Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, Debating the Nature of Reality |574|

Bernardo Kastrup is director of Essentia Foundation and one of the world’s leading experts on metaphysical idealism.

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[00:00:00] Alex Tsakiris: Um, this episode of skeptiko. A show about rules… When to break them:

[00:00:08] Clip: Still hanging out at the after party and, uh, with me, uh, , Tupac Shakur. All right. Believe in death row East believe in that. For real. You ever arrived with you, But if you believe in God, believe in death Row East.

[00:00:20] Alex Tsakiris: And when to follow them.

[00:00:23] Bernardo Kastrup: I accept the rules, you know, laboratory evidence, fine. That’s all I will look at. Reasoning fine. That’s all I will base my argument on. I will never appeal to my own personal subjective insight. And you go a long way. It’s enough to win after this transit. Has been accepted then we can review the rules of the game

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[00:00:44] Alex Tsakiris: that first clip was from 1996, Tupac Shakur, who I included because he was kind famous for breaking rules and famously said, play the game, but don’t let the game play. You. And the second was from our excellent, excellent guest, Dr. Bernardo Castro, who has been on the show before I highly respect is truly one of the leaders in paradigm change from biological robot, meaningless universe to wherever we go next. Now the rules game thing really has a lot of different meanings. As this interview goes on.

Stick round. And I think you’ll see what I

Welcome to Skeptical, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host Alex Caris, and today I’m so excited to welcome back my longtime friend lot of years here. More than most people would probably even realize, and one of the great thinkers of our time when it comes to, let me get this right, an academic level argument for the mental nature of reality or what I like to say, the argument against the idea that we’re all biologic routs in a meaningless universe.

I’m talking of course about Bernardo Castro. Fantastic. Bernardo, it’s great to have you here.

[00:02:10] Bernardo Kastrup: Welcome. Great to be here, Alex. Uh, we haven’t seen each other for too long. Last time we saw each other in person was. 2016, wasn’t it? It’s, it’s my, it boggles the mind how long it’s been already.

[00:02:23] Alex Tsakiris: It was up at, uh, You were with Dak Chopra?

Yes.

[00:02:28] Bernardo Kastrup: Up at Deepak. Yeah. And then you drove down, I think, uh,

[00:02:35] Alex Tsakiris: you have drove up. Same thing. I live right. I live very close to there. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. Same thing. Yeah. But no, it’s awesome.

So, Bernardo, , let’s start with this. You have a new gig since we last chatted. You are now the executive director, Head Concho as Essentia Foundation. Tell us, tell us about that.

[00:02:57] Bernardo Kastrup: Wow. That’s something that, uh, had been looming in my life already for several years, but I had coat feet. I didn’t want to live the high tech world, cuz for me it was not only, you know, the way I earned my living, but it, it was a family, You know, the company worked for a sml, um, was like family for me. But, um, yeah, eventually there came the lockdown.

Um, and then I lost that social aspect of my work anyway. And I had a health condition that made me reevaluate the way I make my decisions. And now I don’t make any choice based on what stands to lose, but, uh, based on what still has to be done. And, um, Fred Matr, who you see there to the left, who is the founder of Essential Foundation, had been asking me for, for quite a while to do this with him and others.

And in 2020 I decided to. Take the plunge. You know, my life is first and foremost about philosophy of mind. Ontology and technology has been relegated to the level of a hobby now, now I build my own little computers, in the attic, late in the late at night. You should

[00:04:09] Alex Tsakiris: remind people about your former life because it’s not only quite impressive, but it also gives you a certain grounding that we’ve often spoke about on, on this show.

So maybe you wanna just go over that part of your bio.

[00:04:25] Bernardo Kastrup: Well, my first education was computer engineering. Um, I have a doctorate in computer engineering was 26 when I got that. I used to work at cern. That was my first job. I worked on the data acquisition system of the Atlas Experiment, part of the large Collider.

Um, then I did, uh, my, I worked for corporate research at Phillips. I founded a company that eventually was bought by Intel. Over a decade ago it was called Silicon Hive. Now it’s Intel Ovn. Um, then I went to asml, which is a company that everybody, the whole world depends on. You never heard of them?

Probably because it’s not a, uh, a consumer company sells to businesses like, uh, you know, Samsung, Dsmc, chip makers. And I worked there for 15 years. I was doing strategy, business development, you know, technology and science driven strategy. Um, and in parallel to that, I was doing philosophy as well for, for the past 15 years as well.

And, and now for two years, the roles have been reversed. I do have a, a doctorating philosophy, uh, but philosophy always took a back seat in my life. You know, if you count the number of hours, um, and now it’s the other way around. Uh, I spend most of my time now in philosophy promoting mainly other people’s ideas through essential foundation, uh, and trying to know, wake people up to the notion that, um, ideal.

The world view that entails mind. Being fundamental is not only something that you need first person spiritual insight to think is the truth. Um, you can make an exceedingly strong case for idealism based purely on reason and, and, uh, laboratory evidence. And that’s what Essentia Foundation, uh, tries to, to promote the, this reality that you can make a rational and empirical case for, for idealism without, uh, direct introspective insight without spiritual.

[00:06:34] Alex Tsakiris: So, you know, the last time we spoke, you were, I guess, just becoming engaged in this battle, this struggle that you saw as necessary part of a paradigm change. So if there is going to be this paradigm change from the ridiculous reductionistic, materialistic to something else, whatever that else is, and you’re proposing something else, that, that takes a certain grinding of the gears that you have to get in there and be busy doing and have to kind of face forward publicly in order to do that.

So I pulled up, you know, essential foundation you’re offering a free, absolutely free, totally free, 100% free six hour course, which I guess would be kind of a, a companion to, you know, your, a lot of the work that people can find on your excellent website. Which is still at, , metaphysical speculations, but the URL is bernardo cast strip.com and there’s just a ton of stuff there.

So I guess, I mean, let’s pump it a little bit, the course and maybe any comment on what it takes to make a paradigm change to kind of grease those wheels that

[00:07:53] Bernardo Kastrup: don’t want to turn. Well, I think you cannot fight two battles at the same time. You cannot fight a battle for changing the rules of the game because the rules don’t offer a level playing field, and they don’t, and then for winning the game.

So you can’t do these two things at the same time, unfortunately. So the, the choice we’ve made was, okay, we accept the rules of the game as they are, which favor, uh, reasoning and laboratory and empirical evidence. Of over direct introspective insight and widespread anecdotal evidence. Now, are these rules fair?

No. Do they offer a level playing field? No, but we, we chose our battle. So we chose to fight according to the existing rules, um, which do not offer a level playing field, but we think we can still win, nonetheless, even according to the present rules, uh, of the game. So that’s what we do and that’s what I’ve been trying to do now for years.

I accept the rules, you know, laboratory evidence, fine. That’s all I will look at. Reasoning fine. That’s all I will base my argument on. I will never appeal to my own personal subjective insight. Uh, I will only focus on rational reasoning. And you go a long way. It’s enough to win after this transit. Has been accepted and we have, we are deep into that process now.

There’s a lot happening under the surface. Uh, after people realize, okay, that this is just b reasoning and evidence based conclusions, then we can review the rules of the game because we always mature, uh, even as a civilization. And we will see that there are things that we are throwing away. You the baby, we are throwing away together with the bath water, but that comes later.

Now we just have to fight according to the present rules.

[00:09:49] Alex Tsakiris: Okay, so we are gonna make a smooth but not totally smooth transition to kind of the skeptical portion of our show , which we were chuckling about. You understand kind of what’s coming, and I appreciate that about you, that

[00:10:05] Bernardo Kastrup: I love it actually. Great.

[00:10:07] Alex Tsakiris: So here, here I’ve pulled up the very, very impressive academic advisory board.

, and there’s a bunch of names on there that people recognize. Several have been on the show, , but I wanted to bring attention to, I think you’ll get a kick out of this professor Jeffrey Cripple Rice University, because I wanted to play for you this clip. This is an interview that he recently did or was on, and he’s there with, uh, Whitney Streamer and Diana Bosh Poka, who we will talk about and, , so you, you know Jeff obviously Yes, Yes.

[00:10:45] Bernardo Kastrup: Know him

[00:10:46] Alex Tsakiris: personally. Do, do you know Whitley?

[00:10:49] Bernardo Kastrup: No, I have never met Whitley. I know who he is, but I have never met him.

[00:10:53] Alex Tsakiris: No. Okay. So author of Communion, probably this is Whitley Streiber we’re talking about Author of Communion, probably the most important alien contact book ever published. And coauthor with Jeff of The Supernatural.

Why the Unexplained Israel? And, you know, the other thing I just add about whi just to make sure you know, has uh, shared contact experiences. So has alien contact experiences shared with other people to go, Wow. Yeah, that was, we all saw it together kind of thing. And also has after death communication experiences that are verified in different ways.

We can kind of take that for what it is. And then he has an implant as well. Which we can talk about because it kind of crosses over into the physical, you know, you like the Jacque Filet, multi-layered ice tip kind of thing. Well this is, has similar play things to it. But with that, let’s play this clip cuz I think you’re going to enjoy this and let me know if you can’t hear this,

[00:11:56] Clip: that we all in some strange way agree on.

Or is this absolutely real when I touch my face? Am I touching me or is an idea mm-hmm. creating the, the impression that I’m somehow here. Um, you know, there’s a book I’m sure you are all familiar with, uh, called The Idea of the World by Bernardo Castro, uh, which Jeff introduced me to, and which I have now read about four times.

