Latest / Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer Show / UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny with D.W. Pasulka

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UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny with D.W. Pasulka · Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer Show

• 0:00
  Welcome to Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer Show.
• 0:02
  I'm Ted Bonnitt and Phil is here, but he's not here.
• 0:06
  It's the beginning of our seventh season and Phil is phoning it in.
• 0:11
  Hey, I'm going to put you on speakerphone.
• 0:12
  Hi.
• 0:13
  I'm in two places at once when I'm not anywhere at all.
• 0:16
  Obviously, I'm in Lewis, Delaware, and our zoom link will not let me in.
• 0:23
  For some reason, the announcement is not letting me in.
• 0:28
  And that's in perfect keeping with our discussion today with our guest because we're going to be talking about the challenges of the new age.
• 0:37
  Yes.
• 0:37
  And technology.
• 0:39
  Let's Bring on Diana D.W.
• 0:41
  pasolka is a professor of Religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington and the author of Encounters American Cosmic, which was another great book, and Heaven Can Wait, her latest book, the New York Times bestseller, the others
• 0:54
  UFOs, AI and the secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny.
• 0:58
  The Diana's research bridges Catholic history, religious practice and emerging technologies, and emerging reports of UFOs and super terrestrial intelligence.
• 1:08
  She holds a BA from the University of California, Davis, and an MA from the Theological Union in Berkeley and a PhD from Syracuse University.
• 1:17
  Diana has drawn on first person interviews, suppressed histories, and access to insiders in the science and tech industries.
• 1:24
  The Others explores a startling new terrain where where the sacred meets the synthetic and where the next phase of human evolution may already be underway.
• 1:34
  Diana, welcome to the show.
• 1:36
  Thanks, Ted.
• 1:36
  That's a great intro.
• 1:37
  I appreciate it.
• 1:39
  Hopefully we'll meet Phil here.
• 1:40
  So unless he's been abducted, and that's always a possibility, could be.
• 1:44
  I've been a fan of yours for a few years.
• 1:46
  I read American Cosmic when it came out.
• 1:48
  What's so fascinating to me about this subject matter is how AI and technology is augmenting the mind's capability to process information.
• 2:02
  It is helping articulate aspects of the unknown, how this is all coming together and changing humanity.
• 2:09
  You're a devout Catholic, and the point you make is that Catholicism predicted over a century ago that there would be a marked change and improvement in human consciousness.
• 2:20
  Some of the great thinkers relied on religion and some of them became religious because of the study.
• 2:25
  Can you explain that a little bit?
• 2:27
  Yeah, of course.
• 2:28
  Okay.
• 2:29
  So I've been studying technology and its impact on belief and specifically on religious belief.
• 2:36
  So this is something that I've been studying for many years, like 30 years.
• 2:41
  It's been a long time.
• 2:42
  And I grew up in California, so I got to see, as you did, the emerging tech sector sector and that type of thing.
• 2:52
  And as that happened, by the way, I was very interested in the impact that technology had on human consciousness and perception.
• 3:01
  So that led me to these guys who are Catholic.
• 3:04
  Actually, the.
• 3:05
  This priest from the early 20th century, who's a Jesuit priest, named Keyard de Chardon.
• 3:10
  And he coined the term.
• 3:12
  What is a Greek term.
• 3:14
  It's an amalgamation of two Greek terms, which means the thinking sphere of the earth.
• 3:19
  It's called the newest sphere.
• 3:21
  And so in the early 20th century, in the 1920s, he looked into the future and he said that he saw.
• 3:30
  He.
• 3:30
  He saw this and described it.
• 3:32
  And he saw another sphere enveloping the earth.
• 3:36
  And it was going to be a combination of a thinking envelope around the earth very much kind of we have the.
• 3:43
  The stratosphere and.
• 3:45
  And so forth.
• 3:46
  So he called it the newest sphere.
• 3:47
  And he said that it was going to be a place where people were going to be connected to each other and where we would in a sense, know each other's thoughts.
• 3:55
  It would be a place of where economics would happen.
• 3:59
  People would have money, create money.
• 4:01
  It would be an economy, it would have an economic component, it would have a creative component and it would be a new.
• 4:08
  It would impact human beings.
• 4:10
  Absolutely.
• 4:11
  So it would be in a sense, a turning point for human beings.
• 4:15
  And humanity now have to understand that this sounded really weird to most people who learned about it and especially to the Catholics with whom he worked.
• 4:26
  And so his superiors put a.
• 4:30
  What is called a warning on his work and urged Catholics not to read that part of his work.
• 4:35
  He was a paleontologist, by the way.
