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The following is a conversation with Gary Nolan, professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, respected and very well published in fields of microbiology and pathology, but he also is known for analyzing UFO artifacts and materials, and for taking a rigorous scientific approach to reports of UFO sightings and experiences.
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And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
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Check them out in the description.
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It s the best way to support this podcast.
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First is Athletic Greens, the all-in-one nutrition drink I drink twice a day.
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Second is InsideTracker, a service I use to track my biological data.
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Third is Blinkist, the app I use to read summaries of books.
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Fourth is ExpressVPN, the VPN I ve been using for many years.
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And fifth is 8sleep, a self-cooling mattress cover I sleep on.
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So the choice is health, wisdom, or privacy.
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Choose wisely, my friends.
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And now on to the full ad reads.
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As always, no ads in the middle.
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I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors.
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I enjoy their stuff.
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Maybe you will, too.
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This show is brought to you by Athletic Greens and its newly renamed AG1 Drink.
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In fact, I just had one of those.
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It s an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance.
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It replaced the multivitamin for me and went far beyond that with 75 vitamins and minerals.
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It s the first thing I drink every day.
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I drink it twice a day now.
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It is the nutritional basis that allows for the insanity that is my physical and mental endeavors.
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So whatever diet I m on, whatever physical training or crazy amounts of push-ups and pull-ups or running that I m doing for no good reason whatsoever, or all the long hours of deep work, I know I m safe because I got all the vitamins and the nutrition I need.
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Plus, it tastes delicious.
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I mean, that s really what life is all about.
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Anyway, they give you one month s supply of fish oil, which is another thing I take every day.
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When you sign up on athleticgreens.com slash Lex, that s athleticgreens.com slash Lex.
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This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data.
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They have a bunch of plans, most of which include a blood test that gives you a lot of information that you can then make decisions based on.
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They have algorithms that analyze your blood data, DNA data, and fitness tracker data to provide you with a clear picture of what s going on inside you and to offer you science-backed recommendations for positive diet and lifestyle changes.
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I really don t need to say all that.
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The most important thing is it s your data from your body and using state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms to interpret that data and to give you advice.
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This feels like the future.
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I love this idea.
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Advice of what you should do with your health should come from your personal data, not population data, which is where most science comes from.
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SPEAKER_01
Of course, you need the basis of the population data, but the specific fine-tuning of the lifestyle changes and advice should be coming from your own body.
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For a limited time, you can get 25% off the entire Insight Tracker store if you go to insighttracker.com slash flex.
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This show is also brought to you by Blinkist, my favorite app for learning new things.
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Blinkist takes key ideas from thousands of nonfiction books and condenses them down into just 15 minutes that you can read or listen to.
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There s so many recommendations that I can give you, including Sapiens, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.
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The Snowden book is on there.
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There s many, many, many others.
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I use Blinkist.
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to do several things, including pick the books that I m going to read in full first.
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It s an excellent preview if you re trying to choose which nonfiction book to read, and it gives you that kind of, the basis of key ideas.
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from which you can now explore deeply.
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And the cool thing about nonfiction books is there s not really spoiler alerts.
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So you can get the key insights and still get a lot of value from reading the book fully.
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Anyway, go to Blinkist.com slash Lex to start your free seven day trial and get 25% off of a Blinkist premium membership.
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That s Blinkist.com slash Lex, spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com slash Lex.
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This show is also brought to you by ExpressVPN.
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I use them to protect my privacy on the internet.
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Many good things I could say.
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So one, you should probably know that if you re using Chrome incognito mode, your ISPs can still get the data.
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SPEAKER_01
So all that weird stuff you do on the internet when you re in the incognito mode,
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People can still know about it.
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Surprise.
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I m so, so very sorry.
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SPEAKER_01
You can also change your location to watch different shows and different sort of video services.
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You know this.
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The thing I love the most is the thing just works.
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It works nice.
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The interface is simple and beautiful.
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It s fast.
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The connection is fast.
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It does not affect the connection as much as you would think it would.
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It works on any operating system, but if you know what you re doing, you should be using Linux.
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That s my favorite operating system.
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And, as I sometimes say about Serial, it s the operating system of champions.
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Anyway, go to expressvpn.com slash LexPod to get an extra three months free.
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That s expressvpn.com slash LexPod.
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This episode is also, and finally, brought to you by Eight Sleep and its Pod Pro mattress.
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It controls temperature with a nap, is packed with sensors, and can cool down to as low as 55 degrees on each side of the bed separately.
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It s snowing outside.
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It feels like the holidays and we re in Texas.
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This is beautiful.
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Nothing is quite as good as a full night s sleep or just that intense power nap.
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on a bed with an eight-sleep cover, Pod Pro cover.
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It s a warm blanket, cool bed, it s heaven.
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One of the many things I am deeply grateful for in this life.
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Of course, I m also happy just sleeping on the floor with no blanket and just passed out, lost in the madness and the beauty of the ideas that I m playing with in my head.
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If I really want to enjoy that experience, I m gonna go with 8sleep.
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Go to 8sleep.com slash Lex to check out the Pod Pro cover and save $200 at checkout.
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8sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
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They told me to tell you this.
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That s 8sleep.com slash Lex.
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Gary Nolan.
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you
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You are a professor at Stanford studying the biology of the human organism at the level of individual cells.
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So let me ask first the big ridiculous philosophical question.
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What is the most beautiful or fascinating aspect of human biology at the level of the cell to you?
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The micromachines and the nanomachines that proteins make and become, that to me is the most interesting.
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The fact that you have this basically dynamic computer within every cell that s constantly processing its environment, and at the heart of it is DNA, which is a dynamic machine, a dynamic computation process.
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People think of the DNA as a linear code.
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It s codes within codes within codes, and it is actually the epigenetic state that s doing this amazing processing.
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I mean, if you ever wanted to believe in God,
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just look inside the cell.
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So DNA is both information and computer.
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Exactly.
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How did that computer come about?
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A big continuing on the philosophical question, this is both scientific and philosophical, how did life originate on earth, do you think?
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How did this, at every level, so the very first step and the fascinating complex computer that is DNA, that is multicellular organism, and then maybe the fascinating complex computer that is the human mind.
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Well, I think you have to take just one more step back to the complex computer that is the universe, right?
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All of the so-called particles or the waves that people think the universe is made of and appears, to me at least, to be a computational process.
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And embedded in that is biology, right?
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So all the atoms of a protein, et cetera, sit in that computational matrix.
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From my point of view, it s computing something, it s computing towards something.
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It was created in some ways if you want to believe in God, and I don t know that I do, but if you want to believe in something, the universe was created or at least enabled to allow for life to form.
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And so the DNA, if you ask, where does DNA come from?
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And you can go all the way back to Richard Dawkins and the selfish gene hypotheses.
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The way I look at DNA, though, is it is not a moment in time, it assumes the context of the body and the environment in which it s going to live.
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And so if you if you want to ask a question of where
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and how does information get stored.
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DNA, although it s only three billion base pairs long, contains more information than I think the entire computational memory resources of our current technology.
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Because who and what you are is both what you were as an egg all the way through to the day you die, and it embodies all the different cell types and organs in your body.
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And so it s a computational,
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reservoir of information and expectation that you will become.
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So actually I would sort of turn it around a different way and say if you wanted to create the best memory storage system possible, you could reverse engineer what a human is and create a DNA memory system that is not just the linear
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version, but is also everything that it could become.
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When we re talking about DNA, we re talking about Earth and the environment creating DNA.
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So this, you re talking about trying to come up with an optimal computer for this particular environment.
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Right.
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So if you reverse engineer that computer, what do you mean by considering all the possible things it could become?
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So who you are today, right?
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So three billion bits of information does not explain Lex Friedman.
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It doesn t explain me, right?
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But the DNA embodies the expectation of the environment in which you will live and grow and become.
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So all the information that is you, right, is actually
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not only embedded in the DNA, but it s embedded in the context of the world in which you grow into and develop, right?
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So all that information, though, is packed in the expectation of what the DNA expects to see.
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Interesting, so like some of the information, is that accurate to say is stored outside the body?
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Exactly, yeah.
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The information is stored outside because there s a context of expectation.
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Isn t that interesting?
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Yeah, it s fascinating.
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I mean, to linger on this point, if we were to run Earth over again a million times, how many different versions of this type of computer would we get?
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I think it would be different each time.
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I mean, if you assume there s no such thing as fate, right, and it s not all pre-programmed, you know, and that there is some sort of, let s say, variation or randomness at the beginning, you would get as many different versions of life as you could imagine.
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And I don t think it would all be unless there s something built into the, you know, into the substrate of the universe.
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It wouldn t always be left-handed proteins.
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But I wonder what the flap of a butterfly wing, what effects it has because it s possible that the system is really good at finding the efficient answer and maybe the efficient answer is there s only a small finite set of them for this particular environment.
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Exactly.
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Exactly.
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That s the kind of, in a way, the anthropomorphic universe of the multiverse expectations, right?
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That, you know, there s probably a zillion other kinds of universes out there if you believe in multiverse theory.
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We only live in the ones where the rules are such that life like ours can exist.
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So using that logic, how many alien civilizations do you think are out there?
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There s
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there s like trillions of environments, aka planets, or maybe you can think even bigger than planets.
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How many lifelike organisms do you think are out there thriving?
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And maybe how many do you think are long gone but were once here?
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I think, well, innumerable.
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I think in terms of the ones that are- Greater than zero.
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Much greater than zero.
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I mean, I would just be surprised.
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What a waste, right, of all that space just for us if we re never gonna get there.
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That would be my first
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a way to think about it.
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But second, I mean, I remember when I was about seven or eight years old, and I would love if any of your listeners could find this National Geographic.
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I remember opening the page of the National Geographic.
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I was about, again, seven to 10 years old.
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And it was sort of a current picture of the universe.
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It was around probably 1968, 1969.
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I just remember looking at it and thinking,
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what kinds of empires have risen and fallen across that space that we ll never know about?
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And isn t that sad that we know nothing about something so grand?
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And so I ve always been a reader of science fiction because I like the creative ideas of what people come up with.
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And I especially like science fiction writers that base it in good science, but base it also in evolution.
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That if you evolve a civilization from something lifelike, right, some sort of biology, its assumptions about the universe will come from
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the environment in which it grew up.
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So for instance, Larry Niven is a great writer, and he imagines different kinds of civilizations.
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In some cases, what happens if intelligence evolved from a herd animal?
