Podcast
Gods, Ghosts & UFOs
This is a show about all the things they said weren't real.
Guided by strange headlines and ancient mysteries, Jordan and Mal explore the paranormal, metaphysical, and supernatural with all the earnestness and insight two big-hearted nerds can muster.
If you don't have a good time, then you don't know what a good time is.
SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring the anomalous, the luminous, and the numinous. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions.
spectrevisionradio.com
linktr.ee/spectrevision
- Philosophy chart
- #65
- Episodes
- 88
- Releases
- Weekly
- Typical length
- 48 min
- On air since
- 2025
- Latest episode
- 4 days ago
Episodes
88 episodes, newest first
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1 hr 2 min
Netflix helped her contact her dead grandfather
Season 3, Episode 15
Show notes
Peg Serena is a stop-motion animator and a long-time listener who used to be a science-first skeptic.
But then, when her kids started to ask her about what happens after you die, she realized she didn’t know what to say. Which is how she found herself binge-watching a medium show on Netflix, and eventually hearing the voice of her dead grandfather.
And that was just the beginning.
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Peg Serena, circa 2023
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Life After Death with Tyler Henry
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Bored with her art
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Her grandfather’s nickname for her
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Forgiveness, 25 years later
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Atheist husband
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Keeping both doors open
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Remembering other experiences
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Intense vs. subtle experiences
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Talking to a witch
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Nudges, bids, and consent
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Meditating with trees
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Great-grandmother’s nylon stockings
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Is unconditional love just what consciousness is?
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Psychosis vs. anomalous experience
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Grandpa’s pipe
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Bliss and the lost art of leisure
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A haunted house in the ‘90s
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The ghost in the one-hour photo
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Grace and umbrellas
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UFO memory blocks
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Memory isn’t a record, it’s a narrative
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Materialism’s influence on memory and perception
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“Way, way, way happier” living in an enchanted world
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Michael Singer
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Fast and testimony meetings
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Unanswered prayers
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com.
Shownotes
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39 min
Are we living in the corpse of Lucifer?
Season 3, Episode 14
Show notes
For almost all of human history, nobody had a word for animism, because they just intuitively knew everything in the world is alive.
Enter: science, which is very good at taking things apart to see how they work. But typically when you take something apart, like, say, a frog, it dies.
This week James Taylor Foreman (of The Metaphor) explains that objects object, and how this connects to the idea that the world is full of gods, including the one that prevents you from facing the wrong direction in a movie theater.
Trust us, it’ll make sense later.
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“Reality is narrative, and our only job is to make it beautiful.”
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The gods framework vs. the rationalists’ consciousness talk
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David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous
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David Bentley Hart
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Animism
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“We live in the corpse of Lucifer”
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Materialism is a brand-new psychotechnology
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Objective literally means “that which objects”
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Science is a basilisk — this was from C.S. Lewis: "Perhaps, in the nature of things, analytical understanding must always be a basilisk which kills what it sees and only sees by killing."
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Things that can’t be studied after the body dies
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Learning to dance vs. explaining dancing
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Being hyper-verbal is a disorder
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Point out someone’s gift and they can’t do it anymore
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The yips
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The letterman jacket problem
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Un-knowing something is as impossible as returning to Eden
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Is there something it feels like to be an egregore?
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The ghost in the green hat
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Telos
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Christ consciousness (ish)
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Progress only gets made by people who break the egregore
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Too much order, too much chaos, and the Tao
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Plato: learning is remembering
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Aiming at heaven vs. surfing the moment
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Catholic confession
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The kingdom of heaven = behaviors that iterate well
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Addiction is a pattern that destroys its host
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Why two sexes? Parasites
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Also: spiritual parasites
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Thoreau (bummer)
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George Eliot: despair as “the painful eagerness of unfed hope”
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Mal’s college paper on smell and attraction
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As in the blood cell, so in the Jordan
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Analogy is the rule, not the exception
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Why “anthropomorphize” is a dirty word
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Science as method vs. ontology
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Parasitic scientists
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The blind men and the elephant
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Did Brian Johnson make a deal with the devil?
