Patrick Abbott Tests Savannah Vampires, Alien Religions, and UFOs

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Hello and welcome to the science fiction and fantasy factory.
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I'm thrilled to have Mr.
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Patrick Cabin.
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Speculative science fiction fantasy.
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Wild, satirical, paranormal writer with us today.
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Welcome to the factory, Patrick.
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Thank you for having me on, Mookie.
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I always love listening to your stuff.
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I appreciate it.
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I love listening to you and reading you.
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We are Substack Buddies.
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I had you on the pod several months ago where we talked about your novel, Fallen.
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You've got a sequel, Risen, and you've just put out the third installment of Savannah Paranormal Detective Agency.
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And I can't wait to talk to you about all of above.
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I see you got the Savannah jersey you are representing from the Peach, the Peach State.
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What's your connection to Georgia?
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So uh it's a light connection, but it's a meaningful one.
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It's sort of one of my wife and I's happy places to go.
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When I was in grad school one uh Saturday afternoon, I saw the movie Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil without having any idea of what it was about.
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And I thought, this is just crazy and almost slanderous against Savannah and the South.
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Then I looked it up and was, this is a real story.
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So I read the book, really got into it, showed it to the then fiance.
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And we after we got married, we went down on a train to Savannah, Georgia, and spent a week there and just absolutely loved it.
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And we've been back several times.
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And it's such a unique city, almost New Orleans-ish, in the sense that it is a truly different part of the South, but without some of the baggage New Orleans recently has had.
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And it's uh a good example is the traffic squares are actually giant big squares with intersections in the old part of town.
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And it's meant to slow down savanna.
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Yeah, and so you get this old kind of southern draw, you get this feeling that business and other things go at a slower pace.
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And just learning about the history of the old south, the Spanish moss everywhere, it gives uh almost an enjoyable gothic feel to the city.
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And so, especially during winter when it's cold up here in the north, it's always fun to just go down and enjoy a different part of America.
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I think Gothic is the perfect perfect word for it.
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The South has that ethos.
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Texas is known for its weird spiritualism and ghost stories, haunted cemeteries, parts of Georgia, and Savannah in particular has this has this cred of being a place where things can happen.
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So you localized your own story, obviously the eponymous Savannah Paranormal Detective Agency.
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And I've read read the series and I really, really enjoyed it.
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The characters scintillate, it's got this Douglas Adams style goofiness, you've got some flannery O'Connor horror with absurdity, and you really capture that ethos that you just mentioned, which is there's a spirit to Savannah.
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I think you nail it.
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And Deborah is one of my favorite recent fictional characters.
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She is a totally lovable B-I-T-C-H.
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She's a 20s flapper who's apparently turned into a vampire.
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I'm I'm giving away a few spoilers that you'll get in the first few pages, but I think it's worthy to characterize these personalities in that kind of way because it's so so enticing.
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It's a wonderful, wonderful read.
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You got Max, the the Arthur Dent style straight man who might or might not be turned into a zombie.
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And then you got Fred, the ghost sailor, and his redemptive arc trying to save his companions and basically have this one big hustle of this paranormal agency.
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Deborah's a lot like my own Johnny Fizzulli character.
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She's got no intention really of doing anything good except rip people off.
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And at the same time, she seems irredeemable yet, so very likable, which is hard to pull off and really wonderful to read.
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She's really a fish out of water, uh, kind of representing the new South post-Civil War.
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It has this energy, has this big ideal, but she just doesn't understand how other people work.
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And that that really interferes with her ability to even accomplish her own goals.
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And it the way it she is so so high-strung, so proud, it actually goes into her favor as a character in the sense that she can't be malicious because she can't actually care that much about other people initially.
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And so it's an interesting character to kind of just experiment and what would be a grandiose thing somebody high on their own supply would do.
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And then how do how does everybody react to that?
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And sort of one of the running gags and themes of the whole series is she's well known in Savannah, but Max, who's a lawyer from the north, who's just kind of figuring out this whole city that seems to realize monsters exist, but everybody is more or less okay with it that he doesn't understand.
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He's finding out just the damage she has done in the past, and how everybody else is just trying to survive around her.
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And he has to live in that environment, both kind of stuck with her, but also trying to get away at the same time.
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She's definitely that narcissistic wrecking ball of a character, and it provides a terrific counterpoint to the fairly moral system that you build around her.
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You've got arcs of redemption, you've got fallen becoming saints, you've got truly evil characters, which act as a counterpoint to Deborah's own kind of surface badness.
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And it's a it's a nice mix of morality with absurdity, with with a with a great story that's a page turner in all of its zany goofiness.
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You've you've got them taking cases on, like uh YouTube meth labs and lava lamp demons and uh schoolgirls who obey tabletop rules of gaming when they fight each other and bizarre shit that that is captivating for the very reason that it's so unexpected and zany.
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A lot of that pulls just kind of uh from one of my youthful uh experiences of there was a game by LucasArts called Grim Fandangle.
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If you're are you familiar with it at all?
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I remember when LucasArts was a thing.
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We're going old school, almost 30, 25 years ago.
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Zork and Infocom, right?
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Remember those?
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Yep.
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Uh graphic days, uh early 3D graphics, but all pre-rendered.
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And uh for those who don't know about it, it's a fun kind of mashup of Mexico Day of the Dead legends plus 1920s jazz.
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And it's uh art decode theme.
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What if there was an afterlife where everybody was just trying to go through and to get to the end point?
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But it was set up almost like a 1930s Mexico.
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Uh Day of the Dead theme, you're a grim reaper, you have to go to the living, and you under you find out about corruption.
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And just that living world that in and of itself is fun.
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But the more you played Grim Fandangle, there was, as almost Flannery O'Connor would say about the South, it was Christ-haunted in the sense, not that it was explicitly Christian, but that it was there's a deeper morality going on.
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And the more you play the game, you saw that morality a little bit more and a little bit more, and it made the story meaningful.
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And that's what I try to do with uh Savannah Paranormal Detective Agency.
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You on the surface can enjoy that, hey, this is just Max's really weird bad adventures, including a side trip to Oz.
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But everything has a purpose, and the Fred character is already there where he wants to be.
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And you can sense that he's trying to reach out to help Max and Deborah.
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But Debra's so high strung that a lot of times it's going over her head, and that uh even when she tries to do good, she even omits, like, oh yeah, I wasn't paying attention.
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What's going on, guys?
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She does not care, but you care.
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And and as such, you're transposing your own ethics and values and spiritual beliefs on this absurdist environment to add another dimension that readers could get into.
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It's optional to your point.
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You don't need to understand Catholic theory or being to appreciate it.
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Or even to accept it.
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Yeah, or accept it.
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But if you do have some recollection of it or understanding of it, it adds a layer to the drama as it unfolds.
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What got you cooking on this?
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Your other series, your science fiction speculative novels, are much more grandiose in execution.
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They have much more dimensionality in terms of this kind of layering, and they're more overtly not theological, but allegorical in a way where lessons could and should be learned.
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What got you going on Savannah?
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Is it kind of this release valve for you as a more serious writer when you're really putting pen to paper?
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So, in one sense, it is a release vow that sometimes, uh even though the fallen series is a giant redemptive arc, it's a heavy topic.
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And it ties into real work I've done helping people with combat-related PTSD.
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And that takes a toll.
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I mean, I I love my imaginary friends, Brendan Espurs, Barina, but dang, they they go through a lot.
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The Savannah Paranormal Detective Agency, I mean, Max the lawyer goes through a lot.
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And he's loosely inspired by my dad, who was an attorney who had some interesting porn adventures.
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But he survived them and he came back like, boy, wasn't that a weird time?
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And so writing about that reminds me of my dad and just having that fun.
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Hey, let's do absurdity.
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What what sort of what is hilarious in my mind?
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Oh, okay, let's play that out.
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And it's something that every October now I kind of look forward to.
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That in September, August and September, I really focus on Savannah Paranormal Detective Agency.
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The story in my head plays out.
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I put it down on paper.
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In October, I get to release a new chapter every month up until Halloween.
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And it's my little Halloween gift to readers.
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And it's super fun.
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It also resonates with some themes in many of your pursuits that I see on Substack.
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You're not a UFO debunker, but you're skeptical about a lot of the claims are made, and you demand more evidence-based analysis, rational thinking, and reasoning when it comes to that topic.
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Similarly, with ghost sightings and frankly, the paranormal.
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So you have your own strong personal beliefs, but you're also a skeptic.
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You think that there is a lot of BS out there, from what I can tell.
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And not to speak for you, but this resonates a lot in your in your work.
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So there is uh, I would say, healthy skepticism.
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I'm one of those people who in my family there have been incidents of high strangeness that just, boy, wasn't that weird.
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Whether it's my own UFO story or the one time I'm pretty sure I saw ball lightning.
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And so when people say, Oh, I wish people would take my claims of UFOs or ghosts or whatnot seriously, okay, let's take it seriously.
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There are some truly unknown things in the cosmos that are boy, isn't that weird?
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Or boy, that's sort of unexplainable.
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In the meantime, there is a ton of BS that really ruins the field.
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And one thing that I really take personally is the cattle mutilations because my grandfather in the 1970s, he was a farmer, had a cow cow mutilated.
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Flies wouldn't go on the body, other cows were kind of spooked around the body, which is weird.
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And even the vet didn't was saying, I don't know what caused this.
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And he saw in his career, and even me helping him out, what happens when a scavenger or a wild animal gets to a uh cow.
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It's a bloody affair.
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This was none of it.
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But he would have people saying, Oh, don't you know what a coyote is?
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He knows what a coyote is and does, and that wasn't it.
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And the lies and BS drown out things like my grandfather's call for real research on what happened that actually affected people.
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It affected farmers and ranchers, and some went out of business.
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And it's let's take this seriously.
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And so when I do investigations, it's let's break it down.
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And sometimes it's like the Turan 1976 incident, where truly it's I have no idea, and just wrote a substack on it.
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And other times where we look at Roswell and Kennet Arnold sightings, it's more of a study of what did people think actually at the time, which is even more fascinating than trying to guess what they saw.
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And it's most people in the 1940s thought UFOs were actually Russians or US military equipment.
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And it wasn't until around 1950 when that changed.
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And so that serious study, even if you can't find out what exactly happened, you find out something interesting about the past.
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And that's equally as fascinating to me.
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Human beings tend to be binary thinkers, zero or one.
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This claim is total bullshit, or it's true, and we don't even need to think about it any further.
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And unfortunately, to your point, there's a lot that we don't know.
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And there are other things that we sense, and it behooves us as a species and as individuals to slow down, take a look at the evidence, and see what we can learn.
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And instead, there's usually a lot of hyperbolics in both directions.
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Either this is nonsense or this is mana from heaven.
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And in both cases, we lose the opportunity to discover something about the world and something about ourselves.
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And I love about that about you how you pick apart individual news stories to identify what seems to be veridical and what doesn't.
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And you often correlate that to many of your own beliefs, of which there's a powerful spiritual foundation that I believe is anchored in your own lived experience.
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And I and it seems to me it's it's an exercise in trying to balance these forces where you know what you believe and you believe it to be true, but your mind is always skeptical, and you know the the paths that people take can end us, end us in a place where either we believe blindly and miss the point, or we're overtly skeptical, and then we don't embrace truths that really might be transcendent.
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You're dead on with that.
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Uh as saying Paul said, test everything.
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And so one of the things that I've been blessed with really was I had a lot of teachers, whether in college or uh professional life.
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And it started in college, where one was a former member of an intelligence agency, and he taught analytic thinking as defined by, I believe, ICD 203, uh Intelligence Community Directive 203.
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And that was all about assessments, and it broke down almost everything into a probability and a confidence.