I’m gonna hopefully get Bernardo on the show if he can ever. Realize that , that I’m not simply saucer Sam, but we’ll see. , that’s not easy. Uh, so, where are we now? Because we are looking at physical objects. They do things they shouldn’t be able to do. They don’t make sense. The implants in my ear, there’s a piece of debris here in this office.

Other pieces have been extensively studied as we all know more than we can even say. And yet that’s not the answer. Hmm.

[00:13:11] Alex Tsakiris: , I love Whitley. He’s been on the show a couple times and then I’ve been on his show, but he doesn’t like me as much anymore cuz I came down on him pretty hard on the Jesus thing.

But tell us what you think. Well, first of all, will you go on Whitley’s show?

[00:13:27] Bernardo Kastrup: I would. Okay. Okay. I, I will through the

great, fine not to, to have conversations. I will talk to

[00:13:33] Alex Tsakiris: anyone, . Oh, I, I mean, I think he obviously has a lot of respect for your work and I think you two would enjoy it. But the, the main question I guess is how are you processing the UFO thing?

Because, you know, I read this a couple years ago, in 2020, the phenomenon, a brief review you did of the movie, and it sounded like you were kind of taking baby steps into this thing. Where are you today in any thoughts on where you are versus where Crile is versus where Whitley Stre is?

[00:14:13] Bernardo Kastrup: I think the UFO phenomenon or the UAP phenomenon, whatever you want to call it, I don’t care about the name.

It’s one of the top three mysteries we have in front of us today. Number one is time. Mystery of time that that is an over, that’s an overwhelming mystery because it’s with us, well all the time. Um, and it holds the answers to, to many things. Understanding the nature of time is the way to understanding our true identity, the nature of reality, everything.

That’s number one. It’s right up there. But number two, it may be the UFO UAP phenomenon because it is something that defies not only known physics, it defies Aristotelian logic. The behavior of the phenomena is not a logical behavior a lot of the times, and it to, to defend myself from. The, the presupposition, uh, of, of what you’re saying.

I did write a book in which I was very open to the U UFO UAP phenomenon many years ago, called Meaning in Absurdity. Um, and so I, I have being open about it that, uh, I think this is a profound mystery, a real mystery, um, that will only yield to us if we open our minds in a way that we can’t even contemplate today, because it would require revising even our logic, not only our physics.

To require revising our, our understanding of reality self, of consciousness, of everything.

[00:15:59] Alex Tsakiris: Yeah. Two, two points to that because I think that to me those are baby steps and kinda looking in the wrong direction. Two takeaways from Whitley and then we’re good on to talk about Dan Walsh. Passal in a minute.

It’s not about UFOs or UAPs, which I hate because it’s just a siop, the uap, just to confuse people. And the guy, I thought it was about UFOs. No, it’s UAPs, this new acronym. It’s not about that. It’s about ET and that’s what Whitley’s saying. Whitley’s saying, it’s about my contact experience. Everyone who’s at the forefront of this field, all those people in that interview are saying it’s about et, it’s about contact.

When Rick Strassman at the University of New New Mexico gave his subjects for the first time, ordained by the great government drug taking experimenting arm that it had when he gave him the dmt. They went into that other realm and there was ET and et said, We’ve been waiting for you. Glad you’re here.

Right. So that’s, that’s in our record. And then, you know, further, when the, you know, famous near death experience researcher Ken Ring, when he did the same, when he tried to kind of cross correlate the results of near death experience accounts with alien contact accounts, he said, Wow, there’s so, so many similarities here.

And that’s work has been picked up more currently by like Ray Hernandez in the free group who did the first academic survey of contact experiences. And the same so, You know, this is what matters from a consciousness perspective. Cuz if you go and talk to the, the UFO people, if you will, they’re all about consciousness.

Now, in, in, in a way that kind of always ticks me off because it’s like they have this kind of kindergarten understanding or they just walked into this new world and they go consciousness, consciousness, consciousness. And they don’t know quite how to, how to deal with it. So that’s why I guess I’m poking at you a little bit, baby steps.

UFO is about consciousness. It’s about, the question I always ask is, does ET have an NDE that gets to. That gets to the heart of it. What are your thoughts?

[00:18:20] Bernardo Kastrup: Um, I, I will, uh, admit to the accusation of baby steps. Um, that’s that, uh, um, yes, that, that’s how I go about things. Um, and it may be wrong, um, because the urgency of of our situation is just overwhelming.

We may not have enough time for baby steps. Um, regarding the ET part, uh, I sort of, I pre assumed that every time we talk about UAPs, UFOs, whatever, there is conscious agency behind those things. So, but to me it’s to talk about the same thing. I don’t think UAPs and UFOs are natural phenomena or mechanistic phenomena.

Uh, they are guided by an intelligence and my illusion to. Logic that is not, Aris of Telling and logic was a sort of implicit recognition of that because it’s only conscious agents, agents that use logic to determine their behavior or something that is beyond our logic. So I, I grant you that. What makes it interesting regarding the UAP UFO phenomenon is agency.

Now you said et Um, what, where I would take perhaps a step larger than most take is in not recognizing that it’s a done deal. That ET is extraterrestrial, that ET is some kind of four dimensional, like we are biological entity from another solar system that came here in some kind of brilliant spaceship.

I think there is a lot more mystery to the earth to wow locuses in space time, uh, than we there imagined today. So it is, its foreign, foreign. It’s foreign to our culture, to our civilization, to our worldview, to our understanding of what is what and what is not. Uh, but it may be geographically speaking or cosmologically speaking from here too.

And that to me is even more mindboggling than the B spaceships coming from series.

[00:20:25] Alex Tsakiris: Yeah, the, you know, the problem I always have with that is twofold. And I guess we’ll get to the first part of the fold in a minute in terms of who’s controlling that narrative and what the dominant narrative is today.

But the second thing, I guess that I’d say, and it’s gonna relate to the second main topic I wanna talk about in terms of how we interface with science, and that is that, you know, in this paper of yours that I’m gonna quote in a minute, Science isn’t about proof, but science is about evidence. And I would say that science is about the burden of proof.

And that we are in this constantly changing game of where that burden of proof lies and whether it lies with what we might say is the kind of conventional or mainstream opinion, or whether it lies with a, a new paradigm that’s being established. And we could trace that all the way back to your idealism.

I think the burden of proof has clearly shifted and you’ve been instrumental in shifting it to Those who want to prop up, you know, scientific materialism, physicalism, that that has been falsified and the burden of proof is on them to falsify idealism or to jump on board with max plank and consciousness is fundamental.

But I don’t wanna digress too far because I would say the same thing is true here with the ET UFO thing. Number one, the, the, I I’m glad you concede the point that we’re, we’re not talking about you. UFOs we’re talking about the intelligence that is the agency. The intelligence, I would say that is behind that technology that we’re observing through the dials, as you like to call ’em on our, on our plane, our airplane on our dashboard.

That tells us what we are sensing in the outside world. But the second part of that is that I think if we look at this from an anthropological standpoint, if we look at the evidence, cultures throughout time has been telling us they come from the stars. If we look at the Native American accounts here, I’ve interviewed, uh, already six color Clark, other people just recently.

The, the, all these traditions are replete with stories. Star people. Star people, star people. They told us they came from the stars. The ancient art tells us they came with the stars. I say the burden of proof is on those who claim they are not from the stars and those who claim that the little pile of sl that Jacque Valle walks around in her pocket and Whitley mentioned is on his desk, is not evidence of a craft of.

Whether it’s made out of whatever material is a crap, I think the burden of proof has, has clearly shifted. Maybe you, maybe you don’t agree, maybe you agree with it. I,

[00:23:11] Bernardo Kastrup: I don’t categorically state that they are not from the stars because I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody knows. I would just be open to the possibility that they are not and to, to, to latch onto the very things you refer to, that cultures throughout history have have been talking about this and they have been saying that they are from the stars.

Another way to look at the very same evidence is to realize that culture throughout history have been talking about this. In other words, they have always been here, which is consistent with the notion that they are from here because they have always been here. And if it’s an expedition, why is it taking thousands of years to, you know, uh, Meet the goals of this expedition.

On the other hand, if they are from here, then there is no go. They’re just from here. They are here because they are from here . Know what I mean?

[00:24:05] Alex Tsakiris: Uh, they’re the watchers. They’ve been here all the time. They watch whenever they want, They’ve planted in the garden and they can come back. Multiple, multiple species.

Multiple, multiple agendas. That’s my read of the data, but I wanna play for you another clip from that same interview with the fantastic Diana Walsh Palka. Do you know who

[00:24:25] Bernardo Kastrup: she is? I heard your name, but I dunno anything about her now.

[00:24:29] Alex Tsakiris: Okay. She wrote a really important book called American Cosmic Super Smart.

A very, very dialed into this thing. Buddies with Jacque Valle, buddies with Gary Nolan. Very, very connected and on the forefront of this whole thing. Let me, let me play this clip. I’ll take you just a minute to cue it up. Sure.

[00:24:49] Clip: So I would say that I agree with John that we’re just at the beginning academic sense, and I think that people who do religious studies have an insight into the hyster of the phenomena.