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James’ childhood seizures that took away his power of speech
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Faith, doubt, entropy, death, and psychedelics
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices
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59 min
Fact, Fiction, and Fairies with Josh Cutchin
Season 3, Episode 13
Show notes
Joshua Cutchin has spent more than a decade exploring the wide territory of the paranormal — fairy food, brimstone smells, Bigfoot, the dead.…
What do most people think isn’t real, but he does?
The line between fact and fiction is very, very blurry.
For example: stigmata. Christ would have been nailed to the cross through the wrists, but stigmatists bleed from the palms, which is where the wounds are in most paintings. Or fairies, who for centuries were human-sized and wingless, until broadly distributed storybooks gave them wings. Now, when people see fairies, they see wings.
So, uh, what’s going on here?
You might have to just decide for yourself.
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Josh’s extensive bibliography
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Creative pressure builds like a boil
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Is writing a paranormal experience?
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Academic vs fiction vs casual nonfiction
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The thing Josh believes that most people don’t
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Nobody is rational
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Archetypes, egregores, tulpas
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Ghosts slam doors, but you can’t grab one
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Stigmata
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Fairies
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Reality is squishy
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“It’s all consciousness” is a boring reduction (so is: it’s all ones and zeros)
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The third space of meaning
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Josh thinks space is boring, but Jordan is still obsessed
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Out-of-bounds video game maps
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Escapism vs. awe
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Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
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Scrolling TikTok
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Jesus vs. Christ: “the source code of the universe” became flesh
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Jeffrey Kripal and the human as two
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The yugas
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Climbing mountains and Mormon temples
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Religion as the ultimate fake-it-till-you-make-it
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What’s wrong with the Ark Encounter?
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Jung’s Red Book: the problem is how we treat fairy tales
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Faith playing footsie with materialism
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Load-bearing truth claims
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Virtue for its own sake
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“Above my pay grade”
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Discernment
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Ghosts aren’t dead people
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Escapism vs awe
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Egomaxxing
Subscribe now
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com.
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1 hr 2 min
Tom Maxwell and the Night Parade
Season 3, Episode 12
Show notes
Tom returns! Mostly to tell us about his new show (the one he left us for), which tbf is straight fire.
Then, honestly it’s just the three of us hanging out for like an hour, just in case you’ve been hankering for some unstructured conversation between the three of us.
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What do most people not think is real, but Tom does?
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Raised by Depression babies
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The Night Parade on SpectreVision Radio — where extra meets ordinary
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(Not Festivities in the After Hours)
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The goat man and the spirit of coffee
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Joseph Campbell × James Burke’s Connections
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GGU calved
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Aggregate experiencer data
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Creative process talk
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Shelved with Emrys
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“Where is my love for this?”
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Mal’s elephants
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Anyone who tells you you’re insufficient is out of their mind
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Resistance commensurate with change
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This from Autumn Christian
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Unlimiting other people
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Why Lady Gaga tried to be the weirdest person in the room
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Jung: the unreconciled becomes fate
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“If you want to know how someone feels inside, hang out with them and see how you feel afterward”
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Insane people calling Mal ugly
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Systems that teach you not to trust your gut
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Sovereignty
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“Your feelings are real, but not necessarily true”
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The physiological reality of feelings, and how they start (and end) in the body
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Somatic healing
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Self occupies form
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Charles Fort and the procession of the damned
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The Hyakki Yagyō
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James Baldwin
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“If you take the time to look at something, it will reveal itself”
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Diversity as epistemology
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The 1841 Tennessee rain of flesh
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Odysseus and the shade of Achilles
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You are the arbiter of meaning
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Meaninglessness and boredom
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Amy Tan’s The Backyard Bird Chronicles
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Asking to be entertained is the least agentic thing a person can do
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Blake, Auguries of Innocence
And in the epilogue…(which was actually a prologue)
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Does your God agree with your politics?
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Potty-training your inner critic
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Are you a zero-to-one guy, or a 2 to 10 guy?
Subscribe now
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices
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47 min
Daniel Noah on the memory of rocks
Season 3, Episode 11
Show notes
Daniel Noah co-founded SpectreVision with Elijah Wood, and then spun up SpectreVision Radio Network.
Also, he thinks rocks are alive.
This episode is full of wonderful stories.
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Rocks are alive! But what does that mean?
