Patrick Abbott Explores Faith, Firepower, and First Contact

The 32nd episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory features Mookie diving deep into science, religion, and philosophy with indie author Patrick Abbott. a writer pulling from real-world experience to build science fiction that resonates. 

Patrick's Fallen series hurls readers into a first contact scenario where humanity is immediately outmatched technologically, strategically, and psychologically. The alien race, the Sabia, arrives speaking our languages, offering gifts, and refusing to explain themselves. The hope, confusion, and chaos fracture governments, ignite suspicion, and force impossible decisions.

What makes the series land is Patrick's background working alongside foreign militaries. He understands what it feels like to operate between cultures, where loyalty blurs and every interaction carries tension. That perspective runs through the story: negotiation replaces heroics, and the real stakes live inside human relationships under stress.

The conversation digs into how those experiences shaped the books, including the psychological toll of deployment and the quieter, often ignored forms of PTSD. He builds characters who function on the surface while slowly breaking underneath, telling the tales of people chasing adrenaline just to feel normal, even as it destroys them.

Faith runs through the entire series. His characters carry belief systems that actively shape their decisions, especially when confronted with something as awe-inspiring and destabilizing as alien contact. The Sabia bring their own religious framework into the mix, turning first contact into a collision of worldviews as much as a geopolitical crisis.

Mookie and Patrick then go broad, into his fascination with the elusive truths that might lurk within UFO mythology, cargo cults, and the human tendency to search for meaning in anything we can’t explain. Why do modern alien narratives feel so familiar? Why do belief systems keep resurfacing in new forms? And what happens when science, religion, and fear all collide at once?

They also get into the reality of being an indie author. No gatekeepers, no safety net. Abbott breaks down what actually works: building a network, using reader magnets, showing up at events, and making direct connections with other writers and readers. The game is simple: do like Mookie and go full DIY, keep creating, keep reaching out, and don’t wait for anyone to notice you.

This episode covers the intersection of experience, belief, and storytelling, and how real-world tension becomes narrative fuel. The glorious result demonstrates how science fiction can still say something honest about the people living inside it.

The Guest

Patrick Abbott is an indie sci-fi and fantasy author whose work fuses military experience, religious inquiry, and speculative imagination. A former overseas deployer with service in Iraq and Afghanistan, Abbott writes the Fallen series—Fallen, Risen, and Dormition—with the fourth and final novel Assumption set for around Christmas. His other works include The Savannah Paranormal Detective Agency, Savannah Paranormal Detective Agency 2: The Tybee Uranium Killer, An Odd Pilgrimage, and The Wick in the Wind. Through his fiction and Substack, he explores first contact, faith, trauma, and the stranger corners of human experience. 

Visit and subscribe to his Substack: https://www.patrickabbott.net/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Hello and welcome to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory. I'm your host, Mookie Spitz, and on the factory floor, I'm thrilled to have Mr. Patrick Abbott.

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Hi, it's great being here. Thank you for having me on.

SPEAKER_01 0:19

It's great having you, Patrick. You're a sci-fi writer?

SPEAKER_00 0:24

I am. I'm an independent sci-fi writer. I base my books either on just the general humor of my life, like my short stories, The Savannah Paranormal Detective Agency one and two, and hopefully many sequels, or uh on my experiences deployed overseas, such as my Fallen series.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

So you you cross over in interesting ways. You've got a little bit of that uh, what was it? The Douglas Adams, Dirk Gentley's holistic detective agency. That's what came to mind. I know you're completely different, and making these comparisons is sometimes onerous, but that's just what came to mind as kind of a wacky, off-the-cuff niche focus. We can talk about it in a second. And then to your point, the military sci-fi of the fallen. You've got a contact, first contact situation. It's it's more heady than most. You've got the alien race, the sabia.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

The sabia, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

And uh humans are negotiating, and it's uh they're at a disadvantaged position, and it's interesting in terms of taking the first contact motif and uh and making it sophisticated in terms of of keeping ourselves out of a sling, so to speak. So we could we could talk about that. You're an army veteran. That's the case.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

You were so I deployed overseas. I wasn't in the army, though.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Oh, okay. So you were you were deployed, or at least part of that. And I'm assuming maybe some of your experiences or the zeitgeist of that translates into your military Venn diagram crossover with science fiction, right, and fantasy and the like.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

So uh it's definitely based on my and others' experiences when we were embedded into foreign militaries, the negotiations, seeing how things are so different when you're living with another side, you're neither in their camp or your own camp because you're kind of thought as, oh, you're now with them. And it's just balancing all the loyalties, having to smooth things over, and then just the general grind of a deployment.

SPEAKER_01 2:31

Yeah, and you bring these to light in your series, which is which is evolving, and there's a religious element too, which we could cover off on. Well, I know it seems like your faith is important to you, and and that's a fascinating perspective. This this admixture, if you will, between science, cosmology, extraterrestrials, and good old-fashioned human religion, practicing religion and reconciling these, bringing them together, and then using those as fuel for your creativity. I'd love to dive in there a little bit. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 3:10

Shall we dive in right away?

SPEAKER_01 3:12

Uh, sure. If not now, when? Let's uh let's go for it.

SPEAKER_00 3:17

Fair enough. So, a little bit of background where that explains where Fallen came from. So I last deployed out in 2019, and I was in Kabul, right on Camp R S, which was the main military base, and I was helping out with various things like the peace treaty and also just the tribal affairs of the area. And coming back, we saw the writing on the wall for Afghanistan. Things were falling apart despite everybody's kind of best efforts. And also with work, I was involved when I got back of working with people who were suffering from PTSD, but not in the typical ways. Too often people think PTSD, they think Vietnam flashbacks, completely alcoholic off the wall. We had a lot of people coming back who were functional PTSD and CPTSD, where they could do day-to-day actions. So everybody's sort of assumed they were fine. But whether it was a marriage falling apart or just constant mental breakdowns that became more and more, that was really going work was noticing that, but nobody was really addressing that. And then COVID happened. And so there was a lot of stressors there. And during that time, I'm thinking, man, I would love to write a book about this, just the kind of the experiences of people and how they're dealing with stress. I go through through the public affairs office with the Pentagon, they go, absolutely not. It's like dang. I'm talking to a senior executive service, an SES person, and they bring up, you know, if you write fiction and you don't talk about sources and methods or names like that, they can't say no to you. And I thought, huh. Well, I could tell a fictional story and get sort of the insight and the experiences that way. And it's well, how do you do that? Sci-fi. I've always been a sci-fi fan. I wanted to get into that. And so I started thinking up the fallen uh first the fallen book, then the fallen series, and having it be sci-fi was actually liberating in a way because I could tell the experiences and also add other layers to it. The first layer I added was basically the experience of Iraqis and Afghans, where this giant military force comes in, like the Sabiya, and just shows up and they go, Why are you here? And we when I was involved, it was we're here to fight the terrorists and whatnot, but I started talking to other people and they told me different stories that were uh very kind of explaining the cultural tension we would experience. For instance, there was a female chaplain in Iraq, and she went up to a bunch of Kurds, uh Kurdish elders in a village, and all of a sudden, in Kurdish, because she was really excited about learning it, started talking about the Quran and how Christians and Muslims are alike, and then she left and it freaked the Kurds out because they were just doing. Imagine you're just in your normal government job, and this person comes up in perfect Kurdish, a little bit of an accent, but all the grammars correct, almost too correct, starts talking about deeply personal subjects and then leaves. I thought, wow, wouldn't it be kind of neat if the aliens in the book just show up to Earth, look a little too like us, just start speaking English to us, French to the French, Russians to the Russians, and when we inquire, like, why are you here? They go, Don't worry about it. Here's some nice stuff. And so I started thinking about that. And then just being a religious person myself, I've been kind of disappointed with a lot of religious fiction out there. It serves a good purpose. I'm not knocking them, but too often they're just kind of stand-in stories for a Christ-like figure who comes in, everybody just has to believe in them, everything's good. Being a Catholic myself, I'm well familiar with Saints stories where people have hard times, where uh people struggle in day-to-day life. And especially with working with people who had CPTSD, a lot of times the questions they would ask is, where is God in all this? And so I wrote, uh, there's a level to fall in that's a pastoral book, in the sense that God's not coming down and shooting lightning bolts and shooting down planes, but people themselves are religiously motivated, especially the Sabia with their religion, some of the human characters, it affects how they interact with people. And it's they're trying to figure out in this extreme situation of two civilizations just meeting each other apparently out of the blue, what does that mean in their life while everything else is happening? And so combine that all together, hit hit it with a stick. The first fallen book was written in 2022, and it's been off to the races since. I've gotten three books out, I'm working on the fourth and final one. Uh, I tell my wife, my imaginary friends are about to release me. I'm pretty excited. I get along well great with them, but when I write chapters, sometimes I'll have dreams where they go, No, that's not how it happened. This is how it happens.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

I I know that feeling as a writer myself, when you know you're on to something when your characters are actually dictating the progression and trajectory of the narrative. It's uh usually we feel that the we're channeling the muse, and the muse is channeling us, and we're relinquishing control. But the real power comes when your own creations grab it from you and even the muse and start doing their own things. That that's when you know you're really on to something, and it's a beautiful feeling just to be a tool of your own characters.