• 4:36
  He was a scientist over a hundred years ago.
• 4:39
  He was talking about our current state of affairs, which includes the Internet and a electronic transmissions and even more intellectually, what you could call remote viewing in a way where there was a very sophisticated sense of a connectedness
• 4:56
  that we are starting to explore now.
• 4:59
  He was way ahead of his time.
• 5:01
  Yeah, everybody thinks that he was ahead of his time.
• 5:04
  Absolutely.
• 5:04
  Because it looks like today.
• 5:06
  And how could he have known about it?
• 5:08
  He didn't have anything remotely like that.
• 5:12
  He actually went on to influence people like Arthur C.
• 5:15
  Clarke, who worked with Stanley Kubrick on 2001 A Space Odyssey.
• 5:20
  And he influenced a lot of sci fi authors with his ideas even as they were being suppressed by the church.
• 5:29
  Yeah, so he was a.
• 5:30
  He was a fake.
• 5:30
  That was way out there.
• 5:31
  You could say that in sense.
• 5:33
  For people who don't know what remote viewing is, that's a systematized way of kind of like looking into the future or looking at things that you can't see in your environment.
• 5:44
  You view these things remotely.
• 5:46
  And so, in a sense, he was like a remote viewer.
• 5:48
  He wasn't trained as one, obviously, but he had his own spiritual sense, which he described as well.
• 5:54
  So that's part of what the book is about.
• 5:56
  And then another person who I knew for a long time, actually, he's a media scholar.
• 6:01
  His name is Marshall McLuhan.
• 6:03
  And he's known actually for his sayings, which you may have heard of, the medium is the message and so forth.
• 6:10
  And what his idea was that technology is absolutely going to change a human being.
• 6:17
  Any kind of technology will change how human beings live, and it will also change how they think.
• 6:23
  So to think that it's apart from us and distinct from us is the wrong way to think about technology.
• 6:30
  So he had this idea.
• 6:32
  Robert Bigelow, who at one time owned the Skinwalker Ranch in Utah, which is now the subject of a popular television reality series, has been speaking recently about their studies.
• 6:43
  And he talks about the idea that approximately 95% of the universe is made up of an unknown dark matter.
• 6:53
  And he thinks that this may be consciousness and that it is a form of energy.
• 7:01
  Oh, my goodness.
• 7:02
  Speaking of remote viewing.
• 7:04
  Hello, Phil.
• 7:05
  Yeah, yeah, I've heard of him.
• 7:07
  Nice that you could join us.
• 7:08
  Listen, I found out it was all Biden's fault.
• 7:11
  Oh, of course it was okay.
• 7:13
  But here I am, and I'm just catching up with your incredible discussion.
• 7:19
  I'm already totally intrigued.
• 7:21
  Please carry on.
• 7:23
  Dark consciousness, boy, that's.
• 7:25
  That's the state that we're living in right now.
• 7:28
  What Bigelow's getting to is that he's big into consciousness studies, and he feels that dark matter of the universe may be a giant accumulation of consciousness, which would better explain the limitations of the Big Bang theory.
• 7:43
  If the universe was created by the Big Bang, what triggered that and what was there before?
• 7:46
  And that consciousness transcends time and space through phenomena studies, which I guess the church relates to in its own theology, is that if everything is energy, why wouldn't it have the ability to generate consciousness?
• 8:01
  Does that make sense to you, Diana?
• 8:03
  Oh, definitely it makes sense.
• 8:04
  Absolutely.
• 8:05
  So I think that in many ways, what religion thinks, or what different religions think in terms of what does the Catholic Church feel about consciousness and so forth.
• 8:14
  There are lots of scientists who are Catholics as well.
• 8:17
  There's no one position on it, but I think that they're very open to different theories.
• 8:24
  Obviously, in your book, you talk about attending a conference called the Hereticon which is amazing.
• 8:30
  And it's an invitation only conference.
• 8:33
  Peter Thiel talked about the Antichrist.
• 8:36
  Thiel's one of the major pillars of Silicon Valley and a technocrat to say the least.
• 8:40
  And he's talking about the Apocalypse and Revelation.
• 8:44
  What does this tell you about how some of the most powerful technologists in Silicon Valley are thinking in those terms?
• 8:50
  What's the relationship there?
• 8:52
  Yeah, I mean, everybody can see that there are lots of people who have created AI and, and are coming out now every week and basically saying we are in an apocalyptic moment and it is because of AI.
• 9:05
  And so.
• 9:06
  Yes.
• 9:06
  So Peter Thiel is talking about something he, he calls his talk the Antichrist or Antichrist.
• 9:12
  And I figured if Peter Thiel is talking about the Antichrist, I need to pay attention.