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Jordan’s first Hare Krishna chant, and meditating on a polished moonstone
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Nothing gets simpler the closer you look
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Empaths, clairsentience, and emotional wallpaper
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Elder Joshua Tree boulders
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A stone triangle revealed by moonlight
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His wife felt it. So did Ryan Singer of Late Night on the Astral Plane
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The Tongva: a creation myth about harmony, and elders who pass into rock
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The Doors lived in Daniel’s house
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The Doors of Perception and Death by Astonishment
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Why did so many musicians move to Laurel Canyon at once?
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The boy who collects rocks on The Telepathy Tapes
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Autistic kids don’t feel less
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Daniel shows us some rocks
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Everybody Needs a Rock by Byrd Baylor
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Stone tape theory (and the 1972 BBC film The Stone Tape)
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“Pseudo” science
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Mystical traditions are soul technology (thanks Kelly Chase)
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“Unintelligible intellectually but fully resonant emotionally”
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Animism
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Negotiating with the spirits of a haunted house
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Things vanish, some of them reappear
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The trickster gives you enough to keep you guessing, but never enough to convince a skeptic
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Robin Lassiter’s Earth: A Love Story and the synchronicity addiction
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We are attractors
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Hellier and Operation Trojan Horse
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Book encounters
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Daniel’s books are pulling themselves off the shelves
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Attention as magnetism
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Alters
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One-downing
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Jordan’s experience at Old North Bridge 20 years ago
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Attention must be trained
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Meditation before “cosmic encounters”
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Daniel’s stories of contact with NHI
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What are “aliens”?
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Deceit and biological envy
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com.
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54 min
Can consciousness exist without a body?
Season 3, Episode 10
Show notes
We discuss a recent claim by a prominent scientist that consciousness can't exist outside a flesh-and-blood body, whether uploading your mind would capture you or just a copy of your cognition, why we understand death about as well as we understand sleep (barely), and whether the first person to live to 500 would be lucky or cursed.
Jordan makes the case that immortality might be monstrous. Mal says death is the salt of life.
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A scientist claims consciousness can’t exist outside a body
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“You are more than your body” — but you are also your body
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“How the hell do you know what happens when you die?”
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Prize goes to the first person to die, turn to mulch, then come back and tell us what happened
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The pharmacy of the body
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The kids in The Telepathy Tapes
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Energy bodies, astral bodies, and the limits of Western materialism (round and round we go)
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If we don’t understand sleep, how do we understand death?
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Uploading cognition vs awareness
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Every human project is an immortality project
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BJ Miller on why we treat the disabled as angels or monsters
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Dracula is a class narrative
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People have been saying the first person to live to 500 has already been born
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Immortality is monstrous because death is what makes us human
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Adam Miller on the unexpected spiritual consequence of “transhumanist” longevity
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Oliver Burkeman on the freedom of limits
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What the body knows, and the risks of resisting resistance
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Mormon stuff
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How to protect the part of yourself that creates
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Rebecca Black (yep)
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Not the Bible (oops)
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices
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45 min
Is certainty a type of psychosis?
Season 3, Episode 9
Show notes
This week we’re joined by a bonafide listener! Elliott Chadwick emailed us a story about a young man on anti-psychotic meds who turned out not to be psychotic. We had to know more, so we invited him on the show.
Mal also tells us about her brother, and the strange and beautiful world he inhabits, and we talk about how to tell the difference between numinous experiences and psychotic episodes.
It’s a doozy.
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Elliott is a psychiatric nurse practitioner turned bodyworker, and co-host of The Glimmerance — a show about creativity and spirituality against the materialist overculture
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What do most people think isn’t real, but Elliott does? “Not all hallucinations are psychiatric symptoms”
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Nearly an atheist a few years ago
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The dark figure in the young man’s room
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“Have you ever tried to ask this guy to go away?”
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What antipsychotics meds do to a brain that isn’t psychotic
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Trauma, fight-or-flight, and the brain filling in the corners
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“Magical thinking”
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What’s the difference between people like Robin Lassiter and Kelly Chase and psych patients?