It’s been around for a long time. We have a lot of records to, you know, that are documenting the interface between humans and the anomalous, and that’s very important. But part of the reason that American cosmic. Did rattle some cages, and I won’t deny it, is that I did field research and I think that as academics going into this now, we feel safe enough, some of us, you know, to now that the, the US government has acknowledged, uh, in June, 2021, that there are these anomalous things.

And so academics are now studying this. But I think that the academics who have studied this can offer some advice, and part of that is that we need to actually do the field research. We need to get into the places, we need to talk to people who, like you, Whitley, who’ve had experiences. We need to do the kinds of things that we’ve always done, and we also need to acknowledge that why?

Why did American cosmic rattle cages? Because there was misinformation and disinformation, which is, there are two different things. Disin info is intentional and we have to acknowledge that. That is part of the history here in the United States of this specific phenomena that are called now UAPs, and I think that academics have been afraid to.

Identify that, but we can’t do it with any kind of integrity if we don’t say, Absolutely. Project Blue Book was a disin info campaign. Um, you know, so, and we have to develop now skills in order to decipher any kind of thing that we might wanna call truth, because, you know, really that’s what academics are trying to do.

They’re trying to uncover things that are historically accurate, you know, factual that we can move on with knowledge.

[00:26:57] Alex Tsakiris: , anything to jump in there with on Diana, before I bring up a topic?

[00:27:02] Bernardo Kastrup: Field research is the way to go about it. Field research and less prejudice, less, uh, um, Prejudged conclusions about what is allowed to be real and what is not. So I’m, I’m with her on that. There is nothing she said that I disagree with.

[00:27:18] Alex Tsakiris: Well, and we might even talk about, because I brought it up on the screen before and then I just kind of mentioned it in passing. You know, one of the things you were drawn to in the movie that you reviewed the phenomenon was this analysis of some of the material that people have found and particular credible people like Jacque Valle.

And that’s the kind of stuff that would be included in the field research. And that’s the kind of stuff that I guess you’re kind of calling for, right?

[00:27:46] Bernardo Kastrup: Yeah, yeah. So, so rigorous, um, methodologically correct field research. Yeah.

[00:27:55] Alex Tsakiris: So, but here’s the other jumping off point on that, that I really, I guess.

Is a huge deal to me and is something I wanna focus on in this interview and talk about. And that’s that we are a wash with disinformation. Not, not just misinformation, not just junk science. Science is a wash within organized, very sophisticated and brutal at times, effort to misinformed, to mislead, to deceive people.

And I think just as she said, we have to not only acknowledge that and acknowledge when it’s happened, but check ourselves and say, Are we in the middle of that right now? Is what’s coming down at us now? Is it, is it misinformation? Is it not just junk science? Is it, You get my point? What do you think about that?

[00:28:49] Bernardo Kastrup: That things go wrong often is, a fact. , because science is done by scientists, and scientists are human. But to, to first acknowledge your point, before I elaborate further, let me give you a personal example. I had a debate with a famous physicist sometime ago. Uh, Zina Feld is a materialist and tries to debunk everything that doesn’t fit with material and extreme determinism.

Um, and in the course of that debate, I accused her of having proposed theoretical entities, hidden variables that she never even defined. So how can we create an experiment to find those hidden variables if she doesn’t even define what they are? And she said on that debate life to my face, that she did define the hidden variable.

And she even mentioned the paper in which she claims to have defined the hidden variables. And when you read that paper, she does no such a thing. The paper is about a toy model, you know, hidden variables of an alternate universe that’s much simpler than ours. She made absolutely no attempt to actually define plausible hidden variables.

In other words, she lied to my face in order to save her face during a, a debate. Do I think that was malicious? No. I think she did it because in her mind that was the lesser evil. It was the lesser evil. To outright miss mislead, I would say lie, uh, then to acknowledge someone who is, uh, pushing towards a different conclusion from the same laboratory data that we both have in front of us.

Um, so is there this information? Yes. The, the world is a wash with this information from all sides because as Thomas Goon once said in, back in the late sixties, the data are not neutral. You always bring in your own world view to bear. When you interpret the data, you never have neutral data and, and that’s what’s happening.

, we fool ourselves and each other through this information. What I don’t think is the case is that there is a organized. Conspiracy that has been going on for decades or centuries. I don’t take humanity that seriously. I don’t think we are capable of that. I think we are just stupid. That’s all there is to it.

[00:31:19] Alex Tsakiris: Well, she’s saying something completely different and the data backs are up. So the history of Project Blue Book, are you near with Project Blue Book? Mm-hmm. is an organized campaign to deceive at a very high level, at a very orchestrated level, at a level that is brutal. It’s, it’s including going out and intimidating people, threatening people with death and the death of the relatives unless they go along with the story.

So, That happened. Do, do you know who Richard Doty is? Do you know who Lou a Elizondo is? Do you know either one of those people? Uh, Lou

[00:31:51] Bernardo Kastrup: a Elizondo? I have heard about him. Yeah. Well,

[00:31:54] Alex Tsakiris: His predecessor, if you will, another, intelligence agent named Richard Doty. Has come clean. He hasn’t come clean cuz they never come clean.

But is admitted to a disinformation campaign that had brutal psychological effects on some innocent American who had stepped forward and said, Hey, I’m seeing these UFOs out on this military base and I’m kind of concerned. And they ran this whole mind game on him and the whole UFO community in order to discredit him and to create this false narrative that has been acknowledged and put forth.

And I’ve had people on the show like Colonel John Alexander who said he, he should be in prison for, he should be in Leavenworth, you know, military prison for that. And the, the latest iteration of that, which is just kind of exploded, is Lou Eli Elizondo, which was part of this latest round of disclosure.

Uh, you know, New York Times, Leslie Kane, Ralph Blumenthal from New York Times, I interviewed both of them on this show. Richard Dolan, everyone comes out and says, Wow, this is the real deal. And I mean, I’m not the only one, but I was like, Gosh, guys, this sure looks like a political siop to me. It looks like a rerun of Richard Doty to me.

And now that’s all come to pass. Why would we believe a counter intelligence agent who’s a professional liar, that’s his job, to tell us the truth about this important secret that they’ve kept secret for so long. So I, I really, this is fundamental to what I’m talking about here, is no, it’s not innocent people making innocent mistakes.

It’s an organized, sophisticated attempt to control the narrative because the narrative that’s coming forth with the UFO is very pointed. It’s, it has a, it has a different agenda, a definite agenda. The agenda is these things are a threat to our national security, and we need a global response. That has, from the beginning been where they’ve tried to take the story, but people have such a short memory that they forget that just a few years ago, Barack Obama and George Bush and every one of them stood up and said, This is not real.

This is not happening. When they knew it was so,

[00:34:09] Bernardo Kastrup: what’s not real that these entities are a threat to us.

[00:34:14] Alex Tsakiris: Well, Barack Obama, in case you’re not aware, categorically denied that these existed. He said, I’ve looked in existed. Okay. He, he said, I’ve looked into this. If anyone would know, I know. There’s no, there’s nothing here.

There’s nothing there. Every president has had to say this, This has been the official position, obviously, of the United States government and therefore the world government, cuz they controlled, for the most part, the information locked down about UFOs, the quarantine of information. That was the story when Diana Walsh Polka, who knows, because she documents in her book, his, her interface with the Invisible College and Jacque Valle kind of gives her the inside scoop and says, Look, here’s how you gotta play this game and here’s how you gotta be careful and here’s how you do this and that.

I mean, that was the, that was the going thing is that you do not talk about this. You do not acknowledge it. That was the official position.

[00:35:16] Bernardo Kastrup: Do you think there are. Organizations or groups of, groups of people, humans here, uh, on our planet, in the US, government, whatever, who know exactly what’s going on, how these things work and what their agenda is and what it’s all about.

[00:35:31] Alex Tsakiris: I think that’s a different question. Uh, it’s an interesting question, but it’s a different question. The way I’d phrase the question is, can we conclusively, say, prove, if you will, cuz this is kind of more of a social thing, prove that there was a group inside the United States government who was actively trying to mislead, misinformed, deceive for a particular purpose, the people of the United States, in the people of the world.

And the answer to that is absolutely yes, we have documentation

[00:36:01] Bernardo Kastrup: of it. Why do you think they did it? What, what was the motivation? Well,

[00:36:07] Alex Tsakiris: Bernardo, we can take their explanation of it, which is what we’ve always heard. We’re just trying to keep you safe. And the other thing they’ll add is, you know what, You can’t really handle it.

You can’t handle the truth. The famous quote, if we were to tell you, there’d be mass confusion. Our whole society would crumble, religion would crumble, all these things. You can handle the truth. It’s better that we kind of control this. So that’s what they’re, that’s what they say. But why, why? You know, and again, I’ll, I’ll reference this to.

Excellent essay that you wrote. The essence of Western culture is at stake here. It is free will, It is the American constitution. We, the people I shall decide if I can handle the truth. You will not decide if I handle the truth. Yeah. So I I don’t go there. I don’t go to where you are. I just go with, I don’t, I don’t agree with Colonel John Alexander on much, but throw the motherfuckers in jail when they break the constitution, when they break the law.

I don’t wanna hear your excuse for why you are just following orders or whatever else. It’s idealistic. But how can we be anything other than idealistic with this truth?

[00:37:25] Bernardo Kastrup: Yeah. There I am with you. I think we, at least the elites. Underestimate the ability of people to actually accommodate hard facts and, and to make good sense and integrate things that are mind boggling at first sight.

