Chuck Yates Needs A Job

0:21 Okay. There's a big, huge disturbance in the forest right now. Okay. So the Yates family's always gone to rice. So grandpa, I think it's class of 30. Okay. So then dad, well in great aunt

0:36 actually went there in

0:41 the late thirties, kind of during the war, but she didn't graduate Mom and dad graduate from there during the 60s. Uncle Terry during the 60s.

0:52 Me, two of my brothers, my ex-wife, both sister-in-laws, and multiple of us have multiple degrees. I've undergrad MBA, dad has undergrad PhD. I think brother Kenny, brother J, both have

1:11 multiple undergrad degrees. Oldest daughter does not go to rice. So you went to race? I went, yeah, went to race. So I'm 91 undergrad and then 94. That's how you know Keith. That's how I know

1:25 Keith. So Keith and brother Jay were really, really good friends. And so that's how I know Keith. And so middle child Sarah is a senior, just graduated from a physical high school. She wants to

1:41 go to Duke and okay

1:46 Gets rejected by Duke, gets into UNC, UVA, and Rice. And she loves with her mom in Westview, less than a mile from campus and just, you know, dad, I don't want to be a mile from campus. I

2:06 made the joke of I wouldn't want to live a mile away from your mother either. But anyway, gets into those three colleges, calls me, Yeah, I'm going to rise. I just, you know, happy moment all

2:18 this. She's there now or? Well, well, was supposed to start in August, the disturbances of forces, she got off the waiting list at Vandy two weeks ago and now she's going to Nashville. Oh,

2:31 okay, yeah, okay. Well, Vander built a good school too. Yeah, no, and I've resigned myself to the fact that Nashville is more fun to visit than Westview. Well, maybe, I mean, I don't know,

2:44 I don't know, I don't know about that, but. So you're cool to come on, religious studies professor over at Rice. We were talking earlier before we started recording,

2:59 just kind of level setting on stuff. And I say that, you know, most of the time, I try to get guests to tell their unique story. And 80 of the time, I know what that unique story is. No idea.

3:13 So I'm going to let you, I've been talking the whole time. I'm going to let you start talking, but can I do one thing that's really funny is, is I went to chat GPT and kind of, kind of played my,

3:25 so you know how you can continue to train the thing. Sure. I said, had he had an opening question for Jeff when he comes on the podcast. And I kept refining it down. And I finally got to some

3:40 point where be incredibly snarky, John Stewart-like and write me the opening, you wanna hear it? Sure, sure. Today's guest is Jeff Kreibel, a guy who turned his fascination with UFOs, mysticism,

3:54 and superhero comics into an academic career. So Jeff, when did you realize that studying the paranormal was your best shot since picking up women wasn't gonna be an option? Yeah, that's pretty

4:07 sorry. That's pretty sorry. Yeah, that's a good question. Why is the picking up women's hands? Yeah, exactly. It's a good question. I haven't done very well, you know, it's all good. It's

4:17 fine.

4:19 That's not true, my XY, so a lovely woman, so. Yeah, no, it's cool, it's cool, Chuck. I am studying religion at Rice is a strange thing. And I understand why you're clueless. Most people

4:34 have never studied religion in high school And unlike, say, history or politics or chemistry or biology or something,

4:44 the study of religion is sort of an unknown. And so people think, oh, Department of Religious Studies, they're there to make us more religious. They somehow belong with the chapel or something.

4:56 And that's not true. We're looking to understand what religion is historically and cross-culturally, like you'd study literature, the arts or history or anything else.

5:11 but it takes some effort to tell people that and to convince people that. So like, for example, I teach a huge course at Rice called, we just call it rally 101. It's an introduction of the study

5:23 of religion. And the first thing I tell the students is, please get out of here. If you think I'm here to affirm your worldview,

5:32 don't take this course. And I warn them for like a week, not basically not to take the course. And of course, they love that. And 18-year-olds and 19-year-olds, that's kind of a reverse

5:49 psychology to keep them in there. But some

5:55 of the students do have

5:58 they have major worldview questions sort of halfway through and they get really upset or they get really excited. And they come to me and they tell me about this I'm like, what did I tell you? And

6:10 what did I say the first week? And they're like, yeah, you did. And they're like, okay, now we're starting. Now we can start to study one's deepest assumptions about reality and about family

6:24 and about culture and really everything, politics, history, everything. So that's what I do, Chuck, is I try to get young people to think about their worldviews and their cultures in ways that

6:37 are critical, but also sympathetic I am deeply sympathetic to religious sensibilities, but I'm not

6:46 affirming of any particular religious sensibility, if that makes sense. Yeah, 'cause you sent me your website and I was reading through it and it seemed just from the reading of we've got

6:59 superheroes over here, paranormal and stuff, but I was kind of reading and just sort of blowing it down to, weird stuff happens in the world, we need an explanation. And I mean, is, you know,

7:14 use the force in Star Wars that different than me taking, you know, me taking in a religious service from the Methodists or whatever. And I don't mean to say that 'cause I am a Christian. Yeah,

7:30 yeah. But at the same time, you know, the mythology of explaining these weird occurrences. So a couple things, I think you're right about the weird. I mean, I've written about the weird and

7:46 thought about it. Basically what really links all of these things for me today is altered states of mind and consciousness that human beings really have. And they really have these experiences,

7:59 including by the way in the business world and in the energy sector I mean, people have near-death experiences. People. have psychedelic experiences, people have pre-cognitive dreams. And they

8:13 generally ignore those in our modern world or modern secular world, but we haven't always ignored those. And I think those become the building blocks of what we call religion. And so I'm really

8:29 interested in those, but I haven't always been interested in those. That's a fairly, I wouldn't say recent interest of mine, but certainly it's maybe 15, 20 years old. And I got interested in

8:42 these strange things through people, by the way, talking to human beings and realizing that they had these extraordinary events and people in my world, academics, simply don't have a way of

8:58 thinking about them or talking about them. And by the way, I don't think they can ever be explained I think explanation is itself a worldview.

