Danny Jones Podcast - #332 - CIA Psychologist: DARPA's Most Bizarre New Tech Should NOT Exist | Charles Morgan

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Dr. Charles Morgan is a Forensic Psychiatrist, former intelligence officer, and Neuroscientist. Dr. Morgan also worked on DARPA projects related to fear extinction, cognitive resilience, and neuromodulation. SPONSORS https://www.amentara.com/go/dj - Use code DJ22 for 22% off your first order! https://prizepicks.com - Download the app today and use code DANNY to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Becoming a CIA psychologist 08:08 - CIA recruitment process 12:05 - Torture doesn't work for intelligence gathering 24:00 - CIA's detecting deception program 37:36 - New lie detection technology 41:07 - CIA memory-altering tech & implanting false memories 51:31 - Where memories are actually stored 52:52 - Best way to detect a lie 59:24 - Memory palace technique 01:04:43 - How to be a more effective learner 01:17:33 - Knowledge transfer experiments 01:20:42 - DARPA 01:28:06 - The OCEAN personality trait system 01:34:22 - Brain-to-brain interfacing 01:36:32 - The "Possession experiment" 01:45:00 - Sci-fi influencing real science 01:47:08 - Detecting heartbeats through walls 01:53:47 - DOE secret projects & UFOs 02:01:04 - Why global UFO experiences are all the same 02:09:19 - Tarot readings & pareidolia 02:23:10 - Morgan's best magic trick 02:26:48 - Precognition & serendipity 02:34:36 - Encoding information into DNA 02:43:38 - CIA's most frightening program 02:52:30 - Bio-weapons Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So how did you become a psychiatrist for the CIA? I got recruited. It was totally unexpected. So in 1998, so I got recruited by them in 2002, but in 1998, 9798, I had transitioned from studying stress-related disorders in the lab at Yale to working in a field environment with the special operations community. at Fort Bragg. And that introduced me to a whole world of people working in intelligence in the different activities. And so people got to know the kind of stress research I was doing. And they knew and knew something about post-traumatic stress disorder, stress resilience, stress hardiness.

Like the quick question is, why do some people get sick if something really bad happens to them in terms of a traumatic event? And why do other people not get sick? Like, they bounce back, they move on. You mean like a psychological traumatic event? Yeah, for something that we call post-traumatic stress disorder. And, I mean, the truth is most people don't get it when they're exposed to trauma. But we've never understood kind of why were some soldiers who were exposed to trauma in combat. Why did they suffer from symptoms after that exposure, whereas others didn't?

And in the early 90s, I was part of what was called the National Center for PTSD. Congress created it, I think, in 87, but then we formed it in 89 to study the neurobiology of post-traumatic stress to say, is it really different from depression, anxiety, panic, and things like that. So long and short of it, we had discovered a number of neurobiological factors that were different in people who did and did not have PTSD, even though they had the same levels of combat trauma exposure. but since there was no war going on, we were looking at things retrospectively. So we didn't know whether the abnormalities we saw in them had been caused by war, whether they predated it and represented a vulnerability,

or whether they were just side effects. So, for example, if you have diabetes, you may have impotence problems or numb feet. Those are side effects of poor sugar control. Right. And then the damage does to neurons, but they're not part of the pathology of, diabetes. So for PTSD, we had the same kind of questions. So I was poking around and I had been in the Navy and I phoned somebody and he connected me to a colonel over at Fort Bragg and he said, come and give us a lecture on what you're doing. So I came into a lecture and at the end of the lecture,

they said, could you stay for a couple of days? We have something fun to show you. And that's how it was the first time I'd ever seen the survival school, sort of mock POW camp where people were doing code of conduct training. Is this a sear? Yeah, for the sear training. And, and, And, you know, I was like, this is really cool, but is it really stressful because you signed up to go? So the first series of studies I did for like six months were collecting spit, blood, psychological testing, and people going through. And the long and short of it was some of the highest stress we've been able to measure in controlled ways in humans, which is really good. So, for example, during the interrogation stress, the levels of cortisol that go up are equal to those that my boss had measured. in pilots landing on an aircraft carrier at night for the first time.

So we were able to get to see in a controlled setting, it's like neurohormone responding to be able to make some inferences about how things might apply in the real world. So that turned into a series of studies, and I began to interact with people who came from different parts of the intelligence community just because of the venue, because I was working with guys who were over at Delta and people in the special operations community with the Navy. So I started getting to know a bunch of people and I met people from the CIA. And they said, why don't you come and work for us? And I was like, no, I got a day job. I'm fine. And in 2002, one fellow called me and he had a unit going that was called Vitmac or the

VIP Medical Intelligence Analysis Center. And Les called me and said, would you come and work for me? And I thought, no, that sounds interesting because I'm also a forensic psychiatrist. So I'm used to evaluating people and then presenting things in court or testifying. And that job was mainly looking at sort of profiling world leaders and then assessing that and making presentations either for people in Congress or people at the White House who wanted to know about a person. So, for example, if an identified world leader had Parkinson's, right, it would be my job to describe them.

Here's what it looks like. here's why you want to meet with him in the morning. If he's behaving in a strange way, it's not because he doesn't like you. It's because it's part of it. So it's everybody thinks it's super sexy and part of it was. But the core of it was helping people in government understand from a psych perspective or a medical perspective the important people they were going to be meeting. Because different world leaders may have different kinds of problems, right?

Some may suffer from anxiety or depression or. or whatever. So like before diplomats would travel across the world to meet people, you would do an evaluation on like recent footage of them or something? They might give you footage. You might have to do your own research and find out. And so that was always the hardest part in the job, right? What data can you get in order to make a reasonably informed sort of psychiatric or medical opinion?

So it was a fun job because that was a challenge. So yeah, the secret part of the job was how we got all that information. but the overt purpose of the job was to actually make our government officials smarter so they'd know how best to interact with the person for that. What other sorts of reasons would you do this sort of forensic analysis on world leaders only for diplomatic meetings or were there any other strategic reasons you would be doing this? You can do them for a number of reasons. When I did them for the Department of Defense, like I used to do some where they'd say,

Here's the guy he sent this letter in saying, I have anthrax, this is what I'm going to do. Like, is he crazy? And you get to watch all the videos and kind of go, it does look like a real mental disorder. These are the features, or it looks like this, or it's not consistent with what we know about a mental illness. So it might be related to targeting and profiling. So for people could say, what do you think of this leader of a terrorist group? Why does he behave that way? And, you know, in part, I tend to be on the more conservative side.

saying, it's probably normal behavior. Not everything is illness. But every now and then, you do see features and behavior where you say that's kind of beyond the norm, the normal range that you see in people. And then you give them an opportunity to view the person from a different perspective. I used to do it for the law enforcement, part of the job when police interrogate people. We used to be able to sit behind a one-way mirror. and then they come in to say, what do you think of a guy?

And you can say, I think he's depressed. They think he's super spy. I'm like, I think he's kind of dumb and I think he's depressed. Because, you know, when you're, from a medical perspective, we're thinking of a possible medical explanations or psychiatric explanations to something. When someone's a police officer or an intelligence officer, they're always thinking, you're trying to lie to me. Paranoid.

You're trying to fool me. So it's a way of pulling back a little bit and saying, how about if you think about him from this perspective, does it give us any other insight into his behavior and how we might influence it or mitigate it? Yeah. So this is the kind of stuff you were doing before you got recruited to CIA? Yeah, I was doing that for the D.O.D. What was the process like being recruited for the CIA? Did you have to go through all the typical tests that the CIA officers go through? Yeah, well, so there's different roles. And since I was getting recruited in already as a doc. I had to go through all the screenings and interviews and security evaluations.

Yeah. And then in my position, I was not joining the clandestine community. Right. Because I'm recognizable. I'm already mid-career, so I'm not going to be somebody that nobody knows on the planet. So I didn't do anything. When people say they went to the farm or they learn how to be an undercover or clandestine person. But yeah, I had to go through all the screening and the interviewing. It was kind of fun because I did it.

interviewed by Sykes and of course I used the same testing. Now I think you were in you were doing this around the same time my friend John Kariaku who's a former CIA officer who was in Pakistan he captured Abu Zabeda who was bin Laden's like IT guy. I think there was around the same time he was in but he was in he would have been in Pakistan around the same time and he's described to me that the MO of people that the CIA wants to recruit are people that are on like the borderline of sociopathy but not quite full sociopolitia. That's one way you could put it, right? If you're trying to, so the business in intelligence is you want information. So you need, you need their placement and access. So if you can't get there, then we want you to find somebody who can and someone who's willing to break the law. A spy is a foreign national who's willing to commit treason in their country to help us. Right. So when you say we want somebody who's a bit on the sociopathy end, it's one way to. to phrase it. I'd say it's a person who's willing to break the law or willing to take a risk

to achieve a goal. So for some people, they may be just too high, strong, nervous, and anxious to function well as someone that you've recruited because they go, I'll do it, I'll do it. But every time you put them under stress, they really actually have a meltdown. Because they're, they'll say that they're confident, but they have too much anxiety. They have other people who are slick and cool and on that sociopathy end you say I'll do it for you but they're also making a deal with everybody else right so you know if they're lying to them they're probably lying to you as well so yeah I think in that world you do see a range from people who they believe they want to do something for the right reason like to have the U.S. get their family out of a country or because they believe in the

principal or because they want to make money I mean spies get paid right right so I think you I wouldn't disagree with his assessment of it I would just say there's probably a wider a wider range of people they get recruited and those are the foreign nationals in but if you're a U.S. citizen and you're going into like the line of work I was in they're already recruiting for me like a doc and I'm board certified so I've been doing it for a long time and you're not recruiting spies put yourself no we're we might be we might be asked to evaluate them right what kind of a person has to be have I hired, right? Right. So I had colleagues who, that was their main line of work, which, so a case officer could consult with them and say, what can you help me manage this person that I've recruited, who says they want to help the U.S. So it's, I think of it like working in the Department of Corrections.

I just, I did that as a moonlighting job when I was a resident. Oh, really? Yeah. Where, you know, you're, you're practicing psych in a prison setting with people who've been violence. Some people murder people. Some people are sex offenders. You're doing, you're doing medical work, you're doing psychiatry. You're just doing it in a highly unusual environment. So you have to have training on how not to facilitate someone's escape from the prison, right? Or how not to get used. In the same way, in the, if you go to the CIA as a doctor, you're

still practicing what you learned as a doctor, but you may be doing it in just very unusual environments for that. But lots of people had misconceptions about that when I was there. So I used to get a lot of hate mail. What kind of misconception? Well, lots of people think that you are the spy. Like, you're the one who's supposed to be going and getting things or exploiting people. And I think that was around the same amount. That was around the same time when at the agency there was a big debate because that's when the enhanced interrogation program was going on. That was John Garriacor. The thing he could do us alone. And there was a real divide in our community of physicians like saying I think it's unethical you can't be involved in it and there was

another group we thought no they could and now you know more than 20 years later we can see that you know sort of when you torture people it ruins our ability to prosecute them so like the recent ruling in guantanamo bay judge mccall said you can't use confessions that have been elicited under torture um so you don't because people look if you're torturing somebody's child in of them, they're going to, they'll say whatever you want them to say, right? Right. And if you think about it, torture as a political tool might be very useful for a dictator, right? You can, you can scare your opposition.

You can make people frightened of you. You can probably get some information from people. But as an intelligence gathering technique, once people figure out you're not going to kill them or that they, then you have no hand, really. I was recently sent some gorgeous Aminida Miscaria by our sponsor Minnesota Nice Ethno Botanicals, the top supplier in the U.S. And I have to say, what it does for my anxiety is incredible. But there's much more than just stress relief. Being non-addictive and interacting with the brain's gaba receptors,

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That's M-N-N-N-I-E-T-H-N-O.com slash DJ. And use my code, DJ-22, for 22% off your first order. Yeah, there was a CIA psychologist who lives like an hour from here, who was one of the guys of the architects of that whole program. Yeah, yeah. I think they made like tens of millions of dollars for that. I forget the guy's name. I want to say Mitchell, something Mitchell.