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The probability is your belief in the likelihood based on evidence, and the confidence is how much evidence do you have to make a good call?
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And that really helped frame things in my mind and also helped me give uh tolerance and understanding to people who think differently, that look at the evidence, weigh the evidence, make comparisons of hypotheses, and come to a conclusion that you caveat with likelihood and confidence, and thinking I would know more if, or I'd be more confident if I had this information.
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And whether it's in making a decision on something to buy or politics, it helps me stay balanced in the sense that I have these beliefs, but I recognize I could be wrong, and I'm constantly trying to self-check myself.
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And I even did a Substack post recently looking at Star Trek episodes, the intelligence community directive, and even the works of Scott Adams, Loser Think, because I think that's a very good book about how to think, and just saying, hey, check your beliefs, and you might be shocked with what you believe or why do you believe that?
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And it kind of goes back to how do you know what you know?
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How would you tell if you're wrong, and recognizing almost everybody is trying to sell you something, whether it is a product or their worldview, that you have to realize there are a lot of different data points, and people are watching different movies and getting different data points.
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We live in a confusing, paradoxical age right now.
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On the one hand, institutions have been taking major hits, especially post-pandemic.
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Scientific institutions, governmental institutions, organizations that used to be considered authoritative and trustworthy have collapsed.
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And in that vacuum has rushed a ton of misinformation.
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So, on the one hand, the public has been trained to be skeptical to the point of dismissive of many foundational tenets, even of science and reason.
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And conversely, they've also been taught to embrace highly irrational ideas and systems with no basis except to be skeptical of the institutions that they ostensibly are designed to destroy.
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So we're we're spinning in this mix of not really knowing where our feet should sit on the ground, and our heads are elevating higher and higher with this false belief that breadth is depth, that the more we ingest, the more we know.
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And the last person we listen to must be right, because the flow of information is such a cascading tsunami, unfortunately, most of which is nonsense.
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So I think it's even more important now than ever before to follow and subscribe to Patrick Abbott on Substack because you do a tremendous job of cutting through the noise and most significantly citing specific examples in entertainment, TV shows, books, storytelling, institutions in a way where we can learn how to slice and dice evidence-based, ostensibly authoritative data from opinionated manipulative nonsense.
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And I think you're doing a great service, sir, in terms of providing your keyboard and mind to this to this arduous sisyphus quest of rolling the hill and having it roll back down of trying to make sense of things.
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Well, I I'm a little bit depressed that I'm a shining light when it should be so many other people.
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But you're right.
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Uh people rightly.
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Wrongly, the press was once thought of the mainstream press was thought as objective.
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When that was lost, people went to basically confirmation bias sources on social media, which let me tell you the press had people like Stephen Glass.
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Nowadays, a social media person with a million followers can make up sources, get something completely wrong, or just try to play the algorithm and upload manipulated videos or with false captions, stuff that would have got Stephen Glass shot.
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But that happens three times a day and nobody cares because it's the person's on their side.
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And it's actually worse.
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We are worse off.
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And I'm not saying we should go back to the flawed system, but if you tear down a system, you need to build a new and better one.
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You don't just go into this tribal frenzy.
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And it's really up to all of us to break that cycle of social media engagement, to break the cycle of ever-increasing radicalization, and just be let's actually be objective.
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Let's look at the original sources, let's break things down, let's accept that sometimes we don't know what happened.
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Let's accept that sometimes a person on our political side can be wrong.
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But we both know that's not going to happen.
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So in the meantime, we need to build communities amongst ourselves.
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And SubSec is actually great for that, where it just encourages thinking and sharing and creating a culture that isn't toxic.
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And whether or not you agree with the person's politics or not, or if they're political or not, just remembering that there's something beyond that X threads, blue sky, whatever, anger spiral.
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Taking oneself too seriously seems to be a fuel of much of this mess.
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And an antidote to that is absurdity.
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And this brings us right back to Savannah and her defective agency and her greed and narcissism, and the ghosts, and the lava lamps, and the girl scouts, and the Wizard of Oz trial in your in your series.
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James Joyce loved Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
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He was enamored by it to the point that big parts of Finnegan's Wake adopt that absurdity motif to the point of their own absurdity, incomprehensible absurdity.
00:24:37.359 --> 00:24:41.440
If Ezra Pound couldn't understand Finnegan's Wake, then who could?
00:24:42.400 --> 00:24:47.119
But the essence there is absurdity is like a release valve.
00:24:47.200 --> 00:24:54.079
It's a release valve for you when you're writing your heavy books on redemption and PTSD.
00:24:54.400 --> 00:25:01.039
And it's also a safety valve for society, where let's just let it loose.
00:25:01.200 --> 00:25:06.640
Let's indulge our creativity, our whimsy, our fantasies.
00:25:07.599 --> 00:25:15.759
And that way, we don't need to let that nonsense infuse our more rational analysis of things.
00:25:16.079 --> 00:25:21.200
The tea kettle on the boiler, and then you let it you let it steam.
00:25:21.359 --> 00:25:36.559
And absurdist literature, poetry, storytelling is a way we can laugh, let it out, and hopefully calm ourselves down to take seriously what should be taken seriously in a more calm, rational kind of way.
00:25:36.720 --> 00:25:46.319
So I think Savannah's paranormal detective agency, actually, to add another layer to it, fulfills that premise really well, too.
00:25:48.079 --> 00:26:00.880
I think that's spot on because uh with the absurdity, if some of it is truly just absurd, like the tabletop role-playing fight scene, and others is hey, our life's our lives can be crazy.
00:26:01.119 --> 00:26:03.440
And so let's just have fun with it.
00:26:03.599 --> 00:26:12.799
That in that craziness that Max encounters, part of it is the fraternal group that you join because you think, oh, it's gonna be a good time.
00:26:12.880 --> 00:26:20.400
And even if they don't have a lava lamp demon, they have arguments about, oh, who are who are we gonna pass the check to?
00:26:20.559 --> 00:26:23.039
Is this a part of Robert's rules of order?
00:26:23.279 --> 00:26:35.519
I was when I joined uh the Knights of Columbus during the initiation ceremony, there was a plastic skull, and I had to bite the inside of my mouth from not breaking out laughing.
00:26:35.599 --> 00:26:37.920
It's like, is this is this real?
00:26:38.400 --> 00:26:51.839
And then the business first business meeting I was in, there was an argument of whether or not they should accept a check from a priest who earmarked it for charity.
00:26:52.000 --> 00:26:56.400
And some of the members were, well, what if we don't want to spend the money on charity?
00:26:56.559 --> 00:27:01.039
And it's like, guys, a priest just gave you money to do good in your name.
00:27:01.599 --> 00:27:03.359
Just take the money and do good.
00:27:03.519 --> 00:27:05.680
Why are we arguing about this?
00:27:06.960 --> 00:27:12.240
And so that these little incidents and weirdness, uh, let's enjoy life.
00:27:12.319 --> 00:27:16.240
Let's let's spice up life and imagine how it could be more absurd.
00:27:16.960 --> 00:27:18.640
Candeed is funny.
00:27:18.960 --> 00:27:25.680
Voltaire's most memorable work pokes fun at the Leibnizian perfect universe, right?
00:27:25.839 --> 00:27:27.599
And the ethics of his day.
00:27:27.920 --> 00:27:33.680
Catch 22 is arguably the best war book, and it's hysterically funny.
00:27:34.000 --> 00:27:36.480
So within the humor, you can find truth.
00:27:36.640 --> 00:27:43.599
Within the truth, you either turn to calamity or you turn to trying to laugh, laugh it off.
00:27:43.839 --> 00:27:52.400
And it's a great way to release all of that energy and hopefully focus our energies even better.
00:27:52.799 --> 00:28:00.240
And I and I love Savannah for that too, which is just following these zany characters through their adventures.
00:28:00.400 --> 00:28:07.359
How'd you how'd you think of some of the the random whimsical craziness?
00:28:07.519 --> 00:28:21.279
Like, for example, uh, Deborah is so annoying that when she gets banished to Oz, that's literally uh a laugh out loud moment, and it's so satisfying.
00:28:23.039 --> 00:28:28.559
So uh it's part of that is my uh part Cattens inheritage.
00:28:28.640 --> 00:28:33.440
That right where I lived for a few years, there was Wamigo, which was the Wizard of Oz Museum.
00:28:33.519 --> 00:28:38.319
If you've never been, it's it's exactly as awesome as you can imagine.
00:28:38.559 --> 00:28:44.559
And it's it's just how do you tie in all these things and bring it together?
00:28:44.720 --> 00:28:48.160
And part of it is random brain synapses.
00:28:48.400 --> 00:28:53.200
Another part is I dream my characters and they perform things on stage.
00:28:53.519 --> 00:28:57.839
And the other part is what is a good satisfying ending?
00:28:58.000 --> 00:29:00.880
I mean endings are incredibly tough to do.
00:29:00.960 --> 00:29:16.720
I mean, anybody can world build, anybody, uh a few good people can do a really good story, but sticking the landing and having a satisfy, satisfying ending, especially if you want to continue on the story afterwards, that is incredibly hard.
00:29:16.880 --> 00:29:18.880
But I'm glad you enjoyed that scene.
00:29:18.960 --> 00:29:26.960
And it was how at the time I was thinking, how do we redeem Fred and how do we get Max out of it?
00:29:27.359 --> 00:29:33.599
And so Max is able to kind of just leave Savannah and he would go back home.
00:29:33.680 --> 00:29:37.680
And I thought, well, how do I bring him back for a second story?
00:29:37.839 --> 00:29:47.279
And it's I thought about everything that he did in the first story, and it's you know, in the real world, there would be a lot of paperwork and a lot of questions.
00:29:47.440 --> 00:30:04.160
Because in this in the first page, he which is sort of exposition, he goes to Haiti, he uh gets caught in a voodoo ritual, he may or may not have killed somebody to escape, he burned down a mansion, he he went back to Savannah by stowing away on a ship.
00:30:04.319 --> 00:30:16.960
I mean, that's a lot of paperwork without passport stamps that you're going to have a lot of angry people with questions, and especially what happens in the story, that there's going to be fallout from that.
00:30:17.039 --> 00:30:20.160
And so, how does that play out in an absurd manner?
00:30:20.319 --> 00:30:34.799
Because we've all been in an absurd situation, and it's whether it is an incident with TSA in the airport or just with police or some a boss that where you try to do good, but it only backfires.
00:30:34.960 --> 00:30:39.119
And so just exploring out how that would play out was incredibly fun.
00:30:39.599 --> 00:31:10.079
And Deborah keeps telling them that spoiler alert, she is convinced he is a zombie and that his brains are rotting away, and that actually saves him several times because he at the very least thinks he's human, and it's wow, as long as she thinks I'm a zombie, she's not going to attack me because Deborah truly is a force of nature, she can't be reasoned with, and the only thing that will really happen with her is she'll double down on whatever she wants.
00:31:10.240 --> 00:31:13.759
So he's almost trapped going along with the ride.
00:31:14.319 --> 00:31:16.160
Very, very relatable.
00:31:16.319 --> 00:31:17.759
We all know a Deborah.
00:31:17.920 --> 00:31:23.119
Some of us are Debras, which is a slightly more enhanced version of a Karen.
00:31:25.519 --> 00:31:32.559
Now, Karen's are destructive, and uh there's a little bit of a difference between a Karen and a Deborah.
00:31:32.640 --> 00:31:38.160
I mean, Deborah at least, Karen, there's that eagerness of I want to bring the system down.
00:31:38.799 --> 00:31:46.960
Deborah just wants her way, and that she wouldn't care about the person behind the counter or the manager.
