 Today, we welcome the fantastic Joshua Cutchin to Skeptico. Josh is a really remarkable researcher and author known for his insanely well-researched books. I've thrown a few of them up there on the screen and on his just vast knowledge of all aspects of the paranormal. This guy, as you'll find out as we do this show, is kind of a walking casebook of paranormal cases. You'll be able to access those deep into your online database there at a moment's notice, which is so fun. This interview is long overdue. I really wanted to have you on last year to talk about your book, Thieves in the Night, amazing book. I was late to the party. Maybe we can talk a little bit about that. I know you have a new book coming out on Bigfoot and I want to make sure we talk about that. I mainly just wanted to get you on because I just so admire your work. Thanks for coming on. Great to talk to you. Thanks for the kind words. I genuinely appreciate it as someone who was listening to Skeptico for a long time. It means a lot to live out this surreal life where your hobbies and your real life get mixed together. I really appreciate it. Thank you. That is a whole funny thing, isn't it? Because that's really how we both are. I don't want to spend a lot of time going into that because we're both got oppressed today. But that'd be a great topic for another conversation is how we got into this and then again, like you just said, I totally relate. Living out this kind of surreal kind of, am I really talking to this person? That's the sense I get every time. Last week I was talking to Dr. Diana Posolka and I was like, wow, this is fantastic. But the purpose for your visit today is to place Skeptico Jeopardy, a new idea that I just invented. You know what? This is going to be good because it's really going to move us along quickly, which we both need. There I have nine topics up on the screen. Bigfoot, the Pope, NDEs versus abductions. Creating reality, really co-creating reality, time and space, pan paranormal. That's who you are, drip, drip, drip, left hand path and God. So Josh, you get to pick and then we get to talk. Well this is so predictable given where I am in my life, but it's just where my headspace is at. I'll take Bigfoot for a hundred, Alex. You know, I like the pick. I just think you're a little bit conservative. I would have gone, uh-oh, wait, oh, daily double. All right. Hey, buddy. So tell us what's going on with Bigfoot. This new book looks, sounds fantastic. You've dug into it really far. So maybe tee that up a little bit, but then just tell us your interest in general and your bottom line on what you think Bigfoot is. Because, you know, if we're going to play the Alex Trebek thing, I mean, that's it. That's the question, you know, is a physical beast that walks through the woods, you know, or the other, and then you could come up with another question. Well, you know, I've been saying this, and I think it's a really good summation of the project, but my dear friend, Greg Bishop, has sort of slapped me on the wrist a couple of times when I've, I invoke this. He's like, how dare you invoke the name of God? But I feel like, uh, cryptozoology, especially Bigfoot, or he has never had its passport to Magonia moment. I'm, I'm not comparing the quality of my work to valet, or the quality of my co-author's work, Tim Renner, uh, to valet. I think that's a, that's a pretty high bar. Um, but in terms of what I hope this book will start to try to accomplish, sort of sits at that same intersection of folklore and, and modern reporting that passport to Magonia did. There are so many people who are very supportive of the idea that Bigfoot is a flesh and blood creature. And, you know, I think I've often said that I think a lot of anomalous topics and subjects, uh, and researchers have sort of a Bigfoot envy. Like the physical evidence is actually quite outstanding. But at the same time there is, Let me jump in because here's what's really cool. And I already teed this up. You have these cases. Yeah. So, you know, Bigfoot is a physical being that you could run into in the forest. Boom. Hit me with a story that really drives that home. Cause you got a million of them. Well, I mean, I mean, if you look at sort of the, the body of physical evidence that's left behind, I mean, I think it almost even would do a disservice just to pick one example, you have scat samples, you have a hair samples, you have the cast, which if you really dig down and take a look at some of these, some of these casts that have been made, they show not only dermal ridges, which are the equivalent of, you know, your fingerprints on your toes, but also specific, consistent anatomy in terms of mid parcel breaks across the foot that you don't see in human anatomy, but you do whenever it's one of these giant footprints that people find in the woods. And, you know, a lot of people will misinterpret that they'll say that, you know, I know that goats don't leave behind footprints, which is a horrible, horrible misreading. It's an ignorant reading of, you know, Psy phenomena in general, the idea that something that is non physical can have an impact on our environment. In fact, that was one of the earliest