and i want to suggest is it possible that et has a cultural complexity that includes a mastery of some of this stuff this extended consciousness stuff that makes our understanding of shamanic cultures as well as magic traditions look like that photo that i have up on the screen of the nearly naked amazonian people who we admire in some respects but in other ways go you know here's your compass go find your way to the to the river and there's a boat on there with a motor in it it's a lot easier i think what what happens is you kind of get to that end point of where does technology so one of the other things wittly said which i like is that advanced civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy have presumably developed a way to maintain continuous communication after death so that the death is all late and we would have been close honestly i think if we if spiritualism in the mid 1800s had gone in a different direction from a policy perspective we may well have been there and that rather changes it's not even a technological solve at that point what that means is that you are you are fully you're operating in the full universe rather than the component of it that you can perceive while you're still in a meat suit right and so when you talk about a technology that relies on shall we say like the physics of magic or the fact that the universe is magic and a technology built on that you're still in a universe that's magic so you kind of get to this end point we go okay so a civilization that can maintain continuous communication beyond death and and can do instantaneous interplanetary transport and so on those things can only work because the universe is magical is you know i'm using that term but you know what i mean like we live in an animate whether it's consciousness universe so yes and no what i would say back and i know this has happened to you as well but it certainly happened to me having on my travels to various like you know sacred sites and weird places and and being amongst like tribal fetish objects and and all this kind of stuff is that a rock can do that if you go to say Marie LeVos tomb in in New Orleans as you walk up to it your blood pressure drops and it's a tomb it's just it's from that level of reality that the technology can be built and who's to say it hasn't remember you've had guests on that can astral travel like so who's to say it hasn't i agree with you that you just end up with this kind of infinite or vanishing point where we might do it on a mechanistic basis or we might do it on an animistic basis but you'll still end up at this point the realization that you are in an animate magic all consciousness universe whatever will will occur and that's kind of where i'm like i'm not sure are you yeah and are there entities in the galaxy that have consciousness ray guns for one of i don't know you know an example do they have do they have that iphone that calls the devil i don't like yeah probably because you know the ufo contact experience especially when you get to things like screen memory and so on is is a little alarming it's that's there's no other question you know i i think that's worth thinking with you know i could hammer on this on and on that you've brought up so many great points i i just think we're going to lose ourselves in the complexity of it but awesome kind of discussion let's bring it back to dr dean yeah maybe more of a down to earth kind of discussion that you and i have had offline and we'll share as much as you feel comfortable with kind of online here but we both interviewed dr dean grade and you did an excellent interview with him and i kind of was a little bit meaner to him but still i i appreciated very much him coming on and if i was mean to him or if i'm saying i was mean to him it's because the vanishing point that you're talking about i think has to be on the forefront of our mind as we walk down this this path the vanishing point being that we're going to reach hyperspace when we realize that the shaman is no different than the et in terms of their ability to manipulate the extended consciousness realm because it all reaches some higher dimension that then totally escapes what we can uh is beyond our understanding and that's where the action probably really begins and i just wonder as awesome as dean is and as important as his work is can he really catch up to their given you know when you talk to dean he says you know to be honest with you and i so appreciate his honesty is i didn't even think of the term spirit seriously until a year ago and if he is on the vanguard and for god's sakes he is on the vanguard but if he is on the if he is on the edge of this does science really have science in this sense have a chance of catching up this is where maybe i would swap that out again to just be a bit more precise and say empiricism and i think dean has got this right like empiricism is fascinating because my definition of it and it's a good one philosophically is that empiricism is the notion that nothing exists outside of sense data and and scientific results are a subset of sense data because you perceive the results right and it invalidates itself as a as a full explanation for the universe because the statement that nothing exists beyond sense data is a statement you make without the sense data to support it you are making a statement about the universe that nothing exists that i can't perceive now um that but once you realize that empiricism becomes exceptionally useful because you've made it the right size and this is how we can do things like archaeology and whatever and i think dean has absolutely