SPEAKER_00 9:16

It can be enjoyable, and it also can be like, come on, I just wrote that chapter, and I'm probably gonna be a little bit more.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

So, in summary, you had a passion about a lot of folks suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and you wanted to translate that, I'm assuming, into some kind of chronicling or some kind of documentary to report on that and in some way help them out. And then you you were informed that no, you can't really do that as being a member of America's services. So the recommendation was made turn it into fiction, and then you realize that science fiction, fantasy as a genre, would uh release you and empower you with all sorts of opportunities to uh indulge your own creativity and storytelling that's there. Fallen was was birthed, and you incorporated a lot of your field experiences too, which is an invading army acting a little bit weird, having questionable motivation. And what would folks be like being in the thick of this from both ends? Yeah, and and and and how do motivations crisscross? How does that ambiguity lead to certain unexpected and unfortunate situations? And there you've got a story, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

And it a lot of it is kind of just dwelling on that and get hopefully giving people insights because with the PTSD, for a lot of people who suffer from it, it's very hard with other people relating to it that uh a lot of times people would be afraid to go to their family because they're afraid of their family just toughening up. Uh, and one of the a good example is in the book, the main character, Brendan, is basically in an adrenaline cycle decline where he's trying, he's almost a junkie for events because that lets him feel normal. But that mental and physical stress is wearing him down, and his episodes where he basically melts down are getting worse and worse and worse until the end. I had one reviewer who said I don't understand this character, he just doesn't man up and get better. And what I'm trying to do with the book is hey, this character is realistic in that sense of how people can function and become dysfunctional. So uh in that way, it does work because it does demonstrate whether or not people recognize it, but that's how some people actually behave. And when it comes to how people feel with an invading army, the first time I was in Afghanistan, we were just walking down the street one day during market day, and the sergeant next to me goes, Sir, how would you feel if every day the Chinese or every week on Thursday the Chinese just walk through your village? And it it was it was that sort of mind-opening thing for me that allowed me to see things from different points of view, even if I didn't accept that point of view, I could recognize it exists. And so with Fallen, I hope that people can see not just the oh, aliens come to Earth, but how would different people who are affected differently by this event react to it and give understanding to how people can react to traumatic events?

SPEAKER_01 12:37

And not only unique to the situation in the Middle East, but in South Korea, especially the younger generation, tremendous resentment about the American occupation. When from our point of view, we we freed them from authoritarian disaster. Look, look at a satellite photo of North Korea, that's all you need to see at night, and there you go. And from their point of view, to your stress, uh, it's an occup, it's an occupation, it's a violation, especially when motivations cross over, when individuals are with other individuals from positions of power.

SPEAKER_00 13:15

Yep. Uh the it's great for the politicians, it's great for the businesses, just having all that money there. But if you are a South Korea nationalist, hey, it's great you're not attacking North Korea, but North Korea is aiming all those missiles at us because you're here and you're also thinking about China, and so China's thinking about us, and then you have other cases like Okinawa, where hey, we we have a base there, they have the ancestral memory of a hundred thousand people being killed on the island, civilians. And if if you throw that out and say, Oh, that was 70, 80 years ago, you have all those cases of Marines behaving badly. And I don't want to get this U-2 ban, but bad encounters of intimacy of non-consensual nature on the island.

SPEAKER_01 14:09

Yes, and they were violated by the Japanese as well. So Korea was occupied from about 1900 to 1945, the end of World War II. When we nuked Hiroshima, we killed 10,000, 15,000 Korean slave laborers as well. So these interlocking, confusing, frustrating tendrils of history ultimately impact the individual. And you have to look at it on an individual level. And it seems like from your novel, you're taking that very individual approach as to power relationships, the idea of cultural misunderstandings, and the need to negotiate from this disadvantaged position. So it's a very, very interesting premise. It's unconventional, and it's nuanced in a sense, which is refreshing when you've got these big epics that concentrate more on world-building technology, geekery, and leave out that human component and the and the drama between the characters.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

And there's some great epic books out there, the Sun Eater series, fantastic. But you're right, on my end, the how people relate to that world is what really interests me. And just because there wasn't really a book particularly like that out there, being told, hey, you can write fiction in your story and they can't stop you was actually very liberating. So it's been a fun exercise since.

SPEAKER_01 15:38

Absolutely. And and how do you reconcile is a bad word because it implicitly suggests contradiction? But how do you merge your spirituality and your Catholicism? And again, I don't know much about you, but from what I can tell, it's important to you, it's important to your family, and narratives about interstellar conflict and this gigantic cosmos with all of these different societies, species, let alone all the religions that are already here on earth.

SPEAKER_00 16:15

So uh practicing Catholic myself, I'll say I believe everything the church teaches. I will then caveat that with, I'm a horrible sinner. So anywhere where I fall in action or belief is completely on me. Uh one of the fascinating things about being deployed was meeting people of good will, whether they were Muslim, Zoroastrian, Yazdi, Alawite, what Jewish, whatever. And while thinking, wow, that's not my beliefs, being encountering them, being of goodwill, just interacting with them was a really refreshing, eye-opening thing. And how we could have, I met the Muslim chaplain for an Afghan unit, and we would have dialectics, I would say, not debates, where we would actually discuss differences, similarities. And he actually brought me once to his Quran study group to be okay, this is what Muslims teach about the angels. Now let's ask our token Christian. And it was a fun, fascinating thing with that. With uh the fallen series, I got to basically explore that in a sci-fi sense of what if there were these Zoroastrian influenced like aliens with also a little bit of Hebrew mythology as well, and they came to us like we came to Afghanistan and Iraq, where some might be interested, like, oh, what do you believe? Most would be, oh, that's what you believe. Oh, and others just wouldn't care. And being a Catholic, I recognize what the church teaches, that there's nothing inherently contradictory about the possibility of aliens. So it would be, what is it like? And for a guy who in the book is struggling with his own faith, wondering where his religion and God are, having these alien friend characters be, so what do you think? And just being almost treated like an animal in the zoo, not in a mean way, but they're they treat him as a curiosity. And as he learns bits and more about him, because at first it's oh, we're not allowed to talk about anything really about us to you. But the more he's with them, the more he's integrated with. He's able to see a little bit more and more. He's able to see similarities and differences, and then also apply that to that explains why they're doing this thing oddly. And it's sort of the negoti and it's a balance for him because one, he has friends and he wants to be kind. Two, though, he's a negotiator for one side and he has to use anything to his advantage, and that is including the trust of his friends and also little bits of the religion that he observes of them to okay, if they can do this or can't do this, how can I use this to the best benefit of the United States?