• 9:18
  So I did go to the conference and I listened.
• 9:21
  And he actually, he and I share a professor.
• 9:24
  We have a professor in common, Rene Girard, who was at Stanford, and he's the one who proposes a theory of human evil which he calls the scapegoat mechanism.
• 9:36
  And the scapegoat mechanism is actually easy to understand if you look at what happens to people when they get canceled on social media.
• 9:45
  So it's this idea that human beings gang up on a person, they pile on that person and, and in the past that was called the scapegoat.
• 9:54
  And that person took the brunt of a community, but it also unified that community.
• 9:59
  So there's a lot of unification that goes on.
• 10:01
  But it's evil.
• 10:02
  It's a, it's an evil thing.
• 10:04
  And this is what Rene Girard talks about and teaches.
• 10:07
  So I was interested to find out if in what way Peter Thiel was talking about the Antichrist.
• 10:13
  My position is that I thank Peter for, for talking about the Antichrist because when that topic is generally talked about, it's talked about in the fringe.
• 10:25
  Right.
• 10:25
  As fringe stuff.
• 10:26
  But Peter Thiel is definitely not fringe.
• 10:28
  So he brings it out into the open.
• 10:30
  And I'm very grateful for that because it gave me an opportunity then to slide in and basically disagree with him that if there was an Antichrist, I'm not saying that there is, but if there was one, it sure
• 10:44
  would look like AI powered social media that allows people to gang up on each other.
• 10:51
  Right, with impunity, and they can do it anonymously and they could get away with it, and it destroys people's lives and so forth.
• 11:00
  And this looks pretty evil.
• 11:01
  So that's what I basically argued in the first few chapters, was that I thank Peter Thiel for bringing up the topic, but I think I can add something to it that he may have missed.
• 11:11
  Isn't the Antichrist Trump?
• 11:15
  And isn't the anonymous evil ice?
• 11:19
  And isn't the nationalist Christian movement basically the scapegoaters?
• 11:27
  Huh.
• 11:29
  It sounds like your interpretation.
• 11:31
  Yeah, you bet it is.
• 11:33
  But I'm not alone in this interpretation.
• 11:36
  Listen, your book is incredible, incredibly inspiring, and I.
• 11:40
  I actually think of it as the Holy Grail, because what you do is unify all of these incredible events that have been happening to us over the last couple of, well, maybe, maybe many decades.
• 11:54
  And I've been personally involved through the Fire Sign Theater in doing predictive, cultural, affecting comedy.
• 12:03
  And I've also had personal experiences with, with quite a few of the people you write about, including a very amusing experience that I had with Marshall McLuhan.
• 12:14
  And I felt very close to many of the topics that you've talked about, including esp.
• 12:20
  I'm definitely psychic and I've been aware of it and have practiced it and have played with it for a long time.
• 12:28
  And I know there's a lot of people out there who also can relate to your book, and I really recommend that they should read it, the others out there, because your book is challenging, revelatory and inspiring.
• 12:43
  So forgive me if I took it personally and spent some time thinking, thinking about it, what it meant to me.
• 12:51
  And this is one of the results of my reaction to your incredible work.
• 12:58
  Wow, thanks.
• 12:59
  That's really an amazing compliment.
• 13:01
  So, Phil, you know, now I'm going to have to follow up and ask you about.
• 13:06
  Tell us about your interaction with Marshall McLuhan.
• 13:10
  All right.
• 13:10
  It's quite amazing.
• 13:11
  I was touring the country with Proctor and Bergman, which was half the widths of the Firestine Theater, and we played up at the El Macambo Club in Toronto many times.
• 13:22
  And either Marshall either saw us do a performance or heard about us, because he sent out a personal invitation for us to come and have tea with him at his office in Toronto University.
• 13:37
  And so we showed up one afternoon and he invited us in.
• 13:41
  He had a servant dressed in full livery with white gloves, the whole deal.
• 13:48
  They served us tea and we had a wonderful conversation.
• 13:53
  And then he offered us some Cuban cigars.
• 13:57
  Okay, now I don't really smoke cigars.
• 14:00
  I was polite and said, sure, Bergman loves cigars.
• 14:04
  So he opened a safe in his office and he took out two cigars, three cigars, and we all lit up and we're sitting and talking and all of a sudden my cigar goes bang.
• 14:17
  And soon thereafter, Bergman's Going.
• 14:19
  He had planted loads in our cigars.
• 14:24
  Now, the reason that he wanted to talk to us was he wanted to bring some humor into his lectures.
• 14:32
  Okay.
• 14:32
  And we did give him some advice about it.