nailed it by in the last book by taking the empirical uh exploration of magic um an animate universe the reality of psi whatever you want to as far as it can and i think he was really good with us both at holding the line i think he's like this is literally all we can get here but this is all that this can show us that doesn't mean that's all that is there in the world so i really like the dean and maybe it's his kind of cosmic function in the world i really like the dean holds that light because like i asked him it's true it's true for and especially this is real skeptical stuff right like um it's true that the data cannot i mean too about satisfaction sure but cannot definitively land on the existence of an afterlife or spirits or any of that stuff because you can't perceive it because it this is how big empiricism is it's one circle and this stuff is outside of it and whilst we all agree like the data approved like it's just that we can't use this one technique to conclusively land on it doesn't mean it doesn't exist it means like it in fact it's a really good argument like empiricism is completely filled up with like this this stuff is real but we need other techniques we need other epistemologies hence why i'm interested in that rather than ontologies to be able to go okay well then where do we what other means of truth validation exist for us outside of empiricism and so i i loved both those interviews and he's to be congratulated because we all agree like it's it's a pretty good case that you know the spirit world exists and life continues after death but you cannot get to it with an empirical model conclusively you can get to something is going on and it was so good of him to kind of go no i will not be drawn outside of it and i'm i'm really happy he held that line and and it leaves us to kind of blow in the wind which is where we belong we want you on that wall we need you on that wall but it's like it's i mean it's so good he's he's just got such the mind and the experience to go like i can't you cannot design an experiment to objectively demonstrate empirically you can't design anything yeah yeah and i'm with you i'm with you and i'm totally 100 supportive of of dean i love what you said about the magical shrinking machine and that is the most beautiful metaphor that i've heard my problem is when i really step back and want to be honest and not be so nice is that you've now shrunk it down to where it isn't that meaningful or important science has now absolutely itself in terms of a larger investigation of who are we why are we here and you've just relegated it to a small part of it it can help but the shrinking machine you know can be a problem can and this is why i was specific about empiricism so empiricism isn't science these are two different things science relies on empiricism currently exclusively in which as a way to as it's exclusive epistemology it relies on empiricism it doesn't need to and and this is something that western philosophy which is hit and miss but one of the things and comes back to what we're talking about there are other forms of proof that we have had available to us for 2,500 years we've had mathematical proofs we've had logical proofs we have had for whatever they were yeah but hold on hold on i mean if dean has helped us make any change at all it's that the shade casting that's been done on empiricism is now flipped and what we can say now is empiricism really is the only game in town because all those other things you're talking about aren't real we can't really measure things no but that's really we can't really do mathematics we really can't because it's all an abstraction of something that we don't know what it really is the only game is in Paris the only game is it's not you're using empiricism which is an epistemology as an ontology again and that's the error so there is nothing and this is the kind of realization that happens across disciplines nothing stops there is nothing that can prevent you from doing that baseline philosophical work of what is reality empiricism is the next level down and i don't think it makes it i don't think it diminishes it i think it restores it and makes it useful again so that it's not designed to be an ontology it's designed to be an epistemology and we keep using it as an ontology and if you if you just let it be what it is again yes you have to do the hard work of going like well that's one method of truth validation but nevertheless here i am as an organism or consciousness or whatever in a universe that has that capacity what can i learn about and this is the western philosophical journey it's the eastern one too in many respects is nothing can stop you there is no like oh look done and i have empirically generated data that solves a crucial thing that every human has to do which is those foundational philosophical principles or work nothing prevents that and empiricism turning it back into an epistemology is tremendously useful on that personal quest to do so so i don't think i think it's the opposite i think it's made it better rather than worse to make it to just let it be what it was initially yeah maybe i'll i'll move on and let it go over the next time we talk i'll i'll ask you to finish that thought about what ontologies what maps of the territory are really something that we can that we can put up on the wall and be proud of because i i don't think i don't think they exist but but i don't think any of those other alternative ontologies really kind of get a but i shut up and move on um so here's a fun one another chance to poke the bear or poke the guest as it is in this case but i