SPEAKER_01 19:08

The pragmatic approach juxtaposed with that spiritual, almost philosophical bent is very interesting and provocative. The typical way of looking at this is communicating with aliens usually takes place with the universal language of mathematics and science. This goes back to Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov. You have these first encounter, first contact situations where ways an alien and a human start to communicate and in Hail Mary, the Andy Weir book, now the movie. Uh that that's how they begin their dialogue, Grace and Rocky. They share their location in the cosmos based on a model. They they they identify the different molecules that they need to breathe, oxygen and ammonia, that kind of stuff. So the gravitational constant is universal. The speed of light is probably the metric in the universe. And there are all these dimensionless constants that we tacitly assume aliens of any sophistication technologically would know about, utilize. So that's a form of communication, that's a language. Now, religion, one would argue, is ad hoc. Like as a practicing Catholic, you have a set of beliefs accompanied by rituals, and you consider them absolute in the sense that these are part of your tribe, so to speak. Zoroastrian aliens, Jewish people, uh, you know, Muslim Kurds. They each have their own ideologies, their own practices. So, how do you grapple with that? On the one hand, there's mathematics and science, measurable, evidence-based perceptions, interactions with the universe. And then there's these belief systems that seem very ad hoc and contextual based on history and culture and society. You blend them in your in your narrative, but I'm very, very curious how you how you, and again, I don't want to say reconcile, but but but figure them out. Like, how do you simultaneously believe that everything the church says is true, and at the same time understand that other religions feel exactly the same way. And beneath and above all of that, the language of mathematics and science might be really the only universal language that we can ultimately share between ourselves and aliens.

SPEAKER_00 21:50

So, with that, uh, it kind of goes into the mindset to not disagreeing with what you said, but that's a very Western mindset dealing with

SPEAKER_01 22:00

With Iraqis and your Zoroastrian uh choice, so to speak, is very interesting for the Sabians, right? Yep.

SPEAKER_00 22:08

So especially with Iraqis and uh especially Afghans that I dealt with. The fact that Islam is true is as true as the speed of light, is as true as the freezing point of water. Right. They don't see a difference to that. Some Americans don't see a difference to that at all. Some do. And so with Fallen, I was able to explore on one side the human, the range, and then the facade of the Sabia, I will say, a very theol theological, theocratic race, and then the differences in between, because like even people of firm religious belief, there can be differences with the pragmaticism. Are the unbelievers demons? Are the unbelievers just mistaken? Are the unbelievers capable of goodwill and even possibly find their way in the good graces of whatever God they worship? There's differences with that. And so, uh, while in the modern world, especially, I just don't want to pick on one side, but the communist era, kind of the post-liberal, post-World War II liberal mindset, which is more secular in the West, those aren't universal. And as we're seeing in the 21st century, we are seeing a maybe not a return to the traditional religious mindsets, but reactions to those eras, where you are seeing radical Islam in the areas where Islam was once more conservative and refined. You are seeing uh American evangelicism taking on new forms that would be completely alien to, say, a fundamentalist from 1910. And so it was able to explore that with the Sabiyya of what would a monotheistic kind of very secretive, almost Gnostic style religion, how would it react to the discovery of people on earth? And how would we react, especially with language, if aliens who look mysteriously like us started speaking English? And when we ask, well, where did you learn that? They go, Oh, we just don't worry about it. Here's some more free stuff. For some people, that would be great. Like that's more than enough. Yeah, it's like, okay. Meanwhile, you have other people on Earth going, Wait a minute, we had a valid question, and you just use that to get richer, and now nobody's asking that mysterious question of the people who are just really acting strange around us. That builds tension, and then that side of Earth might react more hostile to the Sabi. And the Sibia go, why are you being so hostile? Hey, people we gave nice stuff to. Here's some more nice stuff, be mean to those guys. And so it becomes almost a spiral of reactions where it's up to negotiators to one figure out what's going on, and two, stop that spiral before it gets violent.

SPEAKER_01 25:08

And there's mirroring in our society too. You bring up the great point of reactions and re-reactions, the whiplash effect, woke, anti-woke, anti-anti-woke, PC, anti-PC, and the pendulum oscillation politically from one polar opposite to another in our country, especially from president to president. So there's a lot of precedent that gets set contextually in your own life, all of our lives, headline to headline. And it's cool as an author to integrate some of that tension too into the world that you're you're continuously building almost in parallel to that, within that.

SPEAKER_00 25:51

And I was able to explore that in the series too. It's not by no means a main feature, but there's a militia movement that rises on the right that, hey, the government's getting against us. There's also a leftist movement on the left that's rising where people are saying, hey, everything's against us. And it's just adding to the chaos. And I don't really go into it, but it adds to the world barreling of things are bad in the world and they're getting worse. Meanwhile, the aliens are just kind of sitting there.

SPEAKER_01 26:24

Interesting setup, right? And and and it's great creative fodder for you based on your experiences and your initial objective, which is providing people with a salve, right? The folks who've got PTSD, let let bring it to light, expose it. And in a sense, you're bringing to light a lot of this anxiety, this societal angst through the narrative.

SPEAKER_00 26:49

Right. And especially for a lot of people who served, it's very distressing to risk your life, see friends get maimed or killed, and then come back here, where not only are there just the normal day-to-day stresses, but Americans are at each other's throats, the crimes up, all that sort of thing. And it's I went to war, so you guys wouldn't this wouldn't happen, and you guys are doing it to yourselves.

SPEAKER_01 27:17

And we create so many problems for ourselves. We've got the highest standard of living, or one of the highest standards of living. We're better educated, healthier, eat. Go to the piggly wiggly or the Trader Joe's or the Ralphs or any supermarket. Uh, an Egyptian pharaoh would lose their mind. Yeah. Bountiful plenitude, the cornucopia of indulgence that we have every day, the luxury of it, and we're bitching and snapping at each other, and the smallest minutiae and cause for concern is now civil war. Complete loss of perspective.

SPEAKER_00 27:59

And that's kind of uh just a theme in sci-fi as well. In H. G. Wells War of the Worlds, one of the opening lines is how the Martians looked at us jealously. And we don't appreciate what we have, we just do what we do. Meanwhile, there are there in the past there were P people who would kill for this, and who knows what's out there.

SPEAKER_01 28:21

Yeah, even uh the uh the term salary for getting paid is salt, solid. You get a little pinch of salt for your day's labor, right? So that's how that's how they waged uh and measured success.

SPEAKER_00 28:36

Take a Roman legion to Costco, they they would break down crime, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 28:41

They lose their mind. So so, in parallel to that, you have the paranormal agency, the Savannah Paranormal Agency. How did how did that come to be? And what what's fueling your your frenzy?

SPEAKER_00 28:57

So that is a fun outlet because fallen can get heavy. Savannah Paranormal Detective Agency is just a comedic outlet of just what happens if you fall into a crazy world. So the basic premise is there's this lawyer named Max who wins a free trip to Haiti, and he's like, hey, he uh is involved in a zombie facation ritual, but gets away, uh, manages to stow on a ship back to the states, meets a ghost, and they go, Oh my oh my goodness, like, yeah. They land in Savannah and he goes, I need to get back to Ohio where I'm from. But he's basically Shanghai's by a female vampire who is Deborah, who is so prideful, so headstrong that she doesn't recognize he's not a zombie and doesn't really care, and just tries to manipulate them to her own purposes of starting a detective agency on paranormal matters.

SPEAKER_01 29:54

I've had a lot of relationships like that.

SPEAKER_00 29:57

And it's she is so boastful, so oversells things that she says, oh, right away, we'll we'll get you back to Ohio right away. And it starts off with her basically scraping the bottom of the barrel, trying to offer protection and ghost services to paranormal investigators on YouTube and their frauds, and it's just the cycle of them trying to get out of the situation while the craziness just amplifies.

SPEAKER_01 30:26

You got uh a little Buffy meets the Douglas Adams, right? That's terrific. And on Substack, which is where we met, you're you're you're cranking along pretty well. You've got several thousand subscribers and building, you share a lot of different nuggets of stuff. UFOs are are an interest, it seems.

SPEAKER_00 30:48

So I I'm really skeptical of a lot of UFO reports. There are some high strangeness that I recognize are real, but I like looking at things from an analytic perspective. And so, whether it is what various religions think about aliens that I'm on, I think number 15 right now, to I'm working on one on just what did the original reports of Roswell actually say? Just being able to go through news articles and whatnot is fascinating. And I'll give a little spoiler right now with the Roswell one. For the first three years of the UFO hype that started in 1947, most people thought it was either mistaken things or a government program. A very small amount thought it could be aliens, it was actually uh single digits, and the first reference to a flying saucer in a newspaper being related to aliens was an article in a New Orleans newspaper in I think August 1947, where a man was offering UFO insurance or flying saucer insurance, but it would be void if it was aliens.