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right?
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Would you lead from behind, right?
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Would you be – you know, in his case, one of them were the so-called puppeteers.
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And to them, the moral imperative is cowardice.
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You put other people forward to run the risk for you, right?
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And so he writes entire books around that premise.
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There s another guy, Brin, David Brin is his name, and he writes the so-called Uplift Universe books.
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And in those, he takes different intelligences, each from a different evolutionary background, and then he posits a civilization based around where and what they came from.
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And so, to me, I mean, that s just fun.
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But I mean, back to your original question, is how many are there?
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I think as many stars as we can see.
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Now, how many are currently there?
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I don t know.
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I mean, that s the whole question of, you know, how long can a civilization last before it
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runs out of steam and you, for instance, does it just get bored or does it transcend to something else or does it say I ve seen enough and I m done?
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What does running out of steam look like?
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It could be destroy itself or get bored.
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You know, or we ve
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done everything we can and they just decide to stop.
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I don t know.
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I just don t know.
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It s that Elon Musk worry that we stop reproducing or we slow down the reproduction rate to where the population can go to zero.
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Can go to zero and we collapse.
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I mean, so the only way to get around that is perhaps create enough machines with AI to take care of us.
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What could possibly go wrong?
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You ve talked to people that told stories of UFO encounters.
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What is the most fascinating to you about the stories of these UFO encounters that you ve heard that people have told you?
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The similarity of them, the uniformity of the stories.
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Now, I just want to say up front,
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A lot of people think that when I speculate, I believe something.
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That s not true, right?
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Speculation is just creativity.
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Speculation is the beginning of hypothesis.
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None of what I hear in terms of the anecdotes do I necessarily believe are they true.
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But I still find them fascinating to listen to because at some level, they re still raw data.
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and you have to listen.
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And once you start to hear the same story again and again, then you have to say, well, there might be something to it.
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I mean, maybe it s some kind of a Jungian background in the human mind and human consciousness that creates these stories again and again.
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It s coming out of the DNA.
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It s coming out of that pre-programmed something.
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And Jung talked quite a bit about this kind of thing, the collective unconscious.
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But actually, one of the most interesting ones I find is this constant message that you re not taking care of your world.
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And this came long before climate change.
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It came long before many kinds of, let s say, current day memes around taking care of our planet, pollution, et cetera.
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And so, you know, for instance, perhaps the best example of this, the one that I find the most fascinating, is a story out of Zimbabwe.
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50 or 60 children one afternoon in Zimbabwe.
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It was a well-educated group of white and black children who, at lunchtime in the playground, saw a craft.
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And they saw little men.
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and they all ran into the teachers, and they told the same story, and they drew the same pictures.
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And the message several of them got was, you are not taking care of your planet.
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And it got, you know, there s actually a movie coming out on this episode, and 30 years later now, the people who were there, the children who ve now grown up, say, it happened to us.
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Now, did it happen?
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Was it some sort of hallucination, or was it an imposed hallucination by something?
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Was it material?
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I don t know.
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These kids were seven to 10 years old.
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You see them on video.
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Seven to 10 year olds can t lie like that.
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And so, you know, whether it s real or not, I don t know, but I find that fascinating data.
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And again, it s these unconnected stories of individuals with the same story.
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That is worthy of further inquiry.
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Yeah, so here we are, humans with limited cognitive capacities, trying to make sense of the world, trying to understand what is real and not.
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We have this DNA that somehow, in complex ways, is interacting with the environment, and then we get these novel ideas that come from the populace, and then they make us wonder about what it all means.
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means, and so how to interpret it.
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If you think from an alien perspective, how would you communicate with other lifelike organisms?
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You perhaps have to find endpoints on this interaction between the DNA and its
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manifestations in terms of the human mind and how it interacts with the environment.
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So it gets some kind of, all right, what is this DNA?
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What is this environment?
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I have to get in somehow to interact with it, to perturb the system to where these little ants, human-like ants, get excited and figure stuff out.
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Yeah, yeah.
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and then somehow steer them, first of all, for investigative purposes, understand, like, oftentimes to understand a system, you have to perturb it.
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It s like, poke at it.
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Do they get excited or not?
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And then the other way is you want to,
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If you worry about them, you can steer in one direction or another.
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And this kind of idea that we re not taking care of our world, that s interesting.
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I mean, that s comforting.
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That s hopeful because that means the greater intelligence, which is what I would hope, would want to take care of us.
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we want to take care of the gorillas in the national parks in Africa.
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Yeah, but we don t want to take care of cockroaches.
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So there s a line we draw.
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So you have to hope that... Right now we re a bunch of angry monkeys.
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And, you know, maybe whatever these intelligences are, are also keeping an eye on us.
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you know, that you don t want a bunch of, you know, you don t want the angry monkey troop stomping around the local galactic arm.
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Do you think these folks are telling the truth?
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Do you think they saw what they say they saw?
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I think they saw what they said they saw.
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But I also think they saw what they were shown.
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I mean, if you go back to the whole notion of, okay, how long has this been around?
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It didn t just start showing up in 1947, right?
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There are stories going back into the 1800s of people who saw things in their farm fields in the US.
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It s in local newspapers from the 1800s.
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It s fascinating.
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But if you can go even further back,
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You know, so to your point of how would you as a higher intelligence represent yourself to a lesser intelligence?
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Well, let s go back to pre-civilization.
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Maybe you show yourself as the spirits in the forest, and you give messages through that.
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Once you get a little bit more civilized, then you show yourself as the gods.
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And then you re God.
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Well, we don t believe in God anymore, necessarily.
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Not everybody does.
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So what do we believe in?
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We believe in technology.
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So you show yourself as a form of technology, right?
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But the common thread is you re not alone.
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And there s something else here with you.
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And there s something that s, as you said, watching you.
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And at least watching over your shoulder.
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But I think that like any good parent, you don t tell your student everything.
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You make them learn.
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And learning requires mistakes, because if you tell them everything, then they get lazy.
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You ve looked at the brains of, or information coming from the brain of some of the people that have had UFO encounters.
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What s common about the brain of people who encounter UFOs?
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So the study started with a group of, let s say a cohort of individuals that were brought to me and their MRIs to ask about the damage that had been seen in these individuals.
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It turns out that the majority of those patients ended up being, as far as we can tell, Havana syndrome.
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And so, for me at least, that part of the story ends in terms of the injury.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s likely almost all Havana syndrome.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s somebody else s problem now, that s not my problem.
1
SPEAKER_00
But when we were looking at the brains of these individuals, we noticed something right in the center of the basal ganglia in many of these individuals that at first we thought was damage.
1
SPEAKER_00
It was basically an enriched patch of MRI-dense neurons that we thought was damage, but then it was showing up in everybody, and then we looked, and we said, oh, it s actually not.
1
SPEAKER_00
The other readings on these MRIs show that actually that s living tissue.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s actually the head of the caudate nipotamen.
1
SPEAKER_00
And at the time, and I remember even asking a good friend of mine at Stanford who is a psychiatrist, what does the basal ganglia do?
1
SPEAKER_00
He said, oh, the basal ganglia is just about movement and nerve and motor control.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I said, well, that s odd because these other papers that we were reading at the time started to suggest that it was involved with higher intelligence and is actually downstream of the executive function and involved with intuition and planning.
1
SPEAKER_00
And if you think about it, if you re going to have motor control, which is centralized in one place, motor control requires knowledge of the environment.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, you don t want to move something and hit the table.
1
SPEAKER_00
Or if you re walking across a room, you want to be aware and cognizant of what you might bump into.
1
SPEAKER_00
So, obviously, all of that planning requires access to all the senses.
1
SPEAKER_00
It requires access to your desires and memory, knowledge of where and what you want, and desire to walk nearby.
1
SPEAKER_00
Like I used the example of you re at a party, you want to avoid that person, you like that person, the waiter s about to drop something.
1
SPEAKER_00
All without thinking, you maneuver.
1
SPEAKER_00
So that actually all that planning is done in the basal ganglia.
1
SPEAKER_00
And it s actually now called the brain within the brain.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s a it s a goal processing system, subservient to executive function.
1
SPEAKER_00
So what we think we found there was not something which allows people to talk to UFOs.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I think the UFO community took it a step too far.
1
SPEAKER_00
What I think we found was a form of higher functioning and processing.
1
SPEAKER_00
So what we then looked at, and this was the most fascinating part of it, we looked then at individuals in the families of those, let s say the index case individuals.
1
SPEAKER_00
And we found that it was actually in families.
1
SPEAKER_00
And more so, this is the most fascinating part.
1
SPEAKER_00
We ve probably looked now at about 200 just random cases that you can download off of databases online.
1
SPEAKER_00
You don t see this higher connectivity.
1
SPEAKER_00
You only find it in what Kit Green would have called or has called higher functioning individuals, people who are
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, he called them savants.
1
SPEAKER_00
I don t have the means to.
1
SPEAKER_00
We haven t done the testing.
1
SPEAKER_00
But it turns out my family has it, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
We found it in me, my brother, my sister, my mother.
1
SPEAKER_00
We found it as well in other individuals  husband and wife pairs.
1
SPEAKER_00
So statistically,
1
SPEAKER_00
If you had a group of 20 individuals and you found two husband-wife pairs, both of whom had it, and yet it s only founded about, we think, one in 200, one in 300 individuals, the fact that two individuals came together, two sets of individuals came together, both of whom had it, implied either a restricted breeding group or attraction.
1
SPEAKER_00
The reason why it seems to be in, let s say, so-called experiencers or people who claim, if intuition is the ability to see something that other people don t, and I don t mean that in a paranormal sense, but being able to see something that s in front of you that other people might just dismiss, well, maybe that s a function of a higher kind of intelligence to say, well, I m not looking at
1
SPEAKER_00
an artifact.
1
SPEAKER_00
I m not looking at something that I should just ignore.
1
SPEAKER_00
I m seeing something and I recognize it for, not what it is, but that it is something different than is normally found in my environment.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you know, I have a little bit of that.
1
SPEAKER_01
I seem to see the magic in a lot of moments.
1
SPEAKER_01
I have a deep, it s obviously, not obviously, but it seems to be chemical in nature that I just am excited about life.
1
SPEAKER_01
I love life.
1
SPEAKER_01
I love stupid things.
1
SPEAKER_01
It feels like I m high a lot, unlike mushrooms or something like that, where you d really appreciate that.