think the data versus interpretation thing with regard to social engineering what some people call conspiracy which is if there ever was a social engineering of a term it's the social engineering of conspiracy as conspiracy as opposed to what it really is is 90 of the time a social engineering project by someone by a government either our government or a foreign government or a corporation or a shadow government or somebody i think there's this data versus interpretation thing going on people get tired of me talking about the gloria steinem example but i love it because still a lot of people it's something we can touch and we can go and actually put our finger on it's one of the few times that one of the players actually stands out is stupid enough to stand outside and go well yeah i really was a player in a social engineering project and then we find out that she not only was but still is so here's my poke at you to what extent is the current kind of neoliberal quasi proto pseudo progressive divide a social engineering project because it sure as hell looks like one to me it looks like another version i mean it took me seven or eight years into skeptical to realize that biologic robot in a meaningless universe is not just a bunch of dumb guys who haven't figured out an obvious kind of observation it is somehow a social engineering useful idiot you know isn't it better if we send things down this path kind of thing and i always like the example you give of well look at the frontier science done in the darkest corners of those agencies they were way past the materialistic model yeah a long time ago and i wonder if the same thing isn't going on here so when we see these social movements it just to me smacks of social engineering what thank you gordon i think um some of it yes i think a lot of it is inertia so i think we are still in the after effects of some uh either successful or abandoned 20th century technocratic engineering one so if you look at feminism post see and i i don't know quite what steinham was for for the cAA other than surveillance but i rather suspect it has to do i think they're interested in whether feminism could be used to reduce population i think i think that might have been it because if you look at the kind of 20th century technocratic project one of the things they were concerned about um and it's uh it's always the case i saw it like one of the things they were concerned about is overpopulation so i'm not but here we are in a in the inertia of a whole bunch of different ups and projects from um russian meddling to feminism to to all the rest of it and we're kind of in this car creation inevitable conclusion of what happens because there was so much inertia behind them even if they're not running now we're still caught in the tumble of it they're also as far as i can tell looking at the world in the last few years um there are more people private entities billionaires whatever you want playing a game that used to pretty much have one player at least in the west like during the cold war we had one player and whether it was because the the angler american alliance whatever you want to call it and and the the cAA and and all the rest of it were more or less aligned in what they wanted to achieve for the west in the 20th century or not um if you look at it now what isn't enough so i think it's really uh we're in a kind of car crash of current ups and the inertia of historic ones and i think that's just where we are and it's a mess you know one thing i i'd i'd kind of throw out there is is an explanation of these ops number one i always fall back on the reactive versus proactive thing which is i think the first agenda is hey we have to have a foot in the door we have to have a stake in that game so yeah you go and you co-opt or disrupt or infiltrate feminism if for no other reason then we'll figure out what the fuck to do with it later let's just make sure we have we we can play in that game that's the british empire model that's absolutely it yeah and i think that's that's smart but i think if we we're gonna if i was going to venture a guess on what the goal is i think the first goal always since constantine has been control sure because that's our job is is to control and if we can pacify disrupt uh in in this case when you look at feminism if we can atomize the family if we can isolate make people more alone afraid less connected then we're always better off in terms of from a control standpoint yeah it's easier to control the sheep in that way than it is in in any other way and that's my concern with like when i look at like i have up there the first transgender muslim kind of thing because some of these things are actually bordering on the on the kind of comical and it's the same thing in my opinion is like is there an issue in terms of uh sexuality in terms of uh absolutely is there an issue in terms of transgenderism and uh and rights and certain um discreet certainly discrimination that's obvious absolutely is there an agenda that keeps cropping up in terms of trans now finish that with whatever you want you know transhumanism trans culturism trans atlantic globalization i mean i think there's a lot of things that play there in terms of an agenda that seems to be playing out in a bunch of different ways in the same way of atomizing separating and ultimately turning people into being more alone afraid less connected and less spiritual in whatever way we want to kind of define that what what do you think well um well that's kind of a use the word technocracy because i'll i'll work backwards because what you just said there is it's true although