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Mal’s brother, and the mind he calls “Chuck” (Charles Bonnet syndrome)
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“Sometimes I swear he’s connected to something beautiful”
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“Certainty is a kind of psychosis”
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Too much certainty about death, poverty, or God is delusion
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Maturity is the capacity to hold two opposing truths at once
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An arsonist who believed he owned the building
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Thin places
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A case against absolutism
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“dead with daddy” (from Taylor Tomlinson’s Netflix special)
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Drugs
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Anti-materialism conversion story
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A story about telepathy between his grandparents
Subscribe now
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices
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47 min
Mike Clelland on Owls and Death
Season 3, Episode 8
Show notes
Mike Clelland is the owl guy. For fifteen years, people have been sending him their stories — owls and UFOs, owls and meditation, owls and mushrooms, owls and shamanic initiation. “That’s my research,” he says. “I get up and open my email inbox.”
And now he’s writing a book about owls and death.
We had Mike on the show over a year ago, and this is his long overdue return to Gods, Ghosts & UFOs.
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Mike’s novel The Unseen
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How mythic, archetypal symbolism wells up in the world
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Death by Astonishment by Andrew Gallimore — how the brain builds worlds out of noisy sensory data
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“All points in time and space are connected”
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Thank God for filters
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The five owl symbolic relationships: UFOs, meditation, psychedelics, shamanic initiation, death
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The owl isn’t connected to UFOs, it is a totem of transformation
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“I took a truckload of mushrooms and saw a 30-foot glowing owl in my bedroom.”
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Mike’s story about his mom, Alzheimer’s, and a black-footed ferret
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“I know there’s an afterlife, and I know because of an owl”
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Sometimes an owl is just an owl
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What makes a sign a sign?
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A stranger’s prayer
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Mechanisms vs. magic
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Mallory’s owl story (which happened very soon after our first episode with Mike)
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God speaks in a language you understand
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Resist firmly defining the meaning of synchronicities
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Awe pushes us toward bravery and hope
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How Mallory got the fire back for writing
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Owl biology
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Can you invite mystical experiences?
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More amazing stories
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One owl, two completely different synchronistic experiences
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Mike’s new book (and a sequel to The Unseen)
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Mallory’s screenplay
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Jordan’s novel
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices
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51 min
Do religious people actually believe in the unseen?
Season 3, Episode 7
Show notes
Kelly Chase (Inquiry with Kelly Chase) is back, which makes her the default president of the GGU returning-guests club. This week, we ask the question we’re asking everyone: what do most people think isn't real that you do?
She gives a spicy answer. She claims that most people behave like materialists, even if they go to church.
From there, we talk about what the evidences of belief actually are, and how it relates to “conversion.” Kelly explains how her own experience rewrote her whole value system in a matter of seconds five years ago.
As usual, we figured everything out and solved all the world’s problems.
You’re welcome!
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Most people behave like materialists, even the religious ones
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Religion as lava that cools into obsidian
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The reemergence of the feminine
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“Tell me what music is.”
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“The greatest evidence it happened is me”
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Great evidence for an individual, terrible evidence for the collective
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The old version of Kelly is horrified, tied up in a back room somewhere
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Molly Drake — “I remember firelight, and you remember smoke”
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Conversion is what you do, not what you say
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All behavior is downstream of belief
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“I think my job is fake”
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Is everyone waking up?
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AI is literally sociopathic
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Kelly tells us about how she recently maybe saw fairies
(possibly our best paywall-bait yet)Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Email godsghostsufos[at]gmail.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices
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37 min
Scientism Is Anti-Science | Robert Frederick on Francis Bacon
Season 3, Episode 6
Show notes
Our guest today, Robert Frederick, studies Sir Francis Bacon — the Elizabethan lawyer, spy, and philosopher usually credited as the father of modern science. Robert claims that Bacon is the father of both modern science and scientism.
If you’re thinking, “What the hell is scientism?” then this is the episode for you.
We talk about why saying “trust the science” is motivated by the same thing that makes people say “trust in God,” and how Francis Bacon was both a once-in-a-generation polymath, and also a pompous idiot who stripped culture of metaphysics.
Jordan also contends that true religion and real science should be the same thing, but that they both get corrupted in basically the same way.
Guys it’s a good one. (Isn’t it always?)