• 14:36
  But on the other hand, it was, to me, it was the perfect example of Marshall's.
• 14:44
  What would you call it?
• 14:44
  His impish character.
• 14:47
  And the reason why he saw what was happening to the world through a perspective of.
• 14:55
  Oh, how would we put it?
• 14:57
  Inevitability.
• 14:59
  Everything that he said was, it's not only the medium is the message.
• 15:03
  It's already here, it's already happening.
• 15:05
  We're already being changed by it.
• 15:08
  And I noticed it.
• 15:11
  So surprise.
• 15:13
  This is.
• 15:13
  It's happening.
• 15:14
  You're talking about the trickster element.
• 15:16
  Yeah.
• 15:16
  I was at a conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the guest of honor was Arthur C.
• 15:21
  Clarke.
• 15:21
  And he was there to talk to astronauts.
• 15:23
  The greatest collection of astronauts at the time was 70 of them because only 210 had flown into space by that time in 1989.
• 15:31
  And he was trying to lecture to astronauts and he would say, what am I going to tell you people?
• 15:34
  You've been to the moon.
• 15:35
  So he went.
• 15:36
  He went in the opposite direction and talked about fractals, saying that's an infinite universe in the other direction.
• 15:41
  The two of us found ourselves just chatting and I asked him about UFOs.
• 15:46
  And he looked at me and he just said, poppycock.
• 15:49
  And I said, wait a minute, you wrote 2001.
• 15:51
  He goes, Poppycock.
• 15:53
  And he looked at me and he kind of smiled.
• 15:56
  I later found out that he and Carl Sagan talked about it all the time, but he ended up teasing me for the next two days.
• 16:03
  So these guys were really.
• 16:05
  Wow, that's great.
• 16:06
  Those both are amazing.
• 16:09
  He just was egging me on and just loving it.
• 16:12
  Yeah, I remember.
• 16:13
  But Coleman also made fun of himself in a Woody Allen movie, right?
• 16:18
  Yeah.
• 16:18
  But really he was in many ways an inspiration to the Firesign Theatre's work because everything that we did in our initial four albums for Columbia was based on media.
• 16:31
  I thought of ourselves as being co media ants because we were taking the.
• 16:36
  We were trying to show people the effect of media on themselves and on the culture in general.
• 16:44
  And we were admonishing our listeners to break away from it, to become deprogrammed if possible, and to think for themselves.
• 16:54
  And Diana, don't you think that's really the ultimate message now for us all, that we have to start thinking for ourselves and try to disentangle ourself from all of the complications of the Modern.
• 17:09
  What would you call it?
• 17:10
  Well, the technology of the world.
• 17:12
  Yeah, Phil, that's a great question.
• 17:15
  And I would have to say, I don't know if this is a cliche.
• 17:18
  I think I've heard it before.
• 17:19
  That bird has flown, right?
• 17:21
  Yeah.
• 17:22
  Like this idea.
• 17:23
  I interface with young people.
• 17:25
  I'm a professor, so I interface with about 100 of them every semester.
• 17:28
  I have kids that age.
• 17:31
  So I would say that thinking for yourself is a goal.
• 17:38
  But the way that now media structured is that young people as babies interface with screen technologies before their brains can form.
• 17:49
  I think that unless you're in a community that protects that, like the Amish or very conservative religious communities that actually recognize that there's an issue there, that's.
• 18:01
  It's.
• 18:03
  I don't.
• 18:03
  It's.
• 18:04
  We can try to do this, we can try to do that, we can try to think for ourselves.
• 18:08
  Is that worthy goal?
• 18:09
  Phil?
• 18:10
  Yeah.
• 18:11
  I was just talking to my wife about how our daughter, who is 23, fortunately has been in relationships, but many of her friends, almost all of her friends, have never been out on a date.
• 18:21
  And we were trying to think of did we have that experience?
• 18:23
  No.
• 18:24
  And we wonder if the corrosive effects of social media and what they've been through.
• 18:30
  You talk about that in the book.
• 18:32
  You talk about mimetic desire.
• 18:34
  It's a psychological concept that humans do not desire things based on innate independent preferences, but rather copy and imitate the desires of others.
• 18:43
  How does that connect with what you call the erosion of the interior life?
• 18:48
  Yes.
• 18:49
  So I think part of thinking for oneself is having the ability to do that.
• 18:54
  And that involves a certain form of cognition.
• 18:57
  And that's this.
• 18:58
  This idea of the interior life.
• 19:00
  You can develop it.
• 19:01
  It's something that we all know our age, right.
• 19:03
  We all know about this because this is the world we were broug brought up in.
