Today, we’re doing something ambitious and maybe a little bit stupid, but hopefully the right kind of stupid.

We’re rejecting the algorithm. No clips for the feeds. No farming for engagement. Because social media is antisocial.

Tom wrote a book about the Chapel Hill music scene in the ‘90s. Before discoverability tools and doomscrolling. Before music became something you listen to by yourself. Back when people listened together, and told their friends.

After all, word of mouth is the OG algorithm. So that’s how we’re gonna do it.

It’ll be slower, but it’ll be better.

So go tell your friends, and come on up to the house.

~~~NEWS!~~~

We’ll be having our first virtual hangout next week for all paid subscribers and Patreon supporters — speaking of which:

THIS IS THE LINK TO OUR PATREON
1st 100 people get Founder status for $4/month for life.

You might be wondering what the difference will be between Patreon and Substack.
Here’s the breakdown:

Paid supporters of either will get access to ad-free episodes and epilogues.

For the Patreon folks, there will be more bonus video content, as well as access to a private Discord, which we will be launching as soon as the first 100 people sign up.

On Substack, there will be more written work (essays and supplements), some of which will be behind a paywall, as well as access to a paid-subscriber chat, which will go online once we reach 100 sign-ups there.

The world is full of people asking for your money. Anyone who supports this show with actual dollars will have our undying gratitude, and we’ll do everything we can to return the love.

Highlights:

The algorithm is killing us. We have the data.

Social media melts attention and connection

How and why Jordan got into podcasting

Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History proved millions of people will listen to 4-hour deep dives, despite the TikTok-ification of everything

How do we produce stuff that earns thoughtful attention without marketing it on platforms that absolutely ravage attention

How posting on socials violates the creative instinct

If you build your platform on social media, you don’t get to leave

David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water”: we’re all actively worshiping something—the passive viewing sneakily changes our personalities

Tom’s book (A Really Strange and Wonderful Time) about the Chapel Hill music scene in the 90s became a manifesto for “scenius”—Brian Eno’s term for the genius of community, not individual artists

We used to listen to music publicly, with friends, talk about it

Now music is private, instantly available, and we listen alone

The Great Deceleration: we’re trying to build something that encourages depth over virality, connection over “engagement” (whatever the hell that is)

We can’t fail. We’re already on the path.

First 100 Patreon supporters get Founding Member status at $4/month for life

If we can grow successfully without bowing to the algorithmic feeds, it’ll chart a path for other creators

Complete transparency and monthly updates (at least) on the numbers, tracking the OG algorithm of word of mouth

If we’re not giving you what you want, tell us

If we ARE giving you what you want, tell your friends

And in the epilogue…

Once again, here's a link to our freshly-minted Patreon.

And a reminder that the first 100 supporters will get Founder status for $4/month, forever.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most (most!) people report having noetic experiences. Knowing who’s calling before you answer. Predictive dreams. Feeling someone’s presence. Gut feelings that turn out to be true.

The Institute of Noetic Sciences was founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, and it just released a study about twelve unique “noetic signatures” based on deep survey data from over four thousand people.

Some of them know things in their bodies. Others get mental, emotional, or spiritual downloads.

Everyone has a different signature.

But what are the hazards of personal revelation without coherent social support? And what will happen to us if we keep replacing our latent human superpowers with technology?

Still, we have high hopes for 2026. Maybe this is the year we heal from screen addictions. Maybe we’ll finally get some kind of blockbuster disclosure about non-human intelligences. Or maybe, if we all pull together, we can finally break free from the algorithm and move back into our enchanted world.

Highlights:

The Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) was founded in 1973 by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell

They study consciousness, human potential, and the intersection of science and subjective experience

“Noetic” comes from Greek “noesis” meaning “inner knowing” that transcends the five senses and conventional notions of time and space

(Examples: knowing who’s calling before caller ID, predictive dreams, feeling someone in the room, gut feelings that prove accurate)

Most people report having these experiences, but they’re still stigmatized

The Noetic Signature Inventory is a 44-item questionnaire measuring individual’s unique pattern of intuitive experience

Four primary intuitive pathways: body-based (gut feelings), mental (sudden knowing), emotional (feeling into situations), spiritual (mystical experiences)

Is “inner knowing” reliable without the support of a community?