SPEAKER_01 32:06

Perfect. There's it's always about the money, isn't it? See that that's fascinating to me. So it's it's part debunking, part history deep dive, and I'm curious about your angle. What what's your belief about the UFO phenomena? What's your belief about extraterrestrials? I mean, they they figure prominently, obviously, in your Fallen series, they're key characters, the key scenario is first contact. What's your feeling about extraterrestrial life technology? What's your feeling about them actually being here amongst us?

SPEAKER_00 32:49

So when it comes to the possibility of extraterrestrials, I mean, if I had to put money on just one, two, I would say yes. But the evidence, the evidence is so limited that any assessment is of absolutely low confidence to zero. The best evidence we have right now is really NASA seeing things in pictures from the rover that look like things that could only be explained on Earth, being primitive microbes. But then again, we don't actually have it.

SPEAKER_01 33:25

Uh so we can't really some chemical process we don't really anticipate.

SPEAKER_00 33:30

And who knows what it is on Mars. So that's the best evidence there. When it comes to flying saucers, I actually get offended at the charlatans because there's a story in my family that was my grandparents, uh, on a farm that one night there was a blue light that shined into the farm and encircled the farm and was with the light looking into the windows. And it scared my grandfather, who was known in the past when he thought he heard people trying to steal gas from his gas tank six miles away from the nearest town, would run out with the shotgun into the dark just shooting. But it scared him around the same time. He had a cattle mutilation, and he he knew what happens when a cow dies and scavengers get to it. When a cow dies and it gets bloated and it rips, and it it looks surgical, it's not. This was drained of blood. This was the organs removed without any tears, and he even took it to a uh vet who was, I have no idea what did this. And so there is a high strangeness out there that we could be completely natural, could be something else we don't know. The problem is when I say, hey, we should look into these things. This is sort of the black swan event that if we're not careful could flank us really hard. There are hundreds of of if not thousands, of just crazy people of liars, of charlatans who just go nuts with things and will tell these fantastical stories to get attention. And it's this is a serious subject. If you're making a claim, let's look at your claim seriously, and then they'll get offended as if I'm criticizing their religion, and it's no, that there's weirdness out there, and I'm sick and tired of it being kind of drowned out by absolute frauds. And so the interest of mine necessarily isn't debunking, it's let's take this seriously, and if it's a fraud, let's call it out.

SPEAKER_01 35:41

I think Oakham's razor is the best first filter. You've got door number one, extraterrestrials from literally tens of trillions of miles away are physically present on this planet. It's possible there's so much that we don't know, but most people don't realize the vast distances and the sheer physical difficulty. Space is big. Space is big, like Monty Python said, the universe is oh so very, very big, right? And the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, uh a light year is what five trillion, five trillion eight hundred million miles, and and that is four four point two light years. So you're dealing with 24,000 billion miles. That's the closest star. And then it just gets biglier from that. So when you look at Oakham's razor, the sheer difficulty of just physically getting here based on what we know is is prodigious. And then let's tacitly assume that it's way easier than we think. You could do transluminal travel, there's some new technology, wormholes, whatever. Okay, sure. Why not? Then the next step is that's a hell of a secret to keep secret. That would literally be the biggest news ever, especially if technology is involved, if uh people are getting hurt, if there's the threat of a Sabian-like invasion. So uh it's kind of hard to keep this stuff secret. So my my skepticism overrides the opportunism of wanting to be thrilled.

SPEAKER_00 37:28

Yeah, it's important for me. It's important to be leveled. And for what I've really found interesting was looking at original sources and seeing how stories evolve over time. We've gone from in the 1950s of people seeing clear as day flying saucers and drawing very clear craft to valid stuff from the Navy that's distant and fuzzy and behaving weird, but no traditional saucer. And with the alien abduction stories, that has radically changed over time from the physical descriptions of whether or not the aliens have pupils to how they behave, of uh in the original stories, they were wearing Nazi-like uniforms and fascinated by people having fake teeth and talking to people, to these almost gray automatons. And then you just have the origin stories, and this is where a religious element gets involved that depending on where these supposed entities are from, whether they're demons or transdimensionalism, it's actually a lot of those stories are influenced by the people's beliefs that uh oh my goodness, I forget his name. I want to say like Velay, but the French uh U UFO allogists who propose that they're interdimensional, not interspatial. He was a Rosicrucian and he was big into dimensionals and atomism and various beliefs before he even tackled the alien belief. And so that's fascinating how aliens have become a foil for people. And in the and in the meantime, we have genuinely weird cases like the 1950s UFOs over Washington that Project Blue Book blamed on a meteorological event that has never been replicated since. You have the Tehran incident in 1977, which even the Defense Intelligence Agency wrote reports on based on their interviewing of Iranian pilots, to the first stage of the Phoenix Lights that was reported for moving from Nevada to down to Phoenix live on the radio.

SPEAKER_01 39:43

Yeah, the the the my favorite YouTube debunker and skeptic, Zabine Hussenfelder, she's wonderful. She actually dedicated a whole seven-minute video to the instance post-World War II, where these uh these objects were detected traveling super fast and pretty well documented. And this was pre-satellites, pre-any human technology, which would even remotely be able to explain them. And she's kind of like, I don't really believe in UFOs, but there's evidence here for something that we don't quite understand. And I think that that illustrates what you're getting across, which is you could be a skeptic and you start with the notion that there's an explanation, but you're also open-minded to embrace anomaly and possibility and creativity in a way that isn't completely irrational and to your point, compensatory. If you look at the UFO data that comes in, they're predominantly the last heat map I saw, 90-95% of UFO sightings are in the United States, and I believe England, right? And they're English-speaking countries, and they're also deeply rational and cognitive and Calvinistic in the sense where we're we're taught to kind of repress our feelings. Yep. We have the divide, that dichotomy that I was harping about earlier between science and religion. You've got almost zero sightings in countries where the overall population is, on average, deeply religious compared to us. You got zero in the Middle East, you've got hardly any in South America, Latin America. That's because they're living, they're living their religion. They're walking around with demons and angels every day of their life, and they have no reason to want to believe in aliens because they don't need them.

SPEAKER_00 41:41

Right. Uh, even in the Middle East, uh, one thing that fascinated me, sci-fi with aliens is popular amongst Muslims because Islam itself is open to the possibility, but very few will report UFOs. A lot of the high strangeness is, oh, yeah, that's jinn just being djinn. And it it's their religion in a daily basis.

SPEAKER_01 42:02

There are angels, there's uh you know, chariots, and there's all this kind of stuff. You don't need an interstellar voyager coming to cattle prod you or uh, you know, check your teeth.

SPEAKER_00 42:15

Why an angel would want to do that, I don't know, but yeah, it it's and it's been fascinating for me as I study the more modern religion or religions made in a more modern time, how aliens have become a foil for explaining things for being that belief outlet. And it doesn't necessarily reflect on whatever the phenomenon is, it it's really interesting to see how people relate to that phenomenon.

SPEAKER_01 42:42

Yeah, and I think it's viscerally brought to bear with the success of Hail Mary, which was the number one movie. It obviously had a lot of momentum building from Andy Weir's Martian. And uh, you've already got a lot of marketing momentum behind it. But through the lens of what you're saying, it's a buddy movie. Yeah, and we live in a highly polarized, contentious society that's currently in another war. We hate our neighbor, uh, the future looks grim because there seems to be no outlet because of a lot of this contention seems to be building, not dissipating. And then what's the role of the alien, the extraterrestrial, in a film like this? And it's basically E.T. 2.0 with a hysterical main character. And by hysterical, I mean he's always freaking out. Yeah, and whether you love the movie, which most people have, or you hated it, which I did, it's clearly evocative of everything you're talking about, which is believing in UFOs, embracing this idea of aliens, is compensating for our lack of faith in ourselves, in our inability even to touch God. And to tap into our spirituality, we're losing touch with everything.

SPEAKER_00 44:06

Yep, and uh Skeptical Inquirer actually had a good edition of that lately. And I've seen that in the more theosophical uh groups that embrace the idea of aliens that there are ascended masters out there who have things right, who eventually will come and set things right, and that gives hope to people who have, for whatever reason, don't have faith in the more traditional religions, but want to have faith and also give it a little bit of a scientific basis of look, we've seen the UFOs, therefore they're real. And uh in some areas, you have the uh the Christian reaction to that of seeing people freak out and believe in something new, and they say that's demons. Are you familiar with the cargo cult phenomenon in the South Pacific? Not really. So uh quick uh story about that, and I'll tie it in. World War II. We go to these islands where the natives knew of the outside world, they might have met a missionary, but they're still pretty traditional faith. They see us come in with bowdozers bowdozing down bits of their primordial jungle that was where the ancient spirits lived. Like Avatar, yeah. They they saw our planes come in, it was mind-blowing, and we would give them some stuff just to be nice to them, and they thought this is great, just like your bug. Yeah, and then we left. And the tribes were, well, where did those people go? They brought us nice stuff. You so you had people to start their own cults where they would want the cargo to return, they would chop down the forests as they would see us do, they would dress up in what they could best imitate uh US Army uniforms, and they would try to wave, not understanding what things meant, but for the planes to come back. The 1950s happened, and National Geographic and other anthropologists come and go, Wow, this is sad. Um, thank you for letting us take photos of you. Here's some stuff to say thank you. And the cargo cults go, It worked. And to this day, you have the competition between the dying traditional faith, those that converted to Christianity, and those that have their own religion of the cargo cult that believes John Frum, John from America, is going to return and it'll bring up back all the good things, and all they have to do is worship John Frum by raising an American flag, calling their leader general, and just acting like World War II GIs. And so they saw the strangeness, they saw the good things that came with the strangeness, and they wanted to copy that. So while we talk about people in UFO cults, it's actually a thing that we've seen in what we would consider primitive people in the 20th century.

SPEAKER_01 47:05

Very Pavlovian, right? You you something happens related to two events or behaviors that are contingent and not causal, and then you just repeat it, hoping that you get you get the same result. It reminds me obliquely of Rastafarians, actually, and and worshiping Holly Selassie. So Holly Selassie flies in from Africa and he's worshipped by the Jamaicans as really the second coming of Jesus. And he's just some dude in an airplane and he's coming to Jamaica, and it is the religious event in Jamaica of many generations. And then he packs it up and he flies back, and then you got the reggae music, you got Bob Marley, and you got all that, and it's a belief that he came, he arrived. And if we keep doing the reggae and jamming and smoking the ganja, and we got the dreads, Holly might come back. Yeah, Babylon will fall.

SPEAKER_00 48:09

And in Babylon, Babylon man. Yeah. You had some Jamaicans who moved to Ethiopia. He thought they were crazy, but they're a small community now. A very few are Rasifarians. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church actually worked on like halfway houses for them to integrate them into Ethiopian Orthodoxy. But you had people just in a time of trouble find something in the world that they could hope in and go to what we would consider extremes to explore it.

SPEAKER_01 48:43

And it taps into a very Jungian archetypal belief system. So we are creatures who love not only symbol, but we love stories. And we love stories that resonate in an instinctive, pre-programmed kind of way, and anchoring religion in archetype, in myth, and then bubbling it up to real-world experiences that reinforce these archetypes and, in a sense, evolve them and transform them to fit circumstance, is fascinating. And I think you're tapped into something really interesting here, where it goes beyond just the cargo cults and the and the Rastafarians, but it's the idea of UFOs, of science, of the cosmos connecting with us in ways where we could be reminded of our own humanity and at least find some purpose where otherwise we're lost at sea.

SPEAKER_00 49:44

I believe St. Paul wrote about how we have a God-sized hole in us. And so some people will use traditional face to explore and fill that, and other people, for whatever reason, will either invent something new or latch on to something else in the universe, cosmos, and try to explore that.

SPEAKER_01 50:05

So, based on all this understanding and experience and your creativity and your publishing, where where are we headed? We're at in ways, we're at an inflection point, and in other ways, we're just cycling through this endless repetition of oscillating history. Do you do you think it's teleological in a Hegelian sense that we're on our way towards something? Do you think we're at a milestone as a society, especially with AI and with all the disruptions? Or do you think it's just kind of same old, same old, let's uh let's just keep our faith and believe in God or believe in what we've believed in?

SPEAKER_00 50:52

So, in one sense, I re I don't embrace the Whig idea of history that it progresses to a almost predetermined point. We've seen civilizations collapse, sometimes never recover. Uh, near my home in the Midwest, there were Indian mounds and they had established cities. By the time the whites came to the area, the Indians were nomadic because civilization collapsed for them. And so, in that sense, I don't think it's we're bound to progress. We've seen too many cycles and whatnot. I do believe that though there are basically cycles and spirals, there are off-ramps that a society can do to kind of negotiate, reach new kind of thesis, anti-thesis, or you get to the point where there's just such a catastrophic event, like a World War II style event, is an American civilized uh Civil War style event that just completely changes things. And that even for the winner, nothing is ever the same afterwards. And it's um and it nothing will ever go back to the way it was. It never does. It's always a new compromise, a new norm. It's important for a society to do that peacefully, otherwise you will destroy a part of yourself, and the part that wins won't be the same of what you wanted it to be.

SPEAKER_01 52:22

Where do you think we're at? Are you are you Pollyanna? Do you think that these are just growing pains for a bigger and better phase? Or are we regressing and imploding at this point?

SPEAKER_00 52:37

So we're going in a direction. Where that direction goes is up to us. A lot of people like to talk about, oh, this is 1930s or this is the Roman Empire. I was actually fascinated by a book called The Storm Before the Storm, which was about the Roman Republic and just about the rise of the populist movement and the reaction of the elites. And it the there were a lot of parallels I saw that at any given point there could have been a compromise between the various elements of Roman society. Even after their minor civil wars, they could they could have reached a compromise and moved forward, but things just kept escalating to the point you had a Caesar comp. In Spain, you had the compromise you had the spiral of everything that ended with Franco. And yet you really have to go back to Napoleon to see how things started going down for Spain. One you had the Carlos movement, the liberal movement, but it just kept escalating until you basically have commies versus Franco and uh and so it's not that we're degressing or having growing pains, it's what we do about it that will define the past.

SPEAKER_01 53:59

You you seem to hearken to almost a Viconian cycle. Are you familiar at all with Vico? So it it goes kind of like this it begins with uh uh theocracy, it's government and leadership by the priests and the spiritualists, kind of like ancient Egypt. They run the ruse, the priests are even more powerful than the Pharaoh, and then that eventually evolves into an aristocracy where the kings and queens and royalties rule, which culminates in Europe right at the brink of World War I. Then you go through a tumultuous period of transformation where the kings are killed and we evolve into democracy, the rule of demos, the people, and then we scatter and fragment, we lose faith in ourselves, and that leads to chaos. And then out of the chaos, we go back to the gods and the priests, and round and round it goes throughout throughout history. So it might not be that formal or that systematic. It's obviously conceptual and and and a little bit science fiction and fantasy, but but hearing you speak about the trajectory, it's almost like a recurrence that that we keep doing many of the same things, things play out in terms of eras and epics, and then we're kind of back to where we started from because ultimately people don't change generation to generation. Instinct is the same, our weaknesses and strengths don't morph, and people better for worse, good or bad, here we are, and it all just plays itself out.

SPEAKER_00 55:52

And we're kind of seeing one era move because 10 years ago, every country in the world at least had the semblance or the claim of people rule at some level. Even Saudi Arabia was making a big deal about you can vote for your local mayor and town council now.

SPEAKER_01 56:13

Women could drive.

SPEAKER_00 56:15

Big news, big deal over there. You start you about in the last five years, you've actually seen that kind of regress a little bit because Saudi Arabia went yeah, you you've seen Saudi Arabia say, you know what, uh I'll let there be an advisory body that I appoint. You had the Taliban actually completely do away with any semblance of democracy in Afghanistan. It was corrupt before. They're not even playing to the lie. Meanwhile, you have countries like North Korea who still play to that lie of being a democratic people's republic. So it'll be interesting to see if that trend continues and if it picks up any speed.

SPEAKER_01 56:59

China is the behoymath of this trend, where there was an expansion in what would be considered liberalism, uh, giving the middle class some freedoms, reneging on the one child rule because they had a population implosion, and understanding that capitalism, free markets really drive an economy, and a controlled planned state leads to recession and shrinking. So if you want to grow, you need a robust, entrepreneurial middle class. Whee! Then you have the Uyghurs in concentration camps, you have Qi cracking down, you have the internet stifled. And basically the Chinese are now shut up, behave. We we got you a house. We actually have a housing surplus because we overbuild. And as long as you behave, chew with your mouth closed, the octopus, as they call it, won't come down and strangle you. And you're gonna sacrifice your individual liberty and any real personal freedom for this security. Yeah. Most people are like, okay.

SPEAKER_00 58:04

And part of it is they have that outlet because they will even play the democracy game. That there are elections. There are even other parties. The the second biggest party in China is the revolutionary Kaumontong. The Kao Montong, the real one, is running Taiwan, and yet they have this like evil brother version in mainland channel.

SPEAKER_01 58:27

Like Star Trek with uh Mr. Spock with the beard, yeah. Mir Mir Kamontong. Yeah, that's that's imminent. They're gonna grab Taiwan the same way they grabbed Hong Kong. It's just when they feel the time is right, they're gonna go for it.

SPEAKER_00 58:43

Yeah, I I just one, I don't like war, so I hope there's none of that. That would be a nightmare if the potential world war three trigger point.

SPEAKER_01 58:53

That's very, very dangerous.

SPEAKER_00 58:57

And it's just the cycle of oh, everything's getting more and more tense. We can we can negotiate. People can negotiate. I I just hope that everybody is willing to be of goodwill.

SPEAKER_01 59:11

But then again, uh But now the precedent is being set for winner take all, the the the the mightiest, strongest win. And it's not just the Ukraine war, but you know, our current administration is is adapting a policy of opportunism, and some would say, why not? Which is oil is power and money. We have the biggest military, so let's make our move while we've got a chance. And in certain ways, being friendly with Russia defuses a huge potential World War III scenario right there. Are we safer fist pumping with Vladimir than trying to help a rogue state, according to them, uh, even if they are a democracy and a shining example of freedom, even if a little bit corrupt? It's weird. It's how do you weigh these scenarios and options in a world that is becoming increasingly Darwinian, to your point?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:09

And and then just kind of go full circle here and bringing it back to the Fallen series, one thing people forget is there's people involved on all of this at the bottom level who are gravely affected. That when we talk about the Russia-Ukraine war, I mean, I read on the in the news that Russia might have lost 400,000 people last year.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:33

They're losing like they're saying close to a thousand a day. We have this podcast, we've been chit-chatting for an hour. Several hundred soldiers probably got wasted while we've been chit-chatting about aliens and religion and and as a former guy on the ground.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:54

I mean, Stalin's right in the sense that's just a statistic. Think about how many mothers that is. Think about how many brothers and sisters lost the sibling, and then just think about the guy himself. And yeah, he may have been an evil grunt, he could have been a conscript. He was once a child on both Ukraine, Russia side, the US, Iran, everywhere. Who, if you met him at four years old, probably would have came up to you and said, Do you want to play? And just whether it is in a fantastical setting of people meeting aliens or just everyday events, very few people think stop and think, just these are people at the end of the day, and these epic events are happening, and it's an insane thing to relate to.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:41

Well, let's um talk for a second, Kierkegaard versus Sartre. So Kierkegaard felt that because the world is so cruel and unfair, and religion itself was so illogical that he would embrace his faith because it was illogical, because that was a leap of faith, that his belief in God and spirituality was further reinforced by its very absurdity. And Sartre, in contrast, coming out of World War II, was there's no God. This is it, folks. We make of our lives what we will. And whether he was optimistic or pessimistic, you had Albert Camus, his buddy, who was busy running around hedonistically and celebrating life and saying, Well, there's no God, this is it, but we got our experience. Let's make the most of it. So, how do you how do you see everything in terms of your faith and the horrors you just described? Why do good, why do bad things happen to good people as as it's sometimes characterized, which is a moral dilemma, almost an epistemological one, when we're talking about God being infinitely powerful, omniscient, omnipotent, and also good. Where where's the gap?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:05

So I will start on a personal level that there are events in my life that I feel could only be supernatural, and it would have been illogical for me to dismiss that. Uh, I also have the miracles and whatnot of the world, such as the 1917 miracle of the sun in Portugal, which even the atheist paper of the government, oh Secalaro, was there was a weird thing in uh Fatima with the sun, and lots of people saw it. It was weird. So I I can't dismiss that. When it comes to just how you relate to that, whether you keep the faith, whether you lose the faith, that is a truly deep mystery up to the person. And I would say, hey, it's a fallen world. Uh it we throw around our own stuff and then we blame God when it it's really us. Uh 100% of my problems are either because of what I did or what another person did to me. And I'm pretty sure another person could bring up enough times where I screwed over him or her to just be, okay, let's look at the balance sheets. We're all guilty as sin there. Uh, part of it is the hope for a better world and just having that faith. And in fallen itself, the reference to fallen is the main character is fallen in the sense of his mental health, the world is fallen with the craziness, and the Sabiya have their own fallen nature as well. And so it whether it is in the book and in exploring what that means and how various sides relate to that, or just how a person relates to the craziness of the world, is truly what makes a person human. And that that is such a deep personal thing, and it deserves to be shared. You just can't say, hey, it's a mystery, move on, but it's something that we see in humanity that we don't see in animals, we don't see in any AI, that's just a large language model, so it's what makes us humans.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:10

I love that. You you are uh a responsible moral spiritualist in the sense. I try that that you know that the the onus is on us, and if there's flaws with the world, this is what I'm hearing. I'm just trying to paraphrase because I love your worldview. If you see a disconnect or a delta between the glorious, eternal purity of God and the raw savagery and imperfection of the world, that delta is within our own heart and in our own actions. And it's tempting to dismiss God as this perfect being because of our own weakness. And that in itself could be short sighted, and it undercuts all. Our ability to potentially become better because an example is set and a belief is there that could ultimately make our lives better.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:10

And on my own, and I have a real kind of pragmatic Franciscan nature to myself that I earlier I mentioned, hey, I believe everything the church teaches, but the difference is on me. It's that I expand that to the universe, but also kind of focus my sense in that. I love everybody. Do I love the poor? Do I look the other way when I see a guy handing out change? And then I wonder, why are bad things happening in the world? Because people make the same decision I do. And it's I can affect other people. I can change them. I can advocate, I can change them. But what I can do is make decisions by myself that are different with the hope and prayer, if you want, that that can inspire others and influence others to change their decisions as well. And as the Bible says, it's not going to be a perfect world until it's literally all over. So in one way it's a losing game, but if we can kind of even in just our little garden and maybe help our neighbor in the neighbor's garden, that's improvement right there. And you don't know who else that impacts.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:20

The one feeling I'm getting above all others is this earnestness as far as your paradigm goes. You're empathetic to the plight of your fellow humans. You admit your own flaws. And rather than donning this veil of hypocrisy and holier than thou based upon tying into a religion or a belief system, which in a sense conquers your vulnerability, makes you immune to consultation. You're embracing the criticism, acknowledging that we're all finite and flawed, and you're not blaming God for it. You know, years ago, many years ago, I saw my father's ghost. This is when my uh second kid was born. He was just crawling around on the floor. I was coming home from work. I wrote a little piece on Substack, seeing my father's ghost. And uh real, I remember it like it was yesterday. And I'm looking across this little fence gate, and there he is, looking in the window, and he's dressed like he used to. And I at first can't believe it. And the whole feeling was transcendent, like I was in another place, and yet I was there. Everything was hyper-real and out of focus simultaneously. And it was so weird that I was telling myself that this is so weird, I can't believe it's actually happening while I was experiencing it. And I reach over to raise the latch of the fence, and I look away and I look back, and he's vanished. And then I trot over to the window where he was peering in. And there the kids are, everything is fine, as if he was visiting the grandkid. And then I ran over to the corner where I thought if this is a real person, he would have a finite amount of time to literally escape, ski daddle from the scene of the ghost sighting. No one around, no one around. And the memory of it is like yesterday, and the memory and the recollection and the lived experience are completely vivid. So it's a it's similar to what you're describing as witnessing a mirror, a miracle, witnessing some kind of paranormal event. Now, does this make me conclude that the dead are somehow alive, that there's a veil between the living and the dead? I don't really know. And as you can tell, I tend to be very rational and very Western in my view of experience and reality. But I'm sharing this with you candidly as a lived, personal, deeply felt experience. And that ghost of my dad, it was as real and as corporeal as if he would have really been manifest.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:08

And I think that's a sign of a true healthy rationalism because a lot of times people think rationalism is skepticism. No, it's you have an event data point that just can't be dismissed, can't be, oh, that was just a little shadow sort of thing. No, it it's truly such an odd outlier, but it exists. And you have the likelihood and you have the confidence of that assessment. And you you can caveat it with you can't be sure, that's fine, that's fair, and but you won't dismiss it either. And so you can think it's one thing, but you're not gonna say for sure it is, or no, it's not this. When my dad died, I had a dream. Uh the moment he died, uh I had a dream, and I can't explain that. And maybe it was the stress of everything, sure, fine, but I can't just wave my hand at that. There are too many oddities about that.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:18

She had these premonitions. I think that these inputs, to your point, are true in the sense that they were real inputs, and we run the risk as rationalists of treating it like the ozone hole. Remember the first data came in, the ozone hole was so ginormous that scientists dismissed it as an anomaly until they realized that it was it was staring us in the face. CFCs have negative consequences. So there you have it. I I like this balance between reason and what would be considered the unreason or the irrational between science and religion. And I think you you nail that and you let it drive your narrative and create its own kind of emergent tension, which is cool.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:09

And then the stories too, uh, with the Sabiya who have their own made-up religion, uh, and the characters as well, who are fictional but have their religion. In one sense, it doesn't matter if the religions are true or not. And I've even had some atheist beta readers and atheist readers contact me and say, that was a great book, because you had the religious element, yet it wasn't preachy, and the events in it could either be waved away as a personal's opinion, or just hey, they were in a high stressful situation. And so with the fallen series itself, I'm not trying to be like the next left behind where they're definitively Jesus and aliens are there. It's just this is this is how the people in the story experience the story with their worldview. It could be completely that secular enjoyment if you wanted it to.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:02

And that's great storytelling. You take people, you throw them into a situation, their goals are clearly defined, their obstacles are clearly defined, and you let them at it. Play it out, and then the drama emerges from that dynamic tension, and you just kind of channel it, you set it up, you let them at it.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:19

It's like an old football set. You just kind of turn it on and watch them go around.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:24

Yeah, watch it kind of uh like cellular automata, just kind of let it go, and we're just a conduit. Speaking of being a conduit, how how how do you market? I've got a lot of listeners and viewers who are other writers, indie writers. We've got readers who are fascinated by people like us trying to to cut the swath through this tsunami of information, gain a little attention. Uh you've got a pretty good follower base on Substack, like three and a half thousand or so, which is pretty good. And uh, and you seem to get engagement and you're selling some of your books. How how do you do it?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:03

The best network you the best thing you can do is have a network. And the great thing is those people who do read read a lot and want other things in the genre. And especially with us indie authors, we're in it together. It's not like, oh man, he he might go for Moki's book. And if he goes for Mochi's book, he's not gonna go for me. No, it's they want to enjoy more. So having that things like this collaboration going on podcasts, what has really helped me are reader magnets. Whether it's the Savannah Paranormal Detective Agency and giving that away and just having my email address in it, or offering up the first chapters of Fallen, that has gotten people to sign up for the newsletter, gotten people to buy the books, gotten people to buy the uh sequels. So by all means, reach out to other people on Substack or other authors you've enjoyed. And unless they're like the top of the top of the top, we like being contacted. I'm not looking at other people's accounts and going, well, he only has a few hundred followers. I mean, it's not worth it. I could lose people. No, we're in it for the fun. We're not retiring on this money at all. So we want to support each other and let's read each other's books, be like, oh yeah, if you've enjoyed my book, you enjoy his and his mine. So by all means, do that. The two practical steps I can recommend is there's two great websites: Book Funnel and Story Origin, where if you have a reader's magnet, whether it's a few chapters of your book or a short story or a prequel novella, you can put that on there and you can sign up for other people's newsletters where they will promote your book, just kind of have it at the bottom, and you will promote their book. And I do that on all my sub stacks. If you scroll down, the last section usually is three, four uh little novella short stories you can download. To download them, you sign up for that person's newsletter. If you don't like it, you just unsubscribe, but you get to explore what they're writing to, and if you like that, you you stay signed up for their newsletter, you get to know them, maybe you read their book. And so that's really helped me grow. And it's that led to just meeting other authors in person, going to one event where we just kind of uh sync up, be humans, and it's really cool to support each other.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:35

I love it. I'm I'm doing similar stuff to you. I think you're more systematic. And I was telling another guest I just had Al Hagen. He's he's in this circle too. He does military sci-fi, like like you do. Well, check him out. You see, this is where collaboration comes. This is how it works. So uh, and my podcasting is awesome because when you're when you're I was talking about this with Al too, which is like you're posting and you just see text and maybe an image, and then you'll see some creativity, like a short sample or whatever. You don't see the person behind it. And these podcasts are a wonderful way. Like we just spent an hour in change, and I feel like I really got to know you. And the the the delta between just seeing you on Substack and reading your content, and you, Patrick Abbott, is is is refreshing in a sense like you bring dimensionality to your ideas, and it's a real joy to meet people and and bond and create community in this personal kind of way. And it's not just quid pro quo where sign up to mine, I sign up to yours, you like my shit, I like yours, but it's actually making a connection. And I learned a ton of stuff, like the cargo, the cargo cult, uh, you know, some of the UFO instances that you mentioned, and your paradigm of how you see religion alongside science and your focus on ufology from this vantage point on the one hand of debunking, and the other on really exploring and going down the rabbit hole of stuff we really still don't know is awesome. I think that that's really refreshing and cool. And the way I did that was by by meeting you on the pod. So, and then we could share this, and you know, we like and we distribute. And to your point, it's organic, it's natural. And we're not just putting Facebook ads and trying to shove our content down anyone's throat, but but making a connection with other people.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:39

Yeah, and especially in the era of AI where people are just putting prompt after prompt and spewing out books that some people will go for that, sure. They'll they'd go for anything. If you're looking for equality, if you're looking for stories that have meaning, it's these events where I learned about you and your deep philosophical background. I am definitely not getting in a philosophy date debate with you. Uh default to what did Thomas Aquinas say? But uh, you're a real person. Uh, you had Jay Michael on not too long ago. Real person. I'm going through other podcasts of yours of people who I would have never noticed before, and being, oh, they sound interesting. I'll check them out. And so it's this gives readers the experience too of hey, we're real people, we have real stories. Uh, you can like them, you can dislike them, you can give them one star, sure. But know that we have real stories, and there's a philosophy behind it that a grok or a chat GPT story will never have.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:49

Yes, and I love the diversity of the talent and the personality, folks at different points in their indie writing. Like Jay Michael is writing his first book, he's now he's now working on second chance, and we know him from some of his first contact stuff. He's a cool cat. And I I was just blown away by a lot of just matter-of-fact insights he had. For example, how the opportunity costs of AI are deep. Yep. You know, you like you're in your kitchen, you're cooking something. Usually you pick up the phone, call your mom how she made the meatloaf, and now you're picking it up and talking to Chatty Bro, and you're no longer talking to your mom from the kitchen like you used to.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:32

That to me really hit home because, in all this chatter and bullshit about AI, that's a very heartfelt sentiment about what's being lost. And it reverberates across so many aspects of this technology and this inflection point. So that's really cool. And then I've had other guests, um, like Matthew Cressel, who is uh the Nebula Award nominee, and he's he's well known for the different Locust magazine and Apex, and he's out there, he's on the Barnes and Noble Shelf. Rain Seekers is right there. I had a terrific conversation with him. So across the entire spectrum of people just starting out, Matthew's been writing for decades. Yeah, he's not an overnight sensation, and he he's got his own insights, so it's it's on the individual level and it's meaningful to actually connect with people.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:27

And I would say you're a great example and a good piece of advice to people is you can just do things. Right. You you just started a podcast. You also have the TikTok YouTube shorts where you talk about other things as well that I've seen. Just do it. If especially if you started a sub stack, just keep writing, just reach out to people. The worst case scenario is they tell you no, and the status quo happens. That's a pretty good worst-case scenario.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:56

Yeah, it's do it yourself. And a lot of the impetus for this is uh I wrote a sci-fi novel, which I love and I'm proud of, but I I came to the realization that I'm mostly in a vacuum. So, how can I meet other science fiction writers? How can I jump into the community? And how can I turn it into a lived social experience? Start a podcast. All it takes is we're on the Riverside app for 30 bucks a month. It's a good app though. Pump it in the pump it in the buzz sprout and then post on YouTube. Go for it, dude. What's stopping you? And I think that do-it-yourself mentality of just reaching out and creating connection is very important. Any way you want to do it that fits your personality, your proclivities, and your and your time.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:46

Yep, and uh even if you don't become a big author, and almost none of us will, that's okay too. Because if you've inspired or touched one person who said, Yeah, I really liked your story, that is such a success that a person who just turns out AI will never have. So absolutely what you do, enjoy it, don't let it become a burden. Just just find it if it makes you happy in the sense, do it.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:15

I had The Margaret on, she's a sci-fi writer, she considers herself the angry author. Yes, yes, that was published today, right? Yeah, yeah. I just posted it today, and I spent about an hour with her as this deep catharsis, and she was ranting about how it's hard to get noticed, and that she pours her heart into this, and no one seems to give a shit. And giving her that voice, giving her that outlet. And I could relate, we can all relate to this swimming against the stream, so to speak, and at the same time reiterate exactly what you just said, which is just do it and do it for the intrinsic pleasure of doing it, and and share that enthusiasm with like-minded souls, and what can go wrong.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:03

And one way I do understand her pain, because no one is coming to save you as an author, right? That's the horrifying thing. It's not like there's this big industry that's going to promote you, and in fact, trad pump barely barely does that at all. They care about what your social media following is now before they even sign you. Yeah, absolutely. Go out, go to Barnes and Noble, be hey, I have a bunch of books. Would you like to sell it? I could be at an author's event. They see very little downside of that. They might give you the remaining inventory if they can't sell it. That's fine. It gets you that publicity. Reach out to your local podcaster, reach out to your local news, be hey, author event, have a little press release.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:48

Go to events, yeah. I I have this little gaggle of writers, many of whom I met on Substack. So I'm friends with Ingrid Moon. We've been friends for 15, 20 years. I don't even know how we became friends. I wrote a science fiction book and I remember, hey Ingrid, she's on my Facebook. She writes science fiction. We connected, and then she connected me with a couple authors, Blake and Sherry Shimshok and Greg Sorber. And then we have this little writer's click, and we went to LA Comic-Con, Passadino Comic-Con. I'm gonna go check them out at WonderCon. We're gonna go to the LA Festival of Books, and then we get a booth together. That's great, and then we all cram in there. We're like the science fiction club at these at these at these comic book events, and that's how I got into the uh science fiction anthology of 2026, where SA Gibson gave me his card. He goes, You got you're a writer here, and we're we're we're soliciting stuff. That's awesome, and that was in person, so it's not like trolling on the X. So, so so to your point, just get yourself out there, have fun with it, and don't be too hard on yourself with the bullshit metrics. You got 10 followers or 10,000 at the end of the day, it's up to you having a good time.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:13

Yep. Uh and no matter what number you have, it will never be enough. I remember when I got to a thousand, I was like, oh, if I could get to two thousand, I'll be just great, and then three thousand, just great. It's a rack race. What you want is just that quality connection, and don't worry about the numbers. Uh, there'll be so many scams that will say, Oh, we'll promote your book. No, they won't. There are so many things of oh, if you just pay a hundred dollars, you can get a guaranteed sign-up of 500 people, they'll unsubscribe right away. Don't worry about that. Just uh just go out and do it for the love of the game. And for instance, when you go to Comic Cons, you might not make a profit selling books there. That that's cool. You're with friends, you're with people. We've lost that human connection. You can have adult friends who are geeks like you, run with it.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:06

Yeah, and there's nothing like pitching your book to someone who just walked up to your table. That's really weird. And I was I was hustling with Ingrid, and Ingrid's a lovely writer, and she's just terrific, and she's jumping all the hoops. She's got beta readers, professional covers, and she's she's gunning for it. And she's very talented, which doesn't hurt. And she was pitching her book, people would come up to her, and then she'd start going into the plot right away. I said, Look, you've got 20 seconds, and I come from a marketing background. So, how do people understand content? This is Fallout Meets Hunger Games with the Mandalorian.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:51

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:52

All of a sudden, this image pops into the head, and you got them. And if they're into it and they're flipping through your book, then go into the menu show. Of the experience. And then Ingrid taught me get QR codes so they could just scan your book and get it on Amazon. Get bookmarks where you can put your contact info. Get a big sign so that they could see you. And you learn stuff and you share and then you make it a lived human experience instead of just trying to sell your ideas to people who otherwise don't want them.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:27

Yeah, otherwise, all those are great because I'll say from my own perspective, if you go in unstructured, you sound, and I say this from me, I sounded like a crazy person on the street, like I got this book about aliens. So uh the pitch does need to be worked on to those who want to do the in-person pitch.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:47

Yeah, and it helps you kind of sort your own shit out too. You know, I'm working on the sequel of my my debut novel, and a lot of my experience is just on Substack and throughout all these podcasts. I think you're guest number 31 or 32, and I I started uh I started only like maybe four months ago or something, just with the science fiction. I have like four other shows I keep podcasting. And and being able to do this and interact with people and become part of this community has impacted my feeling about my own books, too, I think in a very positive way.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:26

Yeah, and there's nothing.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:28

That to me is like the ultimate benefit if you could actually improve and hone your skills in your craft by want of these lived experiences. That's a big plus.

unknown 1:29:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:40

And I'm reading more than I do. I read a lot of your stuff, whereas before I just scanned and then I'm reading, I read a whole bunch of these short stories in the anthology I'm actually in. And especially if I have someone as a guest, I'm like, shit, I better like you know, do my homework. And and all of a sudden, this book's coming to life. I'm I'm getting to meet the people that I'm sharing the anthology with.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:06

That's awesome. And it's nice too because there's some actual good stuff being published out there, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:12

That I would miss. There's some great stuff that I would have missed, right? So awesome. Well, thank you, sir, for uh for joining us. This has been great, author of the Fallen series. Uh, what's timing like for your series completion? What can we expect? When's the next the next big reveal?

SPEAKER_00 1:30:35

So I I just with editing and everything, I want to say around Christmas this year, maybe New Year, next year, the last book, Assumption, will come out. Uh, Fallen is the first book, risen is the second book, third book is Dormission, and the last one is Assumption.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:51

So Dormission is my favorite title, Dormission, just because it's a very eccentric.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:57

So I I actually kind of pull from Christian theology there. The first book is the fallen, everybody starts off in a fallen state. The second book is they're risen, the good things have happened in their life, but now they it's basically the main character's crucifixion in a way of now that you think you're better, how do you handle the bigger event? Dormition coming from the Dormition of Mary is everything seems asleep, but stuff's moving in the background that sets up Assumption, the last book, where things beyond their control bring them to their end.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:33

That's the classic second act, right? Where it's uh it peaks, it's in stasis, and then boom. Yep. Yeah, good, good, good for you. So we'll be on the lookout for that. If you're into it, I can have you back to um to do a launch party for the show. If you want to, I'd love to. And we can do that. And like, comment, share, everybody. We could uh restack each other on Substack, and we could join the uh the little crew of sci-fi indie writers and kind of build it organically.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:06

Even if you don't uh sign up for mine, look at other podcasts here and sign up for some great authors. Check them out.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:13

And we'll put all the info in the description below, and I'll post audio on Substack and Buzz Sprout, blasted everywhere, and then the YouTube video I'll put up there too. And then looking forward to it. I do these fun overlays, it'll take me a little longer, but I do a little overlay. We'll see the cover of your book come in. And if you're watching us on YouTube now, you already saw it. So there you go.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:34

The future.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:36

I had another guest who saw, you know, he Howard Loring is all into time travel. So you can look at it that way, right? Like the time machine. The the video that's already posted, we're in.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:49

Yeah, he said it was released today, but that was two weeks ago. That's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:54

It's like manage expectations. You're the best, Patrick. Thank you. Thank you so much, Moogie. Keep doing what you're doing, and and then we will catch up. Have a great one. Thank you.