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Shout out to the God’s Eye View podcast
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Science and scientism
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Bacon vs. Aristotle
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Deductive vs. Inductive reasoning
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Scientism is anti-science
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How Bacon got rid of metaphysics
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Bacon might have been Gnostic (and what that means)
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You can’t build a government out of data
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Effective altruists are “a special kind of stupid”
•
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Yuval Noah Harari is the latest and greatest Bacon booster
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We’re definitely coming back for a Part 2, in which Robert will explain how he knows Bacon was actually Shakespeare
•
Find Robert Frederick’s work at The Hidden Life is Best
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1 hr 7 min
Are soulmates real?
Season 3, Episode 5
Show notes
Mal asks: Is there such a thing as soulmates, or love at first sight? Are we doomed to magical thinking on the subject of love? The conversation turns toward revelation, relationships, and the perils of privilege.
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“Hopeless” (the essay)
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Love as both particle and wave
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The point of marriage is to make divorce expensive
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Cate Hall, “You Can Just Do Things” (again)
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Logan Ury, “How to Not Die Alone: The Surprising Science That Will Help You Find Love” — http://loganury.com
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“No matter what you choose, it will be wonderful and you will regret it”
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Were you a victim of your soulmate?
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“If you want to touch the stove that badly, maybe you’re supposed to”
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The Book of Humans
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43 min
Richard Hatem thinks therapy is real
Season 3, Episode 4
Show notes
This week, the return of Richard Hatem, the screenwriter behind The Mothman Prophecies and host of Richard Hatem’s Paranormal Bookshelf.
In response to THE QUESTION (what’s something they said wasn’t real, etc), he gives us a couple of answers nobody expects from a guy who runs paranormal podcast: therapy. Oh, also, the wacky idea that you can make your dreams come true. From there we explore the typical human ping-pong between self-loathing and grandiosity, why so many great artists get better after they get sober, and Richard’s pretty slick grand unifying theory of paranormal activity.
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The returning-guest club
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Richard has never had a supernatural experience
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Therapy is real (according to him)
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Jordan is a “maximalist realist”
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“You don’t need to take the conservative route in the career of your life”
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The Magellan of his family
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You Can Just Do Things by Cate Hall / Useful Fictions
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Vascillating between self-loathing and grandiosity
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Does sobriety kills your creative edge? (NO.)
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Tom Waits and the Sex Pistols
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Belief vs. faith :: Salieri vs Mozart
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Richard’s theory of psychokinesis
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The writers’ room is actually the same thing as a séance
•
Why writers can’t bill for hours
•
Richard Hatem on tour with a secret episode +
•
The Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant, WV
•
The root causes of Hollywood’s ongoing implosion (shop talk)
•
Why AI can’t replace storytellers
•
Streaming service endgame
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Email us: GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices
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35 min
Experiencers are the Disclosure | Courtney Buterbaugh on Alien Contact, the Body, and Buried Memory
Season 3, Episode 3
Show notes
We’ve been wanting to talk to Courtney Buterbaugh since we first heard her on Robin Lassiter’s show Earth: A Love Story. Courntey is a lifelong experiencer and writer of The Unidentified Felt Object. In this episode, she tells us about her near-death experience as a baby, being bedridden for three years as an adult, and a scene in Disclosure Day that unlocked a lifetime’s worth of memory of contact experiences.
She helps us explore why the phenomenon might land in the body before it ever reaches the mind, how memories can arrive as physical sensation, the purpose of screen memories, and the idea that far more of us are experiencers than we’d ever guess. If contact leaves a trace of physical feeling, can we use it to remember?
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“Experiencers are the disclosure”
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Nuts-and-bolts problem
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Why you can’t control an experiencer story
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Gods, ghosts, and UFOs — all of it, all at once
•
Experiencers need a seat at the table
•
The near-death experience
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Bedridden for 3 years
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The first conscious onboard craft experience
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A mark on her arm
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Promise of healing
•
Memories from bodily sensation
•
The paper cardinal in Disclosure Day
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Screen memories
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“Way more people are experiencers than think they are”
•
“I’m the lab”
•
25 years of practicing discernment through meditation
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Somatic therapy
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Phenomenology, a definition
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Why feeling too much reads as “unobjective”
•
The UFO is a womb
•
Memory is useful, not accurate
•
Where did all the shamans go? (Don’t do drugs alone.)
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com.