ways of ghost hunting was to spread talc powder on the talc powder on the floor and wait for footprints to manifest. So the idea that just because something can be physical, but not simultaneously imaginal, I think it's something that the cryptosology needs to sort of get hip to. And I've often said that the last people to get on the consciousness bandwagon are going to be the cryptozoologists. The ufologists are getting there. The ghost hunters have been there for a long time. Obviously, anybody who's interested in ideas of like time slips or, you know, near death experiences, they've been mired inside for a long time. But cryptozoology is sort of that last holdout that is really being super materialistic about this. Let's make sure we tee that up then for folk. Okay. Because I'm guilty of doing the inside baseball thing. So the cryptozoology people are out there and saying, Hey, look, this is real. We just found this pygmy for lack of a better term. And again, we just found this, you know, very rare, you know, other thing that we never thought we'd find. And here we found it. These creatures can exist for thousands of years. And so maybe that's big foot. So that's one camp. And then you have this other camp that says, No, no, no, no, no. This is purely interdimensional. This is Jacques Valais kind of, we don't know what it is. Don't call it this or that. And then we have even the nuts and bolts ufology. I always hate that term because they're really, I've never found anyone who's really just nuts and bolts, you know, great Stan Friedman who just passed recently, you know, oh, he's a nuts and bolts ufology. No, he's not. He did the first book on abductions in the Betty and Barney Hill case. You can't be more outside that you're into the consciousness thing than that. But there's this group we'll call nuts and bolts ufologists and say, Hey, hey, hey, all these reports of big foot. And you see a beam of light and there's a sighting associated with it. These are beings that are being down from the spaceship and come there. So you have those three camps. Are there any other major camps that we have to kind of parse out? And then because you jumped right in and said, Okay, the cryptozoologists are bringing in some good information, but they're also kind of out to lunch in the room. So they have no one materialism. Yeah, you know, I actually took a page from your actually literally a page from your book. I was asked to participate two years ago in a collection of UFO essays, UFOs reframing the debate. And one of the things that I took was your philosophy. And I mentioned to you, I attributed you plenty, I promise. But your philosophy that if, if materialism was broken, then everything's back on the table. And that's really what sort of even if you look at somebody like Stan, who tends to be more on the, I know we've sort of addressed how nuts and bolts ufology is a problematic term. But he tends to be more of the physical beings coming down from outer space camp of thought. And yet he will endorse the concept of telepathy. And once you unpack that, I mean, telepathy should not coexist side by side with materialism. It just shouldn't. And I've had some people say, Oh no, you don't know what you're talking about. It just means that it's just a new thing that's added. No, it doesn't. Like if I have a black and white film and I add one color, I add red, it didn't take away black or white, but it's no longer a black and white film, right? It's black, white and red. So the idea that I keep on bringing this up with people, I've gotten into way too many arguments on Twitter about this. But the idea that we have to scrap a lot of the things we've learned through the materials paradigm, I don't think is necessary. I mean, I know that if I stick my hand in boiling water, I'm probably going to get scalded. But at the same time, it means that a lot of other possibilities are on the table. And if you are a ufologist who does not think that there's some sort of reality to telepathy in these encounters, you're dealing with a tiny handful of encounters, even stuff where people see a light in the sky. They'll often get some sort of message, some sort of telepathic contact, even in those cases. Even in cases where people see what appear to be structured craft, they'll still get these messages, these intense feelings. They'll still have synchronicities manifest in their lives. They will still, like people who have experienced MBEs and alien abduction and fairy abduction, they will still have supernormal abilities manifesting in their lives. So if that's the case, then it doesn't mean that it's not little green scientists from another planet. But why are we so invested in that concept if the doors have been thrown open in terms of the possibilities? Why are we still so married to this very anthropomorphic catch and release model that a lot of ufology is sort of mired in? And you see that in the Bigfoot thing, too. I mean, the sort of logical leaps that people will jump through, you know, you have these great footprints that terminate in the middle of an open field, and the nearest tree is 200 feet away. And they'll be like, oh, well, they tiptoed backwards through