Yeah, Jim Mitchell. Jim Mitchell. Yeah, I knew him. Yeah, Bruce Jess. and Jim Mitchell. And I knew them both. Yeah. Yeah.

That whole thing was crazy, you know, the enhanced interrogation stuff. And what they did was I believe they had black sites all over the place, right? Where they were doing this stuff. But my thing is like, you know, it's got, I imagine, torture's got to work to an extent, right? If you don't go too far. Like, it's got to be, like, how else are you going to get answers for people? If they're going to be, if they're going to hold back and you got to hold their feet to the fire to some degree to get to get that's a really interesting part though historically like from

war two and on most seasoned interrogators have said no you don't you really yeah that you work with people over time they get to know them and people begin to tell you things i mean the dilemma um i think with it in the program as it ran is that people were never able to say well what did we learn from torturing anybody. I mean, I used to tell people, like Alan Dershowitz at once get a torture warrant, right? When people were arguing over, was this a good thing to do or a bad thing to do? A torture warrant? Yeah, just get a warrant to torture people, but you might just well admit it, because people were kind of going, oh, it's not torture. Everybody knows it was. No. And he said, look, if that's what we're going to do, get it. And I used to tell my

colleagues, I said, well, then show people the data. What did we learn from threatening to kill people, right? Or it were. Right. And then the public needs to think about that and say, what do you want your government doing? But in the world of intelligence gathering, whether it's Han Schiff's work, and I'm blanking on the U.S. interrogator worked in the South Pacific. Who's Han Schiff? He was a German intelligence officer who used to interview POWs and get lots of intelligence from Americans. The other fellow, I'm blanking on his name, but it'll come back. But the work really suggests that when you create a rapport with people, you actually learn more from kind of a softer approach over time.

I think the fantasy that everybody has is that there's a ticking time bomb. Suddenly, like, you must know something that's going to kill a bunch of people in a matter of ours, so we need to do anything we can to get you to tell us right now. But it doesn't turn out to be true. most of that information is pretty perishable. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, so that was a disappointing, that was a disappointing thing.

Well, I would imagine that with all the money that we, and research that we put into stuff, like when it comes to war, that we would have had a, I mean, I imagine by now we have a much better way with technology and AI to extract information in people's heads. Or just getting into, I mean, remember, well, yeah. I mean, that's what I used to say is sort of trying to get intelligent out of somebody by like waterboarding. They never dragging them around wrapped in plastic with giant ice cubes until they die, which happened. It was like, man, that's like banging on the radio with a sledgehammer saying, the reception's got to come in better, right? And like in most of my work, me and Gary Hazlett were able to show just raising stress degrades cognitive function really fast and memory so that you're not only, you're changing

the very organ that you're relying on to provide you the information that you think is going to be helpful. So it never made sense to me. But I mean, if you think back, it was, you know, for intelligence gathering, I mean, Hans Blix, when we were all arguing over, it was the WMD in Iraq. And he's like, no, there's not. And then it turns out later, you know, we know that curveball was busy selling his story to a bunch of people going, this is what Saddam Hussein's doing. But there really wasn't. So I think I think it's true that if you're systematic with a lot of open. open source information and maybe the AI approaches will even be better, you probably can get a pretty good picture of what's going on rather than saying it's only one single source who knows it. There's probably some unique situations where, you know, a single person might be the holder of knowledge nobody else has. But if that's the case, then they know you're not going to, you're not going to kill them if you need it, right? So it's like the story you're here now, but having to waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,

over a hundred times, right? You know, like, so it's, you know, it's sort of systematic drowning. And I think once he figured out they weren't gonna kill him. Right, yeah, what ended, what was the recent story that came out with him? What did they end up doing?

They're not gonna prosecute him, is that right? I don't know yet. I know that he and a few others put in a plea agreement. And then it was on the table, then I think the secretary events invalidated it, but then a judge ruled that he couldn't invalidated. Oh, my God. So I think we're waiting to see where that's going to settle out.

Yeah. But, you know, it's like the fellow that gave him a TBI. The guy who was involved in the coal bombing, you know, he can't go to trial because he's incompetent. Really? So I think that's the disadvantage of... Federal appeals court's thrown out the plea deal that would have allowed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the alleged maximum of the 9-11 tax to plead guilty in exchange for his life sentence without possibility of parole. And so they invalidated.

So then it'll go back to the table about whether or not they can have a trial. Like I had to testify down there, but it's the last year ago in May. Yeah, which is on all the stress research, and that's when the judge was trying to think about what happens under stress. And can you take a confession even if it was given while somebody wasn't torture? the person. And so the whole issue there was he's taken back to the same room that they were tortured in. Oh, wow. So, yeah. So it was an interesting case to testify in because from a science standpoint, we know this makes sense. We call that contextual conditioning. We can do fear conditioning and make you afraid of this coffee cup, right, or this stimulus, the less fear of response. But we know that

your brain not only learns that this is bad, that the coffee cup might be bad or dangerous. It also learns, oh, it's this room we're in. And so your brain is doing fear conditioning to the context and to the specific stimulus. And so the argument the government had been making at the time was, well, since we weren't torturing it at the time the guy confessed, it had to be a voluntary confession. And from a science standpoint, it makes no sense.

If you've taken somebody back to kind of a similar environment they were in, and they still know these are all people from the government, and you've tortured them, it wouldn't be reasonable to think that they haven't got torture on their mind from a conditioning response. So the, yeah, so the judge said, don't, can't use confessions that have been tained under those contexts.

So I'm assuming, then that means it will all move back to pushing for a trial. Yeah. But it's amazing, right? You know, this is like 2025. It's insane. And people were wrapped up in 2000. And we still have no trials.

Have you ever visited Gitmo? I have. Really? Yeah, I've been on there twice. Yeah. What I was down there to see some of the sites. Oh, wow. It was intense.

It's, you know, the place is like a giant prison. I mean, I saw what I heard. Yes, I lived in a courtroom that felt like living in a refrigerator all week. Yeah, it's really tightly controlled. So, you mean, you fly in, they put you somewhere to stay, and then you go, there's just, like, fences, barbed wire. It's like a giant prison. The most liberal place you can go to is one of the three restaurants or the gym. Oh, wow.

And you have the most freedom to go anywhere. So I can see why nobody may really enjoy being stationed there. Right. But, yeah, it's a strange. I found it a very strange experience. Yeah. So when you were working for the agency, what were someone like the most constant? common cases you were working on with people, whether it be case officers or whether it be like recruited agents.

What were some of the common like issues, psychological issues or? Well, in those first years when I was in that particular unit, it was mainly people of interest related to higher levels of government. Right, right. And then I moved to the sort of what people called a Q branch or director to science and technology. and mainly worked in the office of the chief scientist on our detecting deception program. And so most of my work. Detecting deception program? Yeah.

So most of my work in the last five years I was there was really looking at this question of how accurate are any of these methodologies that purport to be successful at detecting deception. and how do we know they work? And at the time, the more I investigated it with my team, and we created, we set up different labs, and I was in charge of reviewing the protocols that the government would fund to show us if this technology works, right? And so my job was to go to the sites because I've done a lot of human studies,

and we'd be able to see is a study valid, does the tech work, and things like that. And the long and short of it was most of what was being advertised doesn't really work that well at all, whether it's a voice stress analyzer or a traditional version of a polygraph or brain scans, where everybody wants your tax dollars, right?

They want the government to buy their products. Contractors? Yeah, so I don't know if you heard of the PCAS, that portable credibility assessment. It's supposed to be a handheld little polygraph. They cost a lot. Like an e-meter type thing? It almost looks like an e-meter?

It almost looks like an emeter. Yeah, it has a red light, a green light, and a yellow light. And it was supposed to sort of streamline this idea. But it's linked to the same idea as the polygraph, right? That lying makes you alarmed. And that by using any technology that sees an activation of your fear and alarm system, that must mean you're lying. And I'm like, well, I think the premise is flawed because if you're in a war zone

and you want to come and tell the U.S. something and you know the other people will kill you if you're telling us something, you're going to be more nervous than the person goes, I think I'll go tell them a story, see if they give me some money. So the lies in the intelligence world

are more along the lines of lies of fabrication. Like, I know something you should know. So pay me and I'll tell you, which is different than the common lies that police run into, which is, I don't know, I wasn't there. and I didn't do it, right?

When they go, were you involved in a crime? Sure. No. So we call that a lie of omission. And most of the studies that existed at the time, everything was centered around that law enforcement model of police interviewing somebody and saying, you did it. Right.

No, I didn't do it. And the thinking around that. It's like more of an offensive versus defensive lie. Yeah. And it was like, just think, I mean, the guy who created the polygraph, right? If you think about that and think about Wonder Woman. You created Wonder Woman as well, right? So that's why her lassoot, she could wrap it around people and make them tell the truth.

That was the fantasy or like truth serum. But the hypothesis was that lying is a threat. And so when you go to lie, it activates your sympathetic nervous system because you're trying to survive the threat. And that if we detect activations of that part of your brain or your body, that's right, measures your blood pressure, your heart rate, your skin conductance, that those will tell us that you're lying. In fact, it's not... Proxies. They're proxies for it. And it's not really that great.

I mean, the meta-analyses in looking at the accuracy of the polygraph suggests maybe comes in around 52 to 56%. You know, you could flip a coin. Under certain circumstances, there is a form of the polygraph testing called guilty knowledge testing where you can get it up to about 70, 75%. But it's a recognition thing. So, for example, if I have you... look at a card. I say here we've got seven playing cards or seven numbers. You, you look at one, shuffle them up, and then I just hold it up and you just say no. And I go, was it this number? Was it this number? Was it this number? You could say yes or no. When you see the number you saw before,

you'll have a recognition waveform in your head. You'll get a P3HRR. An orienting sort of response to it. And that'll change your skin conductance. And so, but you could say yes to them all too. So it's not really a lie test. It's a test. It's a test. of recognition. Sure. But that's not the test that people use when they're interviewing people in the field and saying,

you know, have you ever lied? Have you ever done this? It's today, Tuesday. Are you sitting down? So part of my program was looking at those different kinds of polygraph testing. And then looking at new technology.

Some people wanted us to fund brain imaging stuff to go to Afghanistan. I was like, who's going to put their head in a magnet and lay still? So, you know, it's really true if you have a compliant participant who says, I promise not to hum, wiggle, do anything, just think about what you tell me to think about or push the little buttons when you tell me. Right.

You can see some really nice differences in brain scanning between when someone is saying, no, that they don't know something or don't recognize something or endorsing a story that's a lie versus a story that's true. But a friend of mine did a study, uh, Jerry Gannis up at Harvard. and he found that if you just think about wiggling your little finger, you don't when you're in the scanner, but just think about it. It made the differences go away.

So... It made the differences go? It made the differences in brain activity that were seen between when you were lying or truth-telling. You could obliterate those differences by just imagining you were wiggling your little finger. Oh, wow. So this dream that, you know, we could take you, force you to put your head in an fMRI or something and say, tell us the truth.

And you would go, no. Wow. So it's sort of a fantasy. Most people, most people didn't understand that. And so my job, I got to be known as Dr. No. Doctor No. Because I would look at proposals and I would say, no. This episode of the podcast is brought to you by prize picks.

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Was there a lot of spooky technology that they tried to test out? Oh, people want the government's money. Oh, yeah. We looked at how much. Allegedly. Yes. It looked at tons of proposals. And most of the time we had to think about, look, our budget wasn't, you know, unlimited.

And you're talking about budget. You're talking about CIA budget specifically? Yeah. In science and tech. We had, you know, with my boss, we had a particular budget that could be devoted to it. So we would say, how do we want to spend taxpayer money on seeing what would be really useful? What would be relevant for that? So that was a lot of fun because that part of my job was delightful.