Why it’s so hard to balance social coherence against mystical experience

Robin Lassiter said in the last episode that patriarchy and materialism might not have just been huge mistakes—we got amazing stuff from them, and now it’s time to turn the wheel

In what ways are we trying to replace our noetic abilities with technology?

Jordan abashedly hopes this is the year UFOs, NHIs, etc stop being laughed at on on CNN

Mal hopes we heal from screen addiction (it’s actually possible!)

Tom hopes we can free ourselves from the fetters of the algorithm and move back into an enchanted world

The real magic is in interaction, intuition, knowing, and the gorgeous unpredictability of ourselves and each other

And in the epilogue…

How algorithms actually steal your personality

A pretty MASSIVE decision about the future of the show

Our first progress report on Jordan Crowder’s Law of Probability course

***

SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions.

spectrevisionradio.com

linktr.ee/spectrevisionsocial

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Roman concrete has been healing itself for thousands of years, surviving earthquakes, volcanoes, the ocean…

As she’s actively recovering from surgery, Mal has lots of questions about self-healing. And also why her dad keeps telling her to use colloidal silver.

Jordan Crowder has a lot to say about how the body heals, it turns out, having survived some major, life-threatening health crises himself. We ask him lots of questions, and he offers insights that synthesize science and spirituality in a way that is just exactly our vibe.

Finally, we’re gonna hear about something he calls probability engineering. Your future is a probability cloud. Every decision collapses some outcomes and expands others. Agency is your power to project new pathways into your future that didn’t exist based on your past.

But no, you can’t manifest a million dollars without becoming the kind of person who would have a million dollars. Change requires energy, and the universe resists it just like people do.

We talk about how you can do it anyway.

Welcome to 2026.

Highlights:

Jordan Crowder from Conscious Observers doubles the number of Jordans on today’s episode

Mal shares a story about Roman concrete that survives earthquakes, volcanoes, and millennia under the sea because it literally heals itself over time

The whole Nature Communications article is basically about a possible misreading of an ancient concrete recipe

Why Mal is being drawn to things with “self-healing” in the title

Her dad keeps trying to make her spray colloidal silver on her surgery wound

The placebo effect works even when you know it’s a placebo

Cellular communication

How to help your body do what it’s spent millions of years evolving to do (hint: get out of the way)

Thoughts create reality through quantum probability cloud engineering (an introduction to Jordan Crowder’s Law of Probability)

Your future is not one predetermined path (obviously), it’s a cloud of potential outcomes

You can project entirely new pathways into your future probability field that didn’t exist before based on your past

Agency maxxing

Getting a millions dollars (as a, ahem, for instance) probably means changing behaviors you’ve never changed before

People generally don’t like to change—and neither does the universe, because change requires more energy

Also/related: dumping a million dollars on a someone who isn’t ready for it is usually calamitous

What is a Minimally Viable Manifestation?

Ellen Langer says procrastination is not the problem, mindlessness is

The real work is increasing awareness and “awakeness” to your decisions and choices

Jordan and Mal commit to starting Jordan Crowder’s 21-day probability engineering course

And in the epilogue…

The overwhelming evidence of reincarnation overcomes Western skepticism

Without humans, who would care about beauty? We’re not here just to collapse wave functions.

Jordan Crowder’s 90-year-old Jesus hypothetical

***

SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions.

spectrevisionradio.com

linktr.ee/spectrevisionsocial

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A Norwegian physicist just published a peer-reviewed paper that mathematically describes consciousness as a fundamental field that existed before space and time.

She proposes testable predictions—including the possibility that if consciousness differentiated itself into structured reality through something like universal thought, it might have left detectable patterns in the cosmic microwave background.

