Dan having COVID (After Show) (RW245)

It really sucked and there were definitely points where Dan thought he was dying because the fever felt high and he thought this is never going to end. He doesn’t want the Long-COVID and it also doesn't seem like he has it. Right now the only indication that he even was sick as of 3-4 days ago is that he could create some snot if he wanted while normally he couldn't do that. Today, yesterday he felt pretty much normal and if you erased his memory of the last week and then asked: ”Were you sick recently?” he would say he doesn’t think so.

Dan does know people who lost their sense of taste and smell and it has been gone for a little while. Many people in the original round of COVID still will get winded and other things like that from it and that sounds really horrible. How many people who are getting the Omicron are getting the Long-COVID from it? Dan doesn’t know anyone who has experienced that from Omicron, maybe the vaccine prevents that, maybe it doesn't. Dan just wants answers, he wants two different medical people to say the same thing once. Doctor A and Doctor B both agree. It is serious and what they tell you is serious to the point where if you had one doctor who said: ”Yeah, you should smoke cigarettes. They don't do anything. It is fine!” and then the other one says: ”Smoking cigarettes will kill you!” and they are both legit doctors with the same credentials. That is where we are with COVID, no one can agree on anything!

Which supernatural phenomena or unproven stories are most likely to be true? (RW245)

Dear Dan and John,

I am 6’1”, 220 pounds, male, and a High School math teacher. I make about $80K a year and I am now on winter break.

Question #1: Of all the supernatural phenomena, cryptids or unproven stories that people tell each other, which do you think are the most likely to be true? For example: How do ghosts, the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, and faking the moon landing stack up against each other?

Question #2: People often get details wrong, especially in retailing events. Of the likely true things you selected in question 1, what do you think are the details that we definitely have wrong? For example, are Bigfoots the most likely to be real but far less hairy than they have become in the stories?

Thank you for all the great shows! — Listener Rudd.

John’s reply

As a longtime cryptozoologically adjacent person and Bermuda Triangle fancier John can't settle on the whole multiverse of physical things that exist in the world that are outside of our ability to capture and record reliably, so he is left holding the bag of: ”Why do I get spooked sometimes?”

John gets spooked by a lot of things! One time he was walking down the street and there was a person stretched out on the sidewalk, asleep in a doorway, and he stepped over them and as he was stepping over their legs he knew: ”That person is dead!” He went into a shop up the street and said: "Well, that person is dead! Nothing I can do about it!” and he kept going, did his errand, and when he came back out the person was on a gurney in a body bag and they were putting the person in a mortuary van. John knew they were dead! There was no reason looking at them that you would think this person is any deader than the next person.

That kind of spookiness, he can't say that it is not real, he has never been able to talk himself out of it, he never laid in a spooky place at night and gone: ”Come on, get back to science!” It doesn't change the fact that he is spooked, but other than that he doesn’t think there are hairy big feets or bald big feets, he is not even so sure about magnetic anomalies anymore, although he does feel those, too and he has talked about that many times about how in the center of Budapest there is a magnetic anomaly and nothing makes sense there.

That is maybe not true for everybody. Nobody can register it on a science, but John definitely feels it, like when you see Bermuda Triangle movies where all the instruments inside of the Hellcat bombers all start spinning, the altimeters and the compasses are all spinning because of an anomaly or something. John feels that internally sometimes. John is a doubter, but with a caveat.

Dan being a man of science, not believing in ghosts, being very interested in alien abduction stories

Dan likes to think of himself as a man of science. His grandfather was a scientist, a metallurgist, and due to discrimination against Jewish people in his life he was unable to get a PhD in it. The schools at the time, Carnegie Mellon and others, refused to issue him that, but despite that he was given some awards from the government. He worked for the government designing anti-ballistics, tank-armor and stuff like that for World War II. He was very educated, very smart, and up until his very last days, including his last days, he was very lucid and had all of his marbles and was a big influence to Dan as far as the way that he thought the scientific method, and he imparted that kind of thinking for Dan as the template that he uses when he interacts with the world, which is to say Dan thinks of himself as being a rational as opposed to a fantastical kind of thinking person.