1
SPEAKER_01
So I m able to detect something about the environment
1
SPEAKER_01
that maybe others don t, I don t know, but I seem to be over the top grateful to be alive for a lot of stupid reasons.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that s in there somewhere.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s kind of interesting because it really is true that
1
SPEAKER_01
our brains, the way we re brought up, but also the genetics enables us to see certain slices of the world.
1
SPEAKER_01
And some people are probably more receptive to anomalous information.
1
SPEAKER_01
They see the magic, the possibility in the novel thing.
1
SPEAKER_01
as opposed to kind of finding the pattern of the common, of the regular.
1
SPEAKER_01
Some people are more, wait a minute, this is kind of weird.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, a lot of those people probably become scientists too.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like, huh.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like, there s this pattern happening over and over and over and then something weird just happened.
1
SPEAKER_01
And then you get excited by that weirdness and start to pull the string and discover what is at the core of that weirdness.
1
SPEAKER_01
Is that, you know, maybe by way of question, how does the human perception system deal with anomalous information, do you think?
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, it first tries to classify it and get it out of the way.
1
SPEAKER_00
If it s not food, if it s not sex, right, if it s not in the way of my desires, or if it is in the way of my desires, then you focus on it.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so I think the question is how much spare processing power, how much CPU cycles do we spend on things that are not those core desires?
1
SPEAKER_01
What is the most kind of memorable, powerful UFO encounter report you ve ever heard?
1
SPEAKER_01
Just to you on a personal level, like something that was really powerful.
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, I mentioned the Zimbabwe one.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s particularly interesting.
1
SPEAKER_00
And one that actually most people don t know about, but family driving down the highway, two little girls in the back, open glass topped car, and the little girls see a craft right over their car.
1
SPEAKER_00
This is in the middle of the day on a busy highway.
1
SPEAKER_00
The mother sees it.
1
SPEAKER_00
nobody can, they look around, nobody else seems to see it.
1
SPEAKER_00
So the girls take out their camera, take a picture of it.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then they get home, they look at the picture.
1
SPEAKER_00
There s no craft, but there s a little object about 30 feet above their car or so, probably about three feet across, kind of star-shaped.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s not the craft, but it s something else.
1
SPEAKER_00
There s obviously, there was something there.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so what were they seeing?
1
SPEAKER_00
Were they seeing a projection?
1
SPEAKER_00
Were they seeing, and why were only they seeing it?
1
SPEAKER_01
And the photograph was capturing something very different than what we re seeing.
1
SPEAKER_01
There s still an object.
1
SPEAKER_01
Can you give a little bit of context?
1
SPEAKER_01
Is this from modern day?
1
SPEAKER_01
It s modern day.
1
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah, they had a camera.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, they had a cell phone camera.
1
SPEAKER_01
And this was like a report provided.
1
SPEAKER_01
About four or five years ago.
1
SPEAKER_01
By the way, where s like a central place to provide a report?
1
SPEAKER_01
Is this?
1
SPEAKER_00
Oh, there s a mufon, but this isn t public.
1
SPEAKER_00
I ve seen the picture.
1
SPEAKER_01
Oh, this is something you ve directly interacted with.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, I ve seen the picture.
1
SPEAKER_01
So those moments like that, they captivate your mind.
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, it s so different.
1
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t fall into the standard story at all.
1
SPEAKER_00
But in another way, it s a clear enunciation of this notion that
2
SPEAKER_00
when people see events, they don t all see the same thing.
2
SPEAKER_00
Now, we ve heard this about like traffic accidents.
2
SPEAKER_00
Different people will see the color of the car differently or the chain of events differently and just tells you that memory isn t anywhere near what we think it is.
2
SPEAKER_00
But the issue around these so-called UFO reports is that the same people will see a very different thing, almost as if whatever it is is projecting
2
SPEAKER_00
is projecting something into the mind, rather than it being real, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
Rather than it being a real manifestation, you know, material in front of you, it s actually almost some sort of an altered
2
SPEAKER_00
virtual reality that is imposed on you.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you know, I think the company Meta and all the virtual reality companies would love to have something like that, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, you don t have to actually wear something on your face to experience a virtual reality.
2
SPEAKER_00
What happens if you could just project it?
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, that s the fundamental question from an alien perspective when you look at, or as we humans look at ants.
2
SPEAKER_01
How does its perception system operate?
2
SPEAKER_01
So not only how does this thing s mind operate, how does the human mind operate, but how does their perception system operate so that we can stimulate the perception system properly to get them to think certain things.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so, you know,
2
SPEAKER_01
That s a really important question.
2
SPEAKER_01
Humans think that the only way to communicate is in 3D or 4D space-time.
2
SPEAKER_01
There s physical objects, or maybe you write things into some kind of language.
2
SPEAKER_01
But there could be just so much,
2
SPEAKER_01
more richness in how you can communicate.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so from an alien perspective where somebody has much greater technological capabilities, you have to figure out how do I use the skills I have to stimulate the human, the limited humans.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, I mean, let s take the ants exam again as an example.
2
SPEAKER_00
Let s say that you wanted to make ants practical.
2
SPEAKER_00
You wanted to use them for something, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
You wanted to use them as a form of biological robot.
2
SPEAKER_00
Now, DARPA and other people have been trying to use insects for – turn them into biological robots.
2
SPEAKER_00
But if you wanted to, you would have to interact with their
2
SPEAKER_00
sense of smell, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
Their pheromone system that they use to interact with each other.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you would either create those molecules to talk to them, to make them do it.
2
SPEAKER_00
I m not saying talk to them as if they re intelligent, but talk to them to manipulate them in ways that you want.
2
SPEAKER_00
Or if you were advanced enough, you would use some sort of electromagnetic or other means to stimulate their neurons in ways that would accomplish the same goal.
2
SPEAKER_00
as the pheromones, but by doing it in a sort of a tele-factoring way.
2
SPEAKER_00
So let s say you wanted to tele-factor with humans.
2
SPEAKER_00
You would interact with them, and this is again, this is a technology which you could imagine possible.
2
SPEAKER_00
you could tele-factor information into the sensory system of a human, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
But then each human is a little bit different.
2
SPEAKER_00
So either you know enough about them to tailor it to that individual, or you just basically take advantage of whatever the sensory net is that that individual has.
2
SPEAKER_00
So if you happen to be good at sound, or you happen to be a very visually inclined individual, then maybe the sensory information that you get
2
SPEAKER_00
that s most effective in terms of transmitting information would come through that portal.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think the aliens would need to figure out that humans value physical consistency.
2
SPEAKER_01
So we ve discovered physics.
2
SPEAKER_01
So we want our perception to make sense.
2
SPEAKER_01
Maybe they don t, you know, that s not an obvious fact of perception that
2
SPEAKER_01
you have to figure out what kind of things are humans used to observing in this particular environment of Earth, and how do we stimulate the perception system in a way that s not anomalous, or not too, doesn t cross that threshold of just like, well, that s way too weird.
2
SPEAKER_01
So they have to, I mean, that s not obvious that that should be important.
2
SPEAKER_01
you know, maybe you want to err on the side of anomaly, like lean into the weirdness.
2
SPEAKER_01
So communication is complicated.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, that s why I always find this issue of people talking about the so-called greys as interesting, because it is related to what you re saying.
2
SPEAKER_00
They re different enough
2
SPEAKER_00
but they re not so different as to be scary, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
They re not venom dripping fangs, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
They re different enough, but it s also like they re what you could imagine us becoming in some distant future.
2
SPEAKER_00
So is that a purposeful representation?
2
SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I don t believe in the grays, for instance, but I believe that people think that they see it.
2
SPEAKER_00
So if we re talking about a communication strategy that says, you know, we re like you, but not the same as you, this might be a manifestation that you represent in terms of a communication strategy.
2
SPEAKER_01
What do you make of David Favre s sighting of the Tic Tac UFO and other pilots who have seen these objects that seem to defy the laws of physics?
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, I think you have to take them at their word.
2
SPEAKER_00
Are they fascinating to you?
2
SPEAKER_00
Oh, absolutely.
2
SPEAKER_00
No, I know a lot of these people, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
So I know Lou Elizondo, Chris Mellon, the whole crowd I ve been – I saw the videos about three weeks or so before they went public.
2
SPEAKER_00
I was at a bar with Lou overlooking the Pentagon in Crystal City and they showed him to me and my hair stood on end.
2
SPEAKER_00
And he said this is coming out soon.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I know one of the guys on the inside who was the naval intelligence who had interviewed all of these pilots again before this came out.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it was hair raising to hear this, but also exciting that, you know, here s not just people s testimony.
2
SPEAKER_00
These are credible individuals.
2
SPEAKER_00
And if you ve seen the 60 Minute episode with some of the pilots, you know, they have no monetary gain.
2
SPEAKER_00
If anything, they ve got negative gain from coming out.
2
SPEAKER_00
But then you also have all of those simultaneous
2
SPEAKER_00
ship analysis from the USS Princeton and the radar analysis, etc.
2
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, at the end of the day, it s just data.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s not a conclusion.
2
SPEAKER_00
I d be perfectly happy, honestly, perfectly happy if somebody showed that it was all a hoax.
2
SPEAKER_00
I can go back to my day job.
2
SPEAKER_01
That could be a hoax, but other things might not be.
2
SPEAKER_01
This is the point, this is why it s nice to remove some of the stigma about this topic because it s all just data and anomalous events.
2
SPEAKER_01
are such that there s going to be, they re going to be rare in terms of how much data they represent, but we have to consider the full range of data to discover the things that actually represent something that s, if we pull at it, we ll discover something that s extraterrestrial, or something deep about the phenomena on Earth that we don t yet understand.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, if it only stimulates people, for instance, to think, okay, well, what happens if we could move like that with momentumless movement?
2
SPEAKER_00
And it stimulates young individuals to go into the sciences to ask those questions.
2
SPEAKER_00
That, to me, is fascinating.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, after I ve been openly talking about this in the last year especially,
2
SPEAKER_00
I ve had a number of students from top schools who aren t my students come to me and say, if I can help, let me.
2
SPEAKER_00
How can I help?
2
SPEAKER_00
I never had thought about this before, but you opened, you and others, not just you and others, have opened my mind to thinking about this matter.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s why it s actually funny that Elon Musk doesn t think too much about this
2
SPEAKER_01
these kinds of propulsion systems that could defy the laws of physics as we currently understand them.