9:07 And I think we want to explain things. We want to explain these things in the terms of some particular worldview, whether it's science or Christianity or whatever it is, but I don't think we can do

9:18 that. I think that will always fail. And then that's part of teaching religion, by the way, is showing that your worldview works for some things, but not everything. Yeah, so on the other

9:31 podcast, I do big digital energy on Monday One of the things we talked about was the assassination attempt on Trump. And we don't talk politics for the sake of politics, but we always try to bring

9:46 it back to the energy business. And where the discussion went kind of on that, along those lines is just, let's look back over the last six to seven weeks. I think any intellectual honest person

10:02 has to say, The media has been deceptive. on things. I mean, Chuck Todd coming out and saying, I talked to a cabinet secretary that two years ago said Biden was in decline. So I'm not making a

10:15 political issue of it. I'm just, and the reason we need to be cognizant of that is they're potentially doing that about energy. So we as energy folks need to educate more, you know, except that's

10:25 where we went on the podcast. But we tried to do it through the lens of, and we said this, and I forget who said this quote, but never attribute to malice, what can be explained by incompetence.

10:38 And I almost think us sitting here talking right now, us sitting here talking right now, and what I was reading about your work is,

10:50 is it a fair question to say we shouldn't attribute to religion what we could attribute to just randomness? Is that a fair question? Yeah, it's a totally fair question, Chuck like, um,

11:06 again, I think randomness, it's a scientific or mathematical answer to these things. I don't think they're random. I don't think these things happen at random. I think they happen intentionally

11:18 and for reasons. But I don't think human beings generally know what those reasons are. And so it's complicated And drill down on that. Yeah. So for example, I think trauma is a really important

11:38 element here. I think people who have unusual or extraordinary experiences that say an out-of-body experience or pre-cognitive dream or something. I don't think those things just happen. They don't

11:50 happen to Chuck and Jeff sitting here drinking a Coca-Cola and some coffee. They happen to Chuck and Jeff when someone dies or when someone's really ill or we're in a car accident, God forbid. I

12:03 mean, they happen in really extreme circumstances. And they usually happen to heal the person or to help in some way. Not always, some of them are very negative and destructive too. So I think if

12:16 you start thinking about these things globally or comparatively, you can start to see these patterns. And that's essentially what I try to do is I try to think about these experiences that all

12:29 people are having, not just some of them

12:35 And so, for example, did to bring this down. Let me bring this down.

12:42 I've been talking a lot about a book by a woman named Jessica Wade. It's calledA Widow's Guide to Dead Basterds. And it's actually about her husband who dies of a heart attack in a Houston airport.

12:56 Obviously, Bush or Hobby, I don't know which one. And she proceeds through this grief process And all of these strange things start happening.

13:07 with books in particular and she realizes that her dead husband is trying to communicate with and so it's this inner weaving of a grieving process but also of what we would I think call paranormal

13:21 phenomena that are happening in the house into her and her son and she thinks they're all really important and one of her therapists won't hear about it. He or she just thinks it's another symptom.

13:35 And so what I'm trying to do in my work is take people's experiences seriously and by seriously I mean these things are really happening. These are not just symptoms. There really are things

13:50 teleporting through the house from the ashes of the dead person into the child's room that really happens and that but that's somehow part of the grieving process too. That's somehow human. And

14:03 so, I want to affirm that that's happening. I don't want to be the therapist. I don't want to be the person who reduces it to a symptom or to randomness or to neurobiology or whatever your

14:16 explanation is. I want to be the person who listens to someone like Jessica or listens to the widow or the widower. On the other hand, their interpretation of the event is always different. Like

14:31 if I talk to you, if you have a near-death experience and I hear what the afterlife is like, then I talk to so-and-so, and then I talk to so-and-so, who's also have, guess what? You're all

14:40 experiencing a different afterlife. So I have to develop some kind of model to explain why you're all seeing different things and yet why you're all having those experiences too. And what you're

14:53 saying right now is a lot of, my dad has been talking to me Um can be explained, I'm not saying it's right, but can be explained as this is a coping mechanism that developed because of evolutionary

15:12 pressures. And we've all read the psychological studies that do stuff where they say, Hey, we're gonna put a scratch on your facewhen you go to the interviewand you tell me whether the

15:25 interviewerdiscriminated against you 'cause you have the scratch. And they actually don't put the scratch on and 85 of people come back and say, Oh yeah, he discriminated against meYou, there's

15:34 that. Are you saying that you're explicitly, your area of study is, there's enough study there? I'm gonna take them at the wordand see if there's greater forces outside of that. Yes, 'cause

15:49 that's cool. I'm doing that. Yeah, okay. I am not explaining this in terms of evolutionary adaptation or some kind of coping mechanism. Yeah. I don't think, let's take Jessica away again. I

15:58 don't think what

16:01 Jessica experiences a function of just grief and her husband dying. I think grief broke her open to this other realm and that she's having these experiences because of the grief, but they're not

16:16 reducible to the grief, if that makes sense. So for example, let me give you another example. If someone say takes a psychedelic or a certain kind of psychedelic, the natural kind of secular move

16:29 is to say, oh, well, the altered state is a function of the drug interacting with the brain and the person is hallucinating. Chemistry. Yeah, it's chemistry, it's neurobiology. And I'm saying,

16:41 well, the neurobiology's important. You're not gonna get this experience without taking the masculine or the DMT or whatever it is or the psilocybin. But the experience can't be reduced to the

16:54 chemical interacting with the brain. So maybe what's happening is that, the psychoactive chemical is shutting down the brain and opening the person up to some other greater reality. And I'm trying

17:06 to talk about that. So it's a paradoxical model, Chuck. It's not the reductive, bring it all back to my worldview answer. It's a kind of more opening up. Yeah. Well, I mean, we've all heard