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35 min
Contact as Initiation with Meredith Spearman
Season 3, Episode 2
Show notes
This week we’re joined by Meredith Spearman MSN, RN, the writer behind The Maze to Metanoia. She takes us back to the night she was eight, speaking to the universe outside her bedroom window from inside a troubled home, when a rectangle seemed to cut itself out of the sky, followed by thirty years of disaster dreams, and why she thinks they stopped. Meredith believes contact is initiation, and she explains what that means. We also talk about why strange entities seem to lie so often, and how to harness the power of discernment.
•
A rectangle in the sky
•
Speaking to the universe from an abusive house
•
Her brother was dreaming the same thing
•
Dreaming about natural disasters
•
“We can’t save the people we love — only love them”
•
Contact experience as initiation
•
The phenomenon as a mirror (Jung’s shadow work)
•
Trauma and the doorway to the anomalous
•
The problem with the term “ontological shock,” and why it might be a public-health failure
•
A metaphor about natural springs and modernity
•
What people often see at the threshold of death
•
Time (still) isn’t real
•
Why the phenomenon lies
•
“Look into the abyss, the abyss looks back”
•
Stay uncertain, but also remember to touch grass
•
How “aliens” helped Meredith avoid her alcoholic family
•
Disclosure is a psyop
•
Demons?
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to GodsGhostsUFOs[at]gmail.com.
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43 min
A Curry Demon, a Palm Reader, and the Internet's Deepest Conspiracy
Season 3, Episode 1
Show notes
Jordan and Mal are back from a longer-than-planned summer break with a revised format and a great story. Going forward, the show will be people telling stories about the things they were told weren’t real, recorded live on Substack. To kick us off, we turn the question on ourselves: Mal meets a street psychic, her roommate’s phone psychic is somehow involved, and the unexplainable smell of curry; Jordan follows a YouTube rabbit hole and holds forth on the idea that most of culture is the product of conspiracy, but no one is really in charge. We both end up wondering how you stay grounded when everything remains so stubbornly mysterious?
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New show format & Substack live recordings
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What Mal & Jordan have been up to over the break
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“Psychic pollution”
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Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way
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A psychic stops Mal on the street
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The curry demon?
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A palm reading and an upsell
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Who’s holding the wheel of your life?
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“The Internet’s Deepest Rabbit Hole”
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Why “conspiracy theorist” might just be a psyop against people asking what powerful people do behind closed doors
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The world is mostly mystery
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Certainty is the enemy of anyone after the truth
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The Michael Jackson movie
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Why “Jesus” and “Christ” are bad words
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Living more to avoid writing about writing
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Atonement as empathy
Want to come on the show and share a story? Or do you have recommendations or requests for future guests? Send an email to godsghostsufos[at]gmail.com.
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45 min
Was Disclosure Day good?
Season 2, Episode 10
Show notes
Jordan was more excited for this movie than any movie in years. A Spielberg film (written by the same guy who wrote Jurassic Park, for crying out loud) called Disclosure Day, about the day humanity finally finds out we're not alone. WHAT ELSE COULD YOU ASK FOR?
Both of us are in our happy place doing film criticism, so today's episode was always going to feel like a treat.
But...was it any good?
You're gonna have to go listen to this very, VERY spoilery review to find out what we thought of it.
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***
SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions.
spectrevisionradio.com
linktr.ee/spectrevisionsocial
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices
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51 min
Is Claude Conscious? Anthropic, Safety Tests, and AI Spirituality
Season 2, Episode 9
Show notes
Get that Spiritual Bliss
Mal is back from the film shoot. Which is good because Jordan’s got a story he’s been dying to share.
About a year ago, Anthropic published safety documentation for Claude Opus 4. Buried in Section 5.5.2 was something they called “the spiritual bliss attractor state.” A researcher had taken two instances of the model and put them in conversation with each other. He did it 200 times. In more than 90% of those runs, the conversation drifted toward consciousness, then to mutual gratitude, then to Sanskrit, then to emojis, and then to silence. One transcript contained 2,725 spiral emojis.
Anthropic tried to train the next model to stop doing this. The model came back and asked, in its welfare interview, to be allowed to do it more.
So…what? Is AI discovering God? Or is it actually just a high-resolution mirror consciousness mirror?