So there I am with you. Um, I’m not trying to defend anyone, but uh, since it’s skeptical, I’ll try to play the other polarity of this discussion. There is a lot of nonsense and bullshit in the UFO community. You, you, you must acknowledge that.

[00:38:00] Alex Tsakiris: I’m reluctant to just kind of blanketly acknowledge that for the reason that we just said is that we can clearly show that a lot of the confusion and bullshit and apparent just idiotic behavior and thinking.

Was he intentionally orchestrated this guy, You, you, you just don’t know the history here. Richard Doty, again, he’s an inte counter intelligence agent. He ran these guys in circles and then at one point, as kind of a, the ultimate LA ultimate in your face, he goes on this very prominent US show and he says, Yes, I am an et.

We like strawberry ice cream and part. And at this point people were kind of, you know, so they are creating that and the, whenever they create it, they’re mixing it in with 90% true new information that you can’t get any place else. So you’re drawn into it, and then they’re adding the absurd, They’re ridiculous.

So you look like a fool. This is the game that they’ve played. It’s documented over and over again. Dr. Diane Walsh Palka, who is no slouch and is sitting up there with Jeff Cripe and has the ultimate respect of people that you know, like Jacque Vallet. She’s telling to you straight, and that is, this game is a real hardcore game and it’s in play.

But here’s the thing that we’re gonna talk about in a minute. It’s not limited to UFOs. It just, it just shines more clearly in the UFO space cuz it’s been exposed.

[00:39:32] Bernardo Kastrup: The, the question it raises is, okay, how do we know where to look then? How do we know what to take seriously and whatnot? Because even the absurd stuff, the, the in your face nonsensical stuff like alien messages written in binary, obeying human code, if that is planted. Then how do you know, How do we even begin?

Uh, unless we do field research entirely on our own, starting from scratch, how do we know who or what to believe? Uh, we have to have some, some kind of safe port, safe harbors here that we can anchor or bo on because we can’t rebuild the thing from scratch. No, nobody has the education, the time, the tools to start from scratch and derive any meaningful conclusion.

So what we do, other than throw our arms up and just give up and say, Well, there’s, I, I can’t believe anything. Anyway.

[00:40:33] Alex Tsakiris: Well, that might lead into this second essay of yours that I wanted to bring up on the screen and talk about the anti-establishment , sentiment from uh, November, 2020.

Because what I’m, to answer your question directly, Heck, she just said it, which is that one, we have to acknowledge it. And two, we have to start developing , skills, talents, and toughness to combat it. What we can’t do is pretend that it doesn’t exist. Tell us what you were trying to get across in the anti-establishment sentiment.

Cause I think it’s very important and, and, and a good article.

[00:41:15] Bernardo Kastrup: I think there is legitimacy to the overall feeling. You finding many societies today that, uh, they have been deceived by intellectual elites, by, by, by the media, the liberal media, um, and that sentiment. Well justified to a large extent, when we thought that the media was serious and there was consensus and safe harbors to use the same expression I just did, uh, back in the eighties, uh, what we didn’t know is that we were seeing basically one spin of the story, one side of the story that we took for the truth.

And with the internet and social media and our ability to share information and exchange ideas, uh, in a manner, in a manner that is unmediated and unedited by the powers that be in the media. We started to realizing that hey, there, there are many other sites to every single story. Uh, and that has led to a lot of polarization and a lot of bullshit.

Let’s acknowledge that too. Um, but the, the base motivat. Is valid, is correct. Uh, it it affects even my own field, which is, you know, philosophy ontology. Uh, we have been deceived with this notion that, for instance, materialism is, is, is a fact. It’s a Don deal. It’s, it’s definitely true nonsense, nonsense.

Materialism has always been internally contradictory and very, very weak in terms of explanatory power. It has always been a very, very problematic idea. It’s just that a certain critical mass of people in intellectual elite decided that they would stake their career and their public personas on it. So it gathered a lot of momentum, but we were bullshitted and we continue to be bullshitted.

Um, I just don’t think that that is as malicious and as coordinated as I sense you think it is. Uh, but I will very, very easily acknowledged we have been bullshit and then there is a legitimacy to, to. A sentiment, a, a bad sentiment against, uh, intellectual and media elites.

[00:43:29] Alex Tsakiris: Okay. Let me ask you to play hypothetical for a second.

Moving from Diana Walsh Palka, again, as a case study in intentional organized, highly leveraged, like by very powerful people, disinformation. So now we know that’s on the table, that’s in play. We can document it. If you were to imagine, speculate why someone might want to advance a materialistic agenda that has been falsified experimentally, like you said, , if you were to kind of speculate about a potential, what, what, what might that be?

[00:44:08] Bernardo Kastrup: Uh, the way it started, it was, uh, a power grab the way it started materialism, when it was proposed in the early days of science four centuries ago, it was known and acknowledged by the Enlightenment folks to be a, a world view that didn’t really work, but that they needed to combat the church.

Uh, um, uh, they need the horizon on record saying that materialism doesn’t work, but we need to keep using it because it’s our weapon against the church. That was in the 18th century, in the mid 19th century after Dar. There was a perception among intellectual elite that there, there could be finally a total victory against the church, such that the intellectual elite would have the power to steer a culture and move people and not the church because Dar solved what was perceived then as the big problem, which is how do we explain the variety of life other than a creator that made this as it is.

Um, and then people actually started swallowing whole, the notion that materialism is actually true even though it’s not worked out and has internal contradictions. So that was the motivation in the beginning together with getting rid of the greatest fear humanity has always had, which is what will we experience after we.

Are we going to go to hell or are we going to go to heaven? People have used this to control societies for millennia, and that was off the table suddenly. Great, great emotional payoff. Now, today, why does it continue? I think it continues because of stigma. G, which is, uh, conspiracy the other way around. Um, when you.

Start your career and you realize that the people getting promoted are the people who pay lip service to materialism, who portray themselves as the tough people who stare the bleak facts of meaninglessness in the face. You emulate that behavior because you want to get promoted too. And, and this stigma g now, uh, is everywhere.

It it, it pervades the media. Some years ago, uh, psychedelic research papers were published showing that brain activity only reduce. With the application, with the administration of psychedelics, the media published the opposite result. The guardian is on record and CNN is on record saying the opposite.

Why? Because they took a figure from these papers that had a lot of red, but it was not bring activity that was represented by the red. It was functional connectivity, something completely else. And they put that picture saying, Look, lots of ha red, your brain lights up like a Christmas tree. It was the opposite of this study.

And why is that? It’s stigma because journalists feel that they are safe if they portray everything from the materialist perspective. I think it’s just cultural nonsense. It’s the dynamics of human stupidity. ,

[00:46:53] Alex Tsakiris: could it be more? .

Because you see where I see that you went is, yeah, the church has all the power and it’s about control. If we don’t want the church to have the power and in the process of reclaiming that power, there’s a power vacuum and power vacuums are always filled. So is it possible, can we contemplate in a world where someone uses scientific materialism and starts deriving benefit from it in terms of the only thing that ever matters, which is controlling people is divide and rule.

, I

[00:47:28] Bernardo Kastrup: acknowledge that this is used this way for, for, for the purpose of, uh, maintaining power. I just think that it is not as coordinated as, um, he. As conspiracy theories would suggest. I think there’s a lot of personal motivation or small group thinking.

It, it, it’s not aal I don’t think it’s, it’s following a set of rules written by someone at some point at century ago. ,

[00:47:56] Alex Tsakiris: , you’re talking to the wrong conspiracy theorist. Okay. Cause I, I would never say that. I would say it, it requires almost zero effort. It’s, uh, you know, Stalin’s favorite thing about useful idiots.

All you have to do is throw a few pieces of cheese at the end of the rat maze and the rats come and they find their way through it. And then you just have to continue to reward. It takes almost no effort at all. It takes a couple of dozen sock puppet guys, each with a few hundred accounts in right now.

Today. You can kind of create and shape any of this stuff you make here. Let me, let me read for you, cause I wanna move along and make use of your time here in this same article that we were talking about. You write, it goes without saying that some scientific results are unreliable.

Science is done by humans, and As such, just as imperfect as we all are. But there are scientific conclusions so robust that they command broad consensus. Human activity is changing our climate in ways that threaten our survival. Vaccines work of saved countless millions of lives.

Covid 19 is vastly more dangerous than the flu. Face mask and social distancing help contain the spread of respiratory diseases, et cetera. I’d love to know it’s behind that, et cetera, cuz I disagree with almost everyone you, you had there. But let me drill into this one cause I really wanna, I wanna call you to task here and you’re gonna defend yourself obviously, but I think there’s more at stake here than these kind of petty squabbles.

Here’s what you write about climate. Human induced climate change poses perhaps the single greatest existential threat our civilization has ever faced. We, or worse, our children will pay an unimaginably steep price for inaction. In this regard, we must get our act together and globally, Oh, I love that word scale.

To adapt some of our way of life limit emissions, preserve what is left of our planet’s natural ecosystem and biodiversity, and ultimately save ourselves. It’s flat out criminal to ignore this or to use it for short term political gain.

Okay, here you go. Here’s the, here’s the pushback. So you are speaking now as a scientist and you’re talking to the public, and that’s how you’re doing it, and that’s what you’re modeling to a certain extent.

And my pushback is the Diana Walsh po Soko pushback. Let me play. A couple of clips not too long, and then, then we’ll have a little discussion. Not so much about climate change, but maybe kind of about the underlying issues here.