It got to meet lots of scientists, listen to their ideas, help them figure out what it work, won't it work, look at the results and say, looks interesting, probably won't help people in the real world for that. But there were a couple of technologies that turned out to work that were really useful. And we published on those since 2000, I think the first one was in 2006, 2007. Yeah, so you've published like over 100 peer-reviewed papers on this stuff? Yeah, that's how I've spent my youth. I've designed all my studies on a bar napkin, you know, while drinking and talking to colleagues. Wow.

It's when you get most playful. and you can design things. But no, I've been fortunate. I never thought I would be publishing on detecting deception, though, because my thing was stress, PTSD. Right. But when I was there, it turned out, I thought, well, this is how I can be the most useful,

even if you can tell people what doesn't work. Yes. It's helpful, right? Right, totally. I remember sitting in one meeting. I forgot where it was. We were over at the National Science Foundation. But I remember somebody presented on some data

that was basically showing that, their toy worked 33% of the time. And I remember looking at the guy next to him, like, flip a penny, you'll at least get to 50. And I remember I had two special agents sitting in the row who went, no, doc, but you know, 30 few percent, it's better than nothing. Right. And I'm like, no, it's not better than nothing. A penny is better than nothing. Yeah.

So people have a, they really have a misconception about chance, human judgment. I've heard statistics like about the old Stargate program that they used to, the old Cold War remote viewing type stuff where they, I think I could be wrong, but if I read it correctly, if I remember correctly, it was like less than 10% or something accuracy, but they still dumped millions of dollars into it. I don't know if it's ever been proven. No, but it's entirely compelling at a personal level because you remember the times you got a hit. Right. It's like gambling. Right. You don't remember all the times the loss of it.

in once you go well that paid off that was really good so we have a tendency to disregard when something didn't work and we remember when it did so if somebody uses whether it's a voice stress analyzer or a polygraph or something they go well i know it works because that one time we caught a guy and go yeah but you don't know how many times you miss like the 10 that got away so to calculate accuracy i have to know the true positive rate how many hits we really got and i need to know the true negative and the false negative rate of something. I need to know how many people I cleared that were truly innocent and that I wasn't just clearing people who got away with their lies. So what happens in real life is practitioners, whether they're an investigator or something,

they don't know who lied and fooled them and got away because they cleared them. They went, well, I believe him. So he's good, right? Sure. So all they're left with in their mind are the people who finally confessed and looked like the confession matched what happened. And so it can reinforce this belief. And before it sounds too disparaging of those guys, we'll pick on doctors. Doctors do the same thing.

That's just why now we have to do double-blind studies for medication. Because every doctor could say, well, I gave that pill to my patient, and they got better. Right. Well, yeah, and same thing with surgeries, too. Like lots of doctors, they do surgeries, and the surgeries that are, I'm sure there's a vast majority of them where they never hear from that patient ever again.

So they don't know if it went right or if it went wrong and if they found another surgeon. Correct. Right. So that's that selection bias of information that happens. And so from a personal level, you can come away intensely convince something really works. It's just that we're not aware of all the times it didn't, which if we knew that, it would correct our view. But I always tell people, you know, you remember every time you hear the report of an airplane crash. Right.

But your watch doesn't beep every second a plane lands safely somewhere on the planet, right? Because it would drive you nuts. But you go, yeah, but that one time. Right. Right. So that's how our brains are wired. We give disproportionate emphasis on something that is meaningful to us. And we place a different value on it.

And that's true in the detecting deception stuff. I mean, I thought the funny part in that whole world is we as human beings, we always believe we're at detecting deception than we are. And when someone's lying, they always believe that you can see more of their lie than you really can. So there's that illusion of transparency and that illusion of omniscience, right? And so you've got two people being interviewed. The interviewer who's like, I think I can detect deception. And you got the guilty person going, I think they see more of my lie.

And both are wrong? So, you know. At what point are we just going to have some sort of technology that we can just like put a helmet on somebody's head and figure out if they're true, if they're telling the truth or if they're lying. Or even like just suck the information out, you know, in like some like bit, like in bits. And then like just plug it, a hard drive into a computer. Well, you know, I think I think that's what I was just visiting one of the labs, the Brainworks Lab folks over at Yale. And there are the folks who are busy trying to take your brain activity and reconstruct what you were dreaming about and what you.

Oh, whoa. that you saw. And it's pretty amazing so far, like the categories, if someone's thinking about something with the AI reconstruction of what you're probably thinking about, it's not ready for prime time yet, but it still is really interesting. But they're working on that technology while somebody's actively dreaming. I think the New York Times published an article about it where you could see it almost creates like a video of what seems to be going on versus what the person was really thinking. So I think that's the goal people want to know, right?

The other one is the brain-to-brain communication. Yeah. Where if you can hook two brains up, and so far people are pretty good at Tetris, right? They do Tetris better than chance, just sending your thought to the other person. But I think the ultimate goal, if you think about it in that way, is can you have communication? Can you have communication between two brains? So if I see something somewhere in the world, can I send it to you without taking a picture of it? If you think about it, that'd be pretty cool.

But if I can link two brains, that was part of that lecture I gave at the War College that freaks and people eyes. But if you can link two brains, I was glued to that video when I watched it. Can you go find out what someone's thinking? Right? Nobody knows. So if you're sharing thoughts, but if you're asleep and we connect our brains, this is a future. your question and research, would I be able to tap into that? Like, would I be able to experience what you're doing, right?

If I, and it's because there are two different questions. One, can you send your thoughts to me? Can I understand them? Two, can I go get them is a different issue. You mean get them without you sending them? Yeah. Got it. Because if you think about it, if you're linking brains, that's part of that lecture.

I was like, think about this is like the interrogator's dream, right? We don't have to torture you. We can just go poke around inside your head. Yes, yes. But. They have to be willing participants. Well, certainly under our constitutional rights, that would be an invasion of your, your fifth. Your fifth amendment privilege.

But the same matured for like brain imaging. But when you think about it from a neuroscience standpoint, that would be the really interesting thing. Can you share thoughts? Can you see what other people are dreaming? Can you reconstruct in a non-invasive way what they're thinking of? For me, I always thought about that because I did a lot of work in eyewitness identification, looking at the integrity of eyewitness memory under stress. And I was thinking, right now you have to describe it to an artist,

tries to draw a picture. Was it kind of like this or that, that work that they're doing, trying to see if they can create from your brain's activity, kind of what the face was that you saw and looked like. It'll be interesting to see where that goes. I'm not sure that it will be. accurate, it may represent something you believe is true, but your memory may be wrong. Right. And that's something that is definitely true is that eyewitness testimony degrades

quickly over time, like the accuracy of eyewitness testimony, right? Like the really fast. What actually they, what they actually saw gets distorted very quickly. Oh yeah. Yeah. And big time. I did that. That was really fun. We did that in over 800 special operations guys. Oh, really? Yeah. Because so I didn't think I was going to do that either. But because, you know, I had a friend Beth Loftus, who was really famous for her work on false memory and looking at false memories that have been generated in therapy where people then accuse their parents of abusing them or, you know, aliens in the basement or babies and blenders. There was out that sort of recovered memory syndrome series of cases in the late 70s and in the early 80s. Oh, yeah. And I never paid any attention to it.

I thought, yeah, okay. So they meet with a therapist. it creates a false memory, then they sue. But that's like for things to happen when you were three, four, five. And it didn't seem to be too much of a stretch where I believe that we can manipulate your memory to change what you remember from when you were five. Versus, can I change your memory for something happened yesterday when you had a big man throwing you against the wall and hitting you and making you stare at him in face or, you know,

if you were assaulted. So most of the time in like legal settings where someone, someone has an accuser, you know, people are kind of like, yeah, maybe your memory's faulty for what happened 20 years ago. But if a person just got sexually assaulted, we don't think that's happened. We don't think that's possible for that to happen. So if she says that's the guy, that must be the guy. And Beth Loftus had been involved in a couple of different cases where, you know, people were exonerated because the eyewitness testimony was not true. I testified at the Hague in 1997. because Steve Southwick and I had published a paper on war memories

and found that memories about combat trauma change over time. And at the time, this was pretty heretical because when I was in school, we called trauma memory was like a flashbulb. So it was called flashbulb memory, right? Like it's seared into your brain so you won't forget it so you can survive the next time. So we had this belief that your memory for a highly stressful event must be better than your memory for what you had breakfast,

I don't know, three weeks ago. You know, you go, unless this is the same thing every day, you know, I don't know. Well, it turns out memory for traumatic events changes. So I remember I came home from that experience of testifying, and I said to my boss at the time, it was Dennis Tarney. I said, I want to do a study looking at eyewitness memory at Sears School because the stress is good. We can get permission to take a picture of the interrogator right then and there before they

started, you know, beating the student and then do an eyewitness lineup the next day. Right. So that's when a couple of different papers were on. The first paper was with like 500 guys. And we found that memory for the high stress conditions. So they have different kinds of events, but there are two different kinds of interrogation. One's really physically stressful. And the other one, someone's just talking to you. They're threatening, but they don't lay hands on you. So we published that in the paper and showed that the memory for the high stress encounter where you've had to stare the interrogator in the eyes. They're closer than I am to you. And they get punished for looking away. So they got to look. look at you under full lighting it's not dark the the accuracy is about 33% uh for a live lineup when we gave a photo spread array it bump we got it up to like i think was 42 or 43 photos photos photos yeah just looking at still photos and then uh we had pictures from the scene of the crime so to speak and in that first study we got it just up to 51 but but the long and short of it that in the other condition where the stress was lower, people were like it's 75, 80, 90% accurate. So we had this paradoxical finding that memory was better for the lesser stressful event than the high stress event.

And that was really a revelation at the time. So it took us all by surprise. Wow. But it was really helpful because it's sort of like when you think of, if you think of a curve, where as stress is going up or stress is going up and you think of the accuracy of memory, As stress increases for a little while, your memory gets better. But finally, as stress gets more and more intense, it ends up being disruptive to our memory systems in the brain. And we think that's what's happening.

So it's that inverted you. And so we think there might be a sweet spot. But those findings are really important because it said, look, these guys are some of our best for withstanding stress. and the majority of them are wrong about the person that they saw under high stress who was physically assaulting them. And so from that study went on to do something in 800 folks where we thought, well, I wonder if we can change their memory like Beth Loftus has been doing in her experiments. So in one, for example, what I did after people had been interrogated. So let's say you were my interrogator. I've met you.

I've been there for almost a half an hour, depends on the school. And then they put me back in my cell. And, you know, this guy named Dr. Morgan would come along and, you know, ask them how they were doing. And I'd hand them a piece of paper. And I would just say, I'd hand them a piece of paper that had a photograph of one of my students on it from Yale. And I would just let them hold it.

And I would say, so I have a couple of questions about your experience when you were being interrogated. And they go, yeah. And I said, what color was the room? was there a telephone? Did they give you any food? Did they give you a blanket? Did they hurt you in any way? And they go, no, no.

And I never pointed to the picture and said anything. Sometimes people go, I don't think this is my guy. And I would just look at me and go, wow, you are very tired. And I would just take it leave. So the next day, when we got them all out of the compound and we do this lineup, photo spread lineup, of the people, we would do that too, 90% of them will pick the picture I showed them rather than they're a guy that they met. No way.

So if you don't do it, 50% are wrong anyway. So if we don't do an intervention, half of them are wrong. Their confidence is 9 out of 10, though, that they're right. So you've got these super confidence special operations that's going, that's the dude. And you're like, yeah, he wasn't even here. No, that's the guy. Yeah, he wasn't even here. Right.