2
SPEAKER_01
To me, it s a powerful way to think what is possible.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s inspiring, even if some of the data doesn t represent extraterrestrial vehicles, I think the observation itself, it s like something you mentioned, which is hypothesizing, imagining these things.
2
SPEAKER_01
considering the possibility of these things, I think, opens up your mind in a way that ultimately can create the technology.
2
SPEAKER_01
First, you have to believe the technology is possible before you can create it.
2
SPEAKER_00
In my own lab, you know, we always look for, as I ve said before, what is inevitable.
2
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, saying, inevitably, this is the kind of data we need.
2
SPEAKER_00
But if we need that kind of data, the instrument we want isn t doesn t exist.
2
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so I imagine the perfect instrument, I can t make it.
2
SPEAKER_00
And you back into something which is practical.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then you, in a sense, reverse engineer the future of what it is that you want to make.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I ve started and sold at least half a dozen or more companies using that basic premise.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so it was always something that didn t exist today, but we imagined what we wanted.
2
SPEAKER_00
And at the time, many people said it couldn t be done.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, for instance, all the gene therapy that s done today with retroviruses came from a group meeting in David Baltimore s lab.
2
SPEAKER_00
I was a postdoc with him.
2
SPEAKER_00
And one of the other postdocs wasn t able to make retroviruses in a way that he wanted to.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I realized I had a cell line that would allow us to make retroviruses in two days rather than two months.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so he and I then worked together to make that system.
2
SPEAKER_00
And now all gene therapy with retroviruses is done using this basic approach around the whole world.
2
SPEAKER_00
Because something couldn t be done, and we wanted to do it better, and we imagined the future.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so that s, I think, what the whole UFO phenomenon is doing for people.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like, well, let s imagine a future
2
SPEAKER_00
where these kinds of technologies are, but also let s imagine a future where we don t blow ourselves up, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
So if these things are there, they manage to not blow themselves up.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it means that at least one other civilization got past the inflection point.
2
SPEAKER_01
So if some of the encounters are actually representing alien civilizations visiting us, why do you think they re doing so?
2
SPEAKER_01
you suggested that perhaps it s to study and understand their own past.
2
SPEAKER_01
What are some of the motivations, do you think?
2
SPEAKER_01
And again, from our perspective, us as humans, what motivations would we have when we approach other civilizations we might discover in the future?
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, I think one motivation might be to steer us away from the precipice.
2
SPEAKER_00
Or on the assumption that even if we make it past the precipice, at least we re not a bunch of psychopaths running around.
2
SPEAKER_00
So maybe there s a little bit of motivation there to make sure that the neighbor that s growing up next to you is not unruly.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, but I mean, maybe it s sort of a moral imperative, like what we have with, you know, creating national parks where animals can continue to live out their lives in a natural way.
2
SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that would be, I mean, the problem is we re imagining from a anthropomorphic viewpoint, what an alien might think.
2
SPEAKER_00
And as I ve said before,
2
SPEAKER_00
alien means alien, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, not Hollywood aliens, but a whole different way of thinking.
2
SPEAKER_00
And a whole different level of experience.
2
SPEAKER_00
And let s say wisdom, hopefully, that we could only hope to understand.
2
SPEAKER_00
Now, but if we ever get out there, if we ever make it past our
2
SPEAKER_00
current problems.
2
SPEAKER_00
And even if we don t have faster than light travel, and even if we re only using ram scoops or light sails to get where we want to go, and it takes us 10,000 years to get somewhere or to spread out, we might encounter such things.
2
SPEAKER_00
And are we just going to stomp all over it like we did in colonial South America or Africa or all the rest?
2
SPEAKER_00
On our current path, likely.
2
SPEAKER_00
you know, and so what are we going to learn?
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, we re getting better and better at understanding what is life.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I think we re getting better and better at being careful not to step on it when we see it.
2
SPEAKER_01
This is one of the nice things about talking about UFOs is it expands the Overton window.
2
SPEAKER_01
It expands our understanding of what possibly could be life.
2
SPEAKER_01
It gets us to think.
2
SPEAKER_01
It gets the scientific community to think.
2
SPEAKER_01
When we go to Mars, when we go to these different moons that possibly have life,
2
SPEAKER_01
you know, we re not looking at legged organisms.
2
SPEAKER_01
We re looking at some kind of complexity that arises in resistance to the natural world.
2
SPEAKER_01
And there s a lot of interesting- I like that, resistance to the natural world, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
Somehow there s a rebellious process, complex system going on here.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I don t know the many ways it could take form.
2
SPEAKER_01
And there s a sense for aliens that as the technology develops, they take form more and more as information, as something that can influence the space of ideas, of the processing of data itself.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I just, this idea of embodiment that we humans so admire,
2
SPEAKER_01
physically visible, perceivable embodiment may be a very inefficient thing.
2
SPEAKER_01
Right?
2
SPEAKER_00
If you think just about, you know, your area, AI, you know, we re trying to make smaller and smaller and smaller circuitry that is, you know,
2
SPEAKER_00
basically, closer and closer to the physics of how the universe operates, right, right down at the level of any quantum computers are basically right down about quantum information storage.
2
SPEAKER_00
So fast forward 10,000 100,000 years,
2
SPEAKER_00
maybe somebody found a way to embody AI directly into the physics of the universe, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
And it doesn t require a physical manifestation.
2
SPEAKER_00
It just sits in space-time.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s just a locally ordered space.
2
SPEAKER_00
We re just locally ordered space-time, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, I mean, but maybe they found a way to embody it there.
2
SPEAKER_01
they probably have to get really good at not trampling on the ants.
2
SPEAKER_01
The better your technology gets, the easier it is to accidentally, like, oops, just destroy these simpleton biological systems.
2
SPEAKER_00
We constantly think about whatever these things might be.
2
SPEAKER_00
We think that they are some sort of a unified force.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, maybe they re not unified.
2
SPEAKER_00
Maybe they are as disparate as you and I are.
2
SPEAKER_00
And maybe what keeps them from stomping all over the ants is each other.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right?
2
SPEAKER_00
That they are in a self-tension to prevent one or more of them from running amok.
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, that s kind of the anarchy of nations that we have on Earth.
2
SPEAKER_01
So there s always going to be this... There s a hierarchy.
2
SPEAKER_01
This hierarchy that s formed of greater and greater intelligences.
2
SPEAKER_01
And they re all probably also wondering, wait, what s bigger than me?
2
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s what I always wonder is that maybe that what keeps them in line is something that is beyond them.
2
SPEAKER_01
Like what created the universe?
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, that s probably a question that bothers them too.
2
SPEAKER_01
What about the communication task itself?
2
SPEAKER_01
How hard do you think it is for aliens to communicate with humans?
3
SPEAKER_01
So is this something you think about, about this barrier of communication between biological systems and something else?
3
SPEAKER_01
How difficult is it to find a common language?
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, I think if you re smart enough or technologically enabled enough, it s relatively straightforward.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now, whether your concepts
3
SPEAKER_00
can ever be dumbed down to us, that might be hard.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean- Again, talking to the ants.
3
SPEAKER_00
Talking to the ants, I mean- On Instagram.
3
SPEAKER_01
So- You want to look good in this picture, let me explain.
3
SPEAKER_00
Let me explain to you why.
3
SPEAKER_00
So that s the essential problem of, you know, perhaps they realize
3
SPEAKER_00
it is that they re talking to.
3
SPEAKER_00
And they say, rather than muddy the picture, we re only going to give them limited information.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right?
3
SPEAKER_00
And yeah, maybe we could sit down, like you and I, and have a conversation.
3
SPEAKER_00
But then they would make assumptions, the humans would then make assumptions about us that aren t true, because we re not humans.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right?
3
SPEAKER_00
So let s stay at arm s length.
3
SPEAKER_00
Let s just let them know that we re here.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right?
3
SPEAKER_00
And here s the limited amount of communication.
3
SPEAKER_00
Again, this notion that if you give somebody everything, they ll get lazy.
3
SPEAKER_00
And if they ve been around as long as they have, they ve seen every kind of thing that can go wrong.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so they know as much as they might want to step in, that would be a wrong thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you have to also understand the amount of wisdom they carry.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, and so it s very easy as well for religions to, I don t want to get into a whole religious conversation, but very easy for you could see how religions could call them angels or devils or what have you, because again, if you re trying to fit it into a framework of cultural understanding, the first thing you reach for is God.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so when you look at what these things are, and again, with the angels and the devils, in a similar sort of way, their communication is limited.
3
SPEAKER_00
They just kind of give little, what s the Oracle of Delphi, they kind of give these Delphic pronouncements, and then it s up to you to figure out what it is that they really mean.
3
SPEAKER_01
Stephen Greer claimed that a skeleton discovered in Atacama region of Chile might be an alien.
3
SPEAKER_01
You reached out to him and took on the task of proving or disproving that with the rigor of science.
3
SPEAKER_01
The result is a paper titled, Whole Genome Sequencing of Atacama Skeleton Shows Novel Mutations Linked with Dysplasia.
3
SPEAKER_01
Can you tell this full story?
3
SPEAKER_00
The story was, as you put it right there, correct.
3
SPEAKER_00
Reached out, got a sample of the body, did the DNA sequencing, then worked with a team of two other Stanford scientists and a Roche sequencing group, Roche Diagnostics, and probably a total team of about 11 or so people.
3
SPEAKER_00
And as a standard in these kinds of things, the professors actually don t do the work.
3
SPEAKER_00
The students do the work and figured out the answer.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then we helped them put together the story.
3
SPEAKER_00
And the story was simply that it was human, 100%.
3
SPEAKER_00
I went into it thinking it was originally a monkey of some sort.
3
SPEAKER_00
I got kind of excited a few months into the process thinking, well, what happens if it is an alien?
3
SPEAKER_00
Right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Can you describe some of the characteristics of the skeleton that make it unique and interesting?
3
SPEAKER_00
Primarily, it had dysmorphias of the brain.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so the first thing I did, actually, when I got pictures of it, I took it to a local expert at Stanford, and he was on the paper.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he was the world expert in pediatric bone dysmorphias.
3
SPEAKER_00
He literally wrote the book.
3
SPEAKER_00
And on this, because that s what you do.
3
SPEAKER_00
You go to an expert when it s outside of your field of interest.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he said, well, I haven t seen this particular collection of mutations before, or this physiology before, but here s what I think it might be.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he said, but based on the size of the thing and the bone density, it would appear to be like six or seven years old.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now, again, that s the thing where I think the lay public doesn t understand or takes a speculation like that and turns it into a fact.
