The Basement: Joshua Cutchin | Fairies, Bigfoot, and the Connection Nobody Saw Coming
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What is discussed at the start of this section?
I founded Ornot in 2013. I think the best thing about Shopify is that we can practice business without technical skills. We can manage the company's background systems and front-end and sell online. If Shopify was a bicycle equipment, it would be a bicycle itself. That way things are handled and our business is handled in Shopify. Start a free trial at shopify.com website. Today, I'm talking with Joshua Cutchin, a researcher who spent the last decade building the case that every paranormal phenomenon we've ever recorded is a different facet of the same thing. UFOs, fairies, Bigfoot, ghosts, near-death experiences. His book, Ecology of Souls, argues that all of it connects to death, or whatever's on the other side of it.
This theory is being taken seriously by serious people. Jeffrey Kripal at Rice University teaches it to his PhD students. Today we're covering how he built that theory, what the fairy literature gets right that ufology keeps ignoring, and his latest book, Fourth Wall Phantoms, which is about fictional characters that cross into real life. No, that one's true. One day on Hollywood Boulevard, I saw Spider-Man, Thor, and two SpongeBob's. We also talked about how ChatGPT is addicted to goblins. This is a true story. You're going to want to hear it. After the episode, I'll do a quick breakdown of what we covered and what I can prove. Now, let's go down to the basement.
Josh Cutchins here. Welcome to the basement.
Thanks so much for having me. I'm still in shell shock, but... Are you? Yeah, it's just a lot to take in, and I'm always under the assumption that people have no idea who I am. So, you know, hot dog vendor. Remember I said that earlier? Now people in this space know who you are. Well, I appreciate it. Everybody here has been so welcoming and hospitable, so it's wonderful to be invited into this fairyland, this subterranean fairyland, really.
Everyone's nice because you're nice. Not nice people don't, they don't get to the studio. They just, we send them home. Fair enough.
Goodbye.
So you studied tuba. I said to my wife, I said, there's going to be an icebreaker question.
I know exactly what it's going to be. It's going to be the tuba question.
Tuba. Under Fred Mills, Canadian Brass, one of the best players of his generation. He says that tuba is underestimated as a storytelling instrument. You're a storyteller and a tuba player. Do you agree? I would. What are we missing?
How does Joshua Cutchin connect paranormal phenomena to death?
Yeah, no, I would. Oh, man, we could do a whole podcast about Fred Mills stories. They broke the mold with Fred. Yeah, I worked with Fred at the University of Georgia in the quintet setting, which, you know, if you're going to work in a brass quintet setting with Fred Mills, who was head of the Canadian brass, that's quite a privilege. But yeah, the tuba is, it gets pigeonholed a lot as being like, you know, the jokey, farty kind of instrument. Yes. But it really has so many different types of characters that it can be. You know, there's a powerful and there's a menace to it. I mean, if you go back and listen to some of those John Williams scores, you've got Jim Self playing a lot of these tracks and these themes, and Home Alone, there's a playfulness to it.
That's true. An ambition-ness to it. I think of Peter and the Wolf. Yeah, yeah. And it's just, I think that it's kind of been an interesting journey for me because I go into the music space where I have a lot of my friends and gig, because that's a big part of still what I do. And they're always like, so what's up with the UFO thing, Josh?
Yeah.
And then I go into the UFO space, and they're like, what, the tuba? Like, where does this come from? So I kind of feel like an outsider everywhere.
Well, yeah, I mean, you're the jazz-playing, tuba-playing UFO researcher researching alien food offerings. So how did that – what was your household like? Is the weird stuff always around?
Well, that's a really good question. You know, and so as far as this current author journey that I'm privileged to be on – The only person in high school who really wanted me to go into music was my high school band director, because as we were saying a little bit earlier, I always had to work at the music stuff.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is discussed at the start of this section?
0:00–2:47
2
How does Joshua Cutchin connect paranormal phenomena to death?
2:47–10:00
3
What role does the tuba play in Joshua's storytelling?
10:00–18:30
4
How does Joshua's upbringing influence his views on the paranormal?
18:30–1:23:01
5
What connections are drawn between near-death experiences and UFO sightings?
1:23:01–1:23:49
6
How do altered states of consciousness relate to paranormal phenomena?
1:23:49–1:25:12
7
What insights does Joshua Kutchin share about his writing process?
1:25:12–1:26:44
8
How does fiction influence our understanding of UFO phenomena?
1:26:44–2:39:32
Speakers
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