I had my first existential crisis at the age of 7, so now it's the world's problem.

Exiting Plato's Cave  is an interview and sometimes documentary-style podcast about the biggest questions we've been trained not to ask. What is consciousness? Where does it come FROM? Where does it GO? (It's ok, make the joke..) Who, or what, else is out there? Why does so much of what we're told about our own reality fall apart under a second look?

About 2,400 years ago, Plato told a story that paints a picture of humanity, still painfully relevant, about how ideas are formed and accepted. Picture a group of people who have spent their entire lives chained up in a cave, facing a blank wall. They can't turn their heads. Behind them there's a fire, and between the fire and their backs, others walk by carrying puppets and objects. All the prisoners ever see are the shadows those things throw on the wall. They give the shadows names, argue about them, and get pretty good at predicting which one comes next. As far as they know, that's reality. They have no reason to think otherwise.

Then one of them gets loose. He turns around, sees the fire, sees the people carrying the puppets, and eventually stumbles out of the cave into actual daylight. It hurts. (This is important, I feel..) It takes a while before he can even look at the world out there, before his mind can even accept it, ya kin? When he finally understands what he's seeing, he goes back down to tell everyone else. And they laugh at him. They say the trip outside ruined his eyes, and they'd rather kill him than follow him out.

That's the part I find most perplexing. Somewhere along the way, a lot of very smart people were convinced that even asking these questions is a sign you've lost it. Whether you think the puppeteers are lizard folk and the Illuminati, or just ordinary, unremarkable people playing Lord of the Flies with our institutions, the result looks the same: we've learned to police each other for noticing facts and ideas that are decidedly inconvenient to our systems of being. And we're reaching a point, if we're not already well past it, where those systems may no longer serve us at large.

[Why Should We Care to Think So "Heavy"?]

In October 1927, twenty-nine physicists got together in Brussels to argue about what reality is actually made of. Seventeen of them had won, or would go on to win, a Nobel Prize. Einstein spent the week poking holes in quantum mechanics, and Niels Bohr spent the week patching them. Nobody in that room could have told you what any of it was good for.

Now it's in your phone, the MRI machine, the laser that scans your groceries, and by some estimates something like a third of the world economy. Not bad for a week of arguing about things nobody could see.

Here's the part that gets me. None of it paid off for a long time. The transistor showed up twenty years after that week in Brussels. The laser took more than thirty. The first MRI scan of a human body took fifty. For a third of a century or more, quantum mechanics was a bunch of very smart people arguing about cats in boxes.

Now imagine the only thing steering where we look next is whether it turns a profit by next quarter. Nobody has to shut the weird questions down. They just never get funded, never get asked, and fifty years from now nobody notices what isn't there. That's kinda how a lot of modern science gets funded. Not even a conspiracy.

It's all on the table here. I'm tired of these ideas getting treated like a weird hobby you keep to yourself. Or entertainment. I think they're some of the most interesting conversations happening in our lifetime, and I'd rather have them out loud, with people who've actually done the work.

[Who's Doing the Asking]

I need a place to put these ideas and efforts in my life, so I want to use the skills of my career to expand the ripple effect I already see in society.

I'm Dustin Edward Howard, a 3x Heartland Emmy-winning composer and filmmaker from Tulsa, Oklahoma. I value storytelling and presentation, and I'm going to do my best to balance presentation and absurdity here. While staying out of the way, I hope to let the subjects and guests showcase themselves.

I grew up watching Cosmos. Carl Sagan is one of my biggest influences in abstract thinking, while remaining pragmatic and factual... and he was right about almost everything. But in clearing out the "demon-haunted world," science also shut the door on the most mysterious space we have, which is the inside of our own heads. This show tries to open that door back up, carefully, with good tools.

As a person who was raised in the Bible Belt, flirted with atheism and agnosticism, and read most religious texts more thoroughly than many practitioners, I never stood a chance to not have an existential crisis in my life. The good news is, I've found that most serenity in life is tied to our expectations. I am expecting to be surprised. I've got a philosophy, born partly from a misheard lyric (like many great things in life), that I've taken on as a mantra of sorts: "Whatever will be willed of me, or whatever will bewilder me."

[EPC's First Guest: Dr. Michael P. Masters]

Michael Masters is a Professor of Biological Anthropology at Montana Technological University and the author of Identified Flying Objects and The Extratempestrial Model. The short version of his idea: some of what we've been calling aliens may be us. Our own distant descendants, coming back through time to study their own evolutionary past. He put that in print, with his name on it, as a working scientist. That's pretty much the whole spirit of this show.

He's also co-author, with Tim Lomas and Brendan Case of Harvard, of the 2024 paper that went everywhere for floating the idea that some of the phenomenon might already be living here, alongside us.

Our conversation is about time. If they're us, from the future, what does that say about the block universe, about free will, and about why they'd keep showing up without fixing anything? If they fix or change anything, do they still exist?

Masters was kind enough to send me an advance copy of his new book, and [he did the music and recording process], so outside of time travel, the nature of existence, aliens, UFOs, and abductions, we talk about music too, I guess.

Episode one: late November 2026.

[Why Even Fuck'n Bother]

Cant not. I believe that recognizing the strangeness of our situation, through direct experiences, the insights of others, and honest self-reflection on ideas and institutions, can lead us as a species to better decisions and real, positive outcomes. I think we need smart folks looking at more ideas, and we need to help folks get smart. We can't make informed choices about our place in the universe while we're still arguing with the shadows. So we're walking out of the cave, and if the stakes are the human race, we'll drag a few people out with us.

I really hope to use this space to showcase much larger ideas, and as the show grows, so will this space. For now, here is a little more of the other work I have done -