3
SPEAKER_00
No one ever said that it was that age.
3
SPEAKER_00
We only said that the bones made it look like it was that age.
3
SPEAKER_00
But then we went back and looked for genetic explanations of why things might look the way they did.
3
SPEAKER_00
And if you, again, read the paper, it s very carefully caveated to say that these mutations might result in this.
3
SPEAKER_00
But what we did find was an unexpectedly large number of mutations associated with bone growth in this individual.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it was just
3
SPEAKER_00
bad roll of the dice, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
You roll the dice enough times with enough people born every year, and someone will roll the wrong dice all at once.
3
SPEAKER_00
So the sad part about it was individuals in the UFO community who wanted to think that there was some sort of conspiracy around it, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
That somebody had somehow convinced all of my students to lie.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, come on, you know, I would lose my job, first of all, and they would all be, you know, in trouble forever.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but also it s just projecting malevolence onto people that doesn t, I don t think, exist in normal populace, and especially doesn t exist in the scientific community.
3
SPEAKER_01
The kind of people that go into science, I mean, this is what bothers me with the current distrust of science, is they might be naive, they might not, especially in modern science, look at the big picture, philosophical, ethical questions, all that kind of stuff,
3
SPEAKER_01
But ultimately, they re people with integrity and just a deep curiosity for the discovery of cool little things.
3
SPEAKER_01
And there s no malevolence, broadly speaking, in the scientific community.
3
SPEAKER_01
So, I mean, there s a bigger story here, which is,
3
SPEAKER_01
there s a hunger in the populace to discover something anomalous, something new.
3
SPEAKER_01
And science has to be both open to the anomalous, but also to reject the anomalous when the data doesn t support it.
3
SPEAKER_01
What do you make of that, walking that line for you?
3
SPEAKER_01
Because you re dealing with UFO encounters, you re dealing with the anomalous.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, people have said – let s go back to the Atacama case that I was debunking it.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, debunking is a loaded term.
3
SPEAKER_00
It sort of assumes that you are going in purposefully to prove something is wrong.
3
SPEAKER_00
I wasn t.
3
SPEAKER_00
I was just going in to collect the data.
3
SPEAKER_00
I showed that this one was human.
3
SPEAKER_00
There was another skull that somebody had at one point.
3
SPEAKER_00
It was called the star child.
3
SPEAKER_00
They called it the star child skull.
3
SPEAKER_00
I said, you know, I looked at it.
3
SPEAKER_00
I looked at the DNA sequencing that they had done.
3
SPEAKER_00
I said, this is human.
3
SPEAKER_00
End of story.
3
SPEAKER_00
The people who owned the thing at the time disagreed with me, and then eventually another group came in and proved that I was right.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it s not about debunking.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s about getting the more spectacular and hyped cases off the table.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, the reason I got interested in it is because somebody was hyping it.
3
SPEAKER_00
And not because I wanted to disprove it, but because I just wanted to know.
3
SPEAKER_00
And thus, get it off the table, because it s usually the most
3
SPEAKER_00
extravagant things that are most likely to be wrong.
3
SPEAKER_00
Somewhere in the rubble will be something interesting.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so that s what you do.
3
SPEAKER_00
You get the you get the the dross off the table.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then somewhere in the data will be something worth
3
SPEAKER_01
real inquiry.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that, if you inquire deeply enough, will be extravagant.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes, exactly.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s what actually excites scientists is to, I mean, you want, with the rigor of science, to actually reveal the extravagant.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so look at CRISPR as probably the most perfect example of that.
3
SPEAKER_00
These weird sequences in bacterial genomes, all arrayed one after the other with these strange sequences around them.
3
SPEAKER_00
But when you looked at the sequences, they looked like viruses.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so how did they get there?
3
SPEAKER_00
And lo and behold, after a lot of effort and work, well, a couple of Nobel Prizes went out the door, but these strange things ended up having extraordinarily extravagant possibilities.
3
SPEAKER_01
You ve also looked at UFO materials.
3
SPEAKER_01
You are in possession of UFO materials yourself.
3
SPEAKER_00
Claimed UFO materials.
3
SPEAKER_01
Alleged.
3
SPEAKER_01
Alleged UFO materials, that s right.
3
SPEAKER_01
What s another term?
3
SPEAKER_01
Weird materials that don t seem to... They have a story.
3
SPEAKER_01
They have a story that doesn t seem to be of natural origins, but it s not, you know,
3
SPEAKER_01
There s a process to proving that, and that process may take decades, if not centuries, because you have to keep pulling at the string and discover where they could possibly come from.
3
SPEAKER_01
But anyway, you re in possession of some materials of this kind.
3
SPEAKER_01
Can you describe some of them, and maybe also talk to the process of how you investigate them, how do you analyze them?
3
SPEAKER_00
Right.
3
SPEAKER_00
So let s say that there s two classes of materials that I ve been given by people, and they re not given by like the government or anything, just given people who ve collected them and there s a reasonable chain of evidence associated with them that you believe is not just a pebble somebody picked up off a road.
3
SPEAKER_00
There are almost always things that people have claimed have either been dropped off as like some sort of a leftover material, molten metals, or they are from an object that was released from this that kind of exploded.
3
SPEAKER_00
There are almost always metals.
3
SPEAKER_00
I have some couple of things that might be biological that are interesting that I haven t really spent a lot of time on yet.
3
SPEAKER_00
When you look at a metal, you basically, well, okay, what are the elements in it?
3
SPEAKER_00
And what s it made of?
3
SPEAKER_00
And so there s pretty standard approaches to doing that.
3
SPEAKER_00
Most of them involve a technology called mass spectrometry.
3
SPEAKER_00
And there s probably about five or six different kinds of mass spectrometry that you could bring to bear on answering it.
3
SPEAKER_00
And they either tell you, depending upon the limit of the resolution of the instrument, they either tell you the elements that are there, or they tell you the isotopes that are there.
3
SPEAKER_00
And you re interested not just in knowing whether something is there or not, you re interested in knowing whether there are, you know, the amounts of it, and in the case of elements, how many different isotopes are there.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that s kind of where, in some of these cases, it gets interesting, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Because in at least one of the materials, as we first studied it, the isotope ratios of, in this case, it was magnesium, are way off normal.
3
SPEAKER_00
and I just don t know why.
3
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t prove anything.
3
SPEAKER_00
All it proves is that it was probably accomplished by some kind of an industrial process.
3
SPEAKER_00
Whether it s the result of a process, and this is sort of the leftover, or whether it was made that way for a particular purpose, I don t know.
3
SPEAKER_00
All I know is that it was engineered.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s it, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
But then it s – the question is, sort of you go one step deeper, why would you engineer it?
3
SPEAKER_01
Right, and what is engineered means?
3
SPEAKER_01
There s all kinds of, it could be a byproduct, it could be the main result of an engineering process, it would be a small part of the engineering process that is the main part.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, so the ratios of isotopes for any given element are basically the result of stellar processes.
3
SPEAKER_00
A supernova blew up sometime several billion years ago.
3
SPEAKER_00
That became a cloud.
3
SPEAKER_00
Those atoms coalesced gravitationally to form another sun and a ring that became a rocky planet.
3
SPEAKER_00
And the ratios of the isotopes were determined at the time of that explosion.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so everything in the local solar system is more or less of that ratio, depending upon certain gravitational different but but by
3
SPEAKER_00
fragments of a percent, not whole tens of percent difference.
3
SPEAKER_00
So what do humans use isotopes for?
3
SPEAKER_00
Mostly to blow stuff up.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, the vast majority of the isotopes that have been made in the per pound or ton are things like certain ratios of plutonium and uranium to blow stuff up.
3
SPEAKER_00
We don t make or engineer isotopes, which today is relatively easy to do, but it s still expensive.
3
SPEAKER_00
For any other reason, apart from, let s say, anti-cancer, we use stable isotopes in money these days as a counterfeiting tool.
3
SPEAKER_00
You basically embed certain ratios of isotopes in to make it harder for counterfeiters to accomplish.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so but other than that, we don t do anything with that.
3
SPEAKER_00
So why would you make grams of such material in this one case, and drop it around on a beach in Brazil?
3
SPEAKER_00
So which case are we talking about?
3
SPEAKER_00
Describe that visual case.
3
SPEAKER_00
This is the Ubatuba case.
3
SPEAKER_01
Can you describe this case a little bit further, like what material we re talking about, just the full story of the case?
3
SPEAKER_01
It s an interesting one.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s an interesting one.
3
SPEAKER_00
So a fisherman saw an object that released something, or it exploded, and it was this, I ve got some big chunks of it, relatively pure magnesium,
3
SPEAKER_00
with obviously something else in it, because magnesium burns.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it had something in it that would — other metals, simple alloy — that would prevent it from basically burning up.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so the question is — so then we had two pieces that came from two different chains of custody, both claimed to be from the same object.
3
SPEAKER_00
At least physically, when you look at the two things, they look
3
SPEAKER_00
the same, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
So we took small fragments of each of them, we put them in an instrument called a secondary ion mass spec, which is an extremely sensitive instrument.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it can see down to 0.0001 mass units, which is important for, let s say, more arcane reasons, but it s a sensitive instrument.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so
3
SPEAKER_00
one of the chains of custody, we had two pieces from the same chain of custody, and then two pieces from the other chain of custody, one of them had completely normal magnesium isotope ratios, magnesium 24, 25, 26, and the other was off, not just like slightly off, way off, and they were both off to the same extent.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, I mean, it was sort of like you had an internal control,
4
SPEAKER_01
of what was normal, and you had this other one, which was wrong.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so you re left with kind of an open question.
4
SPEAKER_01
Was this a hoax?
4
SPEAKER_01
Were these two chains of custody, one of them a hoax, that somebody purposefully introduced those things?
4
SPEAKER_01
Because you could do it.
4
SPEAKER_01
It would cost a lot.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, at the time that this was found, I guess the 1970s or so, might ve been earlier, I forget,
4
SPEAKER_01
the amount that I had would have cost several tens of thousands of dollars to make.
4
SPEAKER_01
And again, it s not something you would just throw around, and why would you do it in the hope that some guy 30 years from then would pick it up and study it?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s a very subtle, subtle troll.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s a long-term plan.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I just don t know what to make of it, except it s interesting.
4
SPEAKER_01
So a different kind of question that you re asking is, what constitutes evidence?
4
SPEAKER_01
Right, so is this sufficient evidence?
4
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely not.