He doesn’t subscribe to magical realities, he does his best to overcome cognitive bias, and at least he tries to be aware of it and how it works. When he approaches something it is in a scientific problem-solving way. At the same time, these things are absolutely fascinating because so many people across the world report the same or very similar things with a great deal of consistency and they did that even before we had the Internet. They did that even before it was super-easy to type Gray alien into a search box and see 50 pictures and then talk about it as if you know what you are talking about.

There is definitely a phenomenon in the world. For example, take near-death experiences: People report very consistently and always have as far back as the first near-death experience goes, very similar things, similar visuals, similar feelings, they are surrounded by loved ones, and other things like that. Does that mean that those are real things that a person experiences when they are dying, or are those simply the physical effects of dying on the brain? For example if Dan were to cut you with a knife, the place where he put the knife would your skin would separate and then blood would start coming out of that, and if he did that to another person or even to himself, the same thing would happen. It is a physical response to being cut by a knife.

Is the effect that someone experiences when their brain starts to lose oxygen and shuts down in a certain way, are those what create those feelings of the near death experience, the tunnel, the light, all of that stuff? Is not just what happens to the human brain under those experiences? We don't have a way to prove that. Science has actually tried doing tests where they test people and try to subject them to similar things without killing them and they have those experiences to some degree, but that is not a valid way to test, it doesn't prove anything, really. Of course we never know because the people who complete the near-death experience and die can't talk about it, so what is going on there?

The same thing could be turned around to the alien abduction experience, for example, one that Dan thinks about and reads about a lot. Those experiences are very consistent. It is almost uncanny how consistent they are and how many millions of people have and do report these experiences. But then we also have mass media, we have the Internet, we have tons and tons and tons of literature and movies and TV shows, and really anybody who was born and has grown up in the mid/late-1980s and beyond have been seeing this stuff and are knowing this stuff.

So what is the story there? Is it simply a part of the human psyche that just happens to some people and not to others? Or are these real experiences? Who knows! It is impossible to say! Especially when it comes to alien abduction, there is something going on, whether that is something that is a shared experience among people that has a completely explainable biological cause within someone's own mind, some kind of mental illness, some kind of physical created mental experience or something that is real? Either way, something is going on because millions of people experience that on a very regular basis. Something is going on, just like you could say something is going on with everyone getting COVID now. Well, we can prove what that is. We can look at that. We can test for that. You can't test for alien abduction, not really.

That is the big thing that is happening right now that is the most interesting to Dan out of all of these phenomena, although he wouldn't categorize it as supernatural, he also would not categorize Bigfoot as supernatural, he also would not categorize the Bermuda Triangle, all of the examples that he gave, except for ghosts. Dan doesn’t consider those things to be supernatural. While he does believe that there is something going on with alien abduction, he definitely thinks that there is something maybe even with a Bigfoot, but he doesn’t believe in ghosts, and he doesn’t believe in anything that someone would categorize as supernatural. He doesn’t include UFOs in that, that is not supernatural. Supernatural to means basically ghosts in the spirit realm, and Dan doesn’t believe in the spirit realm.

The Buddhist concepts of Karma and rebirth

Dan is a Buddhist and he believes in what Buddhists describe as rebirth, which is different from what most people think of when they think of something like reincarnation or being reborn. It is not that, it is a very complicated issue, it is very hard to explain, but one of the ways that he has heard the Buddhist concept of rebirth explained is that if you understand Karma in the Buddhist definition of Karma, it is a simple concept that is rarely understood in the West this way because usually when we think of Karma it is: ”Well, you did something bad, something bad is going to happen to you!”, which is sort of Karma.

It is simple if you think of it in these terms: ”Everything that you do has a response. There is a reaction in the universe to everything that you do!” If you spill a little bit of water on the ground while you are walking and don't clean it up and someone else trips, there is a cause and effect there. You spilled the water. Someone tripped. Does that mean you are bad? What if you didn't know that you spilled the water? Are you devoid of experiencing a result of Karma? No, you still spilled the water and everything that you do has a side effect to it in the world.