their tracks. That's a real common thing that people say in these Bigfoot encounters. And it's a lot more parsimonious, I think, to look at these as sort of expressions of, I mean, let's say, reified folklore. Let's say, union archetypes rather made flesh. I don't know what McGoni and interdimensional entities, any of these things. But you don't have to always work backwards from the idea that it is a flesh and blood monkey. You don't always have to work backwards from the idea that there are flesh and blood little green men coming down to do things once you realize how broken materialism is. And that's my true sense. It's awesome. Tell me your favorite Bigfoot account and include in there because I did kind of pump you up and it's not unjustified. You're really, I think at this point, a master ferreting out what accounts we should trust and what's accounts the little suspicious of. A Bigfoot account that you think sounds pretty darn reliable based on your criteria and just kind of blows you away. Oh, I will weaponize a well-held Bigfoot account against flesh and blood cryptozoologists. So there's this particular case of, it's called the Ape King Incident. Back in, I believe, the 1930s in Washington. And Fred Beck was the primary witness and a lot of his miners were working their claim. They saw this large hairy hominin in the woods, took some pot shots at it, didn't hit it. But later that evening, their cabin fell under siege. They were having rocks thrown at them. They had these giant hairy hands reaching through the, you know, the holes in the cabin. There was things running across the roof. They considered one of the most reliable stories of Bigfoot attacking human beings. But what tends to get overlooked time and again by flesh and blood cryptozoologists is that Fred Beck pinned a pamphlet. He pinned a booklet on the incident at the end of his life. And Beck had a lifetime of weird things happening to him. He maintained till his dying day that these were not flesh and blood creatures but rather something more akin to poltergeist phenomena. And if you look at a lot of things that people attribute to Bigfoot, the entire chapter in the new book was just about Bigfoot and poltergeist phenomena. The throwing of rocks that are warmed to the touch, running along roofs, tapping on windows. These are all things that you would normally associate with a haunting, but if people happen to see something large and hairy, they make that Bigfoot jump. But Fred Beck, to return to him, there were multiple witnesses in the Ape Canyon incident with, you know, whatever these things were assaulting the cabin. But cryptozoologists tend to, again, leave out Fred Beck's own opinions, which is when you're dealing in anomalies, disingenuous to pick and choose what the experiencer says or their feelings, I feel at least. But if you really unpack the things that happened around the Ape Canyon story, what was building up to it, the actual location of the mine was dictated by one of two different spiritual beings Fred Beck said he had encountered. One, I believe, was a Native American guide. Another was a lady who he said had the name Vander White, the sort of like spirit guide that came to him in a vision and told him that they should follow a large white arrow in the sky to find their mining claim. And they did, and they found it. Shortly before they encountered, sorry, taking potshots of this Bigfoot, they found a single Bigfoot footprint in the middle of a sandbar, hundreds of feet from the shore of the river. And these facts get constantly glossed over because people tend to just jump right to the Ape attack. I mean, if memory serves, there were also anomalous sounds coming from underground, which has a lot of hallmarks of, you know, old world fairy lore in terms of elves, you know, delving in the deeps. I don't know what any of this means. I don't think Bigfoot's a fairy. I don't think Bigfoot's an alien. I don't know what any of this means, but I know that there is more ephemera and weirdness around these things than a lot of flesh and blood cryptosologists want to admit. The thing is the flesh and blood model works really well when somebody sees Bigfoot crossing the road or someone's out hunting and they happen to see some sort of large hairy creature. But if you get people who have had multiple experiences or extended experiences, that's when the synchronicities kick in. That's when people attribute supernatural abilities to these things, like disappearing, like levitation. You know, I just added a... writing this book's been a little bit, like, dripping through a hose, but I just added a story of a Bigfoot who jumped over a guardrail and on the other side of the guardrail is a 200-foot drop. And, you know, people want to say, well, maybe, you know, Bigfoot scaled its way down there or maybe it was able to, you know, tuck and roll. But it's approaching how many angels can dance on the head of a pin levels of excuses for something that, if you were to look at it, any other way would just be generally anomalous. Great, great, great stuff. Okay, that could be a lead-in to any number of these next Skeptica Jeopardy topics. Indies versus abductions. Great