i don't focus on here's the thing the 20th century technocratic project and you include all the people in it like bernay's that are that are part of of the 20th century development of these capacities right so the technocracy thought it fell to these rich people to manage the development of the world and the west for our benefit right so it isn't even just necessarily keeping them alone and afraid that is a side effect of well we are the technocrats we are better at running the world so our our competing narratives are here in the church and here in the family and so on and what we actually want because where all the doctors where all the educators where all of this kind of stuff you need to get it from us and we will manage the society and you will eat the right food and the population will grow or not at the rate that we determine the economy will work this is how this is the the demonic goal so it's funny it's where i wanted to start there on a human level that's the kind of 20th century idea i think they're shooting for it is demonic like if you want to go to a higher level when you're talking about well what are the kind of metaphysical implications i have no idea if any of these people realize they are being ridden by demons but nevertheless the goal of this kind of project is in is in some literal sense it when it comes back to what i was saying before about a car crash of different real and fake things and existing and and historic agendas and so on it's a pity that the word trans is used for transhumanism and something like trans rights because and trans fats like it's actually not a good word like it's and so we have this linguistic problem where things get conflated together and transhumanism is like up and down a technocratic plot. Trans experiences and and kind of new explorations of gender and gender expression aren't however they are regularly weaponized and they're weaponized for intentional reasons and also because and this is because Conor comes on the show a lot Conor Habib comes on my show a lot we talk about this which is you typically find and obviously you typically find the promotion of or the the defense of trans rights and trans visibility on the progressive end of the of the spectrum like obviously that is also a question you guys have when you go encapsulates i think where you're going what's like how come trans people aren't allowed in the military and you're like yeah and then you're like well well it's good that a good thing that's great just ban the rest of them now that but mostly it's because on the left where you find um and where you historically and typically and rightly i guess find the um this promotion's the wrong word because it sounds like an agenda but let's just say the defense and the prioritization of things like trans rights you also get a kind of idiotic left materialism you get the kind of Marxist reduction of everything back into a materialist labor interaction based on his you know observations of a 19th century industrial economy so you have a definite weaponization of different manifestations of this you have the part of it which is good which says you know people should be able to fucking live how they want to live and you also have the people who are trying to help as far as i'm concerned aren't helping in the right way because just the argument goes round and around on a materialist basis because from a progressive perspective magic for one of a better word is is dirty it's it's dirty the Marxists don't like it um the the 20th century philosophers they rely on don't like it uh and we say magic and i substitute spirit you say magic i substitute spirituality same thing if you come at it from an atheistic perspective it's all gobbly good within about two sentences and unfortunately the the the less the left the progressive the neoliberal has married themselves to just do it philosophical kind of non-starter knit wit again biological robot kind of thing hundred percent yeah and i do you have any thoughts on that third picture down there uh i've just so many odds along christ um along and your buddy peter lavender oh my god to me to me this is the most clear example of a political rollout disclosure kind of thing that that is masked by again all this bullshit of people talking about well did he did they did they should they would they it's a complete political disclosure rollout let's look at it as an operation and stop looking at it as uh true disclosure i mean there was this information was disclosed but again it's your term weaponized you know what do you think of tom belong what do you think peter live in the mike peter lavender quote that i do have to get you to respond to the one that just had me pounding on the table i was like i gotta push this back on gordon because gordon like peter his retelling of the story is well and then uh tom de lon called me and of course i hung up because i didn't believe it was tom de lon and he called me back and he said it really is and then we talked for a long time we go gosh we really got to crack this thing and there's so much misinformation disinformation out there we've got to get to the bottom of that we decided well the only way to do that was to go to the military so that's what we did we mean full stop oh really that was the only way to get to the bottom of it i mean that isn't even a well crafted story i was like embarrassed that you even try and spin that out there to me all right i've i've gone too far over the over the moon there but tell me tell me what you think in general about the political sci-op disclosure that was it was always going to be like i one i