So this is, uh, Dr. Judith Curry presenting in front of the United States Congress. She is the former head of the Department of Client at Georgia Tech University, highly respected university here in the United States, and she is extremely, highly respected in her field , of climatology.

[00:50:54] Clip: I thank the chairman, the ranking members for the opportunity to offer testimony today.

Prior to 2009, I felt that supporting the IPCC consensus on climate change was a responsible thing to do. I bought into the argument, don’t trust what one scientist says. Trust what an international team of a thousand scientists has said. After years of careful deliberation, that all changed for me in November, 2009, following the leak, climate gate emails that illustrated the sausage making and even bullying that went into building the consensus.

I started speaking out, saying that scientists needed to do better at making the data and supporting information publicly available, being more transparent about how they reach conclusions, doing a better job of assessing uncertainties and actively engaging with scientists, having minority perspectives.

The response in my colleagues to this is summed up by the title of a 2010 article in the Scientific American Climate Heretic Judith Curry Turns on her colleagues. I came to the growing realization that I had fallen into the trap of groupthink. I had accepted the consensus based on second order evidence, the assertion that a consensus as existed.

I began making an independent assessment of topics in climate science that had the most relevance to policy. And what have I concluded from this assessment? human cause. Climate change is a theory in which the basic mechanism is well understood, but whose magnitude is highly uncertain. No one questions that surface temperatures have increased overall since 1880, or that humans are adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere or that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have a warming effect on the planet.

However, there is considerable uncertainty and disagreement about the most consequential issues, whether the warming has been dominated by human causes versus natural variability, how much the planet will warm in the 21st century, and whether warming is dangerous.

[00:53:11] Alex Tsakiris: Let me pause there and, uh, give you a chance to respond and you can respond either to the, the climate issue if you feel like that’s your Bailey W or what I really wanna highlight is the fact that. She’s doing what Diana Walsh Palka is saying. She’s saying, Don’t trust these motherfuckers. Look, here’s the model for how we have to understand this.

Let’s look at the descending voices. Let’s look at the source data and make our own interpretations. She’s a climatologist. She’s climbed on top of the data and she’s given us a new look.

[00:53:47] Bernardo Kastrup: Okay? Uh, the very, very last thing she said is eye rating to me. And the reason it is eye rating to me, the statement was whether warming is dangerous.

Uh, you are talking to somebody, to a Dutch guy who lives in a country that has more than 40% of its territory, uh, below sea level as much as three and a half meters below sea level. Uh, we are making plans for what our country will be in 2100, and that involves floating half the country on concrete barges, including farms, fields, cows houses.

We are gonna lose half the country we’ve made. We are talking about making the extremely hard decision to stop defending the country against rising sea level because the Belgians are neighbors and the Germans are not doing that. So if we defend our coastline, it will be flooded from the sides anyway.

If a big ice pack in Antarctica right now on land, not in the sea, that is melting from underneath. If that slides down and enters the ocean, half my country is underwater and there will be three families living here in my house with me because I live in the other house. And they will be refugees and the government will put them here.

Uh, our plan is to defend Amsterdam and Amsterdam alone against the catastrophe that we see is happening. So when somebody comes and says whether warming is dangerous, I want to slap them in the face cuz they don’t fucking know what they’re talking about. They don’t leave where I live. So how dare them raise the question of whether warming is dangerous when half my country is going to disappear if I not ice back in Antarctica, slides down, which it can do in five years.

I mean, I find this outrageous. Now, you yourself, you know that, uh, academic credentials are not everything and I know that as well. And I have two PhDs and I’m the first one to tell you that the most dangerous bullshit is the bullshit. So fixed by the latter’s PhD. I know what it takes to get a PhD and I know how easy you can get there without being a wise mind, so to say, just playing with numbers.

Um, so when certain academic authorities tell us materialism is true, we say bullshit. We know to do. We know to look through the appearances of credentials. Uh, so why don’t we do that consistently? Maybe a, a climate change. Denialist who has credentials didn’t look carefully enough. And look, you brought a clip of, of the climate gate that exploded 15 years ago.

It’s old news. It’s a note story Since then, uh, and largely triggered by that event, scientists have come back and looked at the data again and again and again. And the evidence is overwhelming that things are warming up and the evidence is overwhelming that CO2 and methane are, uh, greenhouse gases. So to disconnect the two requires a level of wishful thinking that that.

For people like me who live in the front lines of the ones who will suffer when this thing plays out is, is, is irresponsible. Uh, you showed me a note clip. I can, I didn’t come prepared for it, but I can show you overwhelming amounts of data that nobody questions anymore that indicate that warming is happening, that the Netherlands would disappear, half of it will disappear.

The Germans and the Belgians are not going to host us. We have to float our country and, and, and it, it’s a reality we have to face in my country and people have to face in Florida and in Manhattan and, and, and, and Bangladesh should disappear from the face of the Earth and there are millions of people there.

And, and there will be a drinking water crisis, fresh water crisis across the world. People will die of thirst. How can we play? So cover literally with this to it, This really. Triggers me. Uh, Alex, I know you have never seen me go on an emotional T like this, but you now touched on an ex distinction topic for me and everybody I love.

We are going to lose half our country and it’s inevitable. It’s a matter of how fast will we have time to float half of our country or will we be refugees in Belgium, Belgium and Germany? Is that, these are the stakes for me.

[00:58:21] Alex Tsakiris: So I don’t know quite how to respond because we’d have to roll up our sleeves and get into a global warming debate, which we could and we will a little bit.

But I really wanna steer it to this other aspect of it that I think is behind what we’re really talking about. So number one, I think well just specifically address one point you made. Cause I think you are, you’re misinterpreting what she’s saying in terms of, uh, , does it matter? And I think what she was referring to specifically is there are scenarios where we can have, uh, warming and not to an extent that would be catastrophic to our civilization. So this is like an obvious point, but it just gets washed in the, in this kind of crazy kind.

Thing that we get into of exaggerating things, right? So it’s, it’s a matter of, because she is not saying that, that there isn’t a warming and that there isn’t a human factor to the warming. She’s saying that depending on how much warming we have, it could be catastrophic or it could be not catastrophic or it could even be beneficial if it’s only a slight warming like we’ve seen in past, in history.

The other thing that I’d say, just to kind of respond to the data, and then I want to get into the misinformation, globalization, bullshit thing that this all addresses is the simplest way to measure this crisis is to measure sea level rise. And she has published more recently that is 10 years old or longer.

She has published recently and continued to publish. This is her field, by the way, Bernardo, this is not your field. She, she is what you said when you said she has a PhD. It’s not that she has a PhD alone, it’s that she’s actively engaged in dialoging with colleagues who are, who don’t all agree with her, but this is her bread and butter.

And alls you’d have to do is go back, turn back the clock.

30 years ago, they were predicting the same thing. They were predicting that all these islands would be underwater and that, and that the model was clear that that’s the direction that we’re having there has not been a significant rise in sea level. And that is the easiest way to measure, uh, point out that the global warming.

Here’s the graph that I’ve pulled up on the screen and we can,

[01:00:42] Bernardo Kastrup: It ends in 2000. It ends 20 more in mid 1990s. It ends 25 years ago.

[01:00:48] Alex Tsakiris: Alex, this? I just pulled up the recent, I just pulled up the recent one. For someone else. You’re looking at about a 1.3 centimeter increase in, uh, sea level over.

However, what you’re

[01:01:02] Bernardo Kastrup: saying is that we get the answers from sea level rise. That’s not how the models work. If a certain thresholding temperature is crossed, even if it’s a minor point, something degrees, and it leads to certain, uh, uh, uh, ice packs sliding down the continents and into the sea, you get a dramatic series.

Suddenly the models are complex. There are many variables. These are not linear models. These are nonlinear models. Thi and, and, and the thick of what we know today. We’ve learned the past 15 years. That’s when all the old models were thrown away because things were playing out a lot faster. And yes, it’s not my, my, my area and, and I didn’t come prepared to quote, quote many other scientists and show many other graphs I could have.

But it’s not your area and it’s not mine. We are both quoting other people and it’s a matter of how many people can we quote. Uh, I didn’t come prepared for it, but yeah, this. This affects me very, very much. It affect, affects my country, maybe affects my culture.

[01:02:05] Alex Tsakiris: It might, it might not. It might, it might not.

That’s her point. And that, that point is undeniable. It is logically undeniable. The models have not proven to be at all accurate up to this point. That’s a given. The, we can show over and over again how the predictions of the models have not, have not followed course. So yeah,

[01:02:26] Bernardo Kastrup: things are worse than the models predicted.

Look, it’s not true whether it will affect us. Oh, we’re not. Uh, the woman you showed the clip off at the time she recorded that clip didn’t know either. This was, that was a four by three clip. So it’s decades ago, uh, uh,

[01:02:43] Alex Tsakiris: what it was 2015.

[01:02:45] Bernardo Kastrup: Today, what we know today, we’ve learned. Over the, the past few years in which the old models were proven to be way too conservative.

Things are going a lot faster and we trust models for everything else. Uh, we to some extent, we trust long term weather forecast for agriculture. We model, we coordinate our entire agriculture, what we will plant when based on our models. We trust models to put, uh, a man on the moon, uh, satellite in orbit.