one. All right. My wheelhouse. Indies versus abductions. Go ahead, you kicked this one off. Well, where do we begin? I think of the work of Kenneth Ring, who pointed out a lot of these similarities. I think this is all really tied up in this sort of intersection of shamanic awakening and trauma. And, I mean, if anybody is sort of confused by even attempting to conflate or compare the two, I mean, you have bright lights, feeling of levitation. There are people in, you know, alien abductions who claim to meet or see loved ones who have passed on. Not a very common thing that's talked about, but it's there. You have the associated effects of people who return from said encounters with having increased moments of clairvoyance, synchronicities, poltergeist activity manifesting in their homes. That's a very common thing, amongst people who have had near-death experiences and people who are experiencers of sort of alien contact phenomena. The idea of a life review is not at all uncommon in the abduction literature, either. And then to say nothing of the sort of metaphysics that you get into in a lot of these abduction experiences. People talking about their souls being pulled out of their bodies or, you know, them being shown past lives by whatever these entities are. And that's where I start to push back against, again, this materialist idea that it's little green scientists. To be fair, human beings have supernormal abilities, that's liabilities, so it would stand to reason that perhaps a race of little green scientists would have those same abilities and perhaps even have them more developed. But it's always these moments of dream logic. I mean, there's a clarity that people associate with a lot of these encounters that's parallel both in the abduction literature and in, you know, dreams and in the near-death experience. I've talked to so many people who say it felt more real than real. There was a clarity, there was a lucidity to what they were doing that felt more real than their average waking life. And these are just all things that tend to, I mean, we're sort of bleeding into the pan-paranormal topic here, too. But these are all things that tend to suggest to me that there is a more non-physical aspect to a lot of these encounters than mainstream ecology would have us believe. Well, there is so much to pull apart there. We're in this 25% smear of consciousness. Like, so if consciousness is huge, we're in this 25% smear, if you will, that is time-space, right? You know, we're limited in this time-space continuum and we understand, at least from that vantage point, that other people are talking about being outside of that. So, NDE is talking about being outside of that. Abduction is talking about being outside of that. Psychedelics, you know, all these people are talking about being outside of time-space, and we know that from the language that comes back. They say things like, it was five minutes, you know, in Earth time, but there it seemed like a month. There's no way I could have done everything that I did. Their language is there is a different time-space reality. And then even at the very beginning of the NDE, there's a different space reality in that people are immediately above their body, right? So these are medical reports that are coming back by our most trusted medical professionals, and they just breeze by that part of the story. Here's what they observed, here's what they said, and you said, run that past me again. Right, right, yeah. In the top of the room, and how does vision work from up there and how does hearing work from up there, let alone memory and all the rest of that? I'm going to push you on this a little bit further because everything you said is absolutely true, vital, important, and I'm going to push past that because the data sets that kind of intrigue me lie in, for example, Ray Hernandez goes out and does this first academic survey of all these people who have claimed to have had encounters with ET, shorthand there, and his big takeaway is stop calling these abductions. These are spiritually transformative experiences, and he's saying this isn't just my opinion, this is what the data shows. If you're just going to take the bulk of the data, yeah, there are these scary abductions there, but the majority of them, 66%, are spiritually transformative. They're okay with it. They've invited it. Now, the other data set that I jump over to is the Dr. Jeff Long, radiation oncologist, well-known near-death experience researcher, one of many who publishes peer-reviewed, medically-reviewed research, but he's collected the largest database of near-death experiences that anyone can go access and look up, and here is the data that I keep pounding on everyone's head. Ray, great. They're spiritually transformative experiences, kind of along the lines of what you're saying. Ray is drawing all these parallels, and he's saying, aren't these similar? Aren't these two similar, these NDEs and these alien encounter experiences? And I'm pulling back and going, yeah, they're similar in a lot of those ways, but aren't they different? Ray, in your body of work, you have 10% that are my labs. You have sexual encounters. Involuntary sexual