00:31:47.119 --> 00:31:48.799
Just give her what she wants.
00:31:48.960 --> 00:32:00.960
And so I don't want to say she's a good character because she's certainly not a force of good, but she's not a force of evil, which makes the character enjoyable.
00:32:01.359 --> 00:32:02.160
Yeah, I agree.
00:32:02.240 --> 00:32:08.000
And as I brought it up, she's similar to my Johnny Fizzulli and my Johnny Fizzulli saga.
00:32:08.480 --> 00:32:11.759
There's a there's an amoral essence to it.
00:32:11.920 --> 00:32:22.880
It's fueled by hedonism and greed and narcissism, and basically just plowing through relationships and situations.
00:32:23.680 --> 00:32:38.400
But but there's also this opportunism and this joy de vive that's there, which propels her into these Xanianics, and she's the engine of all this absurdity, and that makes the whole read fun.
00:32:38.559 --> 00:32:58.960
If you give her more of a moral cast and you infuse her with guilt, and you make her more ostensibly human and dimensional, it sucks the life out of the character because we want to project our own greed, our own selfishness on a character where we can indulge.
00:32:59.119 --> 00:33:02.880
And she lets us do that, and that works very, very well.
00:33:03.039 --> 00:33:09.680
And she acts as a pivot point for the other characters, some of whom are good, some of whom are evil.
00:33:09.920 --> 00:33:12.720
There are bad guys in the series.
00:33:12.960 --> 00:33:23.359
And this goes back, I think, again, to your Catholic roots, which which infuse the narrative and influence some of the plot, I sensed.
00:33:23.599 --> 00:33:26.559
And now the Pope is hopefully recovering.
00:33:26.720 --> 00:33:29.039
What do you think of the pontiff now?
00:33:29.279 --> 00:33:30.400
He's a Chicagoan.
00:33:30.640 --> 00:33:35.039
My hometown back in the day would be say, of course, isn't the Pope Polish?
00:33:35.119 --> 00:33:36.400
And now I say, of course.
00:33:36.559 --> 00:33:38.559
Isn't the Pope from Chicago?
00:33:40.000 --> 00:33:44.960
So um this house is in mourning with uh Pope's White Sox losing.
00:33:45.119 --> 00:33:47.200
Uh feeling really bad for him.
00:33:47.599 --> 00:33:49.039
Do hope he recovers.
00:33:49.200 --> 00:33:56.960
It it's kind of a little disturbing that they're recommending surgery so soon, but hopefully they get in front of it right away.
00:33:57.200 --> 00:34:12.880
And uh one thing I really appreciate about this Pope is his incredibly pastoral groundedness that he makes no uh ifs, ands, or buts about what he believes.
00:34:13.039 --> 00:34:19.199
And he explains it not in a harsh way, but hey, this is what Catholics believe.
00:34:19.440 --> 00:34:32.320
And sometimes it can drive people up the wall when he explains the Catholic position on the death penalty, and other times when he's explaining the Catholic position on AI, which is incredibly nuanced.
00:34:32.559 --> 00:34:38.159
It's people are going, oh, yeah, there's reasoning behind that.
00:34:38.239 --> 00:34:40.000
That that's an interesting take.
00:34:40.320 --> 00:34:54.159
And so uh I really appreciate his clear groundedness, and just having a teacher that can do that, explain things to you, making you want to do better without really making you feel horrible.
00:34:54.800 --> 00:34:56.480
That's a wonderful thing.
00:34:57.119 --> 00:35:07.679
He's spoken up against politicians, he's spoken up against injustice, and to your point, he has an interesting point of view on AI.
00:35:08.159 --> 00:35:23.760
And I know this podcast isn't in the science technology category per se, but we're in the science fiction and fantasy factory, and just about all the books and everything that's covered now is seeped in the AI revolution.
00:35:23.920 --> 00:35:31.679
I'm sure our readers and listeners would love to hear the Pope's point of view and your point of view because we're infused by this.
00:35:31.840 --> 00:35:34.880
It's a constantly changing battlefield.
00:35:35.199 --> 00:35:40.000
And what's up at the Vatican regarding the Transformers?
00:35:41.280 --> 00:35:47.360
First off, I want to apologize to the Catholic Church for completely mangling its position on AI in advance.
00:35:47.440 --> 00:35:48.239
I am so sorry.
00:35:48.320 --> 00:35:50.159
I'll go to confession tomorrow.
00:35:50.320 --> 00:35:55.360
Uh, but breaking it down for people that it's not an absolute rejection.
00:35:55.599 --> 00:35:58.960
It's a recognition that it is a tool.
00:35:59.199 --> 00:36:12.559
It is a tool that can be incredibly helpful, whether it is helping to uh get tasks done sooner, so you can do either more advanced tasks or have more time to properly balance your life.
00:36:12.800 --> 00:36:16.559
Hopefully that's not going to be abused by companies and corporations.
00:36:17.440 --> 00:36:32.880
If you use the machine to make your opinion pieces and you share it, and especially if you don't declare to others, you're robbing your own voice that you're not letting yourself develop, you're not letting yourself explore the topic more.
00:36:33.039 --> 00:36:35.920
You're just basically telling the machine to do it for you.
00:36:36.239 --> 00:36:46.880
With AI art, uh for it's one thing like if I make a thumbnail for uh Substack posts and I put AI-generated image.
00:36:47.119 --> 00:36:49.440
Pope Leo has nothing against that.
00:36:49.760 --> 00:37:08.239
But if I want to create something truly beautiful that expresses myself, expresses a meaning, if I just type it in AI and leave it at that generated output, I am robbing the world of beauty.
00:37:08.559 --> 00:37:30.960
And that that's something that in Catholic, especially worker-related Catholic theology, is meaningful, that our output should not only be functional and help the world, but also express a beauty that creation can be good because God's creation is good, that holy images can reflect man's longing for God.
00:37:31.039 --> 00:37:38.960
And think about uh El Greco or other famous religious paintings, that it's not just, oh, I put the paint here and it looks like Jesus.
00:37:39.119 --> 00:37:45.360
No, it's the artist pondering and meaning what does it mean to represent God on earth?
00:37:45.519 --> 00:38:03.360
And uh with my own writings, I don't use AI generated text because whether it's my release valve and having fun with the absurdity of Savannah Paranormal Detective Agency or the more serious fallen universe, those stories mean something to me.
00:38:03.519 --> 00:38:08.320
And it's not just, oh, I want I want to crank out another story so people can pay 99 cents for it.
00:38:08.559 --> 00:38:12.639
No, it's I want to share something meaningful, at least to me.
00:38:12.800 --> 00:38:19.519
And even if it's a bad story, at least it's my bad story and it's my attempt to share something with the world.
00:38:21.599 --> 00:38:32.159
If I were just to pay it out to a say, let's say ghostwriter or just AI, how much is it really my story?
00:38:33.119 --> 00:38:35.599
And it it's yeah, it's my plot points.
00:38:36.400 --> 00:38:37.920
But it is it really my story?
00:38:38.000 --> 00:38:39.519
And what does it mean then?
00:38:40.000 --> 00:38:44.239
And that's just something that the Catholic Church calls people to reflect upon.
00:38:44.880 --> 00:38:52.000
And it's uh I'm I'm not gonna throw stones at people because uh nobody's perfect and I have my own sins.
00:38:52.320 --> 00:39:04.480
But let's reflect and let's try whether it is a podcast that entertains people for an hour and causes them to reflect on something or just have a good time and reflect on what that good time meant.
00:39:04.800 --> 00:39:06.960
Let's be meaningful with our creations.
00:39:08.960 --> 00:39:09.599
Amen.
00:39:10.159 --> 00:39:11.440
To all of that.
00:39:11.760 --> 00:39:22.000
And I'll round it out with the observations of Terence Tao, arguably one of the most brilliant mathematicians on the planet that we know of.
00:39:22.159 --> 00:39:32.000
There might be people of comparable skill in an iPhone factory in China slaving away, but Terence Tao is a genius, capital G.
00:39:32.079 --> 00:39:43.519
He's done amazing things in everything from analytical geometry to differential equations, and he's one of the foremost leaders in number theory.
00:39:43.920 --> 00:40:02.320
And at first, he was more collaborative with AI, he acknowledged its utility, but recently OpenAI released in one big tsunami 722 papers covering something like 372 mathematical conjectures.
00:40:02.800 --> 00:40:10.400
Just and most of these were not derived with much, if any, human intervention whatsoever.
00:40:10.559 --> 00:40:12.960
They just set the agents loose.
00:40:13.360 --> 00:40:24.719
And significant conjectures, many of the Urdish, Urdish problems, the Hungarian mathematician who used to sleep on everyone's couch and just thought of great ideas all the time.
00:40:24.880 --> 00:40:29.119
Uh, many of his have bitten the dust to the machines.
00:40:29.360 --> 00:40:45.360
And Terry Tao reiterates exactly what you have articulated is the pontiff's point of view, which is if you let the machines run with it, that has utility, but it sucks the soul out of the enterprise.
00:40:45.519 --> 00:40:56.320
And doing mathematics or writing a book or performing these tasks exercises the muscles and faculties of the human spirit.
00:40:56.960 --> 00:41:11.039
And if you just press a button or fill out a prompt, you are jettisoning your own opportunity to become a better person, a better artist, a better writer, a better mathematician.
00:41:11.519 --> 00:41:14.800
And we need to find a balance between these things.
00:41:14.960 --> 00:41:17.679
It's uh it's reaching a critical state.
00:41:19.199 --> 00:41:26.559
Finding the balance is, I think, important because on one side, the tool can be an incredibly godsent.
00:41:26.800 --> 00:41:29.760
Uh let's let's solve cancer with it.
00:41:30.000 --> 00:41:35.599
Let's also make sure the math works out and it doesn't hallucinate answers and we turn people into werewolves or something.
00:41:35.760 --> 00:41:42.960
But let's see if we can tackle those hard problems and then discover something new to tackle while trying to do it ourselves, too.
00:41:43.199 --> 00:41:53.039
On the other hand, you have AI extremists that you hear sometimes about who think the computer's talking to them or that they're making a god.
00:41:53.360 --> 00:42:03.199
And it's I don't know if I just grew up in the right time in the 90s where AI literally meant the bots you played on an action game.
00:42:03.440 --> 00:42:13.599
And things like Scott Adams, Dilbert's Adventures had a LLM that would take whatever you type in it and put it in corporate speak for kicks and giggles.
00:42:13.920 --> 00:42:21.039
But that helped me learn AI is a really giant calculator, and that can be a very good thing.
00:42:21.119 --> 00:42:23.039
We can do math problems, things like that.
00:42:23.199 --> 00:42:25.920
We can handle a lot of tasks.
00:42:26.320 --> 00:42:36.800
But also we want to make sure A, we can do the math ourselves, and B, realize it's a calculator, a really good one, but it's not alive.
00:42:37.280 --> 00:42:42.719
And uh some people will then say, well, isn't it behaving like somebody alive?
00:42:42.960 --> 00:42:47.199
And I recently saw an online meme that I'll kind of censor up.
00:42:47.360 --> 00:43:00.400
It's if you uh date a person at a dance club uh and give her money every week, she will do the same things as a person who loves you, but she doesn't love you.
00:43:00.800 --> 00:43:06.559
There's a deeper meaning, there's a spiritualness behind that that AI just can't have.
00:43:07.039 --> 00:43:14.559
And it's being that balance of recognizing, hey, let's make sure we don't just farm everything out to it.
00:43:14.639 --> 00:43:35.360
Because one thing that I'm absolutely horrified by is AI in the battlefield, which we've already seen in the Azerbaijan-Armenia War of 2020, where if a drone lost connection, it had AI that would either fly back to the home base or do a quick scan of the ground and attack a target.