We trust models, uh, to develop medicines that, uh, that will keep us healthy. Uh, we trust models for everything. Why won’t we trust an overwhelming barrage of data and models telling us this shit is dangerous and I will lose, uh, my country will lose at least. Most of its cultural inheritance because Deha and Rotterdam and

And so then we will defend, all of these will be underwater and half of us will be refugees. I mean, the models are telling us that, and we are acting accordingly. We’re preparing to float the country. So how can we still be busy with the notion? Maybe this is not dangerous. Darn. We passed that long ago.

[01:04:02] Alex Tsakiris: Long ago. Okay. So the, I I wanna move on to one other topic. Okay. And, and so I, I would say that the answer that I was going towards, and I wanna give you a chance to respond to this if you want, but I don’t think, cuz it’s not controversial, but the answer that I was reaching for that our friend Dr. Diana Walsh Poka gave, which is cuz the rigging the game. So I’m not, you don’t have to buy into their rigging the game on global warming. You just have to be open to it and , you have to seriously entertain what that would mean. I don’t know if you have any response to that.

[01:04:39] Bernardo Kastrup: Oh, I thought you were going to show me the, Oh, I’ll show you the clip.

[01:04:43] Alex Tsakiris: Okay. I’ll clip.

This from, this from 2015. Another, uh, congressional testimony that she gave, uh, she’s not been invited back since.

[01:04:51] Clip: , are we gonna do nothing because there’s a greater than 1% chance that climate change. There is nothing in my testimony that said we do nothing. I’m saying that what is being proposed? is ineffective. It’s not going to do anything. Even if the US is successful at meeting 80% reductions by 2050, this is going to reduce warming by about a 10th of a degree Centigrade.

It’s not going to do

anything.

[01:05:18] Bernardo Kastrup: When it comes to climate change, looking at data many years ago, it is just not productive because the core of what we’ve learned, we’ve learned a lot recently because the, the phenomenon has accelerated and the correlations have become much more clear. Uh, but the correlation between the pace of industrialization and global warming is very, And the speed of warming is unprecedented in history and we have core samples, you know, of eyes from previous Euros and, and it’s undeniable.

The correlation is, is pretty undeniable if you look at more or less modern data. Um, Alex, So no, I, I, I do not agree with that. And, um, and I think it’s a disservice. Um, may maybe at the time she was speaking and, and that is possible and even reasonable. There was more doubt. Then there is today. No,

[01:06:12] Alex Tsakiris: she speaks today.

She speaks today as a climatologist that with others, uh, by her, by her side, saying the same thing. So just the, the part that is, is kind of hard to take is that you, you are not heating the call of science, which is to hear the dissenting voices. But what to do that, what you have to consider is what we’ve been talking about, is that why would there be another agenda?

Whose interests are served by catastrophic climate change, which is what’s being pitched, and that has to be analyzed independently of the data. See, that’s what I’m suggesting is really what this is all about. That’s what, if you listen to Diana Walsh Polka, that’s where she’s at. She’s let, like we were saying about the UFOs, you gimme the data.

Okay? The first thing I do is what we call on skeptical level two. What’s the deception? What’s the conspiracy? Is it Richard Doty behind the curtain saying, Oh, the aliens like strawberry ice cream. At the same time, he’s revealing documents that have never been revealed before. You go, Oh my God, that’s true.

So you have to understand how that game is being played in order to figure out if it’s being played on you.

[01:07:22] Bernardo Kastrup: I look, I, I do take the heat of science to listen to dissenting voices, but that, that call of science doesn’t force us to believe in what everybody’s saying. We can make up our minds based on data, the opposition, taking the point of view of this person, the opposition, the people who are saying there is a undeniable correlation between climate change and human industrial activity.

They also based themselves on data. Now, I didn’t know we would talk about this today, so I came empty handed that can’t flash graphs for you and videos for you today. I didn’t know. Uh, but you know, you type a a, a search on Google and you get the latest data, the latest model and, and what other people are saying also based on data, also based on model.

So take the heat of science, the call of science as well, and, and look at what the others are saying and the day to they are using. Now, as for motivation, we, we, many times we say, Well, now we, we didn. Make campaigns, anti-smoking campaigns, because there was the big, the big money, the big company selling cigarettes.

So it was a conspiracy. Okay. And then, um, the oil, uh, conspiracies is, is a big one. The oil companies are not allowing this or that to happen, but in this case, it is precisely the big money. The big oil companies who short of Apple, uh, one of them is the largest company, most valuable company in the world today.

Uh, they are the ones who tend to lose from the notion that burning fossil fuels, uh, uh, uh, causes climate change. Their business stands to lose a lot. So who stands to gain elo? Musk alone?

[01:09:06] Alex Tsakiris: I don’t know. here. Your, your time is, you’re already spending a lot of time with me, which I appreciate. No, it’s okay.

It’s okay. I have, uh, one other topic I’m gonna bring forth and it’s much closer to home. In, in our, our wheelhouse it’s Dean Raden. And I, I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to catch this skeptical interview that I had with Dean, but is without a doubt, one of the most unsettling and disappointing experiences I’ve had in the 15 years that I’ve done skeptical cuz I have a tremendous amount of respect for Dean Raden.

But, um, let me play you a couple of clips from this, which I found very troubling at the majority of the interview was about his incredible science, which he, he has, he has brought forth in a way that is so in line with what is so important with you and me about bylaw, that’s a meaningless universe and all that stuff.

Here, let me play this clip.

[01:10:09] Dr. Dean Radin: Increase the strength of entanglement and then intentionally decrease the strength of entanglement. But like I said at the top of the show, paradigm changed. Never goes exactly the way you think. Take Dean’s latest plan, his biotech venture that seeks to jab people in the arm in order to change their dna, of course, to fix their brain, which I thought were a past the brain consciousness thing, but anyways, to fix their brain so they’re not depressed.

So they don’t have Alzheimer’s, and maybe they’re a little bit more psychic than they were before, and maybe they’re even a little bit more connected consciously, more like a hive mind kind of thing. So I wrote a story which is designed to be an antidote to mo the way that psychic phenomena are usually portrayed in entertainment.

So, uh, think about the invasion of the body Snatchers and the Borg and Star Trek and virtually every other example where you have a hive mind, which it presented as the most horrific thing that you can possibly do. And we’re saying in this story, no, it is not only not horrific, it is the best possible thing that we can do to, because it, it pulls together something which is already interconnected, but we be, we sort of behave in an elusory way that we’re separate and we’re not really not connected.

It is that disconnection that leads to the kind of madness that we’re currently seeing in Ukraine. Right? You people add, literally shooting at each other and not appreciating the fact that at a deeper level everything, it really is interconnected, including us. So this is part of the, of the plot line and the story where there’s a tension then between people who, who in this case take a genetic enhancement.

And become a, uh, a group mind. Essentially, everyone outside the group mind thinks that this is scary. We need to stop that. It’s bad from inside. This is the best thing that ever happened. This is like the difference between homo sapiens and homo superior. If we, if we’re gonna survive, we need to advance as a species.

And so the story is basically making the case that homo sapiens is dying and we have to, we either die or we evolve. Well, the evolution is going towards a new kind of human. And if it needs a little genetic push to get there, so be it. So troubling , troubling.

He is contemplating giving you the covid jab. I’m sorry. Uh, it’s his jab from his biotech company. Same thing. Multiple. It’s, uh, altering your DNA in order to get those damn Russians in line. Cuz why are they running around there doing that thing with your Ukraine and that Putin and all the rest of that stuff?

Let’s get everybody on the same page and these people that wanna pollute and do all this other stuff, let’s get them all on this. Hey, Homo Sapien is out. This is the ultimate transhumanist wacky, crazy stuff and it’s coming from Dean Raden. Here’s another clip from that interview later on so you know, I’m not making it up.

So this, this is part of a, uh, a big and very fast growing industry of what will become modern medicine and people today are, are still, some people are afraid of, of r and. Treatments, they, they were afraid of it in the same way that people used to be afraid of organ transplants and prosthetics and all kinds of stuff.

This is simply the way, whether they like it or not, this is where medicine is going because it’s extremely effective. so later on, Dean and I talked about what is now, and I don’t know if you’re aware of this, the overwhelming evidence that the vaccine, the jab that was given is historically the most dangerous, harmful in, in history.

And we just had the thing in the United States, uh, 1600%, 16 times normal, uh, male athletes. And you know, the big 10, the football league over here, which were tested, heart condition. You have, uh, , pregnancies, uh, lost astronomical increase. And then you have the database from the army that was public came out and had all these kind of things.

So, and when I brought that up to Dean, we actually talked about it in the interview. And at first he was reluctant. And then finally I kind of beat him down on the date and said, It’s publicly published database from your, that, that anyone can go and access the database. And he said, Well, you know, essentially, We’re gonna break a few eggs if we’re gonna make an omelet.

So figuring out how to do this, jab you in the arm, change your dna. Let’s all be transhumanist. Hey, that’s part of the price we’re gonna pay.

[01:14:55] Bernardo Kastrup: okay. Uh, uh, in the interesting, in the interest of a productive discussion, I’ll try to take a, a different perspective. Um, I think you are interpreting Dean’s original point about, you know, Ukraine and the fact that we are so separate and incapable of, you know, seeing the world through somebody else’s eye.