As long as you are creating Karma, which all unenlightened non-Buddha people do, all people who have not been enlightened are still creating Karma, the effects of that Karma is going to come back to you. But what if you die before all of the Karma that you have created in your lifetime has a chance to come back to you? You started creating Karma when you are very young, and all of that Karma, whether you intend it or not, starts stacking up. That is the Buddhist philosophy.

The analogy that they use in Buddhism is throwing a rock into a perfectly still, calm body of water. There are little ripples, and the little ripples go out even if you can't always see them, they go very far in this perfectly still body of water, and everything that you do, even your thoughts, is creating little ripples that extend far beyond where you can see them. The fact is, there are other people being affected by those ripples, too, even in ways that you can't possibly imagine, unless you are an enlightened being, and none of us are enlightened beings.

If you happen to die physically before you have resolved all of your Karma, which is basically impossible unless you are enlightened, then that causes your next rebirth. The fact that you are being reborn is because you have created that Karma and it has to go somewhere and you are born again to deal with it again forever and ever and ever and ever, forever and ever and ever, suffering, suffering, suffering, suffering all along the way until maybe you are lucky enough to get stream entry and then seven more rebirths until you are enlightened.

What modern Buddhists often say is that everyone who was going to get enlightened pretty much has been already. Those people are gone, they are enlightened, they are doing whatever it is that you do when you become enlightened, which is you just disconnect from the simulation and you don't have to do it anymore. It is not impossible to get enlightened, but it is tough now. Back in the olden times when the Buddha was chilling 2000-3000 years ago, there weren't a lot of distractions in the world. You could sit under the tree for a few years and get much further than you could now with your iPhone in your pocket.

That comports with John’s experience. Not a ton of people walking around where you feel like: ”Wow, you are just one or two iterations away!”

Dan’s definition of supernatural

Dan doesn’t believe in the supernatural, but there are a lot of things that people would call phenomena that he includes in the natural world. He would also include what people would call psychic phenomena in the non-supernatural stuff because the human brain thinking is electric signals, they can test that, they can show that when people think about something that makes them angry, there is activity in the prefrontal cortex, whatever. That is electricity they are measuring. It seems possible to Dan that a human being could potentially somehow be sensitive to someone else's electricity. Maybe that's possible. Dan doesn't know how that would work, he doesn’t understand it, but what if it is possible?

There is some potential for people to have extra-sensory perception and other things. Predicting the future? Dan doesn’t think that that is possible, but that does not fall in the supernatural. Dan’s definition of it is ghosts, hauntings, poltergeists, and he doesn't believe in any of that.

Bigfoot

Dan has always loved the idea of Bigfoot. What if there is some kind of bipedal forest-dwelling primate that is intelligent and smart enough to avoid detection and somehow still surviving after all that we have done to the forests in the Pacific Northwest and how little forest area there remains, and somehow these things have been around all along the time that we have been around, but they kept secret and private from us? It seems like a long shot! It seems really rare, because if they are that smart, why would a creature so big also be so good at hiding itself? Why? When you hear people tell the stories: ”It made this horribly loud howling sound, and it was this horrible stench that was unmistakable!”, these are all things that would make them not stand out in the woods. You are going to hear them, you are going to see them, why do only some people see them? Why are they so hard to do? Why do we have no proof of it? Dan doesn’t think it is something that is real, but he wanted it to be so bad.

As a kid Dan had really cool boots that on the bottom had a Bigfoot imprint, so when you walk in the snow they made it look like a Bigfoot print. Dan wants Bigfoot to exist, it would be amazing if Bigfoot existed, but it is super unlikely.

More likely than that, though, I think is the concept of a Loch Ness. Not anymore, but a long time ago the idea that there could have been a Loch Ness monster, some plesiosaur type thing living there, sure! Why not? All you need is a few of them. They could keep living in there, that is possible! It is a big lake! Now it would be much harder to find one of them. You would think by now we would find Bigfoot if it was out there. John is not big into cryptozoology, other than because he grew up loving Bigfoot as a kid he wants them to be real, he just doesn't think there is a lot to that stuff. Chupacabra, the Jersey Devil, those are just people confused people not sure what they have seen. There are a lot of things that look like other things in the dark!