This is ancient scripture overlapping with cutting-edge physics. “Thou Art That” from the Upanishads. “I AM that I AM” from Exodus. The earth was formless and void, then God said “Let there be light.” Consciousness precedes manifestation, thought is a collapse mechanism.

Everything happens in cycles. We went out to do science in a universe of strict materialism, and now we’re coming back, changed, to the wisdom of mystery and consciousness.

Finally, we talk to Robin Lassiter about her new Mystery School for the Brokenhearted.

Here’s to the end of a fraught and beautiful 2025, and a 2026 which promises to be no less complicated.

Highlights:

Norwegian physicist published a peer-reviewed paper treating consciousness as a fundamental field rather than an emergent brain phenomenon

Mathematical integration with quantum field theory

Testable predictions involving quantum field interactions, neural coherence patterns, and cosmological signatures in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)

Tom connects this to the Chandogya Upanishad: “Thou Art That”

The Abrahamic analog: “The earth was formless and void” (undifferentiated potential), “I AM that I AM” (consciousness preceding manifestation), “Let there be light” (universal thought as collapse mechanism)

From 2nd century BCE scripture to modern testable mathematical physics of universal consciousness

Everything goes in circles. Going out into the “billiard ball universe” of strict materialism, now we’re coming back around

Robin on discovery through experience itself

What is the relationship between us (personality, body, experience) and the unifying field?

Evolution of grief in community

The healing that can only happen in the presence of others

The Mystery School for the Brokenhearted: the mutual capacity to hold grief without trying to fix or rescue

What makes this era of human history unique

Robin’s “big yes” to the ampersand universe

***

SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions.

spectrevisionradio.com

linktr.ee/spectrevisionsocial

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you’ve got a quiet moment this week, here’s a thoughtful radio essay from Tom that explores the intersections of Victorian literature, social conscience, and what it means to truly connect with our fellows.

Yes, it turns out we can be serious sometimes. Please try not to faint.

In this piece, Tom tracks the circumstances that led Charles Dickens to write A Christmas Carol, from his disastrous American tour and the child labor reports that haunted him, to his compulsive night walks through London’s streets where he encountered the cast out and forgotten.

Within this substrate, Tom weaves together Dickens’ personal struggles, the neuroscience of human connection, and an urgent message about what we’ve lost (and must reclaim) in our age of radical isolation and screen-mediated existence.

Consider this our gift to you: a half-hour to slow down and remember that, “no one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it for anyone else.”

Truly, we wish you the very best of the season, and count you among our beloved fellows.

Tom, Mal, & Jordan

PS - For six years running, Jordan has been making compilations on Spotify called Hot Christmas. Here’s the latest.

And here are links to all the others:

Volume 1

Volume 2

Volume 3

Volume 4

Volume 5

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Let’s talk about drugs.

This week we learned that some doctors have figured out how to make DMT trips last as long as you want. They can dial it up or down, or turn it off if things go south. And in the ultimate hack to do this legally, they formed an actual church, and they’re recruiting members for what they call “expeditions.”

Their stated goals are to develop therapies, solve advanced problems, explore consciousness, and build something called “the Matrix Machine.”

Probably a long shot, but maybe this is how we’ll find out who and what DMT aliens really are.

And speaking of non-human entities: it turns out there’s a mushroom in China that makes pretty much everyone see itty bitty little people. And this thing has absolutely no relation to psilocybin, if you can believe it. In fact, it doesn’t contain a single psychoactive compound that we know about.

So, once again, we’re left wondering if these are hallucinations, or…something else.

Highlights:

The Extended State DMT program (DMTX) has figured out how to stabilize and extend DMT experiences

The International DMT Church

Consistency of DMT experiences

Jordan conjures a comically horrible mental image of people handcuffed to beds with IV drips, trapped in thousand-year experiences they can’t escape

Are we exploring the architecture of the human mind, or accessing something external to ourselves?