17:23 those. So what I would say to the most cynical person on the planet who would look at you and say your nuts is, I would say we've all had the quantifiable view of the situation where the 110-pound

17:41 school teacher lifts the car off the kid that's trapped in them. Right. There's stuff we can do that are limited by our minds. What I'll say, and I hate to even admit it, is I've always said when

17:53 it comes to creativity, three to four. And what does that mean? Give me three to four glasses of wine and I'm at my best where it untapped stuff. So at that very minimum, there should not be a

18:09 Senate on the planet to your work because we can see it, you know? Well, okay, so there are skeptical questions to this and I want to listen to them and I want to think through them. What I call

18:22 the debunking strategies are different than the skeptical question And the

18:28 debunking strategy I think is designed to shut down the conversation. That's really what it's designed to do. And I don't want to shut down the conversation. I want to have it, you know? So

18:42 I hear the skeptical questions that something's happening to the brain or there's some kind of chemical reaction and I think we have to understand that and take that in, but I don't think it's

18:53 sufficient, if that makes sense Yeah. I think it's necessary but not adequate. to use another expression. So let me give you a situation, real life situation. And then I want to start asking you,

19:09 what are all kind of possible explanations for this that you've seen in your research? So start dating a lovely lady. And

19:23 we date, for call it six months, she breaks up with me And breaking up with me includes comments like, I don't even think you like me. You know, stuff like that, you just didn't seem that into

19:37 it and all. And, you know, I kind of went on the self-realization tour and my priest is my therapist, you know. So I'm talking to Patrick and stuff, and I'm like, what's wrong with me? Good

19:49 looking, she's a professional, has a good job. We have a lot of fun. You know, and she didn't even think I don't like her What's wrong with me is there's still trauma from the divorce. all this.

20:00 And you know, Patrick kind of says, well, you know, that is natural. You've been through a lot, blah, blah. So over the next month, I go through, and I have three or four moments where, and

20:17 I'll give you some of these examples. I'm driving along. I hear Johnny Cash's version of hurt makes me hurt myself at night. I didn't physically cut myself, but I'm messing with my head enough.

20:30 And, you know, that led to some realizations

20:34 multiple times. So I was supposed to go to tell you ride for Christmas. I'm sitting in the American Express lounge. Everybody that came in, I got there like five hours early, everybody that came

20:50 in was going to London. I mean, you know, my flight gets delayed such so the the ex girlfriend and coffee on the 26th, like I was not able to go to tell you right, just because flight got delayed.

21:06 And we had been talking, and I kind of knew the morning of the 26th was, this is the shot to get back together. You know, you're talking, we've been constructive in all this, and I am a big

21:20 believer in prayer. I mean, I

21:25 hope God has better things to do than listen to me, but you know, at the same time, I think he watches out for the big ones. That's just my belief. So it is 852. We're supposed to meet at

21:37 Starbucks at 9 am. I'm sitting there and I go, God, what, you know, I've been doing all this self-examination. God, what's wrong with me? Why can't I make this really good looking amazing

21:50 woman? Even think I like her? Is it because I'm scared, blah, blah, blah? What's the whole deal, God? I need a sign from you, God. And I need. blatant sign. I can't be in ambiguity to this

22:03 God. And so my device that I historically always use is random play on my on my music. And the song's going to tell me the answer. Right. So I go to do this. And I'm like, God, I need the sign

22:17 because I'm either going to go walk in there and exchange Christmas gifts with her and say, I hope we're friends forever, or I got to get her back. And you got you got to tell me what's wrong. I

22:26 mean, I think I really like this woman, but I don't know, you know, blah, blah, blah. I need a sign. So I go to do, you know, hit random song. And for whatever reason, my elbow hits my

22:40 radio and kicks my radio on. And it's on Sirius. And I think it's on Aussie's bone yard or one of the heavy metal stations. I swear to God, the song don't know what you got till it's gone by

22:52 Cinderella comes blasting on. Now that sounds It's pretty obvious, right? Let me give you some more details. The third date that I went on with the girlfriend, I took her to see Cinderella in

23:05 concert. During the song, Don't Know What You've Got 'Til It's Gone, she reached over and grabbed me and we had our first kiss. And so - So that's a very significant song to play. That is a,

23:18 that would be number one on the list, right? Right. And so anyway, I'm like, holy cow, I went in there, I got her back. We're happy to this day, you know. Oh, so this, you're still with

23:31 her. Yeah, we wound up getting back together. Okay. And we've been dating, as I like to say, I've been dating her 28 months, she's been dating me, or I've been dating her 28 months, she's

23:41 been dating me 27 months. But, so I lay that out. Let me tell you what priest Patrick said. Okay, this is a good example. And then

23:51 I want you to just go to town. Yeah, good. Everything could have happened. I'm sitting there with priest Patrick. And, so this is Roman cause all this is no, this is, I'm sorry, he's in a

24:01 piss. Okay, so this is a piece of he's a rector, but he calls himself a priest. Okay. And

24:08 anyway, so I sit down with him and I'm going through this and he goes, Jack, I hate to break this to you. And I don't want to rat out my boss. But God, that's all, dude. You know, you just

24:22 like her and you went back in there and got her back. But okay, let's move on. Yeah. So anyway, that was his take on it. Give me everything that you think possibly could have happened. You give

24:33 me, you know, examples of what you've heard and stuff and

24:39 I can go to town. Let's go to town because I think this would be cool. Yeah. I mean, this is a great example, actually. So the first thing I would do is say, Hey, lots of people have had that

24:49 experience, by the way, with random songs.

24:54 One of the coins that comes immediately to mind. is a famous skeptic, by the way, Michael Sherman, who wrote this really beautiful essay on his wedding day, by the way. It was his wedding day.

25:06 And this radio came on in a drawer automatically and played the song that was dear to the dead grandfather of the wife. And the wife heard it and immediately started to cry because she was certain

25:22 that her dead grandfather was somehow present because it

25:26 was a dead radio, by the way. It didn't work. And it just randomly came on in a drawer and started playing like a song from the 1940s.