think it's an abandoned one um we've had this discussion before i think this stuff was to coincide with the movie arrival and a hillary clinton presidency um neither which happened uh and they still are it's it's like a movie right we have it in the can we spent all the money we got it yeah because um this if you look at what and you you'll be in agreement and most of your guests when you talk about this stuff will as well if you look at the majority of the the kind of classic era ufo cases they are patently us cold war propaganda um covering secret military projects and and and and trying to kind of like influence the soviets in the sense of like well maybe they do have a flying saucer like there's a lot of a lot of stuff in the kind of classic cases is that now all of a sudden we have yet another kind of op of like oh well maybe we have these uh um these flying saucers and these these special ray guns and and we got this from aliens and it's and it's important that the american people know that this is here and that was to coincide with what you're still getting two-thirds of washington trying to want which is a um a conflict with russia and and a military dominance of eurasia so i think this is literally a um a semi-abandoned or let's see how this goes more air cover for the kind of things that uh we're going on in the cold war because we're in a new cold war i think it's mental i think it's weirder with tom do long i honestly think he's been mind controlled several times and i don't know if you've heard him on on some of the earlier yeah um interviews where he's like calling people from the car and um or he's like meeting people at the front of the pentagon in the middle of the night and like my good dude you would be in mind control so um i just interviewed i just interviewed kevin day who is a super interesting guy so kevin day is the the top gun intercept orchestrator of all those planes that are on the tic-tac video that gets released mm-hmm i can't go through the whole interview but the guy certainly seems legit 1000% legit and the the ptsd uh valet davis effect which i wasn't familiar with do you know the valet davis so valet davis effect are they went ahead they would joc valet and i forget dr davis's thing but they did a peer review published analysis of the after effects of contact related experiences and this guy says all of them check every box meanwhile he's going to the a clinics and they're going oh complex ptsd and he's like yeah kind of but not really and then he stumbles across eight years later because it's all happened a long time ago he stumbles across valet davis and he goes bingo exactly and he traces it back to when he actually went up on board ship and actually took the glasses out and looked at these visitors and had an instantaneous experience meanwhile he's using this state of the art billion dollar war machine instrumentation to track these things every different way possible and he's seeing it and the other boats and planes are seeing it but then another interesting aspect of it is there's again this screen memory thing going on and he retells the story so many times and i listened to it gordon and i finally asked him i said you know i've talked to enough contactees let me ask you this part about the experience because you said that you observed these 20 flying objects basically trolling your ship for like four days and they were flying at 22 thousand feet at 100 knots can't do that nothing can do that but you didn't think it was anything to worry about i said i gotta tell you how many times i've heard that story from a contactee oh i saw my wife being abducted but i decided i should go upstairs and go back to bed because there was nothing there to worry about so he not only has this experience but all the other people in on the other boats that you know are having the same experience oh those are nothing to worry about they're just enough so i think there's something more than just war games advanced weapon or advanced technology being hidden i think it's a real contact experience and i think they're playing around with true disclosure that is i think there's there is disclosure that could be planet changing but there's a wrestling match of the usual kind in terms of who's going to control that information and how and when they bring it out because obviously that can dictate how the script gets written from there on out yeah i'm not sure i go the whole way there it may well be of course um i what the closest i would get to that because i still think this is when i say it's an op it doesn't mean because i know damn well that they don't have some of these toys that they're talking about right and i don't know the origins of those toys um i don't think you necessarily need to have a crash spaceship to make some of the kind of things that exist that we're not supposed to but maybe that's where you got them from i do think there is a kind of signaling game going on at a um higher geopolitical level and i think russia and china and obviously everyone is playing along the same like they're trying to rattle sabers that we aren't supposed to think exists so if you look at the recent russia thing that may or may not be true that they have like a ray gun that can cause hallucinations and bombants that they're putting on the ship that may exist that may not but we have this kind of stuff going on in the west and they have that and what i'm seeing is is um and i don't just mean to split it on a nation basis obviously because i think we're potentially too geopolitically sophisticated to to have it as a national discussion or between nations discussion