encounters. You have reptilians raping people. There's none of that in... Jeff hasn't stopped collecting NDE accounts. There's none of those in there. There's no my lab accounts. And if you really carefully look at the NDE stuff, it's saying some things differently about, in particular, you know, Jeff's latest book is about God, and people freak out when they hear the word God, of course, but I love what Jeff is saying there. He's saying, look, I just have to report this in the same way that you're talking about your methodology. He's saying, I have to report this because it's being under-reported. The accounts of people encountering what they understand to be God, not a Christian God, not a Jewish God, you know, not a religious God, just sometimes being a spirit, you know, sometimes more of a Christian or other religious trappings, but they somehow feel that there's more than that. But the point is that this is more commonly reported than the tunnel is, for example. And I'm pushing you, I guess, to that level three of saying, okay, I get the pan paranormal. Undoubtedly there's some aspect to that, but are we at a point where we can begin mapping this extended consciousness along this access, which is super important, because if there is a God up at the top of the heap, we need to figure that out soon. You know, that's a really great question. And as strongly as I feel about sort of going that pan paranormal route, I also have a problem with the certainty fetish that a lot of people have, especially the idea that even if a significant portion of genuinely strange or genuine, I guess I should say, contact experiences are, you know, spiritual. That doesn't mean that's describing the entire bulk of the phenomena. I mean, I feel like a majority of UFO sightings, UFOs in general, a majority are misidentification. Then probably the next most common thing is some sort of testing of unorthodox craft. Then you're going to be looking at sci phenomena, spirit phenomena, natural, but misunderstood phenomena, like, you know, some sort of weather phenomenon that we have quite got a grasp on. And then perhaps a portion is also extraterrestrial. The idea that everything has to be all one thing or another thing, I think a lot of anomalists should get away from. And for me, it's always been about giving voice to ideas that are less popular because they're less popular just to try to sort of balance the conversation out. And, you know, as far as how these things manifest and look differently, I mean, you know, from what Hernández is saying, most of these encounters have some sort of positive spiritual component. I really see strong parallels between alter states of consciousness and these experiences. And you can have good trips and you can have bad trips. It can be the exact same thing, but it's what you're bringing to the dance that sort of influences the direction that these particular things go in. In terms of what I want to do and why I find myself so passionate about this is because, yes, I mean, a lot of this implies that there is some sort of objective reality to a lot of these religious concepts about, you know, again, the objective reality of God, the objective reality of morality. And I think that if you're looking at stuff like alien abductions and you don't wind up needy and psi and metaphysics, I think that you're doing it really wrong at some point. But, you know, as far as the my lab thing, you've also got to consider that, I mean, it's commonly held knowledge or at least I think it is that you never let a good crisis go to waste if you're in a position of power. And I feel like if perhaps there is an objective reality to these sort of interactions, experiences, abductions, whatever you want to call it, if there is an objective reality to that, then of course it's going to be capitalized upon to sort of gaslight individuals if you want to abduct them for purposes of testing or for any number of reasons, honestly. I think the idea that it would be employed to that end is patently obvious. Similarly, I've often wondered, allowed if the real reason that the government doesn't open up about UFOs is not because it's their aliens from another planet, but what if they really truly understand the non-physical reality of whatever's happening? That, I mean, I can't imagine the loss of control that would happen if the government came out and said, yeah, you know what, there is a God and we are not the sole arbiters of your destiny. A part of you continues on after you die. The control mechanism is lost, right? Because government and power is predicated on physical violence at the end of the day. If you don't pay your parking tickets, they can come bodily arrest you and if you resist arrest, they can put a bullet in your head. But when you realize that you are more than a meat suit, even that power just completely dissolves. And I've wondered if that's not the real reason that we've had secrecy surrounding UFOs for so long? I love that. I love that. So I'll tell you what, let me pick the next one. Already? Because I think it fits right into that and that is, I'm going to pick the left-hand path because I think this understanding that you're kind of