25:38 I might have the date, the decade wrong. But it was very much like what you're describing. It was a song that was designed to have some emotional effect And it was a wedding day and these were both.

25:56 very skeptical secular people who broke down, the woman broke down crying. And Michael even says it was, it was eerie. I mean, he immediately felt this. So this notion of songs playing

26:14 is common.

26:16 And so I would immediately put it in a comparative perspective and I would affirm it. I'd say that really happened. I think it actually was designed to get you two together. The other thing I would

26:27 say is, we know from a lot of experiments, by the way, that erotic attraction is conducive to paranormal effects. Do you believe it or not? Yeah, she's smoking hot. Well, and there's a link.

26:41 There's a link between erotic desire and weird stuff happening. Okay? Wow. And we know that. We know that actually from psychological experiments as well. So that's the second thing I'd say The

26:54 third thing I would say is to get to your priest, to Father Patrick. I don't think it was God either. I think it was you. I think it was you who conjured or elicited that song. I think you have

27:09 abilities and special powers that you don't recognize and you want to attribute to God. So you say, I'm praying, okay, you are praying. I'm sure that's sincere. But I think who's listening to

27:23 those prayers is some other aspect of you. Okay. I think you did it. And I think some higher part of you did it. And so, Father Patrick, I think is correct. Can I cut you off to ask one

27:36 question there? When you say, I did it, did Chuck Yates wanting to hear that? Chuck Yates didn't do it. Some other aspect of Chuck Yates did it. Oh, okay So some other aspect of me cause Sirius

27:52 XM to play that song at that moment. Or did I totally believe I heard it and they could have been playing Madonna for all on it? If you were sitting in the car with me, did you hear that song or

28:06 did you hear Madonna? No, I would have heard that song. Okay. I would have heard that song. I don't think you caused XM to play that song, but I think some other part of you knew somehow that

28:17 that song was being played. And

28:22 it's funny that you accidentally hit it So I have a reading of that event that it wants to affirm what happened, but also wants to place it in this larger context.

28:34 The erotic or the sexual desire is significant. What Fr. Patrick's saying about God, I think, is correct. That doesn't mean it didn't happen, or that it's not mysterious and strange and uncanny.

28:50 I think it is But that's what I mean I bought. trying to affirm these things in a way that's not specifically religious, but also is somehow beyond our social egos, if I can speak like that. In

29:06 other words, Chuck didn't do that,

29:11 but some other part that you're embedded in did. And when you pray, when Chuck prays to God, one part of yourself is talking to this other part, and you're basically asking this other part to

29:25 intervene and to do something. And it did. It did. It did. Your prayer was answered. Yeah. Let me give you another example. So I have dreams, I dream every night, like a lot of people. I

29:38 wake up and I'm like, what the crap was that about? Well, who was doing that? Who was telling that story? That's a crazy story Well, of course, I was telling that story.

29:53 I was telling that story to another part of me that was listening or being, watching the story, and that part doesn't have any idea what the story's about. I have no idea why I'm having that dream,

30:04 why I'm telling that story. But some part of me knows, right? So I don't think we're, what I'm trying to say is I don't think we're one person. I don't think we're one form of awareness or

30:15 consciousness. I think there's many levels to us, and they're all communicating in a dream or in a prayer or in a religious context or in a neurotic context with a random song like this. Yeah,

30:29 that's interesting. And

30:32 in your research, so it feels like in your research, what you've done is,

30:45 I will call them skeptics or debunkers, we'll say, oh, this is chemistry in the mind You're actually willing to say no. It's potentially outside of that. Have you gone deeper in your research

30:57 where you have a thesis that there are 17 different psychological layers to chuck or there's, and I'm gonna say this flippantly, but not condescendingly, I promise, there's a base on Mars where 12

31:12 people are sitting, have you gone deeper on this? Or is your research to the point of, hey, I think there's something else here going on that we don't know yet, and we need to be looking at it,

31:22 or have you gone deeper than that?

31:26 And I'm sorry, I haven't read all your stuff. No, no, it's fine. No, it's a good question. I'm fundamentally the laziest part of the planet. So let me back up a bit. So those mysterious

31:37 happenings around love and sexual desire that you just shared with me, those are also explained or described by people who are Buddhist or Hindus or entirely secular. What I'm trying to do is

31:51 develop a model that can embrace all of those experiences and not reduce it to the particular religious framework or the particular scientific framework person. That's what I'm trying to do. Do I

32:03 think there are 17 dimensions of Czech or a base on Mars? No, I actually don't. I think those, and I know you're being flippant, but those are our interpretations of really strange phenomena. I

32:16 understand why people come up with those interpretations, but do I sign my name to those interpretations? No, I do not. And so, for example, I speak and I write a lot of what I call the humanist

32:28 too. And I leave that very vague and very ambiguous. And all I, what I really mean by it is what you're describing. I mean that there are two aspects of human beings, this social ego that we are

32:42 aware of, but also this larger conscious field that is actually manipulating aware of the physical environment around us in really strange ways sometimes. And I don't know any other way to explain

32:56 or to interpret these events than positing something like. But it

33:02 isn't, I'm not signing my name to the base on Mars, but I'm also not signing my name to God. You know, 'cause I think what one of my jokes is, look, every experience of God I've ever heard,

33:17 every experience like this I've ever heard is always a human being having it. Yeah. Always. Yeah. And so I'm like, well, maybe there's something about the human being that is extraordinary.