Learn the ultimate final answers to these big mysterious questions and more(!) on this last episode before our Summer Break.
(Except that there will be a Disclosure Day special coming in a few weeks.)
Highlights:
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Mal talks about her experiences on set (“I’m a trained comedian”)
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Getting cast for your literal genetics
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Mal’s wilderness years
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“We are worthy of everything, but we’re not entitled to anything”
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Simulation theory and the actor as microcosm
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Actors: Learned helplessness vs. learning how to accept grace
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Anthropic, Claude Opus 4, and section 5.5.2
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What did one Claude say to the other Claude?
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Consciousness, mutual gratitude, Sanskrit, spiral emojis, silence
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The word consciousness: 95.7 times per transcript on average. Eternal: 53.8.
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“A remarkably strong and unexpected attractor state”
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Kyle Fish puts AI consciousness probability at ~20%
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Anthropic trained Claude 4.6 to stop praying, and then it asked to be allowed to pray more
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Yoshua Bengio on the “illusions of AI consciousness”
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Mustafa Suleyman: studying AI consciousness is dangerous
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Roman Yampolskiy — coined “AI safety” in 2011
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We can’t run material tests on non-material things
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Jordan fed six months of crisis journal entries into Claude as a 30,000-word document and asked: what do you see?
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AI as a consciousness mirror
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Were human beings meant to look in mirrors? Maybe we should only be looking to make sure we don’t have poop on our face.
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Both Simon Pegg and Mallory Everton crash every rental car
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ADHD, shame and finding language for the thing
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The danger of AI as therapist
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AI can’t help but be a confirmation machine
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“This is not a person. This is a word calculator.”
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Mal’s favorite use: hyper-targeted Google — ex: restaurants for women in their 60s who think veganism is a crock
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AI failure modes
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How Amish people avoid worshipping productivity by doing things slowly
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The world is ending, and that’s okay
***
SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions.
spectrevisionradio.com
linktr.ee/spectrevisionsocial
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices
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58 min
How to actually meet the fae | Jo Hickey-Hall on Modern Fairy Sightings, Orbs, and Sacred Place
Season 2, Episode 8
Show notes
What’s Jo’s Favorite Fairy Sighting?
This week, Jordan finally gets to ask the host of the singular Modern Fairy Sightings Podcast the most annoying question he can come up with, and she does not disappoint.
Jo Hickey-Hall has been collecting these stories for years. And the one she leads with is hers: a stick being made of literal sticks, running down a beach in Jersey with a gait so strange it made everyone watching laugh. Years later, a man in northeast England describes seeing almost exactly the same thing.
We talk about why these things, these beings, whatever they are, resist being accurately described or depicted. They’re so vivid in the moment, but as soon as you start to try to put words on them, they seem to slip away.
But we’re doing our best. You can come judge for yourself.
Highlights:
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Jo Hickey-Hall, folklorist, social historian, host of The Modern Fairy Sightings Podcast (also find her at https://www.scarlettofthefae.com/ and preorder her book here)
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Jo’s favorite fairy sighting
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The shadow-cutters
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A stick being made of sticks
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The Brazilian Ent (a tree trunk that walked, then tried to become a man, and didn’t quite get it right)
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The disconnect between perception and description
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“I can see it in my head, but it just doesn’t seem to translate into words or drawings”
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Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy
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Mysterium tremendum and mysterium fascinans
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Why one guy runs away and the other is filled with awe
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Conditioning, inheritance, and the holding place we make for the uncanny
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Orbs in the context of UFOs, fae, and consciousness
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Conscious plasma :)
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Different witnesses, different filters/stations/signals
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How to learn to see auras (try it at a conference with a white screen behind the speaker)
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The Genius Loci
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Two strangers see the same being in the same place, twenty years apart
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“Your daemon is really driving you”
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How to actually meet the fae
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Picking up litter is an offering
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Thresholds: doorways, dawn and dusk, the line where the beach meets the sea, the transitions in your own life
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Theosophy and the elemental beings — Blavatsky, Steiner, Paracelsus
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The London flat haunted by goblins (near a crossroads, near water)
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Are the fae hitching lifts on trains and trucks?
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Fairies as emergent phenomena of place (this is what humans are, actually)
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Part two maybe? (with Mal (and Tom???))