but i do think in some of this hullabaloo and front page in your if for somebody to go on the front page of the new york times it's get signed off in langley right so so i do think there's what we're seeing in a whole bunch of different foro at the moment on a on a geopolitical stage people are rattling sabers that we aren't supposed to know exists and um and that would be as close as i get to i think there's a wrestle over disclosure i think they're like you got flying so it says i got a vomit producing ray gun perhaps okay we might another topic let's see if we have time to get to five or not but this is one first wall here's the guy you're looking at the first guy i know who totally called odd patreon probably a year ago yeah a year ago said yeah no it ain't it ain't gonna happen it's gonna turn the way that all the other ones will turn as if we could see those other ones turning censorship hardcore softcore so tell us you know i pulled to make my little meme there i found very interesting headline just from the last couple days from our buddy but you know jack kante who's the CEO of patreon the new story that i ran across that i thought you know for people like you and i we can would love to spin it and reading between the lines but his big news flash was hey patreon the current patreon model is not sustainable and what he was signaling was i think hey mother fuckers get in line you're worried about censorship i'm gonna i'm gonna change the whole damn thing instead of getting 90 i'm gonna tell you how much you can get and it's gonna be a lot less than 90 in the future and more importantly what he's signaling is i'm running a business here and when i run a business i listen to the people who basically set the rules for my business and the rules for my business going forward are censorship because that's the game that is always going to be at play it's only a matter of who's doing the censoring what do you think of patreon uh well like my background i've been in startups and had them acquired and and from essentially my space on um a platform just gets worse um it happens with facebook it happens with twitter and and for from a commercial perspective um etsy and paypal both kickoff businesses that they decide or unilateral like an astrologer or something that they declare doesn't exist so it's like you're always at risk in our space whether it's um podcaster whether it's magic or whatever you want um how many times do you have to get fucked over by silicon valley's eternal um just nature before you go oh no this time it'll be different this time it'll be great and so i did have a bit of experience in like there's no way this ends well because none of them have um as for the censorship component on a macro basis i actually in a funny way i think it's good news um firstly it is surprising to me that people didn't realize what platforms like google like youtube and whatever actually were and and i've kind of confused it is some sort of public free expression when it is a um it's a corporate product that back back ends into dapper right so but but hold on i mean i think we have to make a distinction there because i'm with you when you say back into back ends into darpa but in another respect it is the public square it is the fourth estate it is the of our time it is and that play could have been made and i think that you know that those questions will be answered in the courts years from now but sure i look at it they're surely going to lose because you know jack kante can't on one hand say i banned this a right-wing woman because she was endangering our group got together and decided i mean as soon as you start policing your content in that way then you are in the business of editorializing and you're putting yourself in a whole a whole different thing so and the whole thing with like with alex jones who i also have up there oh you don't like alex jones don't like alex jones which i think he has kind of exposed himself lately with the trump epstein thing which he's gone gone way over clearly there's a connection there and for him to to allow his buddy roger stone to get on there and say oh really like a classic digression but roger stone to get on there and say the only time trump ever saw epstein is when his chauffeur drove him past his house and he said oh look he must be having he must be having a birthday party for some young girls look at all the young girls at that pool and then he realized it was something more so he just drove on by i mean this it has gone so over the top with alex that i don't know that we can get him back to where he was where he was really i think that true truth erin was dishing out some truth but i i digress again because the point is you cannot ban someone on every fucking platform in a coordinated way on the same day and have that not be cool i mean it's clearly collusion and it's clearly obstruction of obstruction of trade and he will win in the courts but it's going to come five or seven years from now when no one cares but it isn't as simple as oh those are platforms and they can do whatever they want i mean that's something that is going to have to be hammered on i guess i'm just viewing it tactically because i'm like i've worked with these companies um that was my career before i did this i'm like there's no way i would have there's no way i would set up what it is they do in a way that is reliant on any of them because again it's fox and the scorpion i know how they behave and i know how they end up so yes there's absolutely a case and the bit that i was kind of i got halfway through which is i actually see this is good news and