4
SPEAKER_01
But somebody s put it forward, I have the time, it s my time.
4
SPEAKER_01
I ll study it and my objective is to sort of take those that I think are credible enough and do a reasonable analysis, put it out there, and maybe somebody else will come up with an idea as to what it is.
4
SPEAKER_01
Now, what would be better is some sort of true,
4
SPEAKER_01
Technology right something that is obviously We don t have it, you know and people like on neil degrasse tyson and seth shostak have come out rightfully and have said You know when you show up with you know, uh, something really obviously technology that we don t understand
4
SPEAKER_01
you know, then we ll pay attention, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
Not just material.
4
SPEAKER_01
Not just material.
4
SPEAKER_01
A piece of metal is interesting, but, and several of the things that I ve looked at, and things that people, other things that people have come to me with, we found to be completely banal, or were actually pieces of aircraft that were invented back in the 1940s.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so, take them off the table.
4
SPEAKER_01
See, but I think,
4
SPEAKER_00
Again, I think showing up with technology that we humans would find completely novel is actually a really difficult task for aliens because it obviously can t be so novel that we don t recognize it.
4
SPEAKER_00
For what it is.
4
SPEAKER_00
For what it is.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I would say most of the technology aliens likely have
4
SPEAKER_00
would be something we don t recognize.
4
SPEAKER_00
So it s actually a hard problem how to convince ants.
4
SPEAKER_00
You first have to understand what ants are tweeting about, what they care about, in order to inject into their culture.
4
SPEAKER_00
Because that s why I think it would be the technology that you could present is in the space of ideas, is in the,
4
SPEAKER_00
is try to influence individual humans with the encounters and try to, with this kind of thing that you mentioned about us not taking, messages about us not taking care of the world.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s difficult, I mean, for them to understand, you have to come up with trinkets that impress us.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, maybe the very technology,
4
SPEAKER_00
the fascination with the development of technology and the development of technology, the actual act of innovation itself is the thing that they re communicating.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, this is kind of what Jacques Vallee thinks about, is the role of- The control system, he calls it.
4
SPEAKER_00
The control system.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, let me ask about Jacques.
4
SPEAKER_00
Who is he?
4
SPEAKER_00
You know him.
4
SPEAKER_00
Who is Jacques Vallee?
4
SPEAKER_00
What have you learned from him?
4
SPEAKER_00
about life, about UFOs, about technology, about our role in the universe.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, I met Jacques actually soon after the whole Atacama thing happened.
4
SPEAKER_01
I was visited by those people associated with the government and whatever around the Havana, what ended up mostly being Havana syndrome patients, but also Jacques at the same time.
4
SPEAKER_01
And they were actually working behind the scenes with each other that, oh, here s this Stanford professor who is willing to talk about this stuff and investigate things.
4
SPEAKER_01
Maybe we should go talk to him.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he reached out through a colleague and he and I had lunch actually at the Rosewood Inn up on near Sand Hill.
4
SPEAKER_01
So Jacques is one of the first openly active scientists and he s really a scientist in this area, going back to the 1960s.
4
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, he s
4
SPEAKER_01
put forward a number of ideas, speculations about what it might be that people are interacting with.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the first thing that I learned from him is this notion of what he called Kabuki theater, that many of the things that people have seen are, I remember reading his books and thinking, he uses this word absurd a lot.
4
SPEAKER_01
He said, the things that people claim they see are absurd, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
A ship doesn t land,
4
SPEAKER_01
in a farmer s field and then come up and knock on the door and say, can I have a glass of water?
4
SPEAKER_01
And these are stories literally out of newspapers from the 1930s.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s absurd.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, and the other thing that people say, ships don t crash.
4
SPEAKER_01
If you re so technologically advanced, you don t crash.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s absurd that they crash.
4
SPEAKER_01
So he says, this is put on as a show, it s meant to, it s an influence campaign, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
It s not meant to influence individuals, it s meant to influence a culture as a whole.
4
SPEAKER_01
Maybe they don t look at us as individuals, maybe they look at us as an organism,
4
SPEAKER_01
that lives on a planet, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
And perhaps rightfully so.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so that s how you interact with them.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s how you influence them.
4
SPEAKER_01
So that was one of the first things that kind of took me back and realized, wow, there s actually a – maybe there s a puppet master behind the scenes
4
SPEAKER_01
That s, you know, doing this influencing that all this stuff about aliens is just is not true per se.
4
SPEAKER_01
They re just a representation of something that is meant to influence.
4
SPEAKER_01
So that was probably the most interesting.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, the man is brilliant.
4
SPEAKER_01
He s also it can be and I m sorry, Jacques, you can also be incredibly annoying.
4
SPEAKER_01
to have a conversation with, because he will pick apart your arguments, or anything that you think you know, and show you why you don t know what you think you know.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he uses the example that, for me, that is all you need is one counterexample to any conclusion, and you re wrong.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so I learned from him, I mean, I m supposed to be a good scientist, but I learned from him, don t talk about conclusions, just talk about the data.
4
SPEAKER_01
Because data s not wrong.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, convince yourself that the data s not wrong, or not an artifact, but be careful about your conclusions, because whatever is going on, it s much more complicated than we imagine.
4
SPEAKER_00
Wow, that s powerful, being able to always step back.
4
SPEAKER_00
We humans get excited.
4
SPEAKER_00
We start to jump to conclusions from the data, but always step back.
4
SPEAKER_00
Powerful, being able to always step back.
4
SPEAKER_00
We humans get excited.
4
SPEAKER_00
We start to jump to conclusions from the data, but always step back.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, and some of my Twitter feeds, when I dare to go on Twitter, are full of, well, when are you gonna give us the answer?
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, you know, science is not immediate.
4
SPEAKER_01
You re gonna have to be patient.
4
SPEAKER_01
And even some of my science colleagues have said, well, where s the data?
4
SPEAKER_01
My answer to them has been, where s been your work to try to produce any?
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, I m not here to give you everything on a silver platter.
4
SPEAKER_00
We talked offline how much I love data and machine learning and so on.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it s been really disheartening to see the US government not invest as much as they possibly could into this whole process.
4
SPEAKER_00
So let s jump to the most recent thing, which is what do you make of the report titled Preliminary Assessment, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, that was released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in June 2021.
4
SPEAKER_00
So this is what s like, okay, we re gonna step back and we re going to like, where do we stand and where do we hope the future is?
4
SPEAKER_00
What do you make of that report?
4
SPEAKER_00
Is it hopeful?
4
SPEAKER_01
Is it- I see it as very hopeful, very hopeful.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think the adults are finally stepping up and being in charge, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
In a good sense of adult.
4
SPEAKER_01
What s that?
4
SPEAKER_00
In the good sense of adult.
4
SPEAKER_00
In the good sense of adult.
4
SPEAKER_00
Because childlike curiosity is a pretty powerful thing.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s true, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
But it s also, I think, the people who were worried that the populace at large might run screaming into the streets and riot, you know, they basically, the empiric evidence is they re wrong.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, these videos and all these things have been out for now, what, five years?
4
SPEAKER_01
Most people don t even know about it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Right so as as as hyped as it s been and all over the newspapers that it s been and etc You know even Tucker Carlson has talked about it many times on his news program Joe Rogan has a lot of people don t know about it.
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SPEAKER_01
So I think people if it s not affecting their day-to-day life They re going on with their day-to-day life so but that said
4
SPEAKER_01
I think it was an important sea change in the internal discussions going on in the government because, and the reason being, that I think this is actually partly true with the maturation of human social technology.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was becoming so obvious that this stuff was showing up again and again and again around our ships.
4
SPEAKER_01
They just couldn t keep it quiet anymore.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so it s like we need to do something about it and Lou Elizondo and Chris and others to their great credit found the right angle to talk about this.
4
SPEAKER_01
It says, well, okay, let s say it s not out there.
4
SPEAKER_01
Maybe it s the Russians, the Chinese or somebody else.
4
SPEAKER_01
We should know about this because we damn sure know it s not us.
4
SPEAKER_01
So that to me is an important thing to finally be a little bit more open about the matter.
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SPEAKER_01
But like I often say, I m not looking for people to give me permission to do anything.
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SPEAKER_01
I m just gonna do the analysis myself with what I have.
4
SPEAKER_01
Avi Loeb has taken the same approach.
4
SPEAKER_01
He said, I m not gonna wait for the government to give me telescopic information about
4
SPEAKER_01
technologies or things that might be even on our own solar system, I m just gonna collect it myself.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that s the right way to do it, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
Don t wait for somebody else to give it to you.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s also possible to inspire a large number of people to do a wider spread data collection.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, you yourself can t do a large enough data collection that would, if you re talking about anomalous events.
4
SPEAKER_00
Right.
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SPEAKER_00
You should be collecting high-resolution data about everything that s happening on Earth in terms of the kind of things that would indicate to you a strong signal that something weird happened here.
4
SPEAKER_00
And this is why governments can be good at funding large-scale efforts.
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SPEAKER_00
NASA and so on, working with SpaceX, with Blue Origin,
4
SPEAKER_00
fund capitalistic, sort of fund companies, fund company efforts to do huge moonshot projects.
4
SPEAKER_00
And in the same way, do huge moonshot data collection efforts in terms of UFOs.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, we re not, it needs to be like 10X, like one or two orders of magnitude more funding to do this kind of thing.
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SPEAKER_00
And I understand on the flip side of that, if you make it about what are the Russians, what are the Chinese doing,
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SPEAKER_00
make it a question of geopolitics, it gets touchy, because now you re kind of taken away from the realm of science and- Making it military.
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SPEAKER_00
Making it military.
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SPEAKER_00
Some of the greatest, this is what makes me, as an engineer, makes me truly sad, that some of the greatest engineering work ever done is by Lockheed Martin, and we will never know about it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I agree, I agree.
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SPEAKER_01
I wish it was different, but it s the world we live in.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, but related to that UAP task force announcement that you just said, you know, the bill was passed in the Department of Defense and now it formally establishes an office to collate that information and also to be transparent about it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Money is now set aside.
4
SPEAKER_00
What do you think of, just in case people don t know, the DOD established a new department to study UFOs called Airborne Naming, come on, but yes, Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group.
4
SPEAKER_00
Do you know how to pronounce that?
4
SPEAKER_00
No, I do not.
4
SPEAKER_00
A-O-I-M-S-G.
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SPEAKER_00
It s stupid and needs to be renamed, but.
4
SPEAKER_00
A-O-I-M-S-G.