33:31 Maybe there's something about the human being that's God. You know, I mean, maybe we're closer to God than we think we are to use the Christian theological language. And I think we are, but again,

33:41 that's just the Christian theological language. There's also a Buddhist language, There are thousands of languages. around those sets of experiences. And I wanna be aware of all of them, but not

33:53 again, affirm one of them to exclusion of all the others. Yeah. And

34:01 this is gonna kind of look into the crystal ball, 'cause maybe saying what you said in just a slightly different way. So I can wrap my mind around it is, oh, I think, I forget who said this, but

34:13 somebody said there are basically 3, 000 religions out there, I'm an atheist and you treat me so different. Well, you're a Christian. You rejected 2, 999. I just happened to reject 3, 000,

34:27 you know. Right. I forget who said that. But,

34:34 so, and then there's kind of science, you know? So let's take all that. Do you think, do you think, are you optimistic on your study 100 years from now, we're going to know a lot more about

34:49 this, or, or is this, or is this going to be one of the things that, and, you know, I mean, think of Louis Pasteur, I mean, sickness and all this. Oh, there's bacteria. It's germs germs

35:04 germs, germs, yeah, look at your cell phone. Yeah. I mean, we just didn't exist a few, a few years ago. Yeah. So I am, I am not optimistic that science is going to get us there. Because I

35:17 don't think at the end of the day, these things behave in a materialistic or scientific way, you know, skeptics will often say, well, these things don't happen in a laboratory. We can't test

35:31 them and replicate them and measure them, therefore, we don't have to think about them. My answer to that is, well, of course they don't appear in a laboratory. There's no trauma. You're going

35:42 to the North Pole to look for zebras Yeah. Of course you're not gonna find any. You've got to go where zebras live to find zebras. And so I say, go to trauma, go to love, go to death, go to the

35:58 places in human life where things really matter. And let me also point out, Chuck, that

36:05 I mean, you work, you have a radio podcast for the energy sector, you work in the business world. But this event that you're describing to me with this woman is obviously one of the most important

36:16 things that ever happened to you. You remember it. And this is what I encounter over and over again. All you do is you scratch the surface of people and they come up with a story like this. And I

36:29 have heard hundreds or thousands of these stories. And so when I go and I lecture at a university or I talk and talk in public about these things, I know there's gonna be these people who say no to

36:44 this and this, but most of the people are like, Oh yeah, that happened. Oh yeah. So I think people are generally not denying this. I think they're in the closet. I can use that language. I

36:57 think they're hiding it because it often doesn't fit into their worldview. And sometimes that's a secular and scientific worldview and these things don't fit. But sometimes it's a religious

37:08 worldview

37:11 and they still don't fit. Like what happens if you're a devout evangelical Christian father or mother and your child, your four-year-old, starts talking about a previous life? Yeah. What then?

37:24 Well, that happens by the way.

37:28 And what often happens is the parent decides at some point that to love the child and not to reduce it or explain it through the religious upbringing. Not always, but okay, what I'm trying to say

37:43 is Things happen to human beings that do it. don't actually fit into their worldview. Yeah. And those are the things I'm most interested in because I happen to think worldviews are relative and

37:55 always changing anyway. I don't, I don't,

38:02 you know, something I often say is I don't believe in beliefs, but I believe in beliefs. Okay, I like that. Yeah, and that's what I, again, when I try to do

38:15 a rise in a classroom is get the young people to understand what I mean by that and to appreciate that. And so to go back to your question about these 3, 000 religions and the atheist who says,

38:25 Well, you know, I reject all 3, 000 of them. Well, that's just a worldview, again.

38:32 The person's just articulating a worldview. I'm like, okay, and when the religious people say, Well, my religion's right and everyone else is wrong. Well, that's just your worldview. I mean,

38:43 maybe religions are, expressions of this. And maybe the question of whether they're right or wrong is, they're not the right question. Maybe the question is something more like, well, this is

38:55 how human beings have expressed these things, you know, in this particular culture, in this particular time. They've expressed them differently in other cultures and other times. Okay, so. Well,

39:07 you know, it's interesting because two of the things that I've learned in my career, and let's say I started working at 25 in the energy business, I'm 55, so 30 years, and I'll relate this to the

39:23 last two weeks. I just spent the last two weeks filming a big oil and gas play in Australia, and that's halfway around the world, right? Yeah. And I realized I have more in common as a Texan with

39:37 the Australians than I do New Yorkers. Right, right. We have this shared culture in America, et cetera, And those are my peeps, right? to the commonality of human beings. Now, I guess we're

39:49 all descendant from the British. By the way, July 4th, my girlfriend calls it treasonous colony day, or, you know. But, you know, so I guess there is that commonality. But at the end of the

40:01 day, the commonality among man, no matter what, I mean, you read stories about the Mayans and stuff, you know, like, yeah, I can relate to that

40:10 But then at the same time, the pyramids were built with such engineering precision. I don't care what any scientist or engineer says today. We don't know how they did that. So just the loss of

40:26 information, and I've seen it in my career.

40:30 I mean, we went from when I started my career, we would drill a vertical. Well, we'd put an acid job on it or a small frack, and then we got drilling these big horizontals 20 years later, I was

40:41 sitting in a meeting and

40:44 And we were going to drill a saltwater disposal wall, which is just a simple vertical wall. And our driller goes, you know, I've drilled 2, 500 wells in my car. I've never drilled a vertical

40:55 wall. I only drilled horizontal. Now the joke was, well, it's the same thing. Just stop and you get up here. But you didn't know how to drill a vertical wall. And I mean, we're a big,

41:05 sophisticated, smart industry where billions of dollars are spent and that knowledge is lost. Yeah And so it's, I can see all these pieces coming together of commonality, but at the same time, so

41:20 much stuff gets lost. You know, this is why, this is why I'm an academic. I mean, again, I grew up in Nebraska in the Midwest. I'm not, I'm not a New Yorker. I'm not an East Coast person like

41:33 you're talking. I'm a Midwesterner. But I do think universities have a way of passing on knowledge It's really extraordinary.