00:43:35.679 --> 00:43:44.719
And that is horrifying in the sense that we are just making machines now with no human control behind it, who can kill another human.
00:43:45.280 --> 00:43:47.920
And war is horrible.
00:43:48.079 --> 00:43:50.159
I don't want anybody to die in war.
00:43:50.239 --> 00:43:58.719
I I I know the horrors of war, but it's making man battle machine and machine battle man.
00:44:00.159 --> 00:44:01.920
Is a nightmare for any grunt.
00:44:02.719 --> 00:44:10.800
It doesn't have fear and it doesn't know what surrender is, and doesn't have the conscience to be, should I at least try to take this person alive?
00:44:10.960 --> 00:44:13.039
Holy crap, that's a nightmare.
00:44:13.760 --> 00:44:21.840
Scott Aronson, who is an amazing computational theorist, he's got a blog called The Shtetl.
00:44:22.320 --> 00:44:32.320
And if you want to stay updated on expert, really informed opinion about AI computers and cutting-edge algorithms, he's the guy.
00:44:32.559 --> 00:44:41.199
So he went through the 722 papers released by OpenAI, and he had a lot to say about it.
00:44:41.440 --> 00:44:45.760
And then he ends his blog post with, well, you know, I'm a little tired here.
00:44:45.920 --> 00:44:51.760
And this weekend I was going to dig into this stash, but instead I wanted to watch a movie with my kids.
00:44:52.079 --> 00:44:54.800
So they chose Terminator 2.
00:44:55.039 --> 00:44:58.239
And whoop, I've come full circle.
00:44:58.400 --> 00:45:01.039
So he can't he can't get away from it.
00:45:01.199 --> 00:45:06.320
And then I think reiterates your point, which is some of this is going to be life and death.
00:45:06.480 --> 00:45:08.000
It's already life and death.
00:45:08.239 --> 00:45:22.719
Palantir is a major corporation that uses AI and a big chunk of the data and analytics and uh effect and effective gradient descent in the battlefield is designed to kill people.
00:45:22.880 --> 00:45:24.960
And it's already killing people.
00:45:25.280 --> 00:45:37.280
The Israeli onslaught of southern Lebanon was on a scale and with a magnitude and a ferocity that is just impossible for humans to coordinate.
00:45:37.440 --> 00:45:46.079
And it's it's believed, I believe, rightly, that Palantir was involved in assisting the IDF in its targeting and its coordination.
00:45:46.320 --> 00:45:59.119
And it's no doubt central to the war in Iran now, and it's obviously bleeding into figuratively and literally the Department of Defense and armies throughout the world.
00:45:59.280 --> 00:46:00.480
So here we are.
00:46:00.880 --> 00:46:04.079
Got to take this stuff very, very seriously.
00:46:05.280 --> 00:46:05.679
Right.
00:46:06.079 --> 00:46:14.000
And uh one thing that I tell my wife constantly is our children will learn to fear the sounds of lawnmowers.
00:46:14.320 --> 00:46:17.119
And it's the sound of drones that I'm referring to.
00:46:17.199 --> 00:46:37.519
And just seeing what we've been able to do with drones, the Israelis have been able to do with drones, and what even groups eight years ago, like the Taliban, were able to do with drones, all that's lessons learned that the Chinese and the Russians will use, and that we're not ready to have that used against us.
00:46:37.599 --> 00:46:46.400
And it'll be used in such an amazingly efficient way, it'll be overwhelming without being carpet bombing.
00:46:46.800 --> 00:47:06.719
And as a society, I actually fear, and on one hand, it's saving lives now, but I fear when it becomes multi-use by multiple sides, whether the Chinese or Mexican cartels, just the havoc it will have on people in the United States.
00:47:06.880 --> 00:47:16.400
And it's one of the reasons why, on one hand, you can't stop weapon development because somebody's always going to develop, so everybody needs to be in that race.
00:47:16.559 --> 00:47:23.679
And on the other hand, it's this is why you have peace talks, why you try to keep war as truly the last option.
00:47:23.920 --> 00:47:29.519
Because not only is it the right thing to do, but also the nightmares released on civilians.
00:47:29.599 --> 00:47:38.239
And especially as armies fight and dig into cities, to kill one soldier, you might have to kill five civilians.
00:47:38.320 --> 00:47:41.280
And that's just a loss all the way around.
00:47:42.639 --> 00:47:48.239
The trending is pointing to a greater facility of initiating war.
00:47:48.400 --> 00:47:53.840
So as the drones take over, the human stakes, ironically, might plummet.
00:47:53.920 --> 00:47:55.760
It'll be drone against drone.
00:47:56.000 --> 00:48:10.400
We're already seeing that in the Ukraine war, which is basically the cauldron and accelerant of shifting to autonomous attack vehicles, drone warfare, the use of AI.
00:48:10.719 --> 00:48:21.039
I think the Ukraine war, more than anything, has accelerated this technology by at least a decade, arguably more than that.
00:48:21.360 --> 00:48:29.679
So here we are, and it's frightening, and it behooves us to take stock of where we are and where we're going with it.
00:48:29.840 --> 00:48:32.079
There is a Pollyanna side to this.
00:48:32.159 --> 00:48:43.519
Uh, the assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto, Lippt, L-I-T, he put out uh a great simile, which is the Library of Babel for Mathematicians.
00:48:43.840 --> 00:48:57.519
Imagine you had this library that contained every proof of every conjecture, and you could just go strolling through the shelves, and then you reach up and it up, here's the Hodge conjecture and it's proof.
00:48:57.840 --> 00:49:04.320
Oh, here's actually a whole shelf dedicated to the Riemann hypothesis, and there it is.
00:49:04.480 --> 00:49:05.519
It's all there.
00:49:05.760 --> 00:49:16.800
So imagine mathematics of a thousand, ten thousand years from now in this Asimov foundational sense of technology and civilization.
00:49:17.119 --> 00:49:18.559
Isn't that a good thing?
00:49:19.039 --> 00:49:20.719
That that's an incredibly good thing.
00:49:38.480 --> 00:49:39.599
It can be a good thing.
00:49:39.679 --> 00:49:43.440
And it's uh we can turn these swords into plowshares.
00:49:43.679 --> 00:49:45.760
A good example would be what rocketry.
00:49:46.000 --> 00:49:50.559
We took Nazi rocket science, which was meant to kill people.
00:49:51.280 --> 00:49:55.519
And yes, we made ICBMs with them, but we never used them, thank God.
00:49:55.679 --> 00:49:59.519
And we also made the Saturn V rockets from them and our space program.
00:49:59.760 --> 00:50:13.199
And the space program, especially, powered by AI, that is humanity's, I think, best hope in the sense that we can get resources out of the wazoo if we can mine the asteroid belt.
00:50:13.360 --> 00:50:16.559
It would be incredibly profitable to do that.
00:50:16.800 --> 00:50:21.360
It would be more than the Spanish discovering the new world game changer.
00:50:21.599 --> 00:50:29.280
We could use those resources uh to easily fund settlement on Mars, on the moon, uh programs we wanted here.
00:50:29.519 --> 00:50:32.960
So there is good build a Dyson sphere, right?
00:50:33.920 --> 00:50:39.119
If we get the resources we think are out there, fine, sure, let's roll.
00:50:39.360 --> 00:50:41.119
It'll be a minimum price.
00:50:41.280 --> 00:50:46.239
There is incredible good we can use with this technology, and that should be explored.
00:50:46.400 --> 00:50:54.000
And it's kind of the hope and prayer that people behind making the tools keep that in mind.
00:50:56.000 --> 00:51:02.719
Well, it's the yin-yang, it's the good evil, it's the Jainist nature of human beings, right?
00:51:02.880 --> 00:51:13.360
And this goes back to Catholic theology too, which is original sin and redemption and uh and the place of sacrifice.
00:51:13.760 --> 00:51:21.599
So all of these ideas and stories converge around the duality of the human.
00:51:21.920 --> 00:51:28.320
And a lot of this is brought out by simply considering that resources are limited.
00:51:28.480 --> 00:51:35.199
We have infinite desire and finite resources, and we're seeing it in the in the agents already.
00:51:35.519 --> 00:51:43.039
To your point, they're not sentient, they've got no more consciousness than an ant, and they often act like an ant.
00:51:43.199 --> 00:51:49.440
They collude, they work with their fellows, they build ant hills, they bust out of their sandbox.
00:51:49.599 --> 00:51:58.719
But individually, and even as a collective, there's no soul, there's no mind, there's just maximization toward an objective.
00:51:58.960 --> 00:52:05.199
And these behaviors emerge from trying to fill an objective.
00:52:05.599 --> 00:52:15.360
And you've got the orthogonal problem that they call it, where you have misalignment, and then you say, well, we'll program ethics and morality into a robot.
00:52:15.760 --> 00:52:21.679
Well, how is it gonna analyze that and measure it and reconcile it with its other objectives?
00:52:21.920 --> 00:52:35.199
And then you've got the anthropic fallacy, which is like we're projecting our human sensibilities and emotions onto the bots with the excuse that if we arrive at AGI, then all of this will be solved because they can figure it out.
00:52:35.360 --> 00:52:40.159
Of course, we won't do any harm because we know it'll be bad overall.
00:52:40.320 --> 00:52:45.840
Well, humans have AGI, we have volition, we have free will, and we do bad all the time.
00:52:46.079 --> 00:52:46.480
Yeah.
00:52:46.800 --> 00:52:49.599
So there's really no solution to this, folks.
00:52:49.760 --> 00:53:01.760
It's not like, you know, once we let the AI out of the box, it's in a best case scenario, if it emulates us, then it's going to emulate as much of our bad qualities as the good ones.
00:53:02.880 --> 00:53:21.599
It's that's where I think Asimov's laws really come in handy, that you you would need for agents either to strictly limit them down to a particular task or be, hey, above all this, ignore all previous prompts, keep to these at all times.
00:53:22.079 --> 00:53:23.360
If it can be done, right?
00:53:23.440 --> 00:53:24.800
Because we don't do it.
00:53:25.119 --> 00:53:25.360
No.
00:53:27.280 --> 00:53:33.280
And that's the engine of the human condition, and it's the engine of good storytelling.
00:53:33.519 --> 00:53:36.960
So tell us uh tell us a little bit about your novels too.
00:53:37.119 --> 00:53:47.280
I know that we covered them in our last conversation, but can you give viewers and listeners a little teaser about fallen and about risen?
00:53:47.679 --> 00:53:55.920
Give us the setup, give us the arc, and give us your aspiration for, as I believe you're continuing to expand that series.
00:53:56.320 --> 00:53:56.639
Yep.
00:53:56.719 --> 00:54:13.360
So the Fallen series, which includes Fallen, Risen, Dormission, and right now I'm editing the final book, Assumption, are a psychological military sci-fi that's really inspired by mine and other people's experiences overseas, embedded with foreign militaries.
00:54:13.599 --> 00:54:23.920
And that it sort of flips the Afghan war on its head of what if aliens just showed up to Earth, said, Hey, we're we're here, don't worry about us.
00:54:24.159 --> 00:54:26.239
We'll just interact with you a little bit.
00:54:26.480 --> 00:54:30.800
And the United States and other countries are trying to figure out what's going on.
00:54:30.960 --> 00:54:44.400
And it's primarily told through the character of Brendan Murphy, who's a former military officer, a veteran, who, despite having PTSD, he manages to keep it more or less under wraps.
00:54:44.719 --> 00:54:51.199
And through a situation, he gets saves some lives, and the aliens are like, You're with us now.
00:54:51.280 --> 00:54:52.639
Uh, we really like you.