alluding to is really misunderstood by a lot of people. And I love where you brought us right there at the end in terms of the government and we all know we don't know what that means in terms of government. We don't know what that means. I was just going to give a warning that during this entire show, any term that we use, we have no idea what it means. When we say we're people, we don't know what that means. When we say consciousness, we don't know what that means. Alien, Bigfoot, all of them. So add to the list government, we don't know what that means. I'm being facetious, but this idea of the left-hand path I think is misunderstood because one way of understanding it is, hey, somebody's got to control the world. And if you don't buy off on that right away, then just turn on the YouTube news, or you look all over the world and see what chaos looks like. And you go, I don't want any of that. And then you say, well, you know, how much control, you know, Jack booting am I going to put up with in terms of for someone to be in control, someone to run things. And we look at all the people in the world that are out there and we don't agree with and we don't know why they're causing such a commotion and we go really kind of get them off the stage kind of thing. So the left hand path, tell me what you're thinking. Tell me the connection with that with just control and the good parts of control. Also with the Gnostic create better than the creator gods. I think people don't really understand the predicament that you're in. If you don't say that you have some kind of control over your destiny, the God thing is awesome. But it's really, really challenging to say, I have no agency in this world. I'm not going to try and make things better. I'm only interested in merging with the Godhead. And, you know, most of us aren't there. Most of us are living a left hand path kind of existence. But what we really shy away for is when we see the extreme end of the left hand path and we see the evil and we see the petal Pope and we see, you know, the horrible things that are done. I always say the petal thing because it just makes it clear, you know, someone who's taking a two year old child and using them sexually and then killing them, we can all go, oh, all right, I do get that there is evil. And of course, there's a lot of other evil that is, you know, drone striking, wedding parties in Yemen. Ain't so cool either. So the left hand path is wide. I mean, there's so much to unpack there. I think I've tended to be less on, and this must seem super ironic for somebody interested in these topics and as a longtime listener of Skeptica, I tend to be less conspiratorially oriented. Not that I ever deny that it's not happening. And I think a lot of times most of what I just feel like I am is contrarian. So if there's somebody saying it's all conspiracy, I'll say, I don't know about that. And if somebody's saying there aren't any conspiracies, I'll say, I don't know about that. Because I do think there is a not insignificant portion of nihilistic action and behavior and senseless banal behavior out there in the world that there isn't any architecture behind. And I do think that's frightening. I do think that we graphed some of that on there. At the same time as you've... You've got to jump in there. Oh, sure. I want you to deconstruct that because don't we run into the same problem with materialism there? If we understand that there is this extended consciousness that is influencing and how many angels on the head of the pin kind of thing, then isn't the architecture always at play? Can we really say, oh no, he was just free agenting out there as he was doing his serial killing thing? I don't know. As above, so below, it doesn't end. You can't draw the line real clear. I think we all believe that to some degree. I mean, if you look at the sort of language that we use, I was beside myself. I don't know what came over me. You know, it all implies that you're sort of seeding control of your own sovereignty over to something else, even if it's just for a split second and you act impulsively. And you know, you're right. I think that a lot of materialism has sort of given permission for a lot of this bad behavior to take place. I really think that's reality as well. Not to say nothing of the fact that, you know, the opposite, if you were an overzealous in terms of your religion, obviously that can lead to some poor behavior as well. Because again, it's the certainty fetish that people have. Honestly, I've often thought one of the best things that could happen for the world is, you know, if everybody, if everybody would just wake up and say, am I the asshole? Am I the asshole today? You know, that's, that's why I try to, I try to do that pointy on my own. Of course, I mean, there's something to be said for, you know, not constantly being a fit-in sitter. But I said, this is a very thorny question. And I don't, I don't even know if I'm enough of a deep finger to, to sort of even begin to unpack it. Honestly, so talking about in terms of whether or not there's always an architecture behind things, there's a new book that's out or a relatively new book. That's out about retro