41:43 The way that's done is through journals and books and classes and careers and disciplines that sometimes go on for hundreds of years, by the way. And

41:55 the earlier version of this, by the way, is religion. Religions also are multi-generational, and they pass knowledge on through myth and through symbol and through ritual in very effective ways

42:06 sometimes. Sometimes not in so effective ways

42:10 So I am concerned and I do think about how human beings pass on knowledge because we don't live long. You know, we're an organic being and our lives are very short, you know, in the kind of the

42:24 cosmic perspective. So what we do pass knowledge on

42:30 through different means, and we also lose knowledge as you're describing. Yeah. We lose it This may be way outside your field of knowledge, but I'll say this is a statement, but it's really a

42:41 question. thoroughly convinced that the Vatican has copies of all the Gnostic gospels and all these things that have been lost for time. I always find it funny that they would ban books, but then

42:55 they keep the rebuttal to it. So we knew what the guys said. It's kind of like, all right, guys, go on, but

43:03 I mean, what's the rumor out there that we know 6 of what was in the library at Alexandra that burned down. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, yeah. So we've lost those. That's why I love libraries and

43:19 love books, by the way, is you know, when I write, I've written about a dozen books and those books work around the world with human beings, even when I'm asleep. And I'll die someday. And

43:35 they'll still keep working It'll be like I never died because of the person and the voice in those books. So I think a book is much more mysterious and much more special than we realize, and that's

43:52 why I do what I do. I don't do this because I want to make a living and I want a job. I do this because I was driven to do it from the time I was a kid. I think it's really important Do you think I

44:09 kind of asked you this question earlier and I'm sort of coming back to it. Do you think this makes us better the more we explore this,

44:19 the human condition ultimately if we figure out this more? I asked you earlier basically that same question, but I'm kind of coming back to it the more we talk. Are you optimistic about us or

44:32 pessimistic or you just don't know we need a good look? I,

44:37 you know, the academically correct thing to say is that no one knows. No culture is better than any other culture. I'm not sure I believe that. And I don't think a lot of academics believe that

44:50 deep down. I think they have thoughts and values that their families or their cultures don't have. And they do think that they're better. And I suspect they're right about

45:02 that. Am I optimistic or pessimistic? You know, I'm known for being an optimist. You know, one of the things I often say is that if you look at any vision of the future on your television,

45:14 they're all bad. Yeah. There's only dystopias. Right. Well, how do we know that? Why are there only dystopias? Well, it has something to do with entertainment, it has something to do with

45:25 film and something to do with storytelling. But maybe the future is really good. Maybe we transcend our differences and we figure out global warming and we figure out nuclear energy and maybe it's

45:40 really good. Maybe, maybe. So, and I think these paranormal phenomena that we were talking about earlier, I think they're ultimately good and healing and often guiding in the way you talked about.

45:55 I mean, the music and you're still with this woman and there was something really special about that moment. And I think there was something really special about it. So, I guess I'm more of an

46:09 optimist, but I'm not an optimist, naively. You know, I see a lot of resistance to these ideas, particularly in American society. I mean, you can imagine all the dismissals

46:30 of this. What are a couple of ideas that you've researched, believe or whatever that really causes the cynics the debunkers to go. That guy's nuts. Well, and I don't mean to put you in that Oh,

46:44 no, no, no, no, but I'm just fascinated by it. No, first of all, I don't get called nuts a lot. Okay. And I was explaining, I don't think actually most people do disagree. I think they're

46:56 in the closet. Okay. I think they don't want to

46:59 talk. So let me explain that. And then let me talk about the cell phone 'cause it's a metaphor. Yeah.

47:05 You know, when I go and I lecture a lot and I talk a lot at different universities, people say things like, That guy can make UFO sound Ivy League. And I'm like, That's it. That's the answer

47:18 right there. Because

47:21 the reason smart people won't talk about paranormal phenomena is they don't want to sound like the tabloids. They don't want to be embarrassed. And so I just walk in and I start talking about it,

47:31 but I talk about it in their terms. And they're like, Oh. So that's how you do it And so I think it really matters how you talk about it, Chuck.

47:42 Um, the second thing I'll say is, you know, the basic idea behind all of this is related to this cell phone as a metaphor. We, I think we, most people imagine that mind or consciousness or

47:56 awareness is somehow a product of the brain, right? That the brain is somehow

48:03 creating this illusion of consciousness or awareness. Therefore, things like mind reading or precognition or antibody experiences, none of it's possible. It's all, it's all crazy talk. But what

48:16 if the brain is not producing consciousness? What if the brain is more like a cell phone and it's translating or mediating consciousness, which is much more like a field or, or the Wi-Fi, right?

48:30 So I can take this cell phone and I can throw it against the wall and break it. And guess what? I won't hurt the Wi-Fi I'll destroy the mech up. destroy the brain, as it were, or the mechanism

48:43 that picks up the Wi-Fi and translates it into a personal interface. But I won't affect the field,

48:53 the Wi-Fi, the internet at all. And so when you flip or switch to that model of the mind and the brain interacting, then all of these things I'm talking about suddenly become very possible. It's

49:06 like, oh, you can have a connection with another human being because you both are part of that larger field. And your brain isn't producing your mind. It's translating that field into Chuck or

49:19 into your girlfriend, but it's actually the same Wi-Fi. It's the same field of consciousness. It's doing that in a different way. So you're preaching to the choir right now? Okay. Pardon the pun.

49:31 Yeah, but I wrote a Wall Street Journal article caught 15 years ago, We're basically. The premise was when someone dies, you lose a piece of yourself. And then actually went and talked about that

49:47 basically your experiences, your knowledge base aren't just what's in your mind. It's what's in your girlfriend's mind and your kid's mind. And I thought, that's really stupid. I don't believe

49:58 that. 'Til I realized five times a day, I used to walk into my business partner Mike's office. Hey, who was that dude we had a dinner with in Dallas? Mike would say that was Bob Oh, yeah, so

50:10 part of my consciousness, part of my memory bank is sitting in Mike. Right, you know, and that kind of goes to your, we have a Wi-Fi, we have various pods, but don't tell you anything. Right,

50:21 but I'm saying something more radical. Yes, you are, you are. 'Cause you're still, That metaphor, that explanation is still reductive and still neuroscientific at a conventional sense. The sun

50:33 is still circling the earth in my example, and you're willing to say the earth is circling the sun. Yeah, I'm trying to say the mind is not produced by the brain. Yeah. The brain is in the mind.