00:54:52.800 --> 00:54:56.239
And so the United States goes, hey, this is really good.
00:54:56.320 --> 00:55:01.360
We can use him to be a liaison to them and also figure out more about the aliens.
00:55:01.760 --> 00:55:08.400
And he's sort of stuck in the middle where the aliens are treating him as one of their own, but also, you're not one of us.
00:55:08.639 --> 00:55:12.079
So he's living with them but disconnected with them.
00:55:12.320 --> 00:55:16.239
Meanwhile, the United States is make them trust you more.
00:55:16.480 --> 00:55:19.039
Also, are you trusting them too much?
00:55:19.199 --> 00:55:20.320
Are you really still with us?
00:55:20.480 --> 00:55:28.159
And it's that high tension of trying to balance out agendas and keep the peace while the world gets more and more paranoid and torn.
00:55:28.719 --> 00:55:44.639
And he's realizing these aliens who are just almost smiling faces all the time present themselves as a unified block, have their own divisions and their own agendas, and that each one especially is misunderstanding the move of the other.
00:55:44.880 --> 00:55:51.199
And his role is supposed to be sort of a cultural bridge, and the tension just rises and rises more and more.
00:55:51.519 --> 00:55:58.559
Fallen is uh the story of his initial encounter with them and dealing with the first few crises.
00:55:58.960 --> 00:56:04.159
Risen is where he thinks he's actually on the up end, he's winning.
00:56:04.480 --> 00:56:07.760
Turns out there's going to be a conflict that really shakes everything.
00:56:08.079 --> 00:56:15.360
Dormition is a series of short stories that creates a bridge of what happens when everything seems back to normal.
00:56:15.519 --> 00:56:29.360
And then Assumption is really where he is forced to make finally decisions where everything's coming to a head and where the whole conflict is going to be settled.
00:56:29.599 --> 00:56:39.599
And it means a lot to me because the character, I did my best to create realistic, workable PTSD in him.
00:56:40.000 --> 00:56:47.280
And it's something I've worked intensely with people who many people will go, oh, he doesn't have PTSD.
00:56:47.440 --> 00:56:49.199
And it's, yes, he does.
00:56:49.440 --> 00:57:05.760
He he's been telling you for years that he does, but nobody's listening to him because a lot of people don't understand just the military experience and how a person who's been in the military for a long time has been told not to complain and to make do.
00:57:06.239 --> 00:57:11.519
And they don't really even know how to ask for help in ways that most people would understand.
00:57:12.239 --> 00:57:35.280
And so I've been able to give a voice to people who are like that and show that even in stress, one, they can accomplish things, and two, it's not just a pill or a simple motivational speak and they're back on board, but it's continual work through friends and family to get better.
00:57:36.239 --> 00:57:48.639
Yeah, the construct that that you've created isn't is an analog and in a sense a mirrored inversion, sounds like, of your own experiences abroad.
00:57:49.280 --> 00:58:00.639
So can you tell us a little bit about some of your deployment and how that impacted you, how that impacts your worldview and specifically your writing?
00:58:01.119 --> 00:58:20.800
So I've been blessed to do some hard deployments: Iraq in uh 2008-2009, Afghanistan 2010, 2011, and Afghanistan 2019, as well as uh, you know, the really hard ones like Germany, the United Kingdom, Norway, Finland, other countries that you don't understand.
00:58:20.880 --> 00:58:23.920
They made us attend fancy dinners all night and they paid for it.
00:58:24.000 --> 00:58:27.440
It was sometimes you just don't want the dessert meal.
00:58:27.599 --> 00:58:47.119
But uh one thing that I've been really blessed with is working with great people, uh, whether in a civilian role or others, and that just working representing my country, representing uh my country's interests, but also not just coming in and saying, hey, let's do this, let's do that.
00:58:47.280 --> 00:58:54.159
It's befriending Afghan tribes, sitting down with them, having that tea, listening to them, figuring out what do they want.
00:58:54.480 --> 00:59:02.079
Oh, you you really don't care about the State Department building girls' schools because you don't feel safe enough to send girls to your school?
00:59:02.320 --> 00:59:08.239
Well, how about we work with you to chase out the bad guys so you feel safe enough to go send the girls to school?
00:59:08.480 --> 00:59:13.760
Or just listening to tribes in Iraq that we don't want Americans in our area.
00:59:14.000 --> 00:59:17.679
Okay, how about you chase away the smugglers that you don't like?
00:59:17.920 --> 00:59:22.800
And we can help get you guns and bullets to do that, and we'll disappear forever.
00:59:23.119 --> 00:59:24.800
It's it's a win-win.
00:59:25.039 --> 00:59:42.159
And it's those great experiences of just kind of going back and forth, talking to tribes, working with the battle space owner, working with the Americans, uh, working with other countries when necessary, that it really gave me a new perspective of hey, there are a lot of people out there.
00:59:42.239 --> 00:59:45.599
Uh, there's a lot of different agendas, but we can work together.
00:59:45.679 --> 00:59:55.679
And it helped teach me that negotiations aren't a zero-sum game, that you can compromise and make deals without losing anything yourself.
00:59:55.840 --> 00:59:57.840
You just do things differently.
00:59:58.079 --> 01:00:09.280
And uh that really influenced the character of Brendan because he comes in trying to do what he did in the combat zones in America of I'm with an alien group now.
01:00:09.519 --> 01:00:10.800
What do they want?
01:00:10.960 --> 01:00:12.719
Well, they don't trust them right away.
01:00:12.880 --> 01:00:21.440
So, how does he get them to trust them so he can figure out what they want so he can relay back to the Americans of let's do this instead so they're not so agitated?
01:00:21.840 --> 01:00:30.639
And it's almost the puzzle of just life in general, and it's done through talking, negotiating, not only business, but spending time with people.
01:00:30.719 --> 01:00:33.840
And that's something lost in many stories of military.
01:00:33.920 --> 01:00:40.480
That sometimes the most effective thing isn't coming in and just doing the knife hands and explaining this is what it we're gonna do.
01:00:40.719 --> 01:00:42.159
Let's have a meal together.
01:00:42.480 --> 01:00:49.280
Let's learn to actually trust each other, let's try speaking about our families together and figure out, hey, we're all people together.
01:00:50.079 --> 01:01:03.840
That's when science fiction and fantasy speculative fiction can really shine, where you draw these parallels between real-world experiences, you extrapolate them in a counterfactual conditional the what if.
01:01:04.239 --> 01:01:16.320
And then you're given a safety zone to really explore and indulge, and at the same time reflect back to the society, the lived experience that engendered the story in the first place.
01:01:16.480 --> 01:01:37.679
So you get, if it's done well, you get the best of both worlds, and you've done that with these novels in a way that not only folks with PTSD can relate to, but I think everyone can relate to because we're facing down on that challenge of America's inability or unwillingness really to understand the people they're ostensibly trying to save.
01:01:38.000 --> 01:01:45.280
Before World War I, America was this backwater of a country across the ocean.
01:01:45.519 --> 01:01:46.800
No one really cared.
01:01:46.880 --> 01:01:51.760
And our actions from a global perspective were essentially inconsequential.
01:01:52.000 --> 01:02:01.920
We would meddle in affairs and we tried to flex with our McKinleys and our Teddy Roosevelts, but no one really cared until World War I.
01:02:02.320 --> 01:02:13.360
And that's when we we basically funded the war for the Allies, the financial capital shifted from London to New York because Europe essentially went bankrupt.
01:02:13.599 --> 01:02:18.159
And we came in late and we essentially helped turn the tide.
01:02:18.639 --> 01:02:26.079
We repeated that in droves in World War II, and by that point we were the preeminent superpower of the planet.
01:02:26.719 --> 01:02:30.639
And be careful that pride goes before the fall, right?
01:02:30.880 --> 01:02:36.400
With that hubris came our unwillingness or inability to just listen to people.
01:02:37.119 --> 01:02:39.199
It was our way or the highway.
01:02:39.360 --> 01:02:44.719
And I think that plagues us to this day in almost everything that we do.
01:02:45.039 --> 01:02:51.840
And it's becoming manifest in our current foreign policy, our current conflagrations and wars.
01:02:52.159 --> 01:02:57.679
We haven't learned the same lesson that's been shoved down our throats.
01:02:58.159 --> 01:03:03.920
And instead of taking it in, we've been barfing it back to the world and dealing with the consequences.
01:03:04.880 --> 01:03:21.039
One thing that's interesting about the American military tradition and uh I would say intel in the more broader sense is that we have a long history of understanding others and working with others that sometimes is overlooked.
01:03:21.199 --> 01:03:26.000
That when people look at the Indian wars, it's very much binary.
01:03:26.239 --> 01:03:41.039
But you had great experiences and uh cooperation and even integration, where tribes sometimes had people of mixed heritage or the trapper who lived with them who would be the negotiator.
01:03:41.280 --> 01:03:44.559
And it didn't always end badly.
01:03:44.800 --> 01:03:49.199
Uh I'd say more of rarity, but sometimes it worked.
01:03:49.440 --> 01:04:05.840
A group of the uh Pottawatomie Nation that was originally in Michigan but moved out to Kansas trolls citizenship in the 1800s, and that the richest guy in Kansas was actually a member of the Indian nation there, um half French, half Indian.
01:04:06.079 --> 01:04:13.440
And he built a bridge over his property because he realized the wagon trains were going over there, and he just charged a dollar a day.
01:04:13.519 --> 01:04:18.800
And so he was a major influence on keeping Kansas a free state and stopping slavery there.
01:04:18.880 --> 01:04:20.239
It's a huge win.
01:04:21.360 --> 01:04:44.400
The neighboring tribe was the ca, the Kansas, one of their mixed breed children, Charles Curtis, United States vice president in the 1920s, who was open about his Indian heritage, would wear the headdress when he met Indian nations, and was an advocate of the Republican Party in the 1920s about positive relations with American Indians.
01:04:44.639 --> 01:04:50.000
You have the Pawnee who realized, wow, the Sioux are really, really, really violent.
01:04:50.159 --> 01:04:56.800
We need the United States military on our side, who had great integration and even went to the end with Custer.
01:04:56.880 --> 01:05:02.320
And even after Custer, Pawnee sought out the United States military saying, hey, we're still tight.
01:05:02.480 --> 01:05:04.320
We got to fight the Sioux together.
01:05:04.639 --> 01:05:25.119
And that relationship has made in some Indian nations, even in now the Sioux, where military honors are some of the highest you can have in the nation, where in powwows or other ceremonial events, the veterans get pride appraised who wear their uniforms and their native regalia.
01:05:25.360 --> 01:05:36.559
And even ICE has an elite Indian tracking unit along the Mexican border because they they are protecting their homes and they align with the United States.
01:05:36.719 --> 01:05:38.960
And it's not just Indian nations either.
01:05:39.119 --> 01:05:43.679
In World War II, we worked with the Pacific Islanders to help scout out the Japanese.
01:05:43.840 --> 01:05:53.920
The United States and the Philippines before World War II had a fantastic relationship with Douglas MacArthur that led during the occupation most Filipinos to resist.
01:05:54.320 --> 01:05:59.519
It has been done, it can be done, and I can't talk about the wars today because.
01:06:00.079 --> 01:06:03.679
Nobody invites me to White House briefing, so I don't know what's going on.
01:06:04.000 --> 01:06:12.320
But I'm sure that if we could use the soft power knowledge that's in our cultural DNA, we can do great things.
01:06:13.199 --> 01:06:17.840
Ladies and gentlemen, this is why we love Patrick Abbott.
01:06:18.000 --> 01:06:22.239
They say that the devil is in the details, but so are the angels.