But if the guy that was on the photo that I showed them was there, 90% of them would pick that. And what we think is happening is that under stress, we have disrupted the consolidation of memory so that you can slip things in under that high state of adrenaline because they've been all jacked up from being interrogated. They're now in the room, cortisol is still high. We know that cortisol is good for mobilizing, you know, glucose shutting down your immune system so you can survive and run. or fight. Yeah. But it's terribly disruptive to an area of your brain like the hippocampus and stuff like that for integrating context and memory. Yeah.

And so we think what happens is if you meet with them soon enough and you show them something, you're slipping in information and then they can't figure out where it came from later. Right. So it's like a backroom editor. And you go, yeah, that's the guy. And so the next day you don't know, it's a bit of a Trojan horse sort of effect. But yeah, we did a number of techniques that Beth Loftus had used in her studies. and found they worked extraordinarily well under stress.

And so that went a long way in the legal system as well. It's really helpful. It was really helpful in persuading many different courts to then permit by eyewitness expert testimony to help a jury understand two key things. One is that confidence is not related to accuracy. I wish it was. But you can be super confident and wrong.

you can be super confident right. Sure. Or you can have no confidence and be right and no confidence to be right. So confidence is not a proxy for accuracy. But boy, when you're sitting in the jury and you see good looking guy who says, I can assure you, that's the guy. They go, well, that must be the guy because you look confident. So we have to educate the jury about that.

And then the other thing that juries don't get intuitively, it's a bit like we were talking about for deception, we all remember the time something bad happened to us. And we've never had an opportunity to check it for inconsistencies. So most people just think my memory for a high stress event must be more true than my memory for a non-stressful event. But it's never been challenged like it is in the courtroom. And our data say, now the majority of people, although they believe they're right, they're probably not. Right. So the The debate right now scientifically is what is reliable from it, like which element. And right now, where we are, at least in the stuff that I've been doing, we know eye color isn't shape of your face, length of hair.

But whatever you can see from about 20 feet away seems to be pretty good. We're pretty good about race, body type, how kind of big or what kind of shape the guy was. but anything you could see from like, you know, like two feet, two feet in was less than half the time were people correct. And we would joke on our research team to say, well, it kind of makes sense. But if I have to wait, I go, looks like a really bad dude. Might be the guy who mugged me. But wait, he had brown eyes. What are your, and I have to wait to you.

Just going to go, okay, it's him, right? That's too late. So we thought it's probably not adaptive. So our memory, our memory didn't evolve to match. what we need in court. Memory is supposed to be useful. It just has to be good enough. So you go, I'm going to avoid it.

It looks like a bad thing. So I'm not sticking around. And you don't really lose much by avoiding something that didn't kill you. Right. Yeah. That's interesting. I'm reading this book right now all about memory competitions. Yeah.

And there's these worldwide memory challenges. There's competitions that go on. And there's like, those are amazing. There's people that win them. They can memorize a whole deck of cards. Yeah. And, uh, and put it back together like instantaneously.

It's insane. It's phenomenal. And there was one guy that was mentioned in the book who was the most studied man in the history of neuroscience. Yeah. His name was Henry Molassan. Yeah.

And basically he had epilepsy really bad in, I think in his 20s. So they did this surgery, this experimental surgery on him. It was like the first time they ever did it where they went in and messed with his hippocampus or something like this. Are you familiar with this?

I am. Fascinating story. And he came out with no short-term memory. Yeah. They completely destroyed a short-term memory. Yep. Which I think challenged their hypothesis that memory was stored throughout the brain, right? Right.

Or distributed equally. Correct. It's really, yeah, it is challenging. Like we, there's some data that says certain kinds of memories. You can find out where in the brain they're probably stored, but then you have the evidence about things being rather distributed. You're making memory of many different kinds. So, for example, where this linked back to my other work in deception, we were using a kind of interviewing called cognitive interviewing to look at deception to see if we could tell the difference between true versus false autobiographical accounts. And in that technique, you say, hey, I'm really interested in your memory for what you say happened.

Would you be willing to tell me about it? And people go, well, yeah, I want to tell you what happened to me. And so you bracket it. And you say, so about how long was the experience we're going to talk about and how did it begin? How did it end? Okay, focus on that time frame. Just tell me everything you remember. Don't leave anything out. Even if you think it's trivial or inconsistent. If it's in your brain, if it got in there, it's a party of your memory, just go ahead and mention it. And then you shut up and you just let them talk. Then you go back and you say, I think I'm getting a really good picture. Humor me. Go back to the beginning. Start where you did before. And this time, tell me everything is in your visual memory. Everything that you remember. seeing with your eyes. And the next time you go, everything you heard, auditory memory, anything you remember

feeling, touching or tasting in the experience. And people go, oh, yeah, I do remember. There was this weird little noise going on in the other room. I remember wondering if it was a, you know, a fan from the air conditioning system or something. So it triggers recall of these different things. And then if you say touch, they go, yeah, I do remember.

It was kind of this rough edge. on the side of the table, I just remember wondering why it wasn't sanded or something. They'll make these crazy little comments. And then you do the thing where you say, well, so now start with the last thing that's in your memory. Tell me what's right before that. And walk me backwards through your memory.

What's in your memory right before that, right before that. And it jogs additional material for people. It's kind of like when you lose stuff, you try and retrace your steps in the day. Or if you're sitting at dinner and you're talking and somebody loses trying to go, wait, what was I talking about? And what does everybody do?

They go, oh, well, we were talking about this. We were talking about this. You go, yes, now I know where I was. And you pick up your story. Right. That's because our memory works by association. Yes. So I think parts of our memory, it's not all in one spot per se.

It's coded in different ways. There's different salience. So that was a memory retrieval technique interview. And the paradox in using it in detecting deception studies is that the technique fails to work. in people who are selling you a lie, which is really fun, right? They've memorized a story to tell you, and they want to tell their story and stick to it. So there's no real expansion. You don't learn anything new by going through the memory jogging technique.

Oh, yes. That makes sense. Yeah, because although it's not true that inconsistencies mean a person's lying, most liars believe that if they're inconsistent, you will know that they're lying. Right. So they try and adhere to their story. So we do something really geeky with that. If you take the transcript from the interview, you can create what's called a type token ratio,

which is the ratio of new to reused words. So you can say one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, just 10 words. But you've used one and four twice. So eight unique words, 10 total. So eight to 10 is the type token ratio. Here's the geeky part. Lying changes it. it lowers the unique word count, so it changes the ratio.

And we think it's because lying lowers the unique word count. Yeah, it reduces lexical diversity, meaning you're telling your story and you're sticking to it, and there's more mental, we think it's a side effect of the increased mental workload that's required for telling a reasonably complicated lie, because you have to do a couple of things. If I'm just telling you the truth about what I remember, the work in my head is trying to remember stuff. to tell you because I'm being compliant. I'm going, I'll tell you everything. If I'm lying, I have to remember what happened.

So I don't mention it. I have to remember the story I'm telling you. I have to monitor that I don't let anything unnecessary to leak over. And I have to pay attention to you to see if you're buying it. Right. See if I need to see if I need to, because I'm trying to sell you something. You're multitasking. Multitasking in a different way.

And that's one model of in the world of detecting deception where I found there's this crossover from my work in memory to then the stuff I was doing in detecting exception. And we've now done it in Twitter. I think last year we published a paper and looking at lying in Twitter. And the same thing happened. We had like these teams of eyewitnesses and the ones that were, they had a story to tell. Their unique word counts, we couldn't go with response length.

Because in Twitter at the time, you know, limited to like 120 characters or something like that. But when we did it, the unique word count was different between the groups of liars versus the groups of truth tellers. Really? Yeah. Even with the ability to edit with words and text and all this. I didn't think it was going to work, but it did. That's fascinating. Yeah, we've done it in Chinese, in Arabic, in Russian, in Vietnamese. We've learned about 15 different cultural groups.

And so that was really fun. But it was a side effect of the way memory works, right? Hey, guys, if you're not already subscribed, please hammer the subscribe button below and hit the like button on the video. Back to the show. Do you think the idea of or the concept of a photographic memory is a real thing? This is Euphoria Calvin Klein, the new elixir collection, featuring three perfum intense scents, inspired by a unique orchid accord, paired with vanilla, each with its own distinct attitude, each with its own universe, bold elixir, sensual, woody, addictive, magnetic elixir,

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Bring a date, your squad, or even your mom. Book direct at choiceotails.com. In some people, yeah. Really? I do. But in other people, no. There's some people to tell you that they don't see pictures in their head. They remember the words about something.

So I think that, I think for some people, they probably do think in imagery. So there's a, but it's probably easier for some people than others. So I think some of the ones are like some of those folks who can do that mind-bending thing of memorizing a deck of cards in 15 seconds. Yeah. Well, the idea of creating memory palaces is fascinating. Yeah. Because that works so well. Yeah.

I can't get it to work that fast. So I use it. I mean, think about it, right? You go, I'm creating this memory palace. And if I've got it, you're chunking all that data really, really fast in 15 seconds or 20 seconds or 30, whatever the fastest guy is. You know, like, that's amazing to me. But, I mean, stage mentalists have been doing it for a long time for entertainment. It has if you can make an image really fast and pair it with a number, you can say the number of the image.

And it'll come back to your brain. But not everybody like, not everybody can do it. The idea of a memory palace is like you go somewhere like a big building or something like this, right? And then you start from like the driveway and you'll say, I'm going to associate this memory with the mailbox. Okay, the next memory is going to be with the front door. So you like memorize the front door. And like you, so like you somehow you connect a word with the location in that building. Or you just imagine it in your mind that person or the opposite.

object. Right. Right, right, right. It's, it may be quicker just to see it visually. And, so it's like a hot dog. You like, picture like the Oscar Meyer mobile like floating there right by the front door. Absolutely. And it's just something about the giant hot dog laying in your bathtub. Yes, right. Founcing a baby on top of it or something. The more weird it is. Yes. Or the more sexy or graphic it is. Right. Oh yeah. That's another thing I forgot about. It just goes quick and it seems to enhance the recall. The more provocative it is. For some reason, it sticks your memory.

Yeah, absolutely. More. Yeah, something about visualizing this, like that 3D animated image in a certain spot. Like, it's fascinating how that works. So that would be like an example of a photographic memory, something like that. Somebody using, yeah, using that tool. When you think about it, though, it's probably a sign of health that our memory isn't perfect, right?

When you think about it, that's like in my field, like in psych, that's how, like, like therapy may help, right? Right. So if there's, if you always had to live and relive everything and it's, it's vividness and intensity and it never morphed, it never diminished or changed, then we wouldn't see that reduction in emotional responding to it because that's a memory too, right? So the good news is that memory is imperfect, which means that's probably how we move on from stuff.

It's probably how we tolerate family reunions. That's how you stay married a long time. You know, you don't go, I remember everything. Yeah. Kind of go. Well, I had this theory about memory that is probably degraded over millennia, like, with the development of technology and the written word and being able to, like, save stuff, save notes and read and have books and movies and documentaries and all this, all this technology,

I feel like taking over for mundane tasks is like, it's got to be, like, degrading our mental capacities. Did you know, I've noticed it since. I've had, like, you know, a phone about, like an iPhone with contact. I used to know all my friend's numbers by heart. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I can't do it. Totally.

I can't do it. I just committed my wife's phone number to memory like a couple months ago. Yeah. I think of it like those, it's like those brain experience, like if you're not, or like in sort of physical like muscle train, if you're not using it, you lose it. And I think that's probably what our brains are doing. They're going, ah, I don't need it for that anymore. Right.

You've got this peripheral brain you walk around with. Yeah, exactly. Where does that end up in 50 years, you know? Yeah, I don't know. I think I'm probably biased from seeing it in the classroom and trying to see students. I don't know where it's going to go, but I do know that it's a very, it's a very different feeling in the classroom since when people aren't talking to each other, they text. and when I had to say go find something, even though they're on their phones all the time, they have a harder time doing like the internet searching with critical thinking.