• 19:07
  Young people have no idea about this today unless you specifically tell them about it or teach it to them.
• 19:12
  And it's this idea that you could go out, walk in the forest, you can be with your friends and have pauses in your conversations.
• 19:20
  You can think about things, reflect upon things.
• 19:22
  And also that there's a way of life that bears beautiful fruit.
• 19:27
  Right.
• 19:27
  There's a way of life that's not instant, that is cultivated.
• 19:31
  So these are all kinds of values that we all have that now could be lost because of the interface with technology at such a young age.
• 19:41
  So that's.
• 19:41
  And also this idea of the mimetic desire.
• 19:44
  This is what I was talking about with respect to The Antichrist.
• 19:47
  If there was an Antichrist.
• 19:48
  Okay, I'm not saying that there is now, let's get it straight.
• 19:51
  But should there be?
• 19:53
  We have to get it right.
• 19:54
  And what it would be the mimetic desire that we see in social media.
• 19:58
  Influencers telling us, you really want this.
• 20:01
  And then once you get it, you actually know, I actually don't really want that.
• 20:04
  Or it doesn't give me the joy I thought it would give.
• 20:07
  So it's this increasing manufactured desire and it's at scale, it's industrialized, and this is not good.
• 20:16
  No, I can honestly say this is.
• 20:18
  This is bad for us.
• 20:19
  Okay?
• 20:20
  So we have to have an intervention.
• 20:21
  And part of the intervention I try.
• 20:23
  I'm a professor, so I teach a religion and technology class where we talk about different communities like the Amish and their relationship with technology.
• 20:32
  We talk about Marshall McLuhan, who later in his life became pretty horrified by what he saw happening.
• 20:38
  He wasn't gung ho on technology.
• 20:41
  He wasn't like an accelerationist, as we call it.
• 20:44
  He became more of a doomer on technology later in his life.
• 20:48
  Theo de Chardin, though, remained hopeful that the human spirit would triumph.
• 20:53
  So there's that.
• 20:54
  Right.
• 20:55
  And Arthur C.
• 20:55
  Clarke, by the way, I don't know if you've seen any of the videos that are around now of him, but he seems to delight in the fact that there's an end to humanity, but machines are going to take
• 21:06
  over and that we shouldn't be so depressed about that.
• 21:09
  Maybe we are evolving into a, as you write post biological society where we're blending technology and biologics.
• 21:17
  For example, you write about AI resurrections.
• 21:21
  These are chatbots trained on the dead, like China's ghost bots or grief tech tools, statistical models of personality.
• 21:31
  Not a continuation of consciousness.
• 21:33
  And you call this a false transfiguration.
• 21:36
  What are people actually losing when they mistake one for another?
• 21:40
  That's a great question.
• 21:42
  So one of the things you have to understand is I'm writing.
• 21:45
  This is an academic book.
• 21:46
  I am an academic, so I'm not advocating for this position of a post biological existence.
• 21:53
  I actually like us as we are.
• 21:55
  I like human beings.
• 21:57
  I don't think we've evolved into the best we can be yet.
• 22:01
  So I'm not willing to give us over to machines yet.
• 22:04
  Right.
• 22:05
  I'm not into that.
• 22:06
  I don't believe in it.
• 22:07
  But what I do is I've studied it my whole life.
• 22:09
  So because of that, I can.
• 22:11
  I have something to say about it.
• 22:13
  So these trends that you See, like grief tech and so forth.
• 22:17
  I won't deny that people are getting help from them, you know, in their grief, but we have to.
• 22:23
  I think we have to be really careful about that because we're outsourcing, you know, grief tech.
• 22:29
  Let me just explain what that is.
• 22:30
  So there's a huge industry at this moment where you can take everything that your loved one who's now deceased, everything that they.
• 22:39
  Their digital footprint, all of their emails, all their photos, everything that has their voice, and you can download or upload it into a.
• 22:47
  Some type of either LLM large language model.
• 22:50
  This can actually then talk back to you.
• 22:52
  Right.
• 22:52
  And it can be your mom that you've lost or your grandmother that you've lost.
• 22:56
  And people are utilizing these and they're in such pain and suffering when they're.
• 23:02
  The person that they love dies that this is.
• 23:05
  Then they're using this.
• 23:07
  Now this industry is.
• 23:09
  We have to be careful because this is a very vulnerable population who, yes, I want my mom to be resurrected.
• 23:17
  It really changes our relationship to death.
• 23:19
  And it's happening so fast that what I'm doing is.
• 23:22
  I'm questioning it.
• 23:24
  It seems like it would slow people from moving on if they're going to.
• 23:29
  Tremendous denial of reality.
• 23:30
  Yeah.