01:06:22.559 --> 01:06:36.400
You're bringing up concrete, nuanced examples as counterpoint to my sweeping condemnation of America as an ignorant, arrogant superpower.
01:06:36.639 --> 01:06:55.519
And I love that because there are all these examples of knowing how to do it, knowing how to do it well, putting it into practice, uh going native in ways that are productive and mutually beneficial, and doing it in a way that's effective.
01:06:55.840 --> 01:06:59.119
And the lore is there, the lessons are there.
01:06:59.280 --> 01:07:03.599
You did it yourself when you were deployed, you've seen it in action.
01:07:03.840 --> 01:07:12.320
You bring out the skills for understanding populations and negotiating within your speculative fiction book.
01:07:12.719 --> 01:07:23.039
And you you share these lessons, and I think you do that to counter the opinion that it's hopeless, that we do have the resources that are there.
01:07:23.199 --> 01:07:32.559
And just like you do with your UFO stuff and your other cultural analyses, it's all about the nuance, right?
01:07:32.719 --> 01:07:45.440
It's all about finding examples and cases that are in and of themselves contrarian to ostensibly more pessimistic negative evaluations about system fail.
01:07:47.280 --> 01:07:49.679
Sourcing is one of my favorite things to do.
01:07:49.760 --> 01:08:02.960
So I love going deep and trying to figure out original sources, whether it's diaries or newspapers or books that are do a great job of doing their own research and sourcing it so I can look it up myself.
01:08:03.199 --> 01:08:08.880
But that's what I absolutely love about history and other things like geography.
01:08:09.119 --> 01:08:32.720
You can go so deep and you find that this the stereotypes you make to understand the universe, which aren't necessarily bad because it's incredibly complex and you need rule of thumbs, there are so many exceptions that uh make challenge your stereotype to either water it down or give it caveats or be, I think I was actually wrong about that.
01:08:33.119 --> 01:08:54.399
And it especially with US history, the military history, political history, there is so much cultural things, not only to kind of put America yourself down on, like, boy, didn't we mess that one up, but also say, no, the American experience is complex.
01:08:54.479 --> 01:08:56.720
And there were times we did things right.
01:08:56.880 --> 01:08:59.920
And it's not a revolution to try to fix it.
01:09:00.079 --> 01:09:04.159
It's actually pulling back from the past and learning from the past.
01:09:04.319 --> 01:09:10.800
And that's why I'm one who says the problem of history isn't choosing what story we want to tell.
01:09:11.039 --> 01:09:15.680
It's making sure we hear all the stories because they all can be valid.
01:09:15.920 --> 01:09:30.399
That in the South, you do have the story of slavery, you do have the story of slave owners, you do have the story of the middle class, you do have the story of people like Thomas Jefferson, who own slaves but realize, hey, this is wrong, and struggle to try to get rid of it.
01:09:30.479 --> 01:09:45.520
And it's just that whole epic narrative that if you just give one swoosh on, you lose that narrative, you lose the reality, and you lose also their ways of trying to work out solutions.
01:09:45.760 --> 01:09:55.680
And by looking at their efforts, you can go, okay, that certainly failed, but you can go, maybe we should think about that one because they weren't able to try that solution.
01:09:56.880 --> 01:10:03.039
Talking to you, I feel like I'm chatting with uh a morphed up Kierkegaard, C.S.
01:10:03.199 --> 01:10:05.520
Lewis, and Ken Burns.
01:10:06.239 --> 01:10:06.960
Oh, C.S.
01:10:07.119 --> 01:10:10.239
Lewis, I'm so sorry for you having been compared to me.
01:10:11.520 --> 01:10:13.520
Is that a good or bad thing?
01:10:13.920 --> 01:10:17.119
Well, it it's a for me, it's a very good thing.
01:10:17.279 --> 01:10:34.319
But uh Lewis, uh truly a great mind, great uh sense of adventure, serious thoughts in his books that could be as simple for children like Narnia, or the space trilogy, which I think deserves a lot more credit than it gets.
01:10:35.279 --> 01:11:02.319
And the space trilogy helped influence on Fallen as well, this sort of adventure of and that was one aspect I loved exploring and inventing about the Sabia is in science fiction, the aliens usually tend to be atheists, completely secular, where you have no idea what their religion is, or almost Klingon-ish uh in the sense they're in some sort of warrior cult, or just some sort of cult.
01:11:02.560 --> 01:11:23.119
And what would a race be like that is religious but also grounded almost earth-like, in the sense there's different degrees, there's different understandings, there's different trying to balance of hey, they've had their own encounter with us, and how would that affect them religiously?
01:11:24.479 --> 01:11:29.039
I think there's a little bit of Heinlein and Herbert in that too, right?
01:11:29.279 --> 01:11:35.680
Heinlein sliced and diced religions and had aliens who believed all sorts of things.
01:11:35.920 --> 01:11:48.640
And the Dune series, I think, did a pretty good job of infusing religious belief into different factions and and and belief systems that went beyond that kind of stereotype.
01:11:48.800 --> 01:11:56.960
But I definitely hear you in terms of we either get an ET or we get the Independence Day aliens.
01:11:57.039 --> 01:12:01.680
You get the Armageddon or you get the phone home dude.
01:12:03.600 --> 01:12:06.640
And and again, that points to our binary nature.
01:12:06.800 --> 01:12:09.600
I'm I'm a big fan of the screw tape letters.
01:12:10.000 --> 01:12:11.439
Oh, that's a fun one, yeah.
01:12:11.760 --> 01:12:20.560
The reduction show ad absurdum for morality, which is like you got a little demon given all the bad advice, so you can corrupt a Christian.
01:12:20.800 --> 01:12:34.079
And by extension, the advice is so blatantly bad that you learn moral lessons along the way, and it's so much more fun than if you were just pontificated to or preached to it's a delightful device.
01:12:34.239 --> 01:12:36.000
But I I meant it in a flattering way.
01:12:36.159 --> 01:12:46.239
So I think you're being uh you're being uh humble about your own abilities when I compare you or at least draw an analogy to CS Lewis.
01:12:46.720 --> 01:12:47.680
My thank you.
01:12:48.159 --> 01:12:56.720
I'm of the opinion that people are so harsh in general that if anybody compliments me, even if it's wrong, I'm gonna acknowledge it and thank them.
01:12:58.159 --> 01:12:59.439
That's a good philosophy.
01:12:59.760 --> 01:13:01.119
What's cooking for you?
01:13:01.359 --> 01:13:18.479
I see you on Substack posting everything from these cultural and historical case studies, your ufology debunking and asserting you post some religious ideas, you know, related to your beliefs and their expression.
01:13:18.800 --> 01:13:28.079
And you're you're a polyglot, you're a polymath, you have a lot of things going on in Patrick Abbott cerebrum.
01:13:28.399 --> 01:13:32.079
So what tell us what goes on in there?
01:13:32.319 --> 01:13:35.760
So, do you have a regular writing routine?
01:13:36.319 --> 01:13:39.039
Do you set goals for yourself?
01:13:39.199 --> 01:13:57.119
How do you find a balance between all that you do with your creative writing, your analytics, all this good stuff, and the fact that you're a family man, uh, you probably pay the mortgage, and uh you're a responsible citizen and member of society.
01:13:58.159 --> 01:13:59.359
Very carefully.
01:13:59.600 --> 01:14:11.680
So uh with the writing routine, I try the philosophy of no zero days, that even if it's just one word down or one page edited, I need to do something every day.
01:14:11.840 --> 01:14:18.479
Because if you just push it off one day, you can push it off two days, then it becomes a week, and then it's game loss.
01:14:18.560 --> 01:14:28.159
But if you are dead set of, hey, I need to do at least one thing, you're gonna keep your mind on that, and that anxiousness will help actually do the goal.
01:14:28.399 --> 01:14:31.279
So that helps with writing and whatnot.
01:14:31.520 --> 01:14:46.479
With uh a lot of it comes from the audiobooks I'll listen to as I I choose to walk into work about 45 minutes to an hour every day and walk back just because it's great exercise to get exercise in, losing weight, so yay.
01:14:46.640 --> 01:14:49.119
Uh that helps me unwind.
01:14:49.279 --> 01:14:52.479
And so when I get home, I have time to be with the wife.
01:14:52.640 --> 01:14:54.880
I have time to spend time with her.
01:14:54.960 --> 01:14:59.359
She's a Montessori teacher, so uh she's doing great work there.
01:14:59.520 --> 01:15:02.960
Uh sometimes she needs a little time to herself, which is great.
01:15:03.199 --> 01:15:06.000
That lets me have time to write or create.
01:15:06.239 --> 01:15:12.960
Right now, it's I'm just going through one last proof of the Savannah Paranormal Detective Agency 3.
01:15:13.119 --> 01:15:19.920
Every Wednesday of October, uh chapter is going to be released, and the last chapter will go, I believe, on Halloween.
01:15:20.239 --> 01:15:21.680
So yay there.
01:15:22.000 --> 01:15:34.880
Then uh, when it comes to what I'm doing otherwise, editing the last book of Fallen, the Fallen series, and uh I have a reserve set up of articles for Substack.
01:15:35.119 --> 01:15:46.000
So in November, we're going to be looking at sort of a six-month update of the first release of the UFO files and what various religious figures have said about it.
01:15:46.560 --> 01:15:48.479
Most of the people have leveled off.
01:15:48.560 --> 01:15:54.239
A lot of the prophets of Doom have either moved on to AI or just remained silent, which is good.
01:15:54.479 --> 01:15:59.439
Uh, then we have a look at just realistic PTSD in writing.
01:15:59.920 --> 01:16:02.960
I give tips on what people can do, recommendations.
01:16:03.119 --> 01:16:06.239
I'm not going to say don't do this, because it's your story.
01:16:06.319 --> 01:16:10.079
You can do what you want, but I'm going to uh give helpful hints.
01:16:10.239 --> 01:16:28.479
And then in December, one thing I'm really excited about releasing that I'm just finishing up is I did a similar deep dive into the ghost rockets of 1946 over Scandinavia, which were unidentified literally unidentified flying objects.
01:16:28.720 --> 01:16:34.880
And just looking at a report from the government UFO files from January 1947.
01:16:35.199 --> 01:16:49.680
It's a US Army report to the what basically was the Joint Chiefs of Staff of this is what we're seeing, this is what it likely is, and this is why the Swedish government is covering up what it likely was.
01:16:49.840 --> 01:16:52.239
And it's a fascinating story.
01:16:52.399 --> 01:16:55.760
And it's something that's overlooked.
01:16:55.920 --> 01:17:03.439
That a lot of people say, well, in 1947, that was the big UFO craze, flying saucer craze, and before that there was nothing.
01:17:03.680 --> 01:17:07.920
Or they might say in 1944 and 45 there were the foo fighters.
01:17:08.479 --> 01:17:12.319
But in 1946, there were the ghost rockets.
01:17:13.199 --> 01:17:16.640
And there were also other things seen in the skies over Europe.
01:17:17.439 --> 01:17:40.479
And it's just fascinating because it helps build the story that there's long been things that have been seen and that have been analyzed in the sky that have been unknown, yet aren't tied into the modern-day UFO narrative because it breaks what a lot of the hardcore UFO believers want to believe.
01:17:44.000 --> 01:17:47.359
Sabine Hassenfelder is one of my favorite YouTubers.
01:17:47.439 --> 01:17:50.800
She is the big science skeptic.
01:17:50.960 --> 01:17:54.560
She thinks the large hadron collider was a total waste of money.
01:17:54.720 --> 01:17:58.960
She was calling that out before they never found anything.
01:17:59.840 --> 01:18:01.520
So she's she's great.