So what is it that I need to know? These are undergrads in order to answer a question. So some are still really good at it, but I've noticed that certainly when people are playing around on just trying to look anything up really quick, it's catering to that feeling of everything I should, I should be able to find the answer to everything in just a moment.

Yeah. Or I can ask AI to tell it to me, right? Right. So I'll have some students who will write something using AI, but they don't critically assess what it did. And so, and so two things happen in the classroom. I might look at it and go, you never sound like this. This actually sounds way more sophisticated than you ever sounded in the classroom.

I've never heard you articulate an idea like this. It's amazing, right? So I know that they used it. But if I say, well, what did you think of it? like walk me through like yeah what's the argument like what do you think of the argument does it hold and like what are the premises what what's you know what are the proofs that are supposed to lead me to this conclusion and they struggle they struggle with that and they struggle with um reading in a meaningful way they can read but i think of it as functional illiteracy like they know words

but i don't think living in the way that they do do on their phone is teaching them the reading and chunking for ideas, like as you're going through an article and going, how is the author lining up their ideas? What are they explaining to me? What am I doing? I'm still thinking it through, but I've talked to a bunch of other professors and they say, yeah, you seem to notice that, that there's this, there's, people can read, but you ask them, so what does it mean? Like retaining. Yeah, they can retain what they're processing.

It's processing because like I'm training some students who say they all want to go into national security. They want to be intelligence officers. They want to do something where you, and the biggest need, still when I talked to my former colleagues, they had to say, we need people going to do critical thinking, like who can think something through. Yeah. And it's really common when I ask a student, so what is the article about? They will be tempted to reread it to me. And I'll, nope, already read it. I already know it's read it a bunch of times. What does it mean? Yeah. If it's true, what this article has to say, then what? Like, put it in a bigger context.

And so that's what I think is missing right now. And I don't know where it's coming from, but it's a significant shift. And part of their expectation, I think, right now is, well, if I don't know the answer, AI will help me find it really, really quickly. I just type in, what do we know about X? And I'm not sure this year,

I'm going to try something different in some of my classes. where they have to critically appraise what AI has generated and write their own version. So they can begin to understand because it's a tool and it's here. Right. So you can't pretend they're not going to use it. Yeah. I tend to think, you know, I think about that a lot as well. And I think that if you really want to read something and really retain something,

you can't just be like peripherally interested in it or just like it can't be like an assignment. it. I felt like the, out of all the books I've ever read, the ones that I really absorbed the most are the ones I was just enthralled by and I just could not put down. Yeah. You know, like those are the ones I can recall five, six years later. Well, it's funny. I do this course on that called World of Spies and Espionage. And it's basically books and film and they have to use those as the sources of information. But there's one film, you know, the lives of others about the Stasi.

And it's not in English. So they have to actually watch the subtitles. to get the movie. It's their favorite one. Really? And I think it gets at what you're saying. You can't be multitasking or you're going to miss what happened in the closed caption, right? Unless they speak German, right? Right. But they always say, that was really, really good.

And it always surprises me because I think there's a bunch of good movies, but they love that one. And I do too, but I think the difference is it's in a foreign language. And they finally have to focus on it. Right. It's a hyper focus on that. I mean, I was a kid. I grew up without a TV. So I had to hide, I had to hide under the bed at night, really. I did, seriously, with a flashlight and a book.

And so I love reading. Yeah. And I think it's a little more rare if I ask people to raise their hand in class. Like, who's read a book for fun? Who's read, anybody read a man Booker Prize novel? Like, just, who's just read a novel for fun? In a class of 20 people, you might get two who raise their hand. And I think, and I think that's meaningful because I think reading, because I think reading,

challenges your brain in a different way. It's sort of like listening to a lecture if some people just like to type everything they say and I don't think they learn anything. I think people learn something if they have to take notes because if I'm listening to you and I have to take notes

I'm actively engaged with like what are you saying? What's an idea? That idea is important. That idea is important. What's the connection between those two ideas? I'm creating a schema, a mental map of where you went in your lecture to me or what you were trying to explain to me so that I can go back and look at it and go,

these were his key ideas and this is what he said. Yes. When they're just sitting and typing, there's a couple of nice studies on that. They don't seem to retain that. Right. Because they're in transcription mode. Yes, exactly. And the other one is a more active.

And I think. Because you actually have to think to fill in the gaps. You do. You're jotting down key ideas. And then you're going back and processing it. You're assigning a value to the, which of these ideas, which of these two ideas is is the more important one that one's a subset of, right? Or how are they related to one another?

So you're doing a critical appraisal of the information you're getting, learning how to sort its priority and its logic and its relevance. And I think that, if they're doing that, they won't have any problem telling you what something means. If they're just in the mode of saying, I'm supposed to remember a list or ask something to summarize a list for me,

then it's not really critical thinking. And you need both, right? You need that for, if you're going to do science, if you're going to do intelligence, you have to be able to do that critical thinking because there's always going to be an opinion. Everybody always has an opinion about what that guy mean, what that guy mean, what that guy mean,

what's that, what's that imam preaching, what's that pastor saying, what's this political group saying? What does it mean is an integrated, critical function task. Sure. Yes. So I think I think I struggle with how to best help students do that. Because I think the world is just really different. I have to admit, it's foreign to me to think that reading would not be fun. Yeah. And I talked to a grad student the other day before graduation. I was over at UNH where I also teach. And I had a graduate student who came up to me and he said,

I had something weird happen the other day and I wanted to tell you about it I'm like what? He goes Well you know he goes I've read stuff before but I was reading The Hobbit He goes you know it and I went yeah yeah I know the Hobbit And he goes well I was reading it and he goes And there's this really weird thing that happened

I could begin to see and hear like in it And I didn't hear my girlfriend calling my name When I was reading which is like totally weird He goes I've never had that happen before He goes is that normal And went welcome to the world of being lost in a book Yeah right He's 25.

He's never had this experience before. He thought it was slightly alarming. And he couldn't figure out. And he went, no, that's what being lost in a book is like, right? So it's clearly something new. And I think trying to help them figure out in the new world, the order, how to get that, how to get that. That's been a challenge.

For me, the best way for me to, like, get, lost in a book when I'm actually reading it. I like to put music on and like my headphones. Like I was reading a book a couple, probably like a year ago about, it was Annie Jacobson's nuclear war book. And I was putting the, I had the Hans Zimmer. Yeah. Inception soundtrack in my ear.

And I was like, like watching a movie. It was like a movie. It made it better. Yeah. It made it better. But I also, I often think or I often wonder whether you, it's better. And if you can absorb more of the information with. listening to a book as you can with actually reading the words.

I think it probably, it probably varies. For me, since I can read, I can assimilate things really fast when I'm reading, I can get more of it done than listening to it. But, you know, if you like to listen to a podcast when you're running on the, you know, on the treadmill and you're doing something else, that's cool too, or driving or whatever. So for me, I tend to, but I have friends who say, no, no, no, no, reading is, it's not strength I'd rather listen to it and process it that way than I used to tell them figure it out and that's where one tool that's available online that that um google notebook if you give it an

article it turns it into a podcast yeah yeah if you google notebook yes if you give it a pdf if you upload a PDF it will rapidly give you a summary of the paper and it's not just copying everything at Senate, but if you push studio on it, there's a studio function, it may take two or three minutes, but it will take the article and it pops up as two people talking to each other, go, hey, so today we're going to cover something really interesting. What? And it's not, it's, it's amazing, because I gave it a couple of files before I was going to go testify.

I gave it one of my forensic, right out on the stand because I want to know what would it do with this psychiatric report. And it was amazing, it was absolutely amazing. That's incredible. And it really hit key points. I'm like, oh, that's interesting. A jury would understand that. That's really interesting how it made the decision of what to pull from the end of the report and put it right up front.

So it moved things around. It didn't just cover the document in the order the document was written. Really? Yeah. So it's not just transcribing it to audio. It's creating two separate voices. Yes. Conversating.

Yes. Yeah. They're talking back and forth. Yeah, you'll have to try it. It's a studio function. I'll email you if you can't find it. But yeah, it's Google LM. And I told my students, I said, look, here's where I would recommend you use this.

If you say, I am not a reader and I want to hear about this article and then try and read it. I said, use it, have it generate it, listen to your 20-minute podcast on it to see you'll get the bird's eye view really key points. It'll even break it down to this, I forgot the name of the tab, but it'll give you a grid. of core ideas, key ideas that are in this article. So, yeah, it's really cool. I didn't know anything about it. And I had somebody tell me about it like two months ago. And I'm like, this is unbelievable.

Yeah, see, that's my problem is time. Like, I don't have time to read every book I want to read and read every article I want to read. Just drag and drop. Yeah. No, what I've done before is there's this app that I have that I can drop a PDF into. It turns it into just transgrabbs it into audio.

Yeah. So like if I'm in the truck or if I'm driving somewhere, I can just hit play and it plays the audio. When I get home, I can just go back to the PDF, figure out where it left off and continue reading. And then you can continue reading. Yeah. Yeah.

This is different. This is their conversation about it pulling out. And then they add all that social stuff. This is really interesting. Wow, this is amazing. Did you, I never thought of that. I didn't either, but hear it, you know. So I think it's, I was impressed because I gave it a couple of science papers.

I have published in the past because I wanted to see what it would do with them, Would it distort it? Right. It was great. Yeah. Wow. So that's what I told my students. I said, all right, I'm happy with how it summarized the science study.

And I know that some of the science studies are the hardest for them to jump into and read if they haven't before. What's this, Steve? So this is what he was talking about. This is Google notebook. I just pulled in his PDF. Yeah. He sent me, and there's the studio button right here. You can generate it.

You'll hear it. It probably thinks. for like a minute or two. Yeah, that's what I said, stick around. What is this, what is this stuff on the left? It's a summary. Okay. Key topics, a summary.

Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah. And then it'll do a study guide over here. And will it save these, all these breakdowns for you, like in a library so you can go back to them later? Yeah. And you can do the mind map of it if you decide. You want to see it broken out as a mind map.

Oh, really? Like a wireframe type thing? Yeah. And you watch. It'll get started on the mind mapping. and show you that. And then when it's done with the conversation, it'll probably, for this paper, it'll probably be, I'd say, between 18 and 20, 20 minutes. How many pages is this paper? Oh, I'm going to guess and say seven. Okay. So you could theoretically upload like a 400 page

PDF to this and it would still do it? Yeah, I've actually uploaded a two. I haven't done that, but I've done 200. Oh, wow. Yeah, because I wanted to summarize a book that I have in PDF for me. Holy crap, dude. So it breaks it out. And then... So, yeah, it breaks it all. So a student should now be able to look at this and go, okay, this is the structure from this author's paper.

Right? And I told him, I said, you know, let's see if it, hopefully didn't bump you out of the studio there for a second. If you go back to your studio thing, see if it's generated the recording for you. Because then you... Oh, it's still coming. So it'll give them up.

And then when it does, I always save it. But yeah, it's amazing. And I told when I said, this, I highly approve. Say, this is like a great use of AI. I said, this will help you understand how this author decided maybe what are the core ideas with the structure of the thinking. What do they do? So if you want to criticize it, you can know, okay, now I know what you disagree with, what you like, what you have questions about. Right.

As you can break it out. Totally. Yeah. But that's, that was. That's amazing. Yeah. I wonder how long it's going to be before we can just like plug in a flash drive into our head and just download an entire book and get all the information. It all depends when you want that portal.

Or just take a pill? Like you make it a pill to where you just eat like eat that for that book because they have a pill you just eat and then just downloads it all into your head. Well, there's, that was one of the things I had presented on. It's really, God, it's like eight years ago now. One of the guys at Duke and then I forgot the name of the team up in Seattle. But the essential experiment was rat sitting in one little cage, rat in another cage. They connect their brains over the internet. And this one has to do all the hard work of figuring out the maze or which buttons to push to get food.