Most psychedelic insights are “just vibes” (Paul McCartney, for instance)

A mushroom that makes 96% of people see tiny people or elves, often dancing, jumping, or marching (the story)

Reports span Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, and a third-century Taoist text about a “flesh spirit mushroom” that lets you “see a little person”

The mushroom is genetically closer to porcini than to psilocybin—contains NO known psychoactive compounds

Chemical analyses reveal nothing

Experiments on mice

Does this explain why every culture throughout history has legends of fairies, elves, and sprites?

Are the mushrooms making you hallucinate little people, or only allowing you to see the little people that are already there?

(Picture a Lovecraftian world full of squirming horrors just outside our normal perception)

Victorian art depicting sprites smoking pipes while sitting on mushrooms

No epilogue this week. Blame the holidays. But also, if you’re not one of the handful of heroes with paid subscriptions — well, now you’ve got time to catch up, don’t you?

godsghostsUFOs.com

***

SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions.

spectrevisionradio.com

linktr.ee/spectrevisionsocial

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What happens after we die? It’s one of the fundamental questions that drives all human interest in religion, philosophy, and science.

But while it might not conform to strict materialism, we actually do have a huge body of evidence about what the so-called afterlife might look like. You’ve heard of near death experiences, but you might not know how rigorously they’ve been studied. There are thousands of documented cases that reveal remarkably consistent patterns.

So that’s what’s up for today — NDEs, afterlife cosmologies, how the James Webb Space Telescope is breaking Big Bang theory, and what the handprint of God might look like to someone trying to build a religion.

Oh, and a few hours before we started recording, I heard about Robert Monroe’s visit to the afterlife, so we talk about that, too.

In other words, if you can only listen to one more podcast before you die, you could do worse than this one.

Highlights:

Growing up Mormon meant growing up with a rich afterlife cosmology

NDE stories as religious confirmation bias

Ancestors and experiences with people who’ve passed on

People get too comfortable with their pictures of reality in both science AND religion

Is the James Webb Space Telescope breaking the Big Bang theory? (that Kurzgesagt video)

In every generation, you can find prominent scientists who say we’ve figured pretty much everything out, right before some major paradigm collapses

Christian Wiman: “If you believe at 50 what you believed at 15, then you have not lived, or have denied the reality of your life” (from My Bright Abyss)

The large and rigorously studied body of NDE evidence (Jeffrey Long’s work, in particular)

What Robert Monroe saw in his trip to the afterlife (ht Jordan Crowder’s podcast, and Ultimate Journey)

Hell as a lower-dimensional experience

Can a higher-dimensional God manifest as a lower-dimensional being? Would that lower-dimension being not be God?

Bad branding for universal consciousness

Samuel Norton’s Come as You Are, and the hotel analogy for final judgment

And in the epilogue:

Why God might call most Christian creeds “an abomination”

The real definition of moral courage

How social media is like carbon monoxide, lulling doom-scrollers into the sleep of death.

SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions.

spectrevisionradio.com

linktr.ee/spectrevisionsocial

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nick Cook is a British aviation journalist turned consciousness researcher. We discuss his take on the Age of Disclosure documentary, why the UFO conversation has become impossible to have like adults, and how simulation theory might be the most grounding framework for understanding reality (no but really).

Highlights:

Nick’s storied career, from winning four Royal Aeronautical Society Journalism Awards to investigating Nazi anti-gravity research (Hunt for Zero Point) to consciousness studies (Bigelow essay contest winner)

His “Age of Disclosure Challenge”: trying and failing to have actual conversations with skeptics about the documentary’s evidence

We’ve lost the ability to hold adult conversations about polarizing topics

Back to the co-creative nature of the phenomenon

Nick’s simulation theory framework: consciousness is non-local, not generated by individual brains but expressed through them

We’re all nodes of a larger consciousness system, constantly feeding data back

Simulation theory might sound meaningless, but it actually doubles down

Truly understanding consciousness totally recontextualizes human hierarchies

The great secret of disclosure isn’t about NHI technology, it’s about how governments have weaponized this for 80 years with Cold War mentality

Nick’s approach is the least horrifying version Mal has ever heard

Someone please come up with a better name for “simulation theory”

And in the epilogue:

Nick shares his perspective on human agency, or “free will”

Why our souls might have dreaded coming to Earth School

What the Belgium drone mystery proves what intelligence agencies know (or don’t)

***

SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions.