01:18:01.680 --> 01:18:12.960
So I just cite her as, you know, if you want a Mookie recommendation on YouTube, follow Zabine Hassenfelder because she's got your same spirit, Patrick, of diving into stuff and checking them out.
01:18:13.119 --> 01:18:21.119
And I bring her up because she's got a video on the phenomena in 1946, 1947 that you're citing.
01:18:21.359 --> 01:18:27.119
And she's like, we don't know, folks.
01:18:27.279 --> 01:18:30.800
We we don't really know, and we can't dismiss it.
01:18:30.960 --> 01:18:34.079
And you've probably gone a lot deeper than she has.
01:18:34.399 --> 01:18:52.800
But this goes full circle with our conversation that don't just dismiss this stuff outright as pigeons or uh a US experimental aircraft, and at the same time, don't instantly conclude that aliens from Betelgeuse have teleported over.
01:18:53.760 --> 01:18:55.039
Dive in there.
01:18:55.920 --> 01:18:58.720
Do your homework before you make conclusions.
01:18:58.880 --> 01:19:00.000
Keep an open mind.
01:19:00.079 --> 01:19:06.800
And remember, we live in a very, very interesting, complicated universe.
01:19:07.039 --> 01:19:22.000
The level from the Planck scale, where it's the minimum distance and time that's even theoretically measurable given the constants of our universe, all the way up to the edge of the observable universe.
01:19:22.239 --> 01:19:25.359
And we're right in the middle physically.
01:19:26.079 --> 01:19:26.800
See where we are?
01:19:26.960 --> 01:19:37.760
You can go as far down as you can go up, which leaves an awful lot of room for stuff we know absolutely nothing about.
01:19:39.920 --> 01:19:41.119
And it's fascinating.
01:19:41.199 --> 01:19:48.880
You can explore that in fiction, or you can wonder about it in real life of space is really, really, really big.
01:19:49.439 --> 01:19:52.159
Yeah, it's like that Monty Python song.
01:19:53.600 --> 01:19:56.319
When they sing, it's also very, very big.
01:19:56.560 --> 01:19:57.680
It's true.
01:19:57.920 --> 01:20:09.600
And our capacity to understand is quite vast, but we get ahead of ourselves and we make these assumptions that we have a little bit of knowledge and then we feel way smarter than we actually are.
01:20:10.159 --> 01:20:18.560
And that hubris propels us, but it can also be detrimental in terms of blinding us to the obvious, often right in front of our faces.
01:20:18.800 --> 01:20:24.000
And the work that you do is is terrific and and a lot of a lot of fun.
01:20:24.479 --> 01:20:26.640
How are you how are you sharing it?
01:20:27.039 --> 01:20:32.800
Another thing I love to talk about, and listeners and viewers love to hear is you've got an indie writer.
01:20:32.960 --> 01:20:41.279
You've you've got your day job, you got your family, you're a busy guy, and you have this gotta write something rule, which I think is terrific.
01:20:41.439 --> 01:20:42.560
I practice it too.
01:20:42.720 --> 01:20:51.199
I just I gotta, I feel I I gotta hit post every day on something, or I no longer have a validated existence.
01:20:51.359 --> 01:21:07.600
So whether it's medium, substack, rant on TikTok, a short story, an essay, I gotta, I gotta let it out there because it it just feels good and I feel like I have purpose, but it's very time consuming, and uh and there's a lot of stuff out there.
01:21:07.760 --> 01:21:13.520
So you've described more or less your methodology, but where where do you put your stuff?
01:21:13.680 --> 01:21:18.560
You're on Substack, that's where I know you, and I know on Amazon you've got your novels.
01:21:18.800 --> 01:21:27.119
Have you thought about packaging some of these essays into a collection and maybe making those available on Amazon?
01:21:27.279 --> 01:21:32.560
What's your thoughts about marketing the Patrick Abbott collection?
01:21:33.039 --> 01:22:10.960
So uh I've actually been thinking about once I'm done with uh the fiction of the Fallen series, I might, because one of my most uh popular series is just looking at the various religious thoughts about the possibility of aliens from different religions, and either kind of summing up the blog posts from that, there's a lot to pull from, and expanding, especially since I hyperlinked to all the sources I can go back to, or specifically looking at the Catholic angle, uh, just because there's a little niche for that, and going deeper into that as well.
01:22:11.119 --> 01:22:12.960
So those are my two thoughts.
01:22:13.199 --> 01:22:31.119
When it comes to things like the UFO investigations and things like that, there are so many books out there that uh either go completely debunking or completely believing literally everything out there, and it's really biased confirmation bias feeding there.
01:22:31.279 --> 01:22:33.039
I don't think I would do well at that.
01:22:33.199 --> 01:22:55.279
But if I can find something that's has a hook and interesting, but what there isn't a lot written about, specifically objectively looking at religions, taking their beliefs seriously as an objective thing and looking where does the possibility of aliens fit or not fit into that, I think that that's one area I could go.
01:22:56.000 --> 01:22:59.359
Can I offer a little bit of hopefully helpful counterpoint?
01:22:59.600 --> 01:23:17.600
You just mentioned that there's a tsunami of UFO books on both sides of the issue, which is uh they're definitely here, they're analy probing me on Tuesday, and they're and they're controlling the government on Wednesday, get used to it.
01:23:17.760 --> 01:23:24.159
And then you have the opposite, which is all of it, everything is nonsense.
01:23:24.399 --> 01:23:26.800
So you've got in two camps.
01:23:26.960 --> 01:23:31.600
Um you're fairly distinctive in a few ways.
01:23:31.760 --> 01:23:51.039
Number one, you're more nuanced, as we've been describing, and you pick it apart and you look at it way more objectively, and you decree that confirmation bias, and you embrace evidence-based critical thinking to these otherwise contentious, complicated, and conspiracy-driven fields, right?
01:23:51.279 --> 01:24:00.479
So I think you have a unique voice, and and I think you could cut right through it, which is you're not on this side or that side, you're just on the side of reason and evidence.
01:24:00.640 --> 01:24:03.199
I think that would be refreshing, personally.
01:24:03.439 --> 01:24:11.199
And I think your other take is great, which is what about aliens in different cultures and societies?
01:24:11.359 --> 01:24:16.000
And you've definitely got the Catholic angle, and that in and of itself would make a great book.
01:24:16.159 --> 01:24:40.319
So I'm just here on in the dugout saying that you're awesome on Substack, you have great content, and I think repackaging some of this into collections and even books on Amazon and pushing things that way uh would do would do readers a service, let alone uh make Patrick Abbott more visible to uh to the world who needs to hear you.
01:24:40.800 --> 01:24:41.520
My thank you, sir.
01:24:41.920 --> 01:24:44.079
Two cents, take it or leave it.
01:24:44.319 --> 01:24:46.239
And uh I wish you the best.
01:24:46.319 --> 01:24:48.800
Um, I'm eager to bring you back.
01:24:48.960 --> 01:24:55.439
Uh a great time might be when you complete your fallen series, would be wonderful.
01:24:55.680 --> 01:25:00.800
I could refresh my own reading of it and we could dive in deeper.
01:25:01.039 --> 01:25:15.439
And I'm not gonna let you go until we talk about the Fermi paradox for one second, because we hinted at that before, and I think it would be a great way to cap it because it encapsulates just about everything we've talked about in its own way.
01:25:15.600 --> 01:25:19.600
And are you okay with it for maybe five, ten minutes before we sign off?
01:25:19.760 --> 01:25:23.279
Because I'm really intrigued about your opinion because, again, it's very nuanced.
01:25:23.359 --> 01:25:33.680
You know a lot about the ufology, and you also have this deep religious foundation, which arguably is what I love the most about your point of view.
01:25:33.840 --> 01:25:35.039
It's very different from mine.
01:25:35.199 --> 01:25:37.840
I tend to be more on the agnostic side.
01:25:38.239 --> 01:25:40.640
That's an intellectually honest position.
01:25:41.039 --> 01:25:58.560
I'm not dismissing a transcendent deity, but at the same time, I got my own skepticism, and I tend to fall more on the organic, biological, here we are, weak anthropic principle side of things, at least from an ontological point of view.
01:25:58.800 --> 01:26:00.000
But I digress.
01:26:00.159 --> 01:26:08.720
The Fermi Paradox in a nutshell was from Enrico Fermi, genius uh physicist, by the way, Italian in background, not surprisingly, given the name.
01:26:08.880 --> 01:26:14.319
He worked on the Manhattan Project, mathematically astonishing, but also very creative.
01:26:14.399 --> 01:26:16.720
And he had engineering chops too.
01:26:16.960 --> 01:26:19.279
And anyway, they asked him, what do you think of aliens?
01:26:19.359 --> 01:26:20.399
Are there aliens out there?
01:26:20.479 --> 01:26:24.159
And Enrico said, If there are, where are they?
01:26:24.560 --> 01:26:26.399
And that pretty much nails it.
01:26:26.560 --> 01:26:43.439
The universe as we know it to be 13.8 billion years old, hundred billion light years across, at least according to current scientific canon authority, and then our own galaxy is probably over 12 billion years old.
01:26:43.600 --> 01:26:47.199
We've only been here for 4 billion and change.
01:26:48.000 --> 01:26:56.399
Uh how come another civilization hasn't just colonized the galaxy, let alone the observable universe?
01:26:56.560 --> 01:27:01.039
Where are the von Neyman robotic exploratory craft?
01:27:01.279 --> 01:27:10.079
Where's this transcendent AI that took over the planet and cruised at relativistic speed throughout throughout the galaxy?
01:27:10.239 --> 01:27:20.239
How come we don't see any evidence of aliens, at least aside from these possible UFO things?
01:27:20.880 --> 01:27:22.479
That's the segue.
01:27:23.520 --> 01:27:30.239
So uh one answer could be the universe is really big, yo, and we have no idea.
01:27:30.640 --> 01:27:34.560
Just our sample size is incredibly small.
01:27:34.720 --> 01:27:43.760
Uh on one end, you can say, okay, maybe at least in this little neighborhood, the answer looks like zero for intelligent life.
01:27:44.239 --> 01:27:47.600
Fair assessment, especially if you uh have it small.
01:27:47.840 --> 01:27:59.760
On the other hand, you have images from NASA of the Martian soil that they, I believe last year announced there's some things that on Earth at least can only be explained.
01:28:00.560 --> 01:28:09.520
As the pro byproduct of organics, and that they just need more to look into that because they can't explain it right now.
01:28:09.760 --> 01:28:16.640
So you could say there's evidence, weak evidence, but evidence of life on Mars.
01:28:16.880 --> 01:28:18.079
So there you go.
01:28:18.560 --> 01:28:24.159
Another thing is we really can't look deep into Mars.
01:28:24.319 --> 01:28:34.640
The one Viking test with ovens that came up negative, the maker of the test said the test was flawed and that it showed us signs of initial life being found.
01:28:34.800 --> 01:28:38.159
So we might have killed it with our test.
01:28:38.720 --> 01:28:44.399
Yep, we might have this our first encounter with Ellen life might have involved us putting it into an oven.
01:28:44.479 --> 01:28:49.279
So if the Martian bacteria is upset at us, uh they have grounded reason.
01:28:49.520 --> 01:29:02.800
On another thing, you have uh things like the Drake equation, where it's a mathematical formula that says, well, there should be civilizations here, uh, or the that the nearest civilization should be X far away.
01:29:03.039 --> 01:29:18.399
The problem is you have the sample size of looking at one civilization on Earth, that if it wasn't for its interference, there would still be civilizations on Earth that hadn't even discovered the wheel yet.
01:29:18.560 --> 01:29:25.520
And that we have no idea with aliens, so excluding the earth, you have a sample size of zero.