• 23:31
  There's something you mentioned called Replica, which has over 30 million users and many describing romantic or deeply personal bonds with their AI.
• 23:41
  And the question is, where does that leave the spiritual sense?
• 23:45
  And a spiritual sense is a wonderful term if you could maybe answer that and explain what spiritual sense means in.
• 23:52
  Almost all traditional religions.
• 23:55
  So we're talking about, like Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism.
• 23:59
  In most traditional religions, there's this assumption, even if it's not articulated, that the human being is oriented toward transcendence, that transcendence being either what Buddhism calls or Hinduism calls moksha, or Christians call God Jesus and Krishna is called
• 24:20
  God.
• 24:20
  Okay?
• 24:21
  So the human being is not just this thing that lives and dies.
• 24:25
  It's actually oriented toward something more, something transcendent.
• 24:30
  And that we can.
• 24:31
  How we know that there's something beyond us, something transcendent, is because we have a sense for it.
• 24:38
  We have what is called, at least in the Christian tradition, the spiritual senses.
• 24:43
  And it's not just one sense, it's several of these senses.
• 24:47
  And so this is something that you can see it as, as implied in, like Buddhism, because of meditation or Hinduism, meditation.
• 24:56
  People are doing these things in order to cultivate the spiritual sense, which they find to be healthy and good.
• 25:03
  Okay.
• 25:03
  It helps them.
• 25:05
  So the spiritual sense is.
• 25:07
  You can even see it in the New Testament, when Jesus said, those of you who have ears, hear well, he's obviously not talking about our physical ears.
• 25:15
  He's talking about a sense.
• 25:18
  And so what's happening, what I think is scary that's happening with media today is that first off, even people of our generation, a lot of them don't know that we have spiritual senses, that the human being is oriented
• 25:32
  towards something transcendent.
• 25:34
  Once they figure it out, they do things to cultivate it and their life sometimes gets better.
• 25:38
  Okay, they sometimes view this as a good.
• 25:41
  But this can actually, this is actually, this is a region of your brain.
• 25:46
  These are regions of our brain, your cognition.
• 25:48
  And if we do things that harm our cognition, like we become addicted to drugs, we're alcoholics, we work too hard, we don't sleep enough.
• 25:58
  This impacts our ability to orient ourselves toward the transcendent.
• 26:02
  It impacts our spiritual senses and their growth.
• 26:06
  If we hook up kids and babies to technology right away, especially technology that includes types of short form videos like you see on TikTok and so forth, this is absolutely going to shift their cognition.
• 26:20
  In the book, what I do is I, I give the research that shows that this does impact their ability.
• 26:27
  That's associated with the spiritual sense, like empathy for others.
• 26:30
  The sense that delayed gratification of things is actually a good thing.
• 26:36
  You know, don't eat that cake or maybe, you know what I'm saying, make gratification is actually shows to be.
• 26:41
  It's a correlation for success in life, actually.
• 26:45
  So these kinds of things are being.
• 26:48
  I don't want to use this word, this wording, but I guess I've been around tech people for too long.
• 26:52
  Edited out, deleted out of people early on.
• 26:55
  Some friends of mine say that if it's not cultivated by the age of 11 or 12, it's gone.
• 27:03
  So people need to be aware of this.
• 27:05
  Yeah, so parents need to be aware of this.
• 27:07
  Now, I don't know if that's the case or if there's neuroplasticity.
• 27:11
  I have hope that there perhaps is, but I would say don't make it an issue, you know, guard your child's cognition early on.
• 27:20
  Covid had an enormous effect on these generations.
• 27:25
  I know for a fact that my grandson became addicted to online gaming during COVID and he's coping with it right now and trying to become more social in his behavior.
• 27:39
  But he has to learn now how to do it because he lost an opportunity to interact and grow with other people.
• 27:47
  Their reluctance to get on the phone and rather text.
• 27:50
  This generation has really suffered the brunt of dramatic change.
• 27:54
  You're listening to Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer Show.
• 27:57
  Our guest, Diana Pasulka, author of the bestseller the UFOs, AI and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny.
• 28:05
  There was a secret program sponsored by the Defense Intelligence agency.
• 28:09
  It was $22 million of black budget money.
• 28:12
  It was called the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Applications Program.
• 28:16
  It was to study phenomena from a perspective of national security.
• 28:20
  That's why it was advanced weapons.
• 28:21
  Are these incredible objects and experiences a threat to our country.
• 28:26
  It was the largest program in studying UFOs perhaps ever, certainly since the Project Blue book in the 1960s.