50:46 Yeah. The mind is not in the brain. Got it. Okay, oh my God, that's just like so simple. I've at least gotten to the point where there are more hubs than just my physical brain in the mind.

51:01 Yeah, you still haven't gotten to the mind as outside the brain. Well, but you, but I'm willing to take some steps away. If you live my life, Chuck, and you talk to these experiences who had

51:11 very strange and bizarre experiences, you will move to something like the mind is not in the brain, the brain is in the mind. You do move to that, to simply make these experiences possible at all.

51:26 Otherwise, you know, as I say, they're not, they're not possible, they're impossible. So I think that's the deeper idea. And this would also explain trauma and why things happen around death

51:36 and illness and psychedelics because what you're essentially doing is you're taking the cell phone of the brain and you're shutting it down temporarily or you're throwing it against the wall so this

51:47 larger Wi-Fi can appear and you can have the near death experience or the psychedelic state or the

51:54 paranormal event. So that's really what I'm trying to work with and the model, do I know that? No, I don't know that. Is that a thought experiment? I have, yes, I have it all the time and I

52:08 think with it and I think with people about it, I think with you about it,

52:14 it's really cool too, by the way And this is why I'm interested in my adolescent obsession of superheroes, I mean, I think superpowers are real. I think human beings have them and they manifest

52:31 them all the time, but they only manifest them in danger and trauma. They don't manifest them in daily life generally. And that's the tricky part. And that's what I call the Clark Kent Superman

52:42 thing. Superman shows up all the time, but guess what? He only shows up when something's wrong, when there's a danger or something that needs to be healed or transcended. Usually it's just Clark

52:54 Kent stumbling around at the daily planet. Well, you know what's fascinating about that is if you study super performers in the world, like the world's greatest surgeon, Tiger Woods, all that,

53:06 when you go in and you ask Tiger Woods, what were, or Michael Jordan, what were you thinking when you hit that last second shot? You know what they always say? Nothing. Nothing. They've turned

53:16 it off. I know. And a super power comes off. Right, right. It's not that it doesn't take practice and that you don't need the physical capacity of a Michael Jordan or a Tiger Woods, you do. You

53:27 really do. But there's something else going on in those moments that is not Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods. Something else is happening. Yeah. And you hear the same, by the way from, extreme

53:41 athletes, people jumping off cliffs and surfing and this kind of thing. And they get into these states and these altered states are remarkable. The, what was I just going to say?

53:56 Anyway, I just blanked, but I'm sure it was very precise.

54:01 And oh, where I was going to go with this is,

54:09 if you think about it, potentially evolution could somehow describe this in that if I force people turn off their attachment to all this, they're more likely to survive, you know? And as we've

54:28 grown in more comfort with our world, where, you know, my biggest traumas, which red wine do I drink tonight with dinner, evolutionary pressures would say, Chuck, you can turn it off, you can

54:41 go, you know, you can go do this, you can go do that. You know, it's not that I think evolutionary pressures, as you say, are irrelevant, they're very relevant here. I take precognition, you

54:52 know, a lot of people who have thought about precognition, but you know, people know it's gonna happen before it happens. Well, that's extremely useful.

55:02 It's not only useful, and as a survival mode, it's also useful, frankly, in a business mode, or in an adaptation mode. If you know what's gonna happen before, even if you don't know consciously,

55:15 but some part of you knows, You're going to behave in a particular way. toward that future event. So a lot of these things do make sense in an evolutionary model, but you have to be able to say,

55:28 Well, that actually happens. And it's not a fantasy or it's not a hallucination or you're not crazy. Once you admit the reality of it, then you can explore these other theoretical options like the

55:40 evolutionary adaptation model. But you can't even do that. You know, if you say people cannot pre-cogimize the future, come on, Jeff, that's ridiculous. Well, then you're not gonna develop a

55:52 model to explain it. Why are you gonna develop a model to explain something that's crazy that doesn't happen? You're only gonna develop a model of something you think is real. Yeah. And that's why,

56:02 again, I do what I do. And that's why I'm a professor of religion and I'm not a professor of physics or chemistry because those colleagues can't say these things. They won't get the grant. You

56:15 know, they won't get tenure.

56:18 I have no status, Chuck. It's a professor of religion. I mean, we're on the very bottom of the academic

56:27 hole, as it were.

56:30 But that allows a certain freedom. And that allows me to say things that some of my other colleagues, I know they think, but they can't say. And so I just say them. Yeah, no, and

56:46 this has been fascinating I love this. I'm so glad Keith put us together and I'm gonna wind up reading your books and coming back with questions. You're gonna block me on that so far. No, no, no,

56:57 I'm not, I don't think it'll help you. But let's take this into kind of mainstream culture. Don't care what you think about his politics, but he's very, very popular, he's very, very smart.

57:08 Tucker Carlson. Tucker Carlson is adamant about supernatural powers being out there And he derives it from, he's just talking. to too many pilots that have seen things that are unexplained. And he

57:26 said, to your point, there's so many of these experiences, something had to have happened. They could have all made them up. Right, well, this is the UFO, what's called the UAP phenomenon.

57:38 And a lot of it's been reported by pilots for decades, by the way, but pilots couldn't report it because they would lose their jobs or they would be afraid of what was gonna happen to them. And as

57:51 the policies change and we allow the pilots to really say what they're seeing, and as our technology, by the way, gets better, the radar gets better, we start to see things. And this is another

58:03 thing that I think technology is really interesting here. It's really relevant to the near-death experience, for example. I think human beings have been having near-death experiences for thousands

58:15 of years, but guess what? died.