This one doesn't have to do a thing. And it finally gets up and it knows which one to push to get the food and everything. So there's a transfer of knowledge from one mammal to the other. And I said, no, that's pretty cool. How did they do it specifically? They actually connect the sensory cortex in both of them. So the signals from one animal's sensory cortex, the not only motor, but the sensory side, is now feeding its information to the sensory cortex of the other animal. So there are all kinds of experiments where you could have your brain run a robotic arm, right?

Right. So you're basically using your motor, the motor. motor part of your cortex to send signals through an electrical system to run a robotic arm. But what was missing was the sensory. Like, can I now send knowledge, not just directed stuff, or can I get knowledge from another animal? And that's been done. I don't know if it's been done in people yet.

I haven't done a search to see, but it would be really exciting because it could do that. So they're connected via wires somehow? Or it's all over Wi-Fi? Okay. It's, yeah, they were, well, they laid actually, they embedded electrodes over the sensory cortex for a fine resolution. But I think if the technology advances with sort of doing like sort of the near field sort of, it's called a squid meg device, so you can look at brain activity, if you can control that and then trigger and stimulate the areas with real precision, you wouldn't have to put electrodes in. Okay. So I just sat in one month and a half ago and drove.

a go-kart through a maze just by thinking and nothing's attached to my head. What? Yeah, I sit down the show, the big, Meg things over my head looks like a giant cone head and you just sit there and you look at the screen and you just think, you go left, left, left, left, left, left, left, left, left, left,

and you know, you're not moving your hands and you don't have to look, you just look straight ahead and the car begins to turn. It was harder than I thought. It wasn't just like one time you go, left. My car went right into the mountain and crashed. Oh, no. Yeah, and so you get a bunch tries and you suddenly figure out

oh when I think like this it affects so it's a little bit of a biofeedback loop you're actually engaging in but I think that that's pretty soon what people have and want this has got to be the kind of stuff that like DARPA works on right? Yeah

yeah did you ever work with them when you were when you're with science and technology division? Yeah I had colleagues yeah I had colleagues who were over there they always had a bigger budget so of course oh so they didn't try to work with you guys they were on their own no no well it would depend on the project but I remember at one point when we were a good friend of mine was working robotics

and another friend was at DARPA working robotics and my friend said you know what I'm tapping out they have a better budget and we're at the same they're doing a great job I don't spend my money on that so let them let them do it which is nice because sort of as a taxpayer I think I don't know I don't have that I have her some redundancy in the system but they're at least willing but yeah DARPA is they have an extraordinary budget.

I don't even know what their budget is, but it's big. Well, DARPA basically, the way they work is they get funding and they outsource stuff to other companies, right? Yeah. And the way I've heard about the way they work in the past is they'll actually get multiple contractors to compete on a specific project to see who can do it better. Yep. That way you get multiple options. And you can let it compete. And you can say if somebody gets it done faster, maybe they get to, maybe they get to the target goal sooner.

Maybe they get there with a different technique or a different technology, in which case then scientifically, that's a big win, right? Because, you know, oh, there's a couple of ways we can achieve this goal. In the long run, is one just cheaper and one's more expensive, or is one better under certain working conditions than another? So I think it's a great design. Yeah, I think it's a great way to do it when you have the budget. Yeah, totally.

Yeah, I always wonder, like, you know, DARPA, I think is supposedly whatever they're working on, you don't really see that stuff in, like, consumer products or like in the public eye until like 20 years after. Correct. They've actually been working on it. So like one of the things that I heard is that they've been working on things like NERLINK since the 90s. Brain implants to create super soldiers, soldiers that can go into combat zones without. fatigue, without getting tired, they won't need sleep, and won't be able to feel pain, things like this. And then now we hear just over the last few years that, you know, Elon's doing this neuralinks to, you know, help people with, you know, people that have been

paralyzed or that have brain damage or whatever. So it just makes me, my mind's always, I'm always racking my mind thinking, like, I wonder what DARPA is working on now. Well, yeah, it's funny. If you go to the spy museum and you see Charlie, the swimming fish, you know, and look at this, look at where lithium batteries came from, you know, from. Charlie the swimming fish? Yeah, he was a robotic fish for surveillance that could swim through the river and supposed to look like a real fish does. Oh, really? Yeah, you go to the spy museum.

You get to see him. Oh, wow. Yeah, I think he's from the early 60s. But that's where, like, I think lithium batteries were developed at that particular time as well. And then later they became mainstream. But, yeah, there's a lot of innovation that happens in those arenas of government. And sometimes you're right. You don't get to know.

and sometimes you find out years later like there's a I mean look at the history of cryptology and things some of the people who've gotten credit for certain kinds of discoveries now we know well some government person who got it this is Charlie

yeah there is Charlie little catfish yeah hmm yeah you can see they made little dragonflies that were supposed to be able to buzz around and go deeps drop on people oh yeah that's another thing

like all the the technology that they were integrating into animals, like birds and insects and things like this, is crazy. I mean, think about it. If you can, that's one thing I was pointing out to my colleagues. They said, why are they doing this experiment where, like, you can control, like, how a mouse is going through a maze by you thinking, make it go left, go right, or whatever. And I'm like, well, mice can get in buildings, so can cockroaches. Right. So.

Cats. Yeah, so it's like, you know, if you could, if you think about the principle, access and placement, how do you have access to something you need to know? And one of the best ways of getting where I thought about the one guy who was saying, hey, I know what to do with minefields. I have a bunch of rats. I put them on strings and let them run across the field. If one blows up, it's not a human, right? And have them identify where the landmines are. And people are like, that would work? Would they be heavy enough?

Well, that was the issue. Yeah. But if they could smell it, if they weren't, it wasn't usually scentless explosive, right? That would work. There's somebody else who was developing. I don't know if it came from DARPA or not on cockroaches, using them for search things like searching for people under rubble. The idea was, could you send tiny animals down to find out, are there humans down there? Could you send insects and things like that?

But yeah, it's just an extension of saying you can have a mechanical drone or maybe in the future you'll have animal drones or insect drones, right? Would they get you information of some sort? Birds aren't real. Have you ever, have you heard? I have, I have. And the part of it. They charge on the telephone wires. The part, yeah. And the part that I believe is somebody said to me, goes, you ever notice you never see a baby pigeon? All you see is like fully formed adult pigeons downtown. Like, goes, I never see a baby pigeon. There's a little baby pigeon flying around.

There's hatch full grown. Yeah, that's what you said. That's my conclusion. They don't exist. Pigeons aren't real. Yeah, that's crazy. And they have been doing that stuff since, like, early in the Cold War. All the stuff that they were experimenting on, especially during the Cold War, always blows my mind. You know, all the crazy experiments that CIA was doing and DARPA was doing, you know, even like during like the Vietnam War. I think DARPA was like doing. I think they invented the M-16 during the Vietnam War.

Crazy, crazy technological achievements are attributed to DARPA. That's what you do. when you can give unlimited amounts of money to blue sky research. Correct. And their job, you say, this might be useful for national security. Like, and what problem can we solve? Mm-hmm. Yeah, they were even manipulating the weather.

There's this video of Michi Okaku explaining how they were during the Vietnam War. They were basically creating monsoons and specific parts of Vietnam to wipe out the... To try and figure out the Viet Cong. You know, like, that's insane that they were doing that back then. Yeah, fed, they're... And they're messy, right? It's the really interesting problems are often hard to solve. I mean, it's sort of like in the stuff around and stuff that I do about people,

I remember the technicians complaining like, why don't people sit still? Like, yeah, because we were testing at every sensor you can imagine. There's thermal sensors, motion sensors, tracking your eyes, your body movement while you're having a conversation. To see if any of those signals tell us whether someone's lying or telling the truth. Yeah. And the engineers would get so mad. they go, well, they scratched themselves at that particular moment that created too much noise. They were like, these are people.

They don't follow, they're not going to follow all the rules. If you really want to know if it works in the real world, you have to see what you can get. We just finished a project where we looked at, it was about how well can you tell about a person's personality if you never get to meet them. You can only watch them interact in an hour's worth of video stuff. by themselves with one person with two people. So we did it. We had 1,200 people online take all the psychological testing. We picked the different types that were of interest.

And then we had expert docs rate them. And I also had non-expert students rate them and say, you know, we're looking at the five-factor personality characteristics and also the dark triad looking at psychopathy. Yeah. What are they? Can you explain what those are? Sure. There's, we use the acronym Ocean.

So we have openness. Think of it as the inventor factor. If you like Seinfeld, think Kramer. He's got all kinds of wacky ideas. He's willing to try anything. It could work, might work. But it's being open to new ideas, new ways of doing things. You could be into art or literature or the beauty in nature.

But it's having a wide range of interests. I think of it as just real mental curiosity. You like to try new food because you think, well, I've never tried it. I would like to sample that. And so people who are high in it are tinkering with everything, right? And the people who are really on it are really conservative, which is how you want your dentist or your tax guy. Who goes, nope, it's just really a tried and true way of doing this. Don't need to fix it.

It's not broken, right? So that's openness. And then you have conscientiousness. That's like the robocop factor. How predictable, reliable do you show up on time? Do you plan ahead? Do you, are your little OCD? When it's really high, people are like off the chart of obsessive compulsive stuff.

And when you're too low on conscientious, you're like, I might get there, and we'll get it, you know. You show up late and you're not well prepared or you forget to plan. You go on a trip and you go, huh, never thought I'd need money for gas, right? And so in like relationships, it's really fun. There's usually someone who's like doing all the planning. And the other one is providing all the joy and fun to the party, right? Yes.

So that's conscientious is that logical predictability, reliability, Dolly factor. Then we have extroversion, a talker, or an introvert. One way or the other. And the big difference is that, like, for extroverts, we like to think out loud. We like a stimulating environment with lots of stuff going on. In other words, the lockdown was hell for the extroverts, where it was heaven for the introverts who are like happy. When people go away, they go, now I can rejuvenate. I don't have to deal with anybody. And this is great, right? So people are on that. spectrum then we have agreeableness which is how far we go from being Machiavelli to Mr. Rogers so are you are you kind altruistic modest honest don't believe in using other people for your own means and tender minded excuse me do do the feelings of other people really matter and so the more that they do the higher you are on the Mr. Rogers spectrum and okay the lower end just Machiavelli goes no You use people to give it you on.

Don't worry about their feelings. Walter White. Exactly. And then you have what's called neuroticism or emotional reactivity. Think George Costanza on Seinfeld, or Jackie Gleason's character. Sure, yeah. Where people are full of, you see what they feel, you know they're feeling at the time. They can have thin skin.

They erupt very, very easily with anger, irritability. Whereas people who are super low are like the airline pilot who says in a really nice voice, And you feel good. Like we lost our second wing, but we'll be landing shortly. And you go, oh, okay, I feel good. Because he sounds so calm, right? So those are the five. And we were having doctors try and rate those dimensions.

We were really interested in the Machiavellian one and the emotional reactivity one. And we found that both in students and in the guys who are trained to do this for the government, they only did better than chance if what they were looking for matched their own lead. personality feature. So if you were more like Mr. Rogers, you were really good at finding all the Mr. Rogers. If you were more like Machiavelli, you were good at finding the Machiavelli's in the room, but you couldn't find the other ones. You couldn't identify who wasn't. But you could find the ones who were. And the same was true for the emotional reactivity. And the students did the same thing, because we had them do their testing before they did the ratings.

And right now, we're in the phase. We're having AI. run it. So we'll see how well AI does compared to humans at rating personality features in these people. So we'll know the answer next week. Yeah. Oh, wow. That's fascinating. Yeah. But it was a real surprise that the docs weren't much better in more domains. But it does raise an interesting question given the old job I had because I used to joke when I was at the agency. I was like, I don't know. There's not much of a science to all this. Like we just, there's so much. meetings we don't know about it. But I was I was thinking they would at least be better in more categories than just their own personality category. But we now have plenty of data that suggests

that's probably true. So the idea might be if you have to have somebody rate someone, you might have to have two people who have a different personality profile to see what they'll detect. Yeah. Right. But those are the kinds of problems that are hard. Like, because lots of people tell you, oh, we got it down. I can read people really fast. And I know what their features are. And my cynical view is, well, I guess if it's that obvious, you also don't need an expert.