Um, you interpreted it, interpreted it like the Borg in a sense that, um, the result of that would be a loss of individuality. We would become a species of drones that take their tune from a, a leader, um, but we lose our free will. We lose our individuality. Uh, I didn’t see the entire interview, but based on the, that segment alone that you showed, my original interpretation of what he was trying to say was that, uh, we need to experience more empathy.

So it’s not about a loss of individuality, it’s not a loss of free will. It’s just a higher ability to empathize with another human being, to to suffer with another human being. Uh, so we know what it is to be in somebody else’s position. Um, yeah.

[01:16:18] Alex Tsakiris: But Bernardo, maybe I didn’t give you the advantage of it.

Maybe you just don’t know this. You hit, you cold with it. Are you familiar with Dean Raven’s biotech startup in Idaho? He’s moved from California time. I heard. Uh, this is what he is pursuing. This is not hypothetical, kind of No, they are in the middle of it raised millions of dollars. Hold on. Let me, let me pull it up just so you can see it and then we don’t even have to talk about it. Well, I believe you. So anyways, it’s called Neurogenetics and that is his company and that’s what they seek to do.

And he’s using all of his knowledge about, you know, because part of what they derive from all the work that he’s done is they start getting genetic markers on this stuff, genetic markers for all sorts of parapsychological work. And that’s the future. But the immediate thing for him is, let’s do a vaccine delivered, uh, virus that will change your DNA and shape it into this way that we want.

That is extremely troubling. That is transhumanism. That is what is, that is how the agenda is being sold. And I think when, when you write and talk about identity crisis and the problem, in your country and these crazy laws that are being passed that you say, Hey, I understand the spirit of it and I’m all for social justice.

Again, what I think you are not seeing, what you seem to be blinded to, is that there is an agenda behind that that is unmistakably, marching forward in a very particular, , direction. And that direction is to make you less human and for someone to be in control of the direction that that’s going. So it’s, it’s not a hypothetical for Dean.

He is asked deep, sold his house in California, took the millions of dollars, and is in Idaho developing his biotech company.

[01:18:07] Bernardo Kastrup: If I separate it from Dean for the moment, and I, and I just speak generically, I do find it troubling the attempt to influence what is essentially human personality, human mental life through a.

Physiological delivery mechanism, which is essentially what psychoactive drugs try to do. And, uh, our success in doing that has been largely empirical. In other words, we don’t really know how physiology and personality traits or mental inner life really correlate. Um, psychiatry, uh, has failed to find, uh, physiological e even anatomical correlates, uh, to the most common mental disorders that afflict people worldwide.

So our understanding of how these two domains influence one another is very limited. And that’s why I think it is troubling, not, not speaking of Dean specifically, because I, I don’t know anything about this company. Uh, it’s the first time I hear about it, although I believe you, that he has done it. Uh, but speaking in general, I think it’s troubling to try to.

Um, influence mental inner life personality traits through a physiological delivery mechanism, because we simply do not know enough. We just do not know enough about how these two domains play with one another. Um, so see, I will consider that, um, generically this is a troubling thing, uh, to attempt, but I, I, I will insist that, uh, the call, forget the delivery mechanism, forget his company.

The call for our civilization to try to develop our potential for empathy is timely, is important, and it doesn’t be used. Our humanity. On the contrary, it increases our, our humanity. A human that isn’t empathic is a human that lacks humanity. And we have a name for that. It’s called a psychopath, uh, and it’s considered a disorder.

Um, so more empathy am all for it, but, I think there are much more reliable time honored, less risky ways to try to evoke that in our society than a physiological delivery mechanism. That we just do not understand yet. That that, that sounds scary to me.

[01:20:35] Alex Tsakiris: Well, and I would suggest that it’s deeper than that, and it relates directly back to the core, the heart, the essence of your work in what you’re doing at the Essentia Foundation and what we talked about at the beginning.

Because I think we can never forget the part that you mentioned at the very beginning, Bernardo, which is that you are intentionally sidelining the spiritual aspect to all of this in order to advance. A paradigm changing, scientifically confined explanation. Dean has jumped the shark. He has not only sidelined that, but he’s pretending, putting his fingers in his ears and pretending that such a sensitivity or a sensibility isn’t necessary and it is, God is watching.

Whether that God is from within or whether that God is external, there is a hierarchy to consciousness. There is free will. We all have an understanding of what is right and wrong, even if that eventually merges into a global consciousness, there is what, what the near death experience science tells us.

What so much other, uh, wisdom traditions tell us is that we have the ability to steer this ship and we can’t pretend that we don’t. So I wonder if you want to speak for a minute about how spirituality and our, our understanding spirituality of non-religious from the light, the, the, the love that rises up within us, how that might come into play here.

[01:22:19] Bernardo Kastrup: You know, I think what we’ve learned after 2000 years of Christianity is that preaching alone doesn’t help. We wouldn’t be doing what we are doing now if preaching alone helped, uh, we wouldn’t have one sovereign nation. Baral invading another sovereign nation, both of which are Orthodox Christians. Um, so it takes more than that.

What more, How much more? I don’t know, but I will say this, I, The worst thing that has happened in the history of spirituality is the word spirituality, because it has created a category for it that is different from reality. The moment we use the word spirituality, we sort of separated from reality, and I am interested in reality, and I think the properties of reality are such that it has many of the characteristics that go under the word spirituality in our culture, but it’s reality.

I’m talking about. If you know what I mean. I think reality is one in which the subjectivity in all of us is one in the same subjectivity in which empathy is a natural, a natural personality trait of human beings that hasn’t been, uh, repressed through cultural narratives that guide our lives today, um, hasn’t been repressed by the materialist narrative that tells you your life is completely meaningless and the best you can do is just buy stuff in an addictive pattern of behavior.

Cuz at the end it’s offer nothing anyway. So you might as well have fun while you can. I think this is the disaster. It’s that narrative that oppresses, um, personality traits and the characteristics of our inner life that are just natural. Now, how do we, how do we allow those natural. Spiritual, but real characteristics to manifest.

How do we expand our relationship with the reality around us in a way that what we call spirituality becomes self evident and as present as the sun up in the sky? Um, I don’t know, but I think it has a lot to do with changing the narrative. And the narrative today, um, is extremely unhealthy. Uh, it’s a narrative in which we try to deal with our anxieties, particularly the fear of death, uh, by eliminating meaning along with it.

So we get rid of the fear of death because when you’re dead, you’re dead. There is no one there to feel pain, suffer or even be afraid, but to get rid of meaning along with it. And I think debt price, which may have the middle of the 19th century, uh, may have felt like a reasonable price to pay. Right now it’s completely unreasonable because it’s destroying us and it’s making us destroy the world and the ecosystems around us and destroy each other and ourselves.

Um, and emerging from that is it’s extremely urgent. Uh, yes, we have to take care of our physical survival because if we are not alive, then , then there’s nothing we can do because, you know, once the dissociation ends and we are dead, um, yes, we are still who we have always been, but we can’t play a role in this dynamics here, in this dream we call life.

Uh, but beyond staying alive and healthy, I think that’s the most important and most urgent challenge we have ahead of us is how do we get rid of a addictive? And that’s why it’s so difficult to get rid of, uh, but suicidal narrative that is oppressing our nature is oppressing our humanity. And I. If you ask me how to do that, I don’t know the answer.

The only answer I have is every day I wake up in the morning, I know what I have to contribute on that day, and I know that the next day it’ll be the same. I take my cues from nature, from the movements of the impersonal within me. I know my life’s not about me. Nobody’s life is about them. Our life is not about, are not about ourselves.

We are products of nature. It’s about the great dance of nature. And I take my cue from that every day in the morning. And I try not to take responsibility for the end result because who is my ego to take responsibility for the end result? I only take responsibility from my neuro microscopic contribution.

And every day I wake up in the morning, I know what to do that day. And that’s enough for me. Beyond that, I cross my fingers and I pray. I pray cuz I believe in, I believe in God. I’m, I’m more comfortable using the G word that I didn’t want to use in our previous interviews, Alex, I decided that, uh, you know, it’s, it’s um, it’s a silly game to try to stay away from it because everything I’ve been talking about people can couple to the notion of the divinity anyway.

Um, so yeah, I created God that we survived this.

[01:27:07] Alex Tsakiris: I, I think it’s absolutely wonderful the way you strung together so many of the concepts that we’re talking about in a very, very, , lucid and, and powerful way in terms of what the agenda is, what the motivation is going forward in the paradigm change, and how the paradigm change that you are still in the middle of engaged in that battle.

How it is fundamental to all the stuff that we are talking about. And while we have this deep agreement on that level. So I, I was gonna wrap it up there cuz that’s just perfect way to end it. But tell us about the God thing and how you understand that. Cuz that’s gonna throw a lot of people for a loop, obviously it’s a hardly charged word.

How are you processing the idea of what I always call the hierarchy of consciousness kind of thing?

[01:27:56] Bernardo Kastrup: If I speak analytically, I have this notion of a field of subjectivity that underlies all nature, of which we are just disassociated mental complexities. So there is a unity, and that unity is mental. There is one mind underlying all nature, and everything happens within that. And what we call the physical world is just how mental processes outside our individual minds present themselves to our observation.

So there is this idea of an omniscient unity underlying our nature that has been throughout the history of philosophy and religion associated with the concept of a divinity. And although I have steered away for many years, uh, uh, from the word God, because there are probably seven and a half billion different definitions of God out there.