• 28:33
  It was supposed to be four years long, but after 27 months, it was canceled by the Pentagon, allegedly because top brass thought that studying UFOs and related phenomena was very dangerous because it could be demonic, which is relating
• 28:49
  to a biblical context.
• 28:52
  Is that how you see it?
• 28:54
  Okay, so the way I see it is that we're not going to get this straight story here.
• 28:59
  I learned that pretty early on and I've been studying this since 2012, so that's a long time and.
• 29:06
  Okay, so we're not going to get this straight story.
• 29:08
  So 1947 was a very big year for UFOs in this country because that's when Roswell happened.
• 29:14
  And that's when in Washington State, Kenneth Arnold, who was a pilot, saw what he thought was a ufo.
• 29:21
  And he's the one who coined the or.
• 29:23
  He actually didn't coin this, but it came from his sighting, which was the flying saucer.
• 29:28
  So he said he saw these things that look like flying plates.
• 29:31
  Like plates, basically.
• 29:32
  Okay.
• 29:33
  Now the first thing that one has to understand is that back then it was thought of within a biblical framework.
• 29:41
  So back then, a lot of people, him included, saw this as a spiritual thing that happened.
• 29:47
  He interpreted this experience spiritually and he wrote a book about it.
• 29:51
  Whether what he saw was actually spiritual, that another question, but that's how he interpreted it.
• 29:58
  So that idea that these are spiritual things that people see, this framework has been here since at least 1947.
• 30:08
  It was even here in the 1890s during the airships.
• 30:13
  By the way, that started in the town I grew up in, which is outside of Sacramento, Granite Bay, California.
• 30:19
  That's where it started in the 1890s.
• 30:21
  And.
• 30:21
  And that was also thought of.
• 30:23
  A lot of people looked at those and thought that they maybe the end times were right.
• 30:27
  So this always had a religious component that has been consistent.
• 30:33
  Doesn't it also go back to biblical references?
• 30:35
  Aren't the angels Considered as alien visitors who helped to evolve human beings.
• 30:43
  Or Ezekiel.
• 30:44
  Yeah, the wheel in the sky and all of that.
• 30:46
  What is your reference with all of that?
• 30:49
  I would say that you have to take every single thing that you see in the Bible with respect respect to is this a UFO or not?
• 30:55
  You have to take it on a case by case basis.
• 30:58
  I can tell you from my own experience.
• 31:00
  Now, listen, I'm generally, my field is Catholic studies.
• 31:04
  And I, for the first 15 years of being a professor, I wrote books and articles about Catholic history.
• 31:13
  And so what happened, in fact, this led me to look at modern day UFOs, because every time I started to uncover something that I thought was interesting Catholic history, it would look like an orb or it would look
• 31:25
  like an aerial phenomenon in the sky.
• 31:27
  Here's an example from the 1800s in France.
• 31:31
  There were these nuns, they were Ursuline nuns.
• 31:33
  And the one young nun had a visitation that wouldn't go away in her cell at night.
• 31:40
  It was this orb that would come into her cell and fly around her cell.
• 31:44
  And she hated it.
• 31:45
  And she was like, something's good, we got to do something about this.
• 31:48
  So the Mother Superior then came in, saw that it was true, and then decided that it was a soul from purgatory.
• 31:54
  So they went, the whole community prayed until this thing went away.
• 31:59
  So they prayed, they thought they were praying a soul back into purgatory.
• 32:03
  So when you start to scratch the surface of strange phenomena from 100 years ago, 200 years ago, a thousand years ago, you get weird phenomena that you see today.
• 32:16
  And we now have a lot more in the sky.
• 32:18
  We have drones, we have satellites, we have all kinds of things.
• 32:21
  There's still things we can't explain.
• 32:23
  Jacques Vallee wrote a book, Wonders in the sky, which documents ancient sightings that has always been around.
• 32:30
  And one of the questions you get, how is religion gonna survive disclosure of UFOs, will it become absolutely irrelevant?
• 32:38
  And you argue that religion, not disenchanted secularism, is actually the most adaptive framework we have for processing contact with non human intelligence, whether it's AI or UFOs, because the Bible and religious studies are the most ancient records we
• 32:56
  have of civilization.
• 32:57
  And there have been accounts of it throughout history.
• 33:00
  You argue that religion is more prepared for disclosure.
• 33:05
  I do argue that.
• 33:06
  And in fact, I've said this from the very beginning, from 2012 when I first I was open to the possibility that people who are religious would use their religion should this happen to them.
• 33:17
  But I've met too many people who are religious from various different religions who have.
• 33:22
  Once they have a UFO sighting, they rethink their religion in a way that incorporates the idea of UFOs and they become much more religious, in fact.