58:19 Well, with the advance of medical technology, we can pull people back now from very far into the death process. And guess what they say when they come back? Well, I saw so-and-so and I said this

58:32 and I saw that. And so the near-death experience really is a term that is no older than 1975 and that's not an accident. The technology allows us to have those experiences that we probably always

58:50 were having, but we just died. And it's the same with the UFO or the UAP now. I think those things have always been in the sky. I think they've always been interacting with us. Ezekiel saw the

58:59 wheel on that. I think people have always had those experiences, but for technological reasons, we're seeing them now and we're getting more

59:09 empirical evidence of them as it were. And so people are talking about them, including politicians and Congress and major newspapers now. As big as the universe is, I think it would be way more

59:23 statistically unlikely that we're at in terms of, I mean, it's just too big. Yeah. There's too much out there. Yeah, and that's a long conversation. I mean, we can do this. I mean, then you

59:35 have a - We'll do a part two. We'll do a part two at some point, yeah. Yeah, and maybe, just to kind of prime that pump, I think you're thinking in a spatial metaphor I think you're imagining

59:49 UFOs coming from another star, but what if they come from another time? Yeah. And they don't have to go anywhere. They're already here, they're just in another time. Well, suddenly, it all

1:00:03 changes instantly like that, but it's how we're thinking of it, is what I'm trying to say. It's not the phenomena itself, the changes, it's how we're thinking about it, the changes. And that's,

1:00:15 again, what I'm trying to do get people to think about this differently. I mean, with the percentage of the world that's unexplored, ie. the oceans, that

1:00:31 we all played hide and seek with our kids when they were young, I mean, it is not unreasonable to think there are people all scattered throughout the world right now who are sitting there watching

1:00:43 us that are way smarter than we are avoiding detection. I mean, we, I actually think again, it'd be statistically more likely that happening than not. Well, and the other thing - Or some version

1:00:56 of that. The other thing that always surprises me is we somehow think that we're on the wave or the edge of time, that somehow the past is the past and the future hasn't happened yet, and we

1:01:07 somehow just happen to be on that. I'm like, why do we, why do we think that? Um. And so once you shift again and you think, well, the future has already happened, just like the past has, and

1:01:19 we're just kind of moving through it in an arbitrary or relative fashion to use the Einsteinian terms, suddenly all this stuff again, it's not surprising. It's like, yeah, okay. And the thing

1:01:33 about the UFO to go back to it for a minute, I think that one of the things to get over there that people generally can't get over is what I call the moral agency question You know, a lot of these

1:01:45 experiences are abduction experiences, things are happening to people. People are not choosing this, they're not giving a cent to this. Things are being done to them. And I think that's very

1:01:58 troubling to us as a species. We want to be on top, we want to be the main predator as it were. What if we're not? Yeah.

1:02:11 Porno for pyros will make good pets. Yeah, I mean, what if we're not the species that controls everything? What

1:02:27 if we're being controlled in some way? And this gets back to the religious question and the media question you had earlier. And I think that's, again, I think that's worth thinking about. I don't

1:02:31 have an answer to that, but I think that's worth thinking about. I mean, it's crazy to think of, and I may get struck by lightning right now, but it doesn't sound really crazy if God was a king

1:02:45 that died and then the sun took over, right? 'Cause the Old Testament, New Testament, I don't think that's the same God, you know? That's an old observation. Yeah, but I mean, you can kind of

1:02:56 read that and go, wow, you sort of have Bill Parcells as your coach, and now you've got Barry Switzer, you know, it's a. Right. So, well, Jeff, this was really cool. I'm fascinated by all

1:03:07 this stuff, 'cause we talked. We talked briefly the way here is my grandmother made me read Fate Magazine when I was young. And so that was all about the occult and after death and stuff, UFOs.

1:03:18 And it's funny, 'cause I couldn't sleep by myself about one of

1:03:23 my brothers 'til I was about 18.

1:03:27 Yeah, well, Fate Magazine, again, I was really important. The first issue of Fate Magazine, by the way, was essentially the first sighting that gave us the term Frank's Officer. Oh, wow It's

1:03:38 historically important, actually.

1:03:42 I love Fate Magazine, too. Particularly the older covers, which are really, if you look at them, they're very - Yeah, she kept them all, you know. She still have them, or do. I don't know

1:03:51 where those went. My grandmother passed away. I need to go figure out. I'm sure they're in a box somewhere. Yeah, you gotta find those. Yeah. I'm also a comic collector, and I collect Fate

1:04:04 Magazine, as well, and some of those are really hard to find now.

1:04:09 Okay, I'll go talk to my dad, my uncle, none of those two curmudgeons. I probably threw them away. I hope not. I hope not either. That's usually what happens, unfortunately, but sometimes it

1:04:19 doesn't happen. Well, Jeff, this was really cool. I appreciate you coming on. This is been fascinating. Thanks for having me. Is there anything that you would have wanted to talk about that we

1:04:29 didn't? Oh, it's endless. Yeah. All right, we'll do this. Standing invite. I'm really happy, though, that you gave us your own experience because it gave us a way of talking about the

1:04:39 phenomena in a way that makes sense and that it's important. And I don't want people to think, we're just talking or thinking about people over there. I want to cross the table. Like, no, we're

1:04:52 talking about you. We're talking about life. We're talking about death. We're talking about serious things. We're not just blowing smoke. Yeah, I mean, that was

1:05:04 truly real I even started making a podcast series on it. called Chuck Yates Needs a Wife. 'Cause I was gonna tell that story. And I did episode one and it was equal parts kind of Saturday Night

1:05:16 Live skid. But then the second half of it, I sat down with Priest Patrick and we kind of went through that. And then the second was gonna be the same thing. I was gonna Saturday Night Live type

1:05:29 skids. The premise was, if I didn't get married, they were gonna take my podcast away. And that was the funny skip. But then I was gonna tell the serious story and the girlfriend's British. And

1:05:40 so she's a little bit more publicity shy. So we stopped making a mess. That was your wise man. Yeah, maybe we'll pick that back up.