Something like the Bermuda Triangle is very likely either coincidence or planes, boats, whatever that were affected in some way by some magnetic anomaly. Those are real! Maybe you are using old fashioned instruments, you fly over something, and you don't have GPS, you are using an old-fashioned compass to set your heading and something affects it, you go off course, you run out of fuel, you crash. There are no aliens that work there, it is just human error.

They have talked about the moon landing before (see RW229) and Dan is still believing in his theory: We did go to the moon, we did land on the moon, and it was successful. However, what the American public was shown either was not what actually happened on the moon or is mixed in with what actually happened, but was created somewhere in a studio. At that time the space race was a very big deal and the Russians were successful in putting a man in orbit before we were, they were ahead, and we could not afford to not win the space race for morale of the American public.

As a contingency plan they set up a completely successful and completely fabricated moon mission that included footage of the astronauts running around on the moon, different parts of the launch, different shots out the window, lots of different things that they were doing so that should something happen they would still be able to report a successful mission and they would be able to say: ”Hey, look, we did it!” even if we didn't do it, and no-one would know. They could have done this pretty easily back then. But Dan thinks we did it successfully many times, but in that first time a lot of what might have been shown was some of this footage. Maybe we just didn't have reliable or good usable footage. Maybe it contained things that they didn't want them to see. Who knows! Dan is a believer that we did make it to the moon.

Question #2.

People often get the details wrong, especially in retailing events. Dan just thinks that humans are human beings. We always get stuff wrong. The way we remember stuff is different, two people very rarely agree on even the most basic, simple events. As far as how things were created, done, experienced, everyone has a slightly different memory of everything. The memory is incredibly unreliable. John has perfect recall of everything that has ever happened to him. All you have to do is go back to the great archive of the stories John has told on various podcasts and over the course of many years the stories remain perfectly consistent down to the turn of phrase. Dan thinks that means John remembers them one way, but if someone else was there experiencing them, they might have a different memory of that. But that is because other people have terrible memories.

Dan’s son remembers everything. ”Remember that one time you played that song in the car?” - ”You were like five! How do you remember that?”

Do physical locations carry emotional resonance? (RW245)

Hi Dan and John!

I am Rachel, a long time listener, long time caller. Here is a refresher on my details: I am 37, 5’8”, 230 pounds, make approximately $55.000 a year and use she/her or they/them pronouns.

The letter by Delle in the bonus material for episode 231 (see RW231) and your responses came into my life at an oddly perfect time. I listened on my way back from a visit to my old neighborhood in Philadelphia, a neighborhood that is or possibly was loaded with a great deal of sad memories and trauma from a childhood of bullying and social isolation. I hadn't been there except in passing for over a decade. My goal, I suppose, was to return to the scene of my trauma as an adult and hopefully get some closure, or at least catharsis. Bare minimum, I returned to this place to prove to myself that I could.

To my surprise it feels like it worked. It felt cathartic to return and see the places where this trauma occurred from an adult perspective. There is still much work to be done, of course, but I feel as though I am in a much better place to do it now. So many of my memories seem tied not to objects, but to places. They carry an intense emotional resonance for me in a way that objects of my life tend not to, with the exception, I suppose, of my collections of physical music media, and concert ticket stubs. This leads me to the question inspired by Delle's letter and your responses:

1) Do physical locations and places carry as much emotional resonance to you?

2) How do you deal with bad memories and experiences tied to those physical locations?

Thank you for taking the time to read this and for all the great shows! — Sincerely, Rachel!

SeaTac airport

Physical places resonate with John a lot and as they change over time he can go in and out through time. SeaTac Airport for instance in 1969 when he first experienced it he was just an infant, but it was still the same airport in 1974 and by that time he had been in and out of it a lot of times for a five year old or a six year old. By 1978 he had been in and out of SeaTac 100 times and it was a very familiar, comfortable, but also a pregnant place because he was always going from one parent to another. He loved both his parents and didn't have this: ”No, don't make me go!”, but he did have a feeling of being regularly and several times a year completely uprooted and put into also his family, also his parents, but one where all the rules were different, completely different state environment, different sheets, but also different expectations, he was a different person.