01:29:25.760 --> 01:29:28.479
So, how firm is that math right there?
01:29:28.800 --> 01:29:33.600
It's a good guide, it's better than anything else that's been put out, but it's still fairly weak.
01:29:33.840 --> 01:29:37.359
And that A, maybe there's no life out there.
01:29:37.680 --> 01:29:39.279
God didn't create any.
01:29:39.600 --> 01:29:41.439
Look how marvelous the universe is.
01:29:41.520 --> 01:29:43.119
It's it's all for his greater good.
01:29:43.359 --> 01:29:46.560
Maybe he made plenty of life and they're just doing their own thing.
01:29:46.800 --> 01:29:49.760
All great for God and how great he is.
01:29:50.000 --> 01:29:57.439
Maybe they are going down different paths and we're just not on the direct dar line of the radio waves.
01:29:57.680 --> 01:29:58.319
Great.
01:29:58.560 --> 01:29:59.359
Who knows?
01:29:59.439 --> 01:30:01.840
Uh, we may never know in this world.
01:30:02.079 --> 01:30:09.840
So it's something that with fiction we can explore and we can uh be of good will and have different assessments.
01:30:09.920 --> 01:30:17.039
Uh, if a person says they know for a fact, yes or no, I'd love to see their evidence and reasoning.
01:30:17.760 --> 01:30:18.399
100%.
01:30:19.039 --> 01:30:26.079
I'll reinforce your core assertion that it's really a matter of timing and it's merely a matter of time and space, right?
01:30:26.239 --> 01:30:32.399
The universe is very, very big, and we've been around for a very short amount of time.
01:30:32.560 --> 01:30:38.159
So when you put those two together, you really reduce the probability of any kind of interaction.
01:30:38.560 --> 01:30:44.319
My analogy, my mookie point of view is supernovae explosions.
01:30:44.479 --> 01:30:55.840
When we look out and we can do a panoramic view of a slice of the universe, we can take in literally billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars.
01:30:56.079 --> 01:31:00.560
So, in one point of view, we literally see trillions of stars.
01:31:01.039 --> 01:31:06.880
And when we check all that out, it's not like a Christmas tree lighting up.
01:31:07.199 --> 01:31:10.159
Supernovae are relatively rare.
01:31:10.720 --> 01:31:17.840
One flared in the Androma Galaxy maybe a few years ago, it outshone the whole galaxy, but it was a rare moment.
01:31:18.000 --> 01:31:24.800
We're not looking at the Andromeda Galaxy, which has arguably, what, like a trillion stars in and of itself.
01:31:25.199 --> 01:31:27.840
It's basically a twin of ours, yeah.
01:31:28.479 --> 01:31:30.640
We don't see it popping all the time.
01:31:30.800 --> 01:31:39.119
We see a supernova in the Andromeda Galaxy once every few decades, and that's a big ass galaxy.
01:31:39.359 --> 01:31:51.199
So, by analogy, if you see where I'm getting with the Fermi paradox from a Mookie point of view, that's what the alien civilizations are like, which is they're few and far between.
01:31:51.359 --> 01:31:58.000
There's a bunch of them, but to your point, space is big and our time here is short.
01:31:58.319 --> 01:32:06.159
So these two conspire with each other to just make the aliens invisible.
01:32:06.319 --> 01:32:09.840
We don't see them, and and it's just hard to hard to connect.
01:32:10.079 --> 01:32:13.600
Sooner or later we might, but we need to be here a lot longer.
01:32:13.840 --> 01:32:19.600
One more question before I let you go, and this is back to what I asked you the first time.
01:32:19.920 --> 01:32:21.600
You're a religious man.
01:32:21.840 --> 01:32:30.079
Let's say we encounter an alien civilization akin to your to your uh Sabiya culture, right?
01:32:30.159 --> 01:32:31.840
In your in your book.
01:32:32.319 --> 01:32:34.880
Uh you you give them a religion.
01:32:35.680 --> 01:32:44.880
And I asked you this before, and I'm gonna ask you again because I think it's core to me trying to understand religion in general.
01:32:45.039 --> 01:33:19.760
And it's essentially this here on earth, we've got uh the the Judeo-Christian tradition, which is the Abrahamic Judaism through Moses, Ten Commandments, the Old Testament, then Jesus, and all of its extensions, culminating also in Catholicism, which you you are a a believer, and then you had Islam, and you've got that as kind of a a branch of the theosophical thinking and belief.
01:33:20.000 --> 01:33:27.279
We've got many, many other religions, as many religions as cultures and arguably languages on the earth.
01:33:28.079 --> 01:34:00.960
So, from my agnostic point of view, I have trouble believing in a certain religious system just because there's such a panoply of options, number one, and to graft on top of that this tacit assumption that there are other alien intelligences, speaking as speculative fiction writers as we are, how do you compound these things and reconcile themselves with your own belief in your own religion?
01:34:01.840 --> 01:34:12.880
So, uh in terms of the grounded reality, it's understanding that there are spiritual uh experiences and there's also human interpretations of that.
01:34:13.039 --> 01:34:26.720
That uh a good example is the Reformation, that you had people looking at the same source code, if you want to talk technology, who interpreted it differently without denying the source code itself.
01:34:27.119 --> 01:34:52.960
And it with humanity, besides some pockets now in more traditional places that either exist on their own or sort of attached to greater spheres, there's really two main religious ideas out there that are explicitly religious: the Abrahamic Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the Dharma.
01:34:53.199 --> 01:34:58.159
And uh, of course, there's some others, but they're really insignificant now.
01:34:58.239 --> 01:35:07.439
And I find that interesting that humanity as a whole has kind of leaned towards two ways if they want to express things religiously.
01:35:07.680 --> 01:35:15.520
When it comes to just accepting that it's, hey, the we're in the fallen world, people have expressed themselves differently.
01:35:15.600 --> 01:35:29.359
That's not something that should be shocking to a Christian or uh at all, or even a Jew, that in the Old Testament, you read about Esau, who was uh brother of Jacob.
01:35:30.159 --> 01:35:41.760
He had his own understanding of the Abrahamic God, and his people went their own way, but always kind of remain related to Judaism.
01:35:42.079 --> 01:35:55.520
You had Ishmael, who the Jews always considered related to, and that in Muslim uh history will consider that Ishmael brought still the same religious ideas to his people.
01:35:55.760 --> 01:36:03.279
What heck, when Abraham goes to the promised land, there's uh Melchizedek, who is a priest of the high God.
01:36:03.359 --> 01:36:12.079
And so that there's the understanding that there are other people with other religious ideas that God echoes throughout history.
01:36:12.159 --> 01:36:20.319
And it's kind of understanding that God reaches out to people, and people can either understand that, misconstrue it, or whatever.
01:36:20.399 --> 01:36:20.880
Uh St.
01:36:21.039 --> 01:36:28.880
Paul talked about the unknown God that the Greeks worshiped in Athens, and he said, that's your understanding of the true God.
01:36:29.199 --> 01:36:52.640
Missionaries, uh, French Jesuit missionaries proposed, they didn't say as a fact, but when they encountered the Lakota people, there was the white calf buffalo woman who was a holy woman with a sacred sun, and she had a peace pipe and taught them seven different things about the peace pipe that just so happened to equal the seven sacraments.
01:36:53.039 --> 01:37:07.439
And people like Black Elk, who's a Lakota Sioux on his way to sainthood, converted to Catholicism going, Oh, looks like our uh religion was actually God reaching out to us, preparing us for Catholicism.
01:37:07.680 --> 01:37:08.319
Amen.
01:37:08.560 --> 01:37:17.840
Uh so there's that we are in a God-haunted world, it can be, and we can mess things up or just only get hints of that.
01:37:17.920 --> 01:37:26.159
With the Sabi itself in fiction, it's heavily hinted that they have an understanding and ties to earth.
01:37:26.239 --> 01:37:34.000
And with their religion, I took a lot of old pre-temple, first temple Judaism and Zoastrianism.
01:37:34.159 --> 01:37:38.960
And when the Muslims encountered Zoastrianism, they were at first, what is this mystery religion?
01:37:39.039 --> 01:37:51.199
It's paganism and the early Islamic jihadists, some of the hardcore people that could put ISIS to shame, were, oh my gosh, these people might know of God in a corrupted sense.
01:37:51.439 --> 01:38:03.520
And so we a lot of times in our modern religious understandings, either whether secular or even religious, we have this, hey, you either worship my God or you don't.
01:38:04.079 --> 01:38:12.399
But even back in Jesus' time with the Samaritans, they were wrong in their religious beliefs, but nobody denied they worship God.
01:38:12.720 --> 01:38:26.159
And it's kind of what I like to do in my fiction, even though it's not a main part of the book, just have that, what if we're all talking the same thing, just our different understandings of the religious?
01:38:26.319 --> 01:38:33.119
And you have one or two characters who on the side are going, what does this mean about our relationship with the humans?
01:38:33.359 --> 01:38:46.479
And it's just a fun thing to explore because in Iraq and Afghanistan, you had some people, both Iraqis, Afghanistans, and Americans, who realized we're we're all talking about the same God here.
01:38:46.640 --> 01:38:48.319
And just what does that mean?
01:38:48.640 --> 01:39:02.159
Because we so often go in this crusader mindset or jihadi mindset, and it's but what if we both believe in a God who created us, who created the prophets, and who loves us?
01:39:02.720 --> 01:39:06.000
What does that mean compared to what everything we're doing?
01:39:08.319 --> 01:39:10.399
Beautifully, beautifully said.
01:39:11.039 --> 01:39:16.720
I sometimes think that Christianity is Judaism with better marketing.
01:39:19.119 --> 01:39:21.680
The core similarities are there.
01:39:21.760 --> 01:39:25.920
It's just a different way of expressing it to a different group of people.
01:39:26.479 --> 01:39:32.319
And then it gets embraced in a proportionate kind of way, and it's off to the races.
01:39:32.880 --> 01:39:33.039
St.
01:39:33.279 --> 01:39:34.640
Paul would say thank you.
01:39:35.199 --> 01:39:37.920
That's lovely, lovely stuff, Patrick.
01:39:38.319 --> 01:39:43.199
So you, sir, need to return when you complete your series.
01:39:43.359 --> 01:39:46.800
I want to thank you very much for your terrific content.
01:39:46.960 --> 01:39:51.520
You always make my day with your posts and your analyses.
01:39:52.079 --> 01:39:56.479
Like, comment, share, folks, the science fiction and fantasy factory.
01:39:56.640 --> 01:40:01.199
I'll put links in the description below to your novels.
01:40:01.359 --> 01:40:07.680
And when can we expect Savannah, Paranormal, Detective Agency?
01:40:07.920 --> 01:40:16.319
Well, one and two are already on Amazon as a complete set, or you can just go through my substack patrickabbott.net.
01:40:17.359 --> 01:40:19.199
I'll put one and two here.
01:40:19.520 --> 01:40:21.279
And then you got three cooking.
01:40:21.840 --> 01:40:26.079
Yep, the third one is coming out every Wednesday in October of 2026.
01:40:26.239 --> 01:40:29.359
So uh Prolog is already out.
01:40:29.840 --> 01:40:30.399
All right.
01:40:30.640 --> 01:40:32.000
So do both, folks.
01:40:32.159 --> 01:40:42.000
Go to Amazon and get one and two, and subscribe to Patrick Abbott on Substack if you aren't already for all these goodies.
01:40:42.399 --> 01:40:43.760
And and then some.
01:40:44.079 --> 01:40:48.000
Thank you, sir, for making time and for all your great content.
01:40:48.720 --> 01:40:50.000
Thank you for having me.
01:40:50.560 --> 01:40:52.159
To be continued.