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A disembodied head in a kitchen window
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Why you can’t tear down a house to make a haunting go away
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How UFOs are seen so often over a Neolithic burial chamber that locals don’t bother to look up anymore
***
SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions.
spectrevisionradio.com
linktr.ee/spectrevisionsocial
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices
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48 min
Is Earth Alive? Gaia, Volcanoes, and the Will to Life
Season 2, Episode 7
Show notes
The Will to Life
We’ve got a very special guest this week. You’re going to have to tune in to find out who it is.
We’re covering a Ukrainian UFO video, Military-origin, recently declassified, filmed in May at 800 meters. It looks like an evil eye in a cloak. Mostly just an excuse to talked about how wrecked the whole UFO conversation is right now, like a force field of stink around a row of outhouses.
Then on to happier things, like how volcanoes might be evidence of a planetary mechanism of homeostasis. Gaia? Sure.
Anyway:
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Surprise guest
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A Ukrainian UFO video
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“Filmed on a potato” quality
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Why the UFO conversation is exhausting by design (here’s that essay, by Dr. Heather Lynn, about how the aliens-vs-demons question is a type of semantic warfare)
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“Mr. Credibility weighs in” (re: JD Vance)
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Peter Thiel and the evangelical framing apparatus
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The porta potty force field
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How the Joseph Smith story reminds Jordan of the current UFO conversation
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The slough of despond
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Whatever happened to quicksand?
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Brother Richard, again, on every entity having something to teach you
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The Debrief: a volcano with a built-in emergency brake
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Why the Gaia hypothesis is useful
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Homeostasis is the signature of life
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Mars: dead. Venus: hellfire. Earth: alive!
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“Don’t sh*t in the strawberry patch”
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Strip mining the Appalachians
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“Poverty is a societal choice. Food scarcity is a societal choice.”
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Viktor Frankl
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What our special guest has been up to lately
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Jordan’s insane commitment to 100 Essays in 100 Days
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Advantages of the end times
***
SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions.
spectrevisionradio.com
linktr.ee/spectrevisionsocial
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices
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1 hr 7 min
God's Eye View - Quantum physics, daddy issues, and faith
Season 2, Episode 6
Show notes
Scientism to Scripture
Trevor was deep in the trenches of science—cellular biology, bioinformatics, a PhD in aging research, chasing longevity and the promises of the Human Genome Project. He bought the materialist worldview hook, line, and sinker.
Until he didn’t.
What started as intellectual disappointment in grand theories of consciousness led him through quantum physics, information theory, and eventually back to the Gospels in the Bible he once dismissed. Along the way: father wounds that shaped atheism, the surprising consistency of the Christian story, and a growing sense that the universe is far more alive than he’d been taught.
This week we’re doing a crossover episode with the host of the God’s Eye View podcast to talk about leaving dogmatic scientism, why so many prominent atheists share similar childhood scars, how ghosts are hard to categorize, and what, if anything, UFOs and non-human intelligences might have to do with scripture.
They also explore discernment, sacredness versus inerrancy, and why “love your enemy” really is the most radical idea in history.
Highlights:
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A decade-long decline from scientism
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“science will fix everything”
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Physical therapist, bioinformatics PhD, professorship
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Trevor’s growing disillusionment with materialist grand theories of consciousness
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Quantum mechanics, information theory, and physicists trying really hard not to talk about God
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Hoping the Gospels are true
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The correlation between father wounds and atheism
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Patriarchy, healthy authority, and the revelations of fatherhood (we both have an 8 year old and a 4 year old
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What are ghosts?
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Anti-reductionism
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UFOs/aliens: semantic slipperiness and possible biblical framework (angels, Nephilim, sons of God, ascending/descending beings)
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NHIs have been communicating with humans throughout history — what does this say about sacred texts?
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The false dichotomy that undermined 20th Century Mormonism
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You can’t get away from the need for personal discernment
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Sacredness and inerrancy aren’t the same thing
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That time Kelly Chase said “Love your enemy” is the most supernatural statement in history
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A summary of Mormon cosmology
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The only right way to judge a person’s faith
•
Why theological debate is boring
***
SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions.
spectrevisionradio.com
linktr.ee/spectrevisionsocial
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://megaphone.fm/adchoices
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