4
SPEAKER_00
A-O.
4
SPEAKER_00
All right.
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Is directed by the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.
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SPEAKER_00
What do you make of this office?
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SPEAKER_00
Are you hopeful about this office?
4
SPEAKER_01
I think there s still a tug of war going on behind the scenes as to who s going to control this.
4
SPEAKER_01
But I do know, though, that money has been set aside that will be used to
4
SPEAKER_01
make things more public, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
To start to get others involved.
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SPEAKER_01
I m involved with an effort to get other academics involved.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you think there might be some of that money could be directed towards funding, maybe like groups like yours to do some research here.
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SPEAKER_00
So they would be open to that, you think?
4
SPEAKER_01
I hope so.
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SPEAKER_01
I mean, nothing is set in stone yet, so, you know, and I m not hiding anything because I just don t know anything, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
But I do think that there will be public efforts.
4
SPEAKER_01
Now, there are being set up other private efforts.
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SPEAKER_01
to bring monies involved and to use that to leverage and get access to some of the internal resources as well.
4
SPEAKER_01
So what you re seeing is kind of an ecosystem building up in a positive sense of people who are willing to do the research.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, you know, before it would be you couldn t even go to a scientist and ask them to help.
4
SPEAKER_01
Now, if there s money, as I said before, scientists are essentially capitalists.
4
SPEAKER_01
We go where the money is.
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SPEAKER_01
I mean, the work that I ve done, I did out of my own pocket.
4
SPEAKER_01
And probably about $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 of money went into the paper we published out of my own pocket.
4
SPEAKER_01
But the amount of money that needs to go in is in at least the few millions to do a proper analysis of these materials.
4
SPEAKER_01
The work I know that the Galileo project is involved with, it s probably in the 5 to 10 million range to get stuff done.
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SPEAKER_01
But that s actually a relatively modest amount of money to accomplish something that has been in the zeitgeist for decades.
4
SPEAKER_00
I should also push back a little bit on something you probably will agree with.
4
SPEAKER_00
You said scientists are essentially capitalists.
4
SPEAKER_00
What I ve noticed is there s certainly an influence of money, but oftentimes when you re talking about basic research and basic science, the money is a little bit ambiguous to what direction you re doing the research in, and the scientists get really good
4
SPEAKER_00
at telling a narrative of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we re fulfilling the purpose of this funding, but we re actually, they end up doing really what they re curious about.
4
SPEAKER_00
And of course, you cannot deviate, like, if you re getting funded to study penguins in Antarctica, you can t start building rockets, but probably you can, because you ll convince some, you ll concoct a narrative saying, rockets are really important for studying penguins in the Antarctic.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think that s actually,
4
SPEAKER_00
This is one thing I think people don t generally understand about the scientific mind, is I don t know how capitalistic it is, because if it was, they would start an effing company.
5
SPEAKER_00
No, I mean when I meant capitalist, I didn t mean in the – they ll start companies per se.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean we can only do the research where there s money.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so from – maybe it s a bad use of the term capitalist.
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SPEAKER_00
We will only do the research where there s money.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, why do most people work, many biologists work in cancer research?
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SPEAKER_00
Because there s a lot of money there.
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SPEAKER_00
It s an important problem.
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SPEAKER_00
But
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SPEAKER_00
I might not have ever gotten involved in it if there wasn t money.
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SPEAKER_00
I might ve gone and I was gonna be a botanist when I was a kid.
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SPEAKER_00
That s what I wanted to do.
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SPEAKER_00
So having money available will bring people to bear.
5
SPEAKER_00
Now, another mistake that s often actually made, I think, by the lay public about science is that people think that we re paid to do things.
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SPEAKER_00
Just as you said,
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SPEAKER_00
I get a research grant and luckily from the NIH they give you a fair amount of latitude.
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SPEAKER_00
I will go my own way and I ll find something, I might have proposed something, but I ll end up somewhere entirely different by the end of the project.
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SPEAKER_00
And that s how good science is done, you follow the data, you follow the results.
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SPEAKER_00
And so that s what I m hoping can be done here.
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SPEAKER_00
I think the worst kind of thing that could be done with this subject area is to put it inside another company where they have a set plan of what it is they re going to do and the scientists either do what the executives tell them to do or not.
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SPEAKER_00
that isn t how anything will really get discovered.
5
SPEAKER_00
Get it out into the public, get open minds thinking about it, and then publishing on it and doing the right kind of work.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s how real progress will be made with this.
5
SPEAKER_01
let s again put our sort of philosophical hats on.
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SPEAKER_01
Do you think the US government or some other government is in possession of something of extraterrestrial origin that is far more impressive than anything we ve seen in the public?
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SPEAKER_00
If I, I ve not seen anything personally, but if I believe the people who I don t think can lie, yes.
5
SPEAKER_01
This is.
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SPEAKER_01
How does that make you feel in terms of the way government works, the way our human civilization works, that there might be things like that?
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SPEAKER_01
and they re not public.
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SPEAKER_01
Is there a hopeful message for transparency that s possible?
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SPEAKER_01
Like if you were in power, and I m not saying president, because maybe the president is not the source of power here, would you release this information in some way or form?
5
SPEAKER_00
Yes, if I were.
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SPEAKER_00
I think it s,
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SPEAKER_00
I think it s something that can bring humanity together, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
I think that knowledge of this kind of thing to know that we are, you know, we are more alike than we are different in comparison to whatever this is, is a positive thing for us.
5
SPEAKER_00
And to know, you know, I don t necessarily care that the government has been hiding it.
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SPEAKER_00
And I think, you know, people who ve been talking about what we should give,
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SPEAKER_00
government officials or whatever amnesty, I think that s probably the right answer.
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SPEAKER_00
We don t – this isn t a time to look back and say you did something wrong.
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SPEAKER_00
You did whatever you did because that was the data you had available to you at the time and those – you had good reasons for doing it.
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SPEAKER_00
Now, if your reasons were selfish,
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SPEAKER_00
if your reasons were you wanted to do it because you wanted to monetize it yourself to your benefit but against that of others, then I think maybe there s something else that could be said.
5
SPEAKER_00
But, you know, an opportunity to get all this information out if I were in charge,
5
SPEAKER_00
I would try to do it.
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SPEAKER_00
Now, I might be shown something, though, that says, there s a reason why you don t want to let anybody know this.
5
SPEAKER_00
Maybe you don t want everybody having access to unlimited energy, because maybe you might turn it into a bomb.
5
SPEAKER_01
Or something that gives you hints that something like unlimited energy is possible, but you haven t figured it out yet.
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SPEAKER_01
And if you make it public, maybe some of the other governments you have tensions with will figure it out first.
5
SPEAKER_00
Right.
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SPEAKER_00
It s kind of an arms race going on, I think.
5
SPEAKER_01
In all forms, and it makes me truly sad because it s obvious that, for example, the origins of the COVID virus
5
SPEAKER_01
It s obvious to me that the Chinese government, whatever the origins are, is interested in not releasing information about it because it can only be bad for the Chinese government.
5
SPEAKER_01
And every government thinks like this.
5
SPEAKER_01
Actually, this has been a disappointment to me.
5
SPEAKER_01
talking to PR folks at companies.
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SPEAKER_01
They re always nervous.
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SPEAKER_01
They re always conservative in the sense like, well, if we release more stuff,
5
SPEAKER_01
It can only be bad.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then an Elon Musk character comes along who tweets ridiculous memes and doesn t give a fuck.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I ve been encouraging CEOs.
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SPEAKER_01
I ve been encouraging people to be transparent.
5
SPEAKER_01
And of course, government, national security is really like another level.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s human lives at stake, but you know,
5
SPEAKER_01
let s start at the lighter case of just releasing some of the awesome insights of how the sausage is made, the technology, and being transparent about it, because it excites people, like you said, it connects people, it inspires them, it s good for the brand, it s good for everybody.
5
SPEAKER_01
I honestly think this kind of idea that people will steal the information and we use it against you is,
5
SPEAKER_01
is an idea that s not true in his idea of the 20th century.
5
SPEAKER_01
Like you said, some of the benefits of the social media, our social world is that transparency is beneficial.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I hope governments will learn that lesson.
5
SPEAKER_01
Of course, they re usually the last to learn such lessons.
5
SPEAKER_01
What do you make of Bob Lazar s story in terms of possession of aircraft?
5
SPEAKER_01
Do you believe him?
5
SPEAKER_00
I don t believe in the Bob Lazar story, to be quite honest.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, Jeremy Corbell has done a great job interviewing him and has done some beautiful documentaries.
5
SPEAKER_00
I just don t, I don t know how to interpret it.
5
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, again, some of the people who I fraternize with think it s all rubbish.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but maybe he s right, but I don t know.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, the problem is...
5
SPEAKER_00
This is a little bit different about how I approach the whole area than a lot of others.
5
SPEAKER_00
I m less interested in going over old paperwork and all these old histories of who said what, you know, the whole he said, she said of the history of UFOs.
5
SPEAKER_00
I m a scientist.
5
SPEAKER_00
I worked on the brain.
5
SPEAKER_00
area because it s something I can collect data on, I can go back to the same individual, collect their MRI again, and redo it.
5
SPEAKER_00
I can hand that MRI to somebody else, they can analyze it.
5
SPEAKER_00
I can get materials, I can analyze them, I can get some of these skeletons, I won t touch any skeletons ever again, but I can analyze it and somebody else can reproduce the data.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that s what I m good at.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so, you know, I m not going to go into the whole, I m not a historian.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s true, but there s a human side to it.
5
SPEAKER_01
Sometimes I think with these, because again, anomalous, rare events, some of the data is inextricably connected to humans, the observations.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, right.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I hope in the future,
5
SPEAKER_01
that sensory data will not be polluted by human subjectivity, but that s still powerful data, even direct observations, like if you talk about pilots.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so it s an interesting question to me whether Balbazar is telling the truth, whether he believes he s telling the truth too.
5
SPEAKER_01
And what also, what impact his story and stories like his have on the willingness of governments to be transparent and so on.
5
SPEAKER_01
So you have to credit his story for captivating the imagination of people and getting the conversation going.
5
SPEAKER_00
He s maintained his story for all these years with little to no change that I m aware of.
5
SPEAKER_00
But there s so many other people who are, let s say, experts in that story.
5
SPEAKER_01
Their gut, you know, you accumulate a set of sort of circumstantial evidence where your gut will say that somebody is not telling the truth.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
You mentioned Avi Loeb.