spectrevisionradio.com

linktr.ee/spectrevisionsocial

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kicking us off this week, Mal takes us through the complete James saga—a YouTuber whose mysterious “UFO” turned into toxic performance art. After that, a high-level conversation about The Age of Disclosure, before Tom finally gets to share a wonderful update from Loch Ness.

It’s good, guys. It’s real good.

Highlights:

Recapping and then tying off the story of James the UFOtuber

How he started off, what made him compelling, etc

That time a couple weeks ago when he maybe faked his own death?

His half-hearted attempts to keep the mystery alive

The big reveal that it was all a hoax

A lively conversation about the crappiness of this whole thing, and what it reveals as an artifact of our culture

Weaponized sincerity, parasocial manipulation, and other fun ideas to enjoy

Jordan’s meta-review of The Age of Disclosure (including a quick recap of his experience attending a screening in LA)

A stupid review from the New York Times that we refuse to link to

A Bug’s Life as a labor organizing manifesto

Go join Citizens for Disclosure (after you hear an impassioned pitch for civic engagement)

Something is shifting, people are tired of the same things, conversations are bending differently

News from Loch Ness - researchers used underwater drones to capture very boring footage and very interesting SOUNDS

Very much also: charming Scottish narration and infectious enthusiasm

The lake monster laugh is going to be our new ringtone

And in the epilogue

***

SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions.

spectrevisionradio.com

linktr.ee/spectrevisionsocial

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, for kicks, we decided to flame a rancid piece of alien abduction “journalism,” including feeding the thing to AI on a whim to see what happens. Then, on the back of an article in The Debrief about a supposed “Seventh Sense,” we get into a speculative conversation about transhumanism, biology, technology, and human perception, before circling back to waste more time with sycophantic LLMs.

Beware the energy vampires.

Highlights:

A thorough dissection of alien abduction woo-woo gobbledygook

A “spiritual healer” who probably doesn’t exist, albino men in parks, bodies on spacecraft walls, O negative blood as 1950s genetic engineering, and UFOs “dumping out water and frogs”

The article claims “we are a much more advanced version of AI... Tesla approved that”—a sentence made of words

Experiencers dealing with trauma and isolation deserve thoughtful journalism, not content farm garbage

We ask Claude what it thinks, and are reminded how important it is to frame questions carefully when interacting with AI

From Chrissy Newton at The Debrief - New research from Queen Mary University reveals humans can detect objects buried in sand before touching them

Humans achieved 70% accuracy detecting hidden cubes; AI-assisted robots only managed 40%

Mirror touch synesthesia: some people literally feel what they see happening to others—sight translating directly into tactile sensation

The “seventh sense” is actually our fingertips reading microscopic disturbances in sand around hidden objects—feeling the echo of what’s beneath

Our technology mimics nature, then reveals deeper layers of complexity in nature, in an infinitely recursive pattern

Why transhumanist dreams of replacing our “fragile, broken bodies” with robot perfection are probably very silly

The more we understand biology, the more we realize how incomprehensibly sophisticated human bodies actually are

What if advanced civilizations actually value hard work done by hand?

Assembly lines run by robots: great. Assembly lines staffed by humans forced to behave like robots: the worst

Remember that AI slop is basically an energy vampire

And in the epilogue:

How good horror movies are basically modern incarnations of the Aristotelian tragedy

Wrestling with the probability that the universe is full of super-intelligent, non-human monsters

Why we blame victims to make ourselves feel safer

Last thing! Here’s the link to check out Anomalie - use code MAGIC for 60% off the full experience.

***

SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions.

spectrevisionradio.com

linktr.ee/spectrevisionsocial

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices