In this episode of What It Means to Be Human, Dan sits down with Joshua Cutchin — folklorist, paranormal researcher, composer, and one of the most original thinkers working in the strange today.
Joshua has spent years tracing the hidden threads between UFOs, fairy lore, near-death experiences, altered states, ghost stories, and the deep symbolic structures that shape human experience. His work asks an unsettling but increasingly unavoidable question: what if these phenomena are not separate at all, but different expressions of the same underlying mystery?
Together, Dan and Joshua explore the strange feedback loop between fiction and reality, and why stories may do more than reflect the world around us. They discuss whether characters are discovered rather than invented, why the phenomenon seems to borrow from culture and wear different masks across time, and what folklore can reveal about modern encounters with aliens, lights, and non-human intelligence.
The conversation moves through fairies, souls, symbolic reality, ontological shock, consciousness, reincarnation, religion, and the possibility that what we call “the paranormal” may actually point toward a radically different understanding of life itself.
This is a conversation about the limits of language, the instability of categories, and why the deeper you go into the phenomenon, the harder it becomes to separate imagination from encounter, story from event, or death from transformation.
If the strange has a shape, Joshua Cutchin is one of the few people trying to trace its outline.
Remember to be curious – the universe is bigger than we know!
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Music: Thunderbird Culver Drive Hayden Calnin
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