causality by Eric Warko. I don't think you've had Eric on the show yet. I did, but not about that book. Okay. I'm actually seeing Eric in Maryland this weekend. I'm leaving from here to go to the airport. And in one of his interviews, he said that he is playing with the idea that every dream is a retro causal or prophetic dream. And I just, I don't, I don't particularly see that being the case because I mean, obviously there are some dreams that I think that if you're paying attention to your own internal life, but also sort of the literature, yes, there are dreams that are significant and they, they tend to foreshadow things. But there are also dreams where you, you know, walk into the bathroom and you see your mother with jam on her head and she sings, you know, the, the Pennsylvania polka to you and, and this corresponds to a lot of indigenous ideas of there being big dreams and little dreams. And big dreams are the dreams that mean something. Little dreams are the dreams where you're actually processing stuff. And I wonder if sometimes our personal behavior doesn't fall under those lines. I don't think it all has to be constantly motivated by something our bad behaviors or our behaviors in general. I think that sometimes there might be a very materialist kind of autopilot that just kicks on and we do things. We act selfishly. But I think sometimes it's, it's, it's, it's motivated by something a little bit more non physical. Right. I'm not sure where I draw that line in terms of distinctions myself. I mean, I, I would like to think that me not wanting to, you know, get up and get another beer from the fridge. I would like to think that that's motivated by pure materialist motives of laziness and, you know, calorie, calorie restriction or a calorie restriction, but you know, not expending energy. As opposed to something that's like some sort of actual moral defect, but who knows? I mean, I think sometimes it might be one, sometimes it might be the other. And maybe it's always the same thing. Maybe it's not. I just, I don't know if I can put a real pin in that in terms of how I feel. That's another rambling response for you, but. No, it's, it's pretty good one because if you're not rambling on this stuff, then you haven't thought of it your thing of the certainty model. There's just no way to find certainty here. I'm just going to throw out another thing and people are going to get tired of hearing this because I get stuck on these things until I can get them out. And I just love talking to really smart people about them because hint, hint, this is what skeptic goes really about for me is my journey, my learning by talking to other people like you. So, you know, the other data point that really seems interesting to me is a guy named Dr. Gregory Shishon. Have you heard of him? It sounds familiar, but I cannot tell you anything about him. He's a professor of death experience researcher who really took a different angle on this. He's very much of an academic and he's interested in religion. So he did a cross cultural, cross temporal look at NDEs, so ancient religions, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, you know, all these Buddhism and his big takeaway is, Hey, what if NDEs are the basis and of course they get socially engineered and use this control mechanisms and, you know, co-opted for the culture, you know, all these other things, but at the heart of it, like the one thing you said that I think is so true is that most of this can't argue with the moral imperative that we do feel like we know what's right and wrong. We know who's sitting on our shoulder telling us the right thing to do. Well, that's right out of the near death experience aspect of being the judge of your own soul. So again, the co-opted religious thing is God will judge you and send you down to hell. But the real account says, Well, actually the way it works is you will evaluate yourself and you will say, Hmm, Josh, you did really well over here, but you know, maybe you could have done a little better. It wasn't your best moment and you go, God, to say that that's the least. Yeah. Oh, I'm so, well, don't worry about it. It's okay, you know, but you come back and what you share with the tribe and what gets incorporated into our religion is everything we do matters and we know what's right and wrong and we will be judged even by ourselves on our ultimate soul journey, what that means. So that's what I'm picking apart here because it seems to be one of those jigsaw pieces that falls into place and starts making a lot of things make more sense, including the left hand path, because the left hand path is our desire that we all have to run away from that aspect of our soul, which we have to. We can't live in this world and live in that other world too. So more to unpack there, but give it your best shot as we wrap this thing up. I think that if you look at the guiding ethos that is almost universally behind every NDE is the fundamentality of love and the idea that the concept of love is somehow biologically motivated, I still just doesn't pass the smell test for me. I don't think it really passes the smell test for anybody, as you've alluded to multiple times. But