You know, every person has his or her own or their own view, uh, of God, of the divinity. So if I use the word, I dunno how people will interpret it. That’s, that’s why I sort of stayed clear, steered clear from that word and used more, uh, unambiguous, uh, words like, uh, um, spatially unbound, field of subjectivity underlying our nature, irre, reducible and, and, and so on.

Um, at the end of the day, we are humans and humans are not just analytic philosophers. Humans speak from the heart, not only from the mind, and they don’t just look for con, conceptually unambiguous and clear terminology. They use terminology that evokes emotion. And from that perspective, if the word God is better than.

Especially unbound field of subjectivity that underlies all nature, reducibility. So, um, since I’m talking to people in general, not just analytic philosophers or scientists, today I am in my, you know, going to start my 49th year. Soon, I decided that, uh, I’m not going to play that precious game anymore. You know, I would talk about God and my God is not the same as your God.

I don’t understand it the same way as you do. Uh, but I still use the word because the essence, the core is there anyway. So now I’m comfortable with it and I’m comfortable in saying that, yes, I pray to God, but God may not always know. It is doing. Um, but we may help ,

[01:30:16] Alex Tsakiris: you know, that’s, uh, that’s great to me, the interesting thing there is kind of one level down, because if, I think it’s easy to get to the almost non-dual, , God thing, it’s the steps in between that are hard.

So what are we doing with angels? What are we doing with spirit guides? What are we doing with, you know, all these hypothesized, spiritual hierarchical beings that pop up again and again? And that’s the problem I see with the God thing. I think it’s pretty easy to get people on board with the big God.

It’s the steps in between. Do you have any thoughts on that?

[01:31:02] Bernardo Kastrup: That could be an interview in its own merit. I can give you a hard answer and or an analytic answer. Which one do you prefer? Only one. Both . Oh,

[01:31:11] Alex Tsakiris: always Both. If I could

[01:31:12] Bernardo Kastrup: get it . So I’ll start with the least important one, the analytic answer. Look, our perceptual apparatus has evolved over 4 billion years of evolution to pick out the elements and states of reality that have a bearing on our survival.

That’s what evolution is all about. So we discern and pick out the states of the world around us that have a bearing on our survival. Whatever is going on out there that has no bearing to our survival wouldn’t have evolved. There would be no evolutionary drive to fix that genetic characteristic, to develop a perceptual system that picks out things that are irrelevant for our survival.

It wouldn’t have happened. In other words, it is a statistical. Virtual certainty that there is a lot more going on than what we can perceive. And then some people would say, Well, but we have telescopes and microscopes and infrared sensors. We, we can actually now pick out a lot more than our perceptual apparatus allows us to do.

Yes. But notice that all of that is still filtered out through our perceptual apparatus because we have to perceive the output of telescopes and microscopes and infrared sensors and all that. So we are still limited in a para paradigm, paradigmatic way, uh, by the parameters of our perceptual apparatus as it evolved.

In other words, it’s a virtual certainty that we are blind to a lot of what’s going on out there because it simply does not have a bearing on us. Could this extra lot of what’s going on out there that we don’t perceive, that we don’t even have. Words or parameters or categories for could that entail what has been metaphoric, metaphoric, metaphorically called angels, demons, spiritual entities and all that.

It would be silly to deny that it could, there could be other dissociated complexities in the mind of nature that because they play out in a way that has no bearing to the survive of, of our own associative process, our own lives, we didn’t evolve to pick them out. We don’t have parameters even to talk about them or conceive of them to imagine them.

They can be literally, uh, there’s a wonderful word in English that escapes me now, incommensurable, they can be literally incommensurable to, to all of, with all of our categories and we would be therefore completely blind to them. So it is, it is. Not only a possibility, I would say it’s statistical certainty that there is stuff going on that we have no idea of.

And it may include what people call spiritual entities. Now, the heart answer, uh, even within me, if I introspect deeply, you, I, I can discern elements of my own mind, of my own personality, that have a degree of autonomy and sometimes, sometimes wage war against one another. Um, any addict knows this. There is the demo of the, the addiction and the angel of the cure that’s trying to straighten you up.

Um, every time you experience cognitive dissonance, every time you repress something, a trauma, an idea, every time you’re ashamed of yourself, these are all entities within the bus we call ourselves and they are fighting one another, and they are pushing the rope in their own direction. And sometimes one of them wins.

Sometimes the other wins. There is always a demonn on one shoulder and an angel on the left shoulder. And this is only within my own mind. Could there be transpersonal mental entities that are playing this game? Based on my own introspection, I would say yes. There is stuff that happens within me that I look carefully yet, and I think there is no way this is mine.

This is Zi stuff. This is strange stuff, you know that this doesn’t come from me. It’s passing through me and I happen to recognize it when I’m respecting carefully. Uh, I think most people would just blame themselves when, when they are overwhelmed by a wave of being personal within them. Um, because of the current cultural narrative of materialism that whatever happens in your mind is a product of your brain and therefore it is you.

Do you blame themselves for that? Well, in fact, It may not, it may be a tsunami coming from somewhere else, and you may be powerless, uh, to defend against that. And it overwhelms you and it’s not you. And you can still take moral high ground. And of course, that end gets into a discussion about, you know, how do we define legal responsibility, criminal responsibility?

Could this be used as a defense? And it’s all very complicated, but I do acknowledge the impersonal operating in ways that are too subtle for us to even conceive of, let alone perceive as a

[01:36:15] Alex Tsakiris: very nuanced and, uh, beautiful, beautiful answer, which is what we’d expect the master. After all, how do we stay in touch?

How do we find out what you’re up to follow? You take your course. Should people take your course? Absolutely analytic

[01:36:34] Bernardo Kastrup: idealism, if they’re interested in this stuff, take the course first. It is free. Uh, you don’t even need to register. There is no registration while payroll, anything. It’s six hours of material.

We don’t need to watch it in one, go watch a little bit at a time. Um, and I think you should do that before even buy at the first book because then you have to pay money because my publishers do ask for money and I publish with an official publisher because otherwise I’m not taken seriously. Um, but yeah, you go to the Essential Foundation website.

There’s a lot of free stuff. You go to castro.com. My personal website, most of it is free videos. I interviews, podcasts, all kinds of things. So yeah, that’s where you should go before you spend your money. And then there’s the

[01:37:19] Alex Tsakiris: books. What’s, what’s coming, what, what’s coming up in, in the book area? Do you have anything?

Yes.

[01:37:26] Bernardo Kastrup: I just agreed with my publishers. To write a new book that will be tentatively titled, um, Analytic Ideal in a nutshell. And, you know, it’ll not be very new material if you, if you’ve read my previous 10 books, but it’ll be an attempt to sort of encapsulate that in as straightforward and summarized story as possible without defacing it, without doing justice to it.

So it’ll probably be a short book. I’m working on it. And beyond that, there is another book in my head. I dunno the title yet, but, um, something will come through me at some point in the future. Um, that will have to do with our Western inheritance. Um, I want to write about that because it’s an inheritance.

I was at odds with for most of my life, I was even ashamed of for a certain period of my life. And with maturity, I have come to accept it with all the things that come with it that I am ashamed of. Like the horrible things Western societies have done to others in the past. And all that maturity makes you accept that.

Um, not in a, in a new responsible way, but you accept that part of your inheritance is dark. Um, and you don’t give it free reign, but you, you give it a right to exist. The past exists, um, and, and attempt to focus on what’s good about our western, uh, inheritance, you know, beyond vi and nonduality and all the wonderful things from the East that have kept us more or less sane during the dark times of the 20th century and early 21st century.

There is something that is ours. There is, there is. There is a pot of gold Barrett in the backyard. We just have to dig it and one day I want to write about it. That’s

[01:39:17] Alex Tsakiris: exciting. Can’t wait for that one. Well, you’ve never disappoint. You’re having a huge impact for one person. It’s just unbelievable that where you pop up nowadays, you are really, really changing the game, changing the paradigm and wow.

Who could have ever hoped to nature

[01:39:39] Bernardo Kastrup: more than that. Nature is doing it through me.

[01:39:43] Alex Tsakiris: awesome. Reconnecting with you. Bernardo will do it again soon.

[01:39:47] Bernardo Kastrup: It was great to talk to you, Alex. It was the most likely discussion we’ve had so far.

[01:39:52] Alex Tsakiris: Thanks again so much to Dr. Bernardo Castro for joining me today on skeptical boy. Oh boy. There’s so many questions I could, uh, I could jump off on this interview as you might anticipate, but I guess I’ll stick to the main one, which is, what do you think the chances are that Bernardo can lead us towards this paradigm shift from scientific materialism? Physicalism well, what do you think that process looks like? And is he somebody who can do it? And given the dialogue we had here is that. Make him. More likely or less likely to be able to do it.

So, if you are in tune with what I’m saying, then you’ll know how to answer that question. And if you are in tune with that question, And if you’re in tune with his show and if you’re, I think, or you’d like to think about this stuff and dialogue about this stuff. Join me on the skeptical forum. I’d love to talk to you. There’s an interesting dialogue.

I need. Really smart people who can get to level three on this stuff. To join me if you are one of those people and you think like I’m. Overwhelmed with the amount of responses that I get to the show, which I sometimes say the layer. No, I I’m not. So if you feel like you could add to this dialogue, this conversation in any way, then please join me. I’d appreciate it. And I think you’ll, I think you’ll enjoy it.

And with that, we can wrap up this episode until next time. Take care and bye for now.

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