5
SPEAKER_01
I forgot to ask you about him, Omar.
5
SPEAKER_01
you know, because you ve analyzed specimens here on Earth, what do you make of that one, and what do you make broadly of our efforts to look at rocks, essentially, or look at objects flying around in our solar system?
5
SPEAKER_01
Is that a valuable pursuit, or maybe most of the stories can be,
5
SPEAKER_01
Most of the fascinating things could be discovered here on Earth or on other nearby planets.
5
SPEAKER_00
Just going to Oumuamua, you know, I think Avi s insight is an interesting speculation, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
Like I was saying before, people can sometimes look at something and not see it for what it is.
5
SPEAKER_00
Many would just look at that and say, oh, it s an asteroid and dismiss it.
5
SPEAKER_00
There was something odd about the data that Avi picked up on and said, well, here s an alternative explanation that actually better fits the models than it just being a rock.
5
SPEAKER_00
And to his credit,
5
SPEAKER_00
he just has ignored the critics because he believes the data is real and is using that then as a battering ram to go after other things.
5
SPEAKER_00
So I think that s great.
5
SPEAKER_00
You know?
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, what is his main conclusion?
5
SPEAKER_01
Does he say it could be of alien extraterrestrial origins?
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, that s one of the things.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, he s explained how it could be a light sail.
5
SPEAKER_00
And a light sail is certainly within
5
SPEAKER_00
near human capabilities to make such a thing.
5
SPEAKER_00
I think Yuri Milner, he s a Russian billionaire.
5
SPEAKER_00
He s involved, I think, in a project to make light sails with laser, you know, to launch them with laser power, essentially, towards Alpha Centauri.
5
SPEAKER_00
So it s something that humans could make.
5
SPEAKER_00
I think Avi s proposal is perfectly within the realm of possibility.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, sadly, the thing is now nearly out of our solar system.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yes, I mean, to me, that s inspiring to do greater levels of data collection in our solar system, but also here on Earth.
5
SPEAKER_01
It just seems like we should be constantly collecting data because the tools of software that we re developing get better and better at dealing with huge amounts of data.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s changing the nature of science.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, collect all of the data.
5
SPEAKER_00
Right, collect the data.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, the Galileo Project asked me over the weekend to join, and I did.
5
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, I m not a specialist in any of the stuff that they re doing.
5
SPEAKER_00
But, you know, in looking at the list of people who are on there, there are really no biologists on there.
5
SPEAKER_00
So, at some point, if my expertise is required for something.
5
SPEAKER_01
What s the goal and the vision of the Galileo Project?
5
SPEAKER_00
better talk to Avi, but my understanding and just actually looking at the at the sort of the bylaws this morning, literally just got them is number one, collect the data on UAP and number two, collect data on local, potentially local technological artifacts.
5
SPEAKER_01
I need to look into this.
5
SPEAKER_01
This is fascinating.
5
SPEAKER_01
And Avi is heading the Galileo Project.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
Have you spoken to him?
5
SPEAKER_01
On this podcast, yes.
5
SPEAKER_01
I believe it was before he was headed.
5
SPEAKER_01
Is this a new creation?
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, the Galileo Project was, I think it s about six or seven months old now.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s amazing.
5
SPEAKER_01
And he s getting a group of scientists together.
5
SPEAKER_00
Oh yeah, about a hundred.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s awesome.
5
SPEAKER_00
Actually, I was looking at some of their stuff over the weekend.
5
SPEAKER_00
I m shocked at the level of organization that they ve already got put together.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s amazing.
5
SPEAKER_00
It looks like a moonshot project.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I ve been involved with a lot of NIH, large NIH projects, which involve a lot of people in coordination, and they re putting it together.
5
SPEAKER_01
So you re extremely well-published in a lot of the fields we began this conversation with.
5
SPEAKER_01
So you re a legit scientist.
5
SPEAKER_01
But yet you re keeping an open mind to a lot of ideas that, that,
5
SPEAKER_01
maybe require you to take a leap outside of the conventional?
5
SPEAKER_01
So what advice would you give to young people today that are in high school or in college that are dreaming of having impact in science or maybe in whatever career path that goes outside of the conventional that really does something new?
5
SPEAKER_00
If you believe in something, you believe that an idea is
5
SPEAKER_00
valuable or you haven t approached something, don t let others shame you into not doing it.
5
SPEAKER_00
As I ve said, shame is a societal control device to get other people to do what they want you to do rather than what you want to do.
5
SPEAKER_00
So shame sometimes is good to stop you from doing something unethical or wrong.
5
SPEAKER_00
But shame also is something that is circumscribing your environment.
5
SPEAKER_00
I ve never let people who ve told me, you know, you shouldn t do that.
5
SPEAKER_00
line of science, you should be ashamed of yourself for even thinking that.
5
SPEAKER_00
Give me a break.
5
SPEAKER_00
Why is it wrong to ask questions about this area?
5
SPEAKER_00
What s wrong with asking the question?
5
SPEAKER_00
Frankly, you re the person who s wrong for trying to stop these questions.
5
SPEAKER_00
You re the person who s almost acting like a cultist.
5
SPEAKER_00
You basically have closed your mind to what the possibilities are.
5
SPEAKER_00
And if I m not hurting anybody,
5
SPEAKER_00
And if it could lead to an advance, and if it s my time, why does it bother you?
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I had a very well-known scientist once tell me that I was gonna hurt my career talking about this.
5
SPEAKER_00
If anything, it s enhanced my career.
5
SPEAKER_01
I have a couple question on this.
5
SPEAKER_01
So first of all, just a small comment on that.
5
SPEAKER_01
I ve realized that
5
SPEAKER_01
It feels like a lot of the progress in science is done by people pursuing an idea that another senior faculty would probably say, this is going to hurt your career.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think it s actually a pretty good indicator that there s something interesting when a senior-wise person tells you this is gonna hurt your career.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think that s just the one, as a small, if I were to give advice to young people, if somebody senior tells you this is gonna hurt your career, think twice about taking their advice.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
No, I mean, I think that s the primary thing.
5
SPEAKER_00
And the other, I tell my own students, you know, I have a lab of about 20, 30 people, and it s been that big since 1992.
5
SPEAKER_00
People come and go.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s not the data that falls in line that s so interesting.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s the spot off the graph that you want to understand.
5
SPEAKER_00
that s it, you wanna, when something is way off the graph, that s the interesting thing because that s usually where discovery is.
5
SPEAKER_00
And the number of times that I ve stopped people in my lab and said, wait a second, go back a few slides, what was that?
5
SPEAKER_00
And then it ended up being something interesting that made their careers.
5
SPEAKER_00
I could count on a few hands.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, get excited by the extraordinary that s outside of the thing that you ve done in the past.
5
SPEAKER_01
Just on a personal psychological level, is there, you know, I m sure at Stanford, I m sure in you,
6
SPEAKER_00
some of these ideas, there s pressure.
6
SPEAKER_00
How do you not give in to the pressure?
6
SPEAKER_00
How do you not give in to the people that push you away from these topics?
6
SPEAKER_00
What would you say is shame?
6
SPEAKER_01
I just point to my successes.
6
SPEAKER_01
I say what you know, you re the ones who told me not to start companies all this time ago.
6
SPEAKER_01
You know, and now you re the one coming to me for advice for how to start a company.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
Right.
6
SPEAKER_01
Um, but the, from the scientific area, it s, it s, you re wanting to take something off the table that might be an explanation.
6
SPEAKER_01
How is that the scientific method?
6
SPEAKER_01
I reverse shame them.
6
SPEAKER_01
Reverse shame them.
6
SPEAKER_00
So purely with reason through conversation you re able to do that.
6
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So it doesn t feel, because to me it would just feel lonely.
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There s a community.
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Yeah.
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There s a community of science and, you know, when you re working on something that s outside a particular conventional way of thinking, it can be lonely.
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I mean, there s, you know, in the AI field, if you were working on neural networks in the 90s, it could be lonely.
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I have met some of the most fascinating people ever that had I stayed the conventional track, I would never have met.
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I mean, truly brilliant people because of this.
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So, it is for those worried about, well, should I step outside of my comfort zone?
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You re gonna meet some really interesting people.
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And because I m open about this area, I ll go and give a talk in Boston, Harvard or MIT.
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And at dinner, inevitably, this subject comes up.
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And inevitably, somebody else at the table will admit both that they re interested or that they ve seen something.
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And suddenly the whole tone of the conversation changes.
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It s kind of like there s safety in numbers.
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And then, or I ve had people come to me afterwards, after dinner and say, hey, I don t talk about this openly, but
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So the number of scientists who know that there s something else going on is much larger than the scientific community would like to think.
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That s a really powerful one, which is I don t talk about this openly.
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but here s what I believe.
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And you d be surprised how many people speak like this and hold those beliefs.
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And I am optimistic about social media and a more connected world to reveal more and more.
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Like us not to have these two personalities where like this public and private one.
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We ve mentioned the big questions of the origins of the universe.
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What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing?
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For us humans, our human existence here on Earth, or just at the individual level of a human life?
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What, Gary, is the meaning of life?
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I think that what we re going through today with this realization, it s kind of like you ve lived on an island your whole life and you ve looked across the ocean and you ve never imagined there was another island with anybody else on it.
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And then suddenly a ship with sails shows up.
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You don t understand it, but you realize that suddenly your world just got a lot bigger.
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I think we re in one of those moments right now, that our world view, our galactic view is opening, right, to something a little bit bigger.
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And not just that there might be somebody else, but that there s something else.
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And what it is, is yet to be understood.
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And the fact that it isn t understood, to me, is what s exciting.
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Because I can fill it with my dreams.
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And this discovery, our world might...
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is about to get a lot more humbling and a lot more fascinating once we look out and realize we were on an island all along.
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It makes us both smaller but larger at the same time, to me.
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I can look outside at the stars and think and imagine what else might be out there.
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And although I know that I will never see it all, it excites me to know that it s there.
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Well, Gary, both to respect your time and also because at 12 I turned into a princess.
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Let me just say thank you for doing everything you re doing as a great scientist, as a person willing to reject the conventional.
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And thank you for spending your extremely valuable time with me today.
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Thanks for talking.
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Thanks so much.
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It was great talking.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Gary Nolan.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now let me leave you with some words from Stanislav Lem in Solaris.
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How do you expect to communicate with the ocean when we can t even understand one another?
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Thanks for listening and hope to see you next time.
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