SeaTac started to change and they modernized it and they built onto it and then they built onto it again and modernized it again and with each modification they made it a lesser and lesser place. It was a place that had such an identity and such a feeling, and the vibe was intentional, and all of John’s emotional life as a child is associated with that very real place. As they started to modify it and change it and make it bigger and glitzier and worse he continued to have life-altering experiences at SeaTac over and over.

When 2001 happened and all airports were ruined forever it became an unrecognizable terrain, terra incognito, a place that he knew like the back of his hand, he knew every bathroom, he knew every stairwell, and all those things were gone, you couldn't go anywhere, and yet still buried under all of that carapace of garbage there is the SeaTac of 1969, the tiny little shadow of it. There used to be at the north end of SeaTac a giant window and at Christmas time they would hang a humungous wreath that was there throughout the Christmas season.

When John was a kid, no matter where he was in the airport - he would get dropped off in the airport a lot after a certain point - he would always find the wreath because he always traveld at Christmas, usually Christmas Day. He would have Christmas morning with his mom and he would fly to Alaska in the afternoon and have Christmas night with my dad. He would find that wreath that was at a dark end of the airport, that area now is Alaska Airlines, but at the time there was nothing going on up there. It always felt empty, but there was that wreath that was a great comfort, even though it was enormous and the scale of the wall and the ceiling and this wreath, it was just so big, but there was never anybody there and he would go and look at the wreath and go back into the hustle and bustle of the airport. All that is just gone, but still there is a shadow of that memory.

John can be in places, he can go back to old neighborhoods, he can go stand in front of his childhood homes, and you look at them with their new paint jobs, with their RAV4’s parked in front, it is kind of a game here in Seattle where he drives around with Jason Finn and he will say: ”I dated a girl that lived in that building! I dated a girl who lived in that building!” And you can see through the matrix of time to remember that building in 1992 and go: ”Oh, right! And that was the girl over here!”

There aren’t a ton of places that John doesn’t go look at because he doesn’t want to go there. Luckily none of his childhood homes are that. Going back to Alaska last year and being on the chairlift at the ski resort and realizing that it was a place he had been very sad, not a place that he had grown up happily. It was a place he was constantly under attack. There are very few places that John is careful about going and standing in front of, very few places that he would turn left a block in advance of the block where the place was. All of those places got those negative associations when he was in his 20s, none of it is from childhood. He can look at his own childhood with fascination, even the bad parts, but stuff that happened between the ages of 20 and 24 when he was still on drugs, there are a few places where nothing is going to be gained by him standing in front of that house. He wouldn't have even thought of it until they started talking, but there are places that he doesn’t drive by.

Dan’s reply

Dan doesn't associate a lot of sentimentality with objects. He used to and he doesn't anymore. He actually really enjoys not doing that and then being able to give away things that supposedly should have meaning and don't. It has been a long time since he was back home, which would be Philadelphia/Abington. The 1-2 times that he had visited back there there was a nostalgia, for sure, but he doesn’t have any real desire to go back and revisit those things. Also he tries his best not to replay things that happened in the past in his mind. I likes to examine the things that happened shortly after they have happened, learn what he can from them, and then move on and not dwell on those things, which is not always easy.

Dan tries not to hang onto those things to the point where he really would even be in a situation where he would revisit a place where this thing happened. He really just doesn't want that because he doesn’t really have much of an association with those places anymore. If anything he has forgotten them and he doesn’t really feel a strong desire to hold on to them anymore.

John thinks a lot of it is age, too. Dan is almost 50, and at that age there is a certain amount of absolution that you apply to your past because by that age you have dealt with what you are going to deal with. You can keep working, but you have been over it enough and you got to come down one way or the other on stuff. That was then, or this is me, or whatever.

The stuff that Dan did 20-40 years ago, some of those decisions definitely put him in the situation he is in now, no doubt, but what is going back and thinking about them really doing? Thinking about things in his past that have happened, traumatic events, good events, bad events, whatever, he doesn’t have strong reactions to those memories anymore.