Right. You know, it's like with lying, most people don't rehearse. And so their lies are stupid. They just like, you know, you listen to the story and you go, that's just, that makes no sense. So what you're really detecting is stupidity or failure

to think through something. You're not really detecting any esoteric signals of deception. No. So I'm like, that's the good news. I guess most people don't have that much practice. Right. That a few people do and they get away with it.

Going back to this brain-to-brain interfacing stuff. Yeah. So they did the experiment on the mice. The one mouse was able to work its way through a maze and... Actually, it was looking at toggles. And one's a maze and then the other experiments where it toggles. Like which toggle do you have to push to get food pellets that it likes versus something it doesn't like? And what was the purpose of this experiment?

How does like, I assume when you do an experiment like this, there's got to be some like ultimate end goal for this, right? It was designed to test hypothesis whether or not sensory information, knowledge that you have can be transferred to another animal. Got it. Right? Without them ever having to experience doing the task. Like, can that knowledge now just reside in their head? And how could this be able? applied to war or military or CIA.

Well, like the old joke in the Matrix, she goes, do you know how to fly it? Not yet. And then you watch her upload it, right? And then she can fly the helicopter. Right. I think the motor stuff was all more obvious trying to help people who are either quadriplegic or lost a limb, work a robotic arm. But if you think about the extension of it, having your brain direct drones from a military standpoint, can you think and react probably the new systems react, probably faster. than human brain can think so.

But the idea was, can you fly something without ever heard go anywhere, right? Or can you work a robot in an environment that you can't go? So you can sit in a booth and be all wired up and you can be running the thing, right? But in a medical context, those experiments were all about trying to see if you could help people use robotic systems to walk, to reach out and touch things, to be able to have an experience. the transfer of knowledge from one brain to another is related to learning and relearning. So if someone's had a TBI and the idea, can we help rebuild memory, can we help rebuild knowledge and information systems? So they don't have to go through the whole experience to learn again.

Can that information be given back to someone? Well, we have these machines. We have these machines now that a surgeon can sit in a room across the world. and people can go into the operating room and this big machine does the surgery for them. Yeah. Where I guess they put gloves on or something, I don't know how exactly it works.

But there's videos of it that are insane. You're just hoping the internet doesn't go down. Try to find a video that, Steve. Yeah, right. Hope the internet doesn't go down. Correct. Well, so I don't know if you saw it. I called it the possession experiment where they had a...

Yes, from the video there were in a coil over someone's head. And it was still the guy who's sitting under the coil can watch a video and he can control. a hand on a joystick of a person in another state whose brains hooked up too so that he could co-op and he could use that guy's hand to shoot stuff on the video that that guy couldn't see. So, and that was the idea of the guy who was doing the study. He said, well, I want something where guy could put on a helmet and say, I'm not a brain surgeon, but I can put on the helmet and lend you my hands so that you can put it on it.

We used to joke and say, that's really cool. That's really cool. as long as the internet stays up. You know, see you're in the middle of surgery. You know, I've got nothing. Oh, thank God. I mean, well, Elon's got all the, the sky. What are those things called?

The sky nets. That's right. All his internet satellites all over the world now. This is the robotic surgery. Yeah. I couldn't find the act, some good videos. So this is from news. There's tons of great videos.

You'll find it. They're usually pretty pictures. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Look at this. So he's got, so he's in this machine. Oh, good. Yeah, there is.

Yeah, so they like they strap into this like virtual reality machine with their arms and their their heads are like in this thing and then this giant machine. Absolutely. It's amazing. Yeah, it's incredible. It's that's yeah. So so with the brain to brain stuff, you're taking out all the electronics and all the wires and all the Wi-Fi and you're doing it. That would be the ultimate goal, right? So the first goal would be directly linking them, having wires.

laying a net, sort of it's like a neural net laid the grid that you actually place on the brain, the open up, lay it over the sensory cortex. But the idea now would be is that you wouldn't. Could you just put it like a hat on or would it have to be on your actual brain? Well, before, we'd had to get into your brain. But now it's moving to the point where if you're either wearing a coil over your head that's changing the magnetic field, if you're doing that, you can either both detect activation or activate cells. So the idea would be, it should be non-contact, ideal would be non-contact and non-invasive, right?

So it could be wearing a cap, but ultimately it could be like with the squid that I sat in. It's not even touching my head. It was just arced over it. So it felt like it was real. Yeah, it's called a squid meg. I've got with the actaments. It looks like a big cone, but it's basically reading my brain signals and translating those into an activity. But that's a function of then, I guess, who funds it.

And I'm thinking, from a commercial standpoint, it's got to go in the game industry, you know, where people want to play video games and they want to be immersed in them and be able to think of things. What does this do? Playing videos with mind control. There you go. Oh, wow. Oh, yes. So this is the crew that has the cap that you put on. And the team in the Brainworks Lab.

So what does she use her eyes to, like, move around? She's thinking. She's thinking. She's got a cap on right there. Yeah. Wow. And so it's detecting sort of activity that's going on. And it can be muscle activity or it can be brain activity.

Depends which company. Because it's really hard not to tilt your head when you go, I want to go down the hallway, right? So I think they're trying to figure out, should you just think it? Or can it actually read from some of your facial muscles? Because you're playing the game. On a science standpoint, they won't care. They go any way that we can give you the immersive experience as a game player. Right.

I think, you know, they'll be fine. Well, with the, so with this brain to brain stuff, you could, I understand how, how you're saying, you could basically hijack somebody's brain with your own brain and transfer everything. You're doing your motor functions, your knowledge of the anatomy of the brain, if you're doing brain surgery, uh, to that person. but could we figure out a way to link them without satellites or without like some sort of a Wi-Fi connection, I wonder? Well, normally, that's what we call like training you as a doctor and sending you somewhere

to do it. Exactly. Right. So traditional education is we want to put information in your head and you can go do it in any specialty area. Right. So these kinds of settings, you kind of go, what are the different context where I can lend you can your brain run my body, right, to do something that I couldn't do.

It's sort of, that's when you have to think like science fiction for a bit, but it's like Asimov's 3001, right? The guy plugs into the worldwide internet and links whatever he sees and hears to somebody somewhere else on the planet. I see that they don't have to carry around a phone. So I think from the national security standpoint or intelligence community standpoint, it's it's less risky right if i don't have to carry a camera or a recording device or have anything on me that would be incriminating if i can once i've seen stuff and i remember it transfer what i've

seen in here and know in some setting to them the people who need to know it yeah right it's like it's like another form of remote viewing kind of yeah it would be uh it would be a way of saying my information is secure because no one can tell right now what's in my head, but I can secretly send that to someone else. What we don't know right now, at least I'm not aware, if they do, no one's published it yet, is whether or not if you and I were going to communicate in a brain-to-brain conversation, and I'm somewhere else in the planet, and somebody intercepted The communication. We don't know whether we would all use a common language or if it's like an encryption problem.

Like, do we have to train with one another to understand what we're both thinking? And we don't know if then you guys had to train if it would be exactly the same or you'd have your own language. Would it be languages or would it be pictures? We don't know. Right now with the Tetris experiment, people are trying to imagine the shape or with the effects. X is an O's, like, telepathy experiment. You're just trying to imagine an X or an O. And the other person's going, I think I'm getting the impression of an O and an X, you know, can do better than chance.

Right. So, ideally, it would be sort of multimodal, right? Yeah. Because I say, hey, I heard something. Let me send you, let me think about it and let you hear what I heard. So that would be really interesting. I don't know where that, I'm not aware of that having progressed from the animal experiments yet. Right.

I know that they've experienced, they've done a couple of experiments with hive brain, like linking the brains of many different rodents to see if they're able to solve a problem faster than the solitary rodent itself. They are. But I'm not sure. I know that somebody had a plan for trying it in several humans. to see if you linked all their brains, would they do problem solving better? And as I said here,

I don't remember, I don't remember if the experiment's been done. But that would be like saying, hey, you know, or the three heads better than one. Right. And if we link our brains when we're problem solving would be any better.

And I'm not sure. I mean, you know, because, you know, I might be the idiot in the room, right? And prevent everybody from figuring it out. Right. Well, what you said about science fiction

and science fiction, becoming reality is interesting because the Pentagon, I think, was inviting in the 90s and the 80s. They were inviting, like, very successful, prolific science fiction authors to the Pentagon to talk with them about ideas for DARPA. Yeah. Like, I think one of the writers for Terminator was there, as well as the movie Alien and a few other, like, really notable sci-fi, like famous sci-fi movies. So, like, they're spending money talking to sci-fi.

writers, fantasy writers. That's amazing. I think it's important. I think it's important because if you go back to those personality traits, right, for people who are super high in that dimension of O openness of that fantasy, exploration, new ideas, new things, they may or not, they may or not be conscientious. Like, they may never translate their ideas into something that's workable because they don't have the discipline to do it. If they're high O, high C, then they usually can, right? But people who are low in O, and high in conscientious, they make very good tech people. I mean, right?

They're not trying to innovate. They're trying to make something work and engineer it and produce it. So I think when you think of the selection pool, if you're part of an organization that's, you know, making a system, you tend to then get tunnel vision down a lane and not think of all the different ways something could go because you're so focused in this way. So bringing in people, I think it's really cool.

You're bringing people who are like thinking crazy different ways. and go, hey, what if we could do that? Yeah. And people go, no, how could we do that? I remember one guy came when I was in government and he said, I want to know. How did Captain Kirk know when he was on the Starship Enterprise and they were isolating heartbeats on that planet? Which one was Spock or something?

I can't remember it was Spock or Kirk, but they could identify who the person was by silencing all the other heartbeats and finding out, you know, who was there. And me, I was having fun with him. because he looked so serious. And I said, well, it's because it was a TV show. But we did experiment with that looking at heartbeats through walls. If you love diving into culture and comedy, like on Danny Jones podcast, Playoff Hockey is right up your alley. NHL on T&T has the best coverage, making every game feel intense and unpredictable.

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And if you do, can you see how many people there are? And could you identify them? So that would be kind of cool, right? Is Elvis in the building? Is Elvis not in the building? Wow. So, but that came from a TV show idea, right? Right.

How do you do it? So I think there's a real need for that creativity and play. I think that when people play, they're really at their most inventive. Because anxiety doesn't kick in. Like, it has to work, right? And that's why I always joke. I don't think people believe me when I'm giving a lecture.

I go, you know, all of this, this was all designed on a bar napkin, having a great time. Right. It's really good friends. Because those are the times when you can sit, you can have something to drink, you can talk about it, you go, hey, I have an idea. What if might not be ethical, but could we do this, right? And then you go, yeah, that'll probably be unethical. We couldn't do that.

But if it could, it would work, right? And then you back and you go, what would be an ethical way of getting this done? And it gives you a freedom to play and invent and say, how would you do it? There. Yeah, there you go. Through wall heartbeat detection.

Recent advancements in radar tech have enabled the detection of heartbeats through walls, which several studies demonstrating the feasibility and accuracy of such systems. 2025 study proposed a method using single-channel continuous wave radar combined with maximal overlap to scrape wavelength transform to extract heart. Heartbeats from individuals behind walls. Wow. The accuracy of 95.27%. So that's the accuracy at like isolating the actual heartbeat.

Wow. And the other question I was interested in is how can we use your heartbeat to identify you again? Right. So and people's heartbeats are far more unique than they imagine. the acoustics in your heart are probably different than somebody else's because of the nature of the size of your heart, your exercise, the shape of your heart, and the internal chambers. But I was actually interested in the EKG thing. Like, you know, I was trained in medicine. We never thought that it was like personally unique unless you'd had like a heart attack and had an anomaly.