• 33:31
  And so that.
• 33:33
  It's not just that I think that religious people are more adaptable to this.
• 33:37
  Of course they are.
• 33:38
  They already have that framework of non human intelligence within their worldview.
• 33:43
  But now I'm much, much stronger on this position because of what I see as almost like a counter movement that hopes religious people will lose their religion because of UFOs as such a strange thing.
• 33:58
  I get people who are politicians who come to me or in some way affiliated with the government or journalists, right.
• 34:03
  And they're like, don't you think religious people are going to have a really hard time here?
• 34:07
  Like Steven Spielberg has said this, even when he was promoting his last movie, he was like, well, you know, religious people might have a hard time when this happens.
• 34:16
  But I could say, no, they're not going to have a hard time.
• 34:19
  They already believe in this.
• 34:21
  The whole concept of extraterrestrials begs the question of a great universe of consciousness and evolution, Right.
• 34:33
  Which are attributes of the human spirit and understanding.
• 34:37
  We feel that our spirits can evolve and that our spirits might be continuous and that.
• 34:44
  And that we will evolve into other forms of consciousness, other forms of beings.
• 34:50
  And I think that the UFO phenomenon and the extraterrestrial possibility of extraterrestrial contact is an opportunity for us to sense Gods majesty, the majesty of the universe, the reality of an extended consciousness and a life in that consciousness.
• 35:13
  Mormonism, it's part of their whole origin story.
• 35:16
  That's right.
• 35:17
  That's right.
• 35:17
  You can have your own planet.
• 35:19
  Right.
• 35:19
  For 10% of your gross.
• 35:24
  I don't know.
• 35:25
  I know that Mormons do, but I don't know the specifics.
• 35:27
  I have some friends who are Mormon and invited me to Salt Lake City to talk with them about it.
• 35:33
  So I should be on your show again?
• 35:35
  Oh, absolutely.
• 35:37
  That Again, we're just scratching the surface here.
• 35:40
  Diana, don't you think that perhaps also one of the things confronting us is again, technology is advancing our awareness beyond our capability to comprehend it sometimes.
• 35:51
  For example, the TikTok video, the recordings of those objects around the Navy ships, which should be put into proper context, these are representations of something that the sensors are picking up.
• 36:04
  That's all it is.
• 36:06
  That's why the eyewitness accounts of the pilots are much more important.
• 36:10
  It's a really interesting case because in 2005, when the TIC Tac video happened, and I guess they were F18s, recorded the objects and chased them.
• 36:19
  That was because they had just installed brand new sensor technology in the forward radar units in the nose cones of these craft.
• 36:28
  Initially they thought it was a bug in the system because it was a brand new radar system.
• 36:32
  But then they were able to cross reference it with infrared and then eventually they made visual contact with it.
• 36:39
  That pushed us into an understanding that we cannot deny it any longer.
• 36:44
  And the whole idea of the disclosure in the 2017 New York Times about Leslie Keen help break the whistleblowers, it wasn't because they were fascinated by UFOs.
• 36:53
  They were worried about the safety issues because these things were on a daily basis buzzing their pil.
• 36:59
  And these pilots were landing white faced, full of fear that they were gonna be hit by these things.
• 37:04
  And that's why this squadron commander went to the Pentagon, said, listen, this can't be a resume event anymore.
• 37:11
  We have to be able to talk about this.
• 37:13
  And so technology is pushing our consciousness in that respect.
• 37:17
  Can you briefly respond to how technology is pushing our evolution because we have a minute left.
• 37:22
  Oh, yeah, sure.
• 37:24
  Okay.
• 37:25
  That's an easy one.
• 37:26
  Okay.
• 37:27
  So, yeah, the thing is, I was asked this question about is this a new phenomenon or is this something that's always been here?
• 37:34
  And I said it's both.
• 37:36
  Because first there's something that's always been here, and now we have better tools for assessing what it is.
• 37:42
  We've got goggles now that have all kinds of different ways of seeing beyond a visual spectrum for us.
• 37:48
  So it's both.
• 37:49
  So I think technology is really interesting in the sense that it's definitely going to allow us to see things that we've never seen before.
• 37:57
  Diana Pasulka, thank you so much.
• 38:00
  This was great.
• 38:01
  We have a whole bunch of shows lined up and you can hear everything on our website, SexyBoomershow.com and on your favorite podcast platform.
• 38:09
  Thank you, guys.
• 38:09
  Thank you.
• 38:10
  A good time?
• 38:10
  Yes, it was wonderful.
• 38:12
  Talk to you soon.
• 38:13
  See you later, Phil.
• 38:14
  All right.
• 38:14
  I hope so.