An example is the following: In 1997/98 Dan wanted to start a web hosting company and he was going to run it out of his house. This was back in the days when you were lucky to have like a 2400 baud modem. One of his friends ran a little hosting company over one ISDN line, and that was plenty fast enough to host dozens of websites! Dan thought he should get in on this racket, make some extra money, and run these servers that he knows how to run anyway out of his house. He had to sign a contract with AT&T to provide a business ISDN line that was going to cost $150 a month and you had to commit to a certain amount of time and you had to give a $500 deposit. The guy that he was going to go into business with at the last minute changed his mind and didn't want to do it.

Dan had already signed and executed the contract, though, and now he was going to be on the hook for an ISDN line for a few hundred dollars a month, which at that time in his life and still he would not want to pay a few hundred dollars for something that he didn't need and couldn't really use and that he wasn't going to do anymore. Dan was so furious, he called these people and fortunately they let him out of the contract, but still he had to pay $500, which is a lot of money for something that you are not even doing. Over the course of my life… he has to get four new tires for his truck and that is going to cost him $1100, fine, they are Michelins, they got a really good warranty on these, it is fine, he made peace with it.

That is more than double what this ISDN line thing wound up costing me, but the amount of anger and frustration and fury and rage… he was channeling it ever time he did yard work for months, he was so pissed off, and looking back it was $500 which was a lot of money to him back then, but did he really feel it? Did it make it so that he could not live his life the way he needed to? No, it just hurt! But it was fine. He wasn't on the streets because of it or anything. It just sucked. All that time that he spent in that negative head space around it, replaying it in his mind, thinking back on it, going over and over: ”What if I had said this? What if I had done this different? What if I had waited a day to sign the contract? What if I had gotten an agreement between me and him down on paper? What if I had asked him to put up the money? What if, what if. What if.”

This pain that he was causing himself about all of this stuff was just crazy! Why did he do that? Even if it had felt like a lot of money? Still, what is the point of that? You can't dwell on that anymore. You have to let that go! You have to move on!

Dan can't really look back on his life and say: ”Oh, man, what if I had done this thing different? What if I played that different?” His whole life is: ”What if I had done it different?” Literally, there would be nothing he wouldn't second guess or question. Maybe three things where he wouls say: ”I did that right! That TV that I bought in the early 2000s was pretty good. I am glad I got that!” What is he going to walk away with and say: ”Yeah, that was the perfect thing to do!"? Nothing, really! So what is the point of that kind of thinking at all? Dan just avails himself of all of that thinking, there is no reason for it.

If something really traumatic had happened to Dan in a certain place he wouldn't want to go back to that place, it would take a lot of courage to go back to that place.

John’s reply

It is nice to go back sometimes to a place and realize how small everything is, how much bigger you are, and how much the boundaries of your whole world were just a tiny little area. There were times when John agonized over $500 for years and made terrible decisions based on $500 somebody owed him or didn't owe. You get older and you are bigger in every way, and you can not only see: ”Oh, the $500 was nothing!”, but also the stakes between those people were nothing, or that person that used to traumatize you was a small person and the trauma only felt enormous because you were small, but now you can see they were just weak. One of the most disarming things about all of the trauma that you experienced when you are young is realizing at a certain point that the people you thought were strong were weak, and the strength that they inflicted upon you was weakness, which is a huge flip.

In the best possible scenario it turns it into empathy or sympathy for that person and you are able to turn your own hurt into something positive, which is: ”Oh, they just were hurt and they sucked because they didn't know how to deal with it!”, but even if you don't forgive them, to be able to see: ”Oh, that wasn't about me at all. That was about them! It was a bad accident that I had been born to that person or that I lived next to them or that they were my uncle!” or whatever. There is that advantage of going back to a place that seemed so big and so full of monsters and realizing it is really small and those monsters were small.

If you are really unlucky and you lived with actual monsters that you go back and you realize that they were just as monstrous as they seemed, that is a different process of dealing with true monsters. But that is probably a process that is a longer episode. They hear sometimes from people that have dealt with real monsters.