We figured, well, everybody's heart goes broodoo. groups. You're like your classic P-Wave QRSD complex. Mm-hmm. It turns out that it's a little more unique than we thought. And so if you can get a clean recording, we had done one experiment. We had people wear these things.

They were called Life Shirts, I think, was the company, I think it was some vivo metrics. They went out of business. But he'd read this whole thing, were fully KG. It had respiratory expiratory volume and inspiration volume. So we could look at heart rate variability. And I had one group of people. go in and do an experiment like just stair climbing.

Then the next week we had another group come in, but we put 10 people in from the previous group, had them all do stair climbing, just go up the flight of stairs, come back down in the building, and then just sit in the chair. And then we gave it to a team of tech guys, and we said,

hey, tell us whether or not there are any people from group two that were in group one. And if you can't tell us who they were. We can't tell you if there were, weren't we just wanted what do you think and they were able they didn't have a 95% accuracy at the time but their theirs was like about 85% of the time they could correctly go this heartbeat was in this group and I was thinking now that would be really cool yeah no it seems like that would be a very practical use like to take out bad guys right like instead of carpet bombing towns you could

literally like somehow figure out if you can you figure out where the signature is right right can you out where the guy, where the bad guy is and take out just one person without any collateral damage, you know. So see, that's where, that's where people would get, like, annoyed if they go, oh, my God, do you have a doctor talking about, like, using a heartbeat to target somebody, you know? Well, if you could kill one terrorist to save the lives of a thousand people, then, you know, you're saving a lot of lives. Right.

And it's also, it's also the development of looking at applications of science. Say there are many things are dual use. It's not my decision whether somebody does it. But I think it's being honest and saying, look, you are able to identify something. And this hands-off approach to looking at heartbeats would be really beneficial when we look at people who've been severely burned because you can't put electrodes on them. They have like severe burns or little neonates, little tiny babies. The electrodes are almost bigger than the baby. Right.

So this standoff kind of Dr. McCoy approach, having a device that gives you the vitals and the sensor can pick up all those things you need to know from you're doing your exam. Like that's a technology. That's something. But when you work in national security environments, people are always trained to go, how could that be used against us? Right. And how could it be used for us? So it's the same issue now is up like when people talk about whether it's the Ray Ban glasses or facial recognition, right? Like the meta glasses?

Yeah. And they can be filming. Or they look at the system of surveillance that the Chinese government's using facial recognition. Yes. And so look, these are just technologies about how accurately it can scan your face and then pick you out from a different angle, right? It's just that the application of it is when the government does it is they want to, they can track people, right? Right. And I think that that's where that's where then you have a debate in your, in whatever social community meetings.

Is that something I want the government doing? Right. Is do I want them doing it at home? Am I okay if they do it somewhere else? Right. Those are the things. Because, you know, that's what got the, that's what historically, that's why the CIA was partly in trouble for the MK Ultral experiment. right. The idea was

how to exert some degree of mind control over people. But they forgot to tell Americans they were experimenting on them. And the same is true from the department. Without their consent. Yeah. And it was like that project with the Department of Energy where they were radiating

people without telling them to see. Oh, like doing nuclear tests? Yeah. Well, people would go to the hospital and, you know, your grandparents might go in for their little visit and get radiated outside of their awareness because there was a project ultimately looking at if there was a nuclear war and there was radiation, what would be the vulnerability of the American population. But the main point was, no, it was the government experimenting on its citizens without telling them.

Wow. So it's always good to be skeptical, you know. It's crazy that the Department of Energy started out as the Manhattan Project. Yeah. They just changed their name a bunch of times. Yeah. It's insane. Well, you know, it was funny.

I think it was it Rick Scott who was running years ago. Oh yeah, yeah. Back in the 2016 or something like I was going, I'm going to eliminate the Department of Energy. Did he say that? Yeah, and everybody goes too expensive. He doesn't seem to... The Department of Energy.

He doesn't seem to know what it does. Oh, my God. So I remember when he got in, he's like, oh, yeah, we're going to keep that. Well, I've had a lot of people on here that say that the Department of Energy are the control of all, like, the secret UFO stuff. Yeah. Like, they're the ones that are testing all those Tick-TAC stuff that the pilots are seeing and all this crazy.

I mean, those things, a lot of people believe that, I think, I think what's that guy's name Ross Colthart just came out and he said he knows beyond the shadow of a doubt. He has hardcore evidence that those ticktacks that they saw on the West Coast, those fighter pilots saw, were Lockheed Martin technology. Yeah. So like, that's some deep deep stuff. He could find out. Yeah. But like if that's some sort of crazy anti-gravity stuff, of course the Department of Energy is going to have their hands on it because they're, what was the guy? Harold Malmgren, who actually passed away recently, who was the advisor to.

Ford, JFK, and Nixon, I think. He was close to Richard Bissell, the guy who started Area 51, and he did this amazing documentary with my friend Jesse Michaels, where he talks about the history of all of this stuff and how it's all connected to the Manhattan Project. You think about it. It makes sense we pay. A ton of your tax dollars go to organizations that are always focused on,

is there an emerging technology? How do we get a new one? How do we have an advantage? How would we use it? Of course. And would we use it? Right? Yeah.

Where we get it out doesn't melt in the rain, right? You know, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if there's a ton of technology it's never been used, right? I hope it's developed. That's the other thing. Hopefully they keep funding it, right? But I think that's the, for me, that's after working in government, that is the interesting and necessary back and forth challenging that should happen between people in an open society and having a part of your government that's secret where you can't know. Right.

And you're like... In a world where it's harder and harder to keep secrets. Correct. And I think it's okay to keep challenging the government because I think when sometimes you're fine, they don't always do what they're telling you or they're doing. And sometimes it's not making everybody safer. It might be making things worse. but yeah I think it'd be really fun to know I remember when I got sworn in at the CIA

and George Tannett was like Does anybody have any questions? Boom! Some kid puts up his hand right away and he goes, are there UFOs? Really? And he said, yes Elvis and John F. Kennedy are all having a party out there right now.

We all laughed, you know, like, but I just thought it was so funny that we all just got sworn in And the very first question somebody has is, are the UFOs in area 51 and 10? It was just laughing. And he goes, no, but whatever. Of course he would say that. Yeah.

I mean, that's the dilemma, right? They always say no. I think everybody knows. I think it's like JFK, right? I mean, do we know, does the majority, if you pulled the majority of the population and ask them what they believe was Lee Harvey-Auliswold acting alone? I think the majority of people who paid attention to it would say, of course not, right? And the same thing with UFOs.

Like, do we have, are there UFOs flying around stuff that's not made by humans? That's not human technology. That either is like whatever, some other species that lives here, like the same way we live here with ants or from another solar system. Like, of course I think most people believe that. But you're never going to get the answer from the government. They're never going to let you know. Unless, unless, you know, with what Trump's doing right now, trying to classify everything to get everyone's attention off the Epstein files. I think it's possible he might let us know that UFO's a real.

No, I was just thinking they'll accidentally like open a file. He's going to come out tomorrow. I got to come clean. Yeah. UFOs are real. That would fit Orwell's prediction, right? It's just like, now we're with East Asia, quick, quick, do you shift, right? Right, right.

So, but yeah, I wouldn't doubt that right now. It's amazing to watch it happen. I think, I think when you look back like historically, you go, yeah, it's just really, it's fascinating. You always wonder, what are they not telling me, what I want to know? people always want to, you know, like, I don't know if it make difference in how many taxes I'm paying, but it'd be fun to know. Right. Well, some people also speculate that, you know, all that missing money that's come from the Pentagon, like Donald Rumsfeld talked about the day before 9-11. And then it's like now it's like 20-something trillion dollars.

Some people speculate that that missing money has gone to like black projects and stuff like this, that you can't disclose to anybody. It certainly would make sense. I don't know if it's true, but it would make sense, right? say that's the purpose of secret stuff it's supposed to be secret yeah you know and if if what harold maumgram said is true and uh the secret stuff is classified two levels above the manhattan project the nuclear bomb then you know you would imagine you know they would go to great lengths to hide receipts to things like this you know yeah yeah and then you just kind of hope well whoever's in charge of it is being responsible

I worked in government so long I was like, well, I do like that adage don't ascribe to a conspiracy what you can account for by incompetence. But so not everything that they can't explain has to be a conspiracy. The problem with that is, my problem with that is, and I've had a lot of people say that to me before,

especially former CIA people. So I agree with you that out of all the things people think are conspiracies, 90% of them are incompetence, 10% of them are probably conspiracy. It might even be lower number. It might even be 5, 95. But the problem is people in the government or people that are in whatever that are against

the conspiracies will always use that argument even when the 5% is the conspiracy because you have the excuse saying, look, 95 to 5, you can't even have, you can never get your 5. Yeah. You know. You're right. Yeah. So, yeah, you have to decide, can you just have fun with it? exactly I hope it's cool

I mean I always tell her they go I don't know don't you think there are I'm like if there are it'd be pretty cool to know it'd be really cool to know what's the tech where's it from how does that be really cool right yeah and you know it also like

the what we were talking about with telepathy and like using using words and to do this brain to brain communication I would imagine like pictures would make more sense just because there have been stories of, there's lots of stories of children having encounters with quote unquote aliens, right? Whether you want to believe it or not. And these kids, there was one big account that happened in Zimbabwe, Africa in the 90s.

And they interviewed, and this guy, John Mack, this Harvard psychiatrist, went and interviewed all these children at this school in Rua Zimbabwe. And they all explained the same thing. They drew pictures of these things. And they explained that they were communicating to them in a weird, ambiguous way that just technology is bad, and you have to be careful with technology. And they said it wasn't words, but it was just like a feeling that was implanted into them. Like a telepathic feelings being pushed into them.

It's really interesting. I don't know if you've ever read Jung's monograph on Flying Saucers. It's really fun. It's very thin. but he gets at that idea as why do we see these similar experiences with people in different places on the planet who don't talk to each other but have a similar conception. Yeah, and you get to see his view of it was it's a it's because of the brain's the brain's similarity around the planet. There's only certain ways we can conceive of ideas, which is, Some people have made a lot about his term of the archetype, but he said like crystal formation, there's only certain, there are these limited ways we form the basis of information and that that similarity is in everybody around the planet.

But I thought one of those more interesting ideas was that you wouldn't be able to know the difference between it being generated in your head or outside your head, you know, because the experience is what people have. Right. He did another, he talks about the same thing, like when people have had their encounter. with spirits or ghosts, right? And people would ask him, is it real? And, you know, his view was, yeah, they're real. It may not be what you think it is, but it doesn't make any difference because it's your experience with it, that affects how you think

and how you move and what you do. But it's a fun monograph. I thought it was really interesting. He was trying to think about it at the time, how do you explain all the different sightings of similarities? And so one views to say, well, they're real external things that appear in the sky run by a government or that they represent real external things created by some other civilization. Yeah. And he said, and another explanation is a little bit different, which is they are external manifestations of something in us.

Yeah. Which was a hard idea to get. Like a projection? or a side effect of how we process information, a side effect of what our brains do. And that's why he used to say, look, the archetypes, we often talk about them now as if, oh, I have those, and I know what to do with them.

And his view was, no, they run you. You don't run them. So that, and so you say, what's the difference between that and possession? Right. It depends on the framework a person's using in making sense of their world if you believe

oh, there's this external entity that controls my brain and makes me do things that possesses me. His view is that, well, it's no different. His term form of it was an archetype but somebody else might say you're being possessed by a demon

and this view is, well, from one particular angle, this is a distinction without a difference because it means that something autonomous from your consciously decided sort of arrangement of thinking has any say in, right? And that you're being moved and affected by something.

But it's an interesting monograph to read. Yeah. Because, yeah, it's from the, I think it's, I can't remember if you published