i don't mean the banning of people and so on every time they do this and you're noticing it especially with twitter at the moment um the whole platform gets worse and people don't want to be there anymore every time they do this they make the thing that they're trying to make safe or better worse and it just seems like everyone's kind of working that out and either looking for a new thing or realizing that we do need to pivot towards a a more decentral kind of like using platforms to connect in an analog way rather than everyone hanging out on a platform and i actually see it as a kind of good news that they're and it kind of shows in many respects how scared they are or aware they are that the kind of overarching propaganda is failing because propaganda always kind of fails before a regime change and and you sort of get the sense that we've got a few years left to run if these idiots making it so much more awful because they've got their marching orders from wherever like you know wherever they come from and they just it's going to be crap but i actually kind of see it as a it's going to be more slightly more difficult and this is just how the world works to be on the internet in a satisfactory way but in the medium term maybe that's good like maybe we will end up with ways that don't rely wholly on everyone being on a platform that is like a DARPA funded surveillance thing right like i don't know i'm a bit i'm a bit more yeah no i spot on i really like where you're going and i think again that is being played out as we speak because the third meme i have up there is you know joe rogan's recent interview with jack dorsia twitter and the news out of that is you know 10 000 thumbs down on youtube because of joe rogan who if anyone who doesn't understand him i don't want to say he's a shill because he's not but i mean he's just a part of that megaphone now you know in some way that we don't totally understand and whether he's co-opted or just following the cheese that's laid down through the maze or who cares or you know but you know there he is tossing softball questions jack dorsi but to your point it's thumbs down thumbs down thumbs down thumbs down to where you know he had to apologize to his listeners yeah right i'll do it better next time yeah right and or youtube should get rid of that thumbs down thing anyway why don't we just have likes we don't need dislikes but to your point i think those are the throws of a dying fish you know what i mean yeah absolutely um netflix is doing it as well i mean they actually got rid of the rating system because amy uh amy schumer yeah when her okay yeah when her show came out whatever it was 18 months ago um and it was terrible uh because they and she'd made such a big fuss about being paid the same amount as um i forget who right and everyone found it awful that they did what youtube may well do which is that i will remove the negative bit you guys this is this is not how you it's almost you can always make a medical metaphor i'm like you were treating the symptoms here and and i don't think they have the awareness to do anything else i don't really watch alex jones so i'm not sure what he's up to or anything uh i enjoy alex jones immensely i have to say uh because he's an entertainer he is directly at this point especially he's completely crossed over the line to we really can't take him anything other than and then entertainment and for anything everything after his apology to james elephantus on it was all is revealed you know why do we have to apologize to james elephantus for pizza gate why did we have to do that well clearly to me there's some kind of connection with his you know trump has taken that off the table that will not be pursued there will not be any draining of the swamp and i think the orders came down there and that's the thread that i follow with alex jones that clarifies where that the whole thing is going but enough on him i had one more topic and i was going to see if we could if we could get there but in a lot of ways i think we already have when we talked about counterfeited spirituality that seems to be strictly looking at empirical data the data from the alien contact experience mainly the data that's been collected by bond buddy ray hernan is in the free organization but the only ones who did a real scientific study of it including leo sprinkle and other phd level harvard phd level people who know how to collect that kind of data for whatever that's worth survey empirical data but those experiences line up almost perfectly within your death experience so what do you do with that data one way to interpret that is that these are truly spiritual experiences and i'm one person who's pounding the drum over there kind of with your demonic uh uh trickster kind of sensibility that you're expressing going really uh are we sure it could the technology again loosely using the term technology be so developed that they can counterfeit the spiritual experience and i wonder if you have any thoughts absolutely like when i love ray hernan does stuff as well this you know what i'm going to say like so if near death experiences or after death contact and ufo cases have some have a lot of structural similarities and and after effects and people's lives yeah this is that kind of naive western idea of well then it you know well my my gran is in heaven and and i spoke to an alien so this must be good that's really really naive and you know what i'm going to say it looks like the spirit world to me the spirit world is ambivalent and and we just that's one of the things perhaps we can learn um by doing comparison a little