I think once you realize that that is a fundamental and that is the most important thing, that it's pretty easy to see what is anti-love. Selfishness is anti-love. Hurting others is anti-love. Hurting yourself is anti-love. And I think once you put that together, I think that's where the real moral imperative narrative starts to emerge. And I know that's a sappy kind of new agey kind of thing, but it really is fundamental to all these different experiences. And you know, as far as the idea that NDE's are sort of the genesis of a lot of major religions, I think that makes an incredible amount of sense, because this is where the direction of the Bigfoot book has been going. I've been thinking a lot about archetypes lately and what they are and what they represent. And I find it hard to believe that there's not some sort of objective external reality to things like that. And if people are all going to this other consciousness realm during near-death experiences, obviously not everyone is literally encountering anubis, right? And that's just depending on your cultural framework that's happening. But that concept of the dog-headed saint finds its way into a lot of major religions. I talk about in my latest book, you know, people are seeing dogman across America, which has no, there's no possibility of dogman being an actual flesh and blood cryptid, but people keep on mentioning it. And to me, I see that as an expression of these archetypes. So I think that even in spiritual practices that seem very far removed both geographically and philosophically and temporally, you will often see a lot of these things manifesting. And to me, that implies a shared objective external reality. And I mean, perhaps Indies were foundational in a lot of religions forming, but I don't think you can dismiss people who are actually able to traffic with the other world and go into other states of consciousness and are able to actually sort of confer with the spirits, which is something that a lot of different cultures have all had methods of doing as well. So, you know, I'm kind of on board with that idea that Indies are a motivating force behind religion, but I think we should just say all sorts of extended consciousness slash spirit contact, I think all has contributed to this giant soup that we're in. Great. I'll tell you what, we are going to wrap things up. You have to go get on a plane. Yeah. Do some other stuff. But, you know, Josh, tell folks you've hidden a little bit at this new book that's coming out, The Big Footbook. What is the name of that? Where the footprints end. It's myself and Timothy Renner. I've been referring to it as the Big Footbook, but it's almost completely certain that it's going to be a two-volume work. And I may we may have a mutual friend of ours providing the forward. We'll see. Oh, intrigue. Okay, we'll leave that hanging out there. I heard on another podcast you that might be, but I'm not going to reveal it. Well, you know, things change and people are approached about stuff and they have more time or less time than they thought they would. So, I don't want to say it's a done deal, but I've got someone that had no interest in Big Foot who might be writing the Forge of the Big Footbook. So, that excites me. Given the kind of book you're writing, that's the perfect person, right? As someone who has no interest because you're saying everyone should have an interest and if you don't have an interest, then you're not, you need to read this book to understand why. Yeah, so the topics are, you know, intersections with Big Foot and Fairy Lore, Big Foot and Ghost Lore, Big Foot and witches, Big Foot and Women in White, which is something that I never thought was a thing. Taking a look at the folklore, I mean, Big Foot and Santa Claus, which is just mind-blowing, but the common thread throughout all of it is this Wild Man archetype and how the Wild Man archetype is consistent with a lot of what people report as Big Foot behavior nowadays, and even people who are into flesh and blunt Big Foot. So, that's going to be coming out, I think we're still on track for autumn of this year. And in the meantime, I have three other books, The Trojan Feast, The Brimstone Deceit and Thieves in the Night about food, smells, and child abduction in the regard to the paranormal, respectively. And a poorly-maintained blog, book at joshwithhensham.com Your website is, is great, so people should check it out, even if the blog isn't as up-to-date as they'd like. Great stuff, really appreciate you joining me, and we'll just have to do it again soon. We'll play another round of Skeptico jeopardy. I love it, yeah, we didn't get to have the stuff I wanted to, so thanks so much for having me, Alex. I really appreciate it. So, thanks for watching this video, and if it wasn't really a video, but just an audio, stored as a video, well, I apologize. But there's more videos out there as well, but please check out the Skeptico website, you can see it here, we cover a lot of different stuff you might be interested in relating to controversial science and spirituality. A lot of shows up there, over 350 of them are so all free, all available for download, so do check it out.