bit better so that we don't have this binary of is it aliens or is it ghosts and are they good or are they bad there are better way literally objectively better ways of coming at this material and and understanding that it it has some ambivalent ambivalence or it might have one or more agendas like that's that's how we've always interacted with these things as a species that's how we've always interacted so yeah 100 with you on that i love race stuff i do think on the edges of that you do get people who are who are more optimistic about the motives for extra dimensional contact than i think we should be maybe this is our business background alex you know maybe this is something like that but i'm generally i want to know why someone is being nice yeah i want to know why someone is being nice yes that that is a a business value that i can definitely tune into you know it's um it's been awesome we've spent g in hour and 45 minutes has flown by gordon tell folks what's going on with ruin soup and where the hell is the book buddy uh yeah gotta be one or two of them out there what's what's the delay um the delay is i'm you know i have about three full-time jobs at the moment because they have a brand new farm which is a full-time job and i have a premium membership because they don't use patreon for people who like this kind of stuff we do quarterly courses the next one is on um ancestors and uh contact with the dead um so you can do that at ruin soup dot com obviously the majority of it is free the show the blog and the facebook page um if somebody wants to take a course just a kind of detail here someone wants to take a course how do they pay for it yeah are you open to patreon if they want to do that no i don't do patreon um you're like you just click on the member section of the website and join up it's the same idea like yeah there's a monthly fee and um well there's a monthly membership but it's not just the one course we don't sell them different like differently we do like the live video and people go on holidays together and all kinds of weirds it's a it's a really fun and amazing group um lunatics like me but if you're doing experiments together right you guys do oh yeah experiments and remarkable ones and i in fact credit the fact that this 60 000 hectare bushfire got 800 meters from the farm and no further to um the repeated kind of intention exercises and and um nakshatra mantras we did on a big simultaneous group basis and it's it's been an incredible last few weeks and if that kind of if you like um if you like exploring skeptico style content in a in a way that is uh is embodied i guess um that might be for you it might not listen to the show anyway who who are the i have not popped over there i'm a member but i've i just haven't made the the leap and i don't know exactly why because i want to poke in there i i love that idea of embodying it and finding like-minded folks who's coming over there give me an idea of the of the profile i'm sure it's a wide variety of folks but yeah yeah um there's there's a lot of sort of background interest overlaps magic being the principle when these are these are magically operant people by and large and the courses are very specifically because they vote on them they're very specifically about magic but we'll end up doing other ones eventually and so with this fascinating overlaps with people with either a permaculture background or philosophy uh the majority of them are in the u.s um yeah it's they're they're amazing and the lives they get up to um this is one of the things that's fun about our little world you meet the most remarkable people awesome well i really hope people check that out and they're going to find me over there more because i i really want to do that i think what you're creating in the community that you're creating is super important and talk about embodying it you know here's a guy that a couple years ago was talking i remember when we were talking we were sitting out on the patio near my house and you were visualizing what you did manifest i mean exactly and it was really kind of remarkable to see you go through that process so you have a nice little apple farm and whatever else you're farming there on the edge of the world overlooking Antarctica and you you tell people a little bit about that project that you've that you've undertaken there because i know a lot of people really find that it's kind of the total reframe of the prepper thing into a positive lifestyle where i want to be regardless of how good or bad things get no exactly so um i mean i'm a permaculture designer i'm events officer for permaculture Tasmania we've only just got here so it's in we've only been here 12 months so it still just looks like overgraze sheet paddock um with a few things that we've planted right but that is the general idea to kind of live in a in a way that is experimental in the sense of there are permaculture's this is a whole separate show right it is in a really interesting place in terms of what it does next and and i'm very interested in that overlap i know dr hunter is as well i'm contributing to his latest book in that kind of sense so yeah we live on five acres in southern Tasmania beginning a sort of permaculture journey which will include you know on farm produce and accommodation and and all the other things and it's amazing yeah when it's not on fire it's an amazing place to be awesome well it's been just great reconnecting with your own skeptical i know so many people will appreciate this interview gordon do take care let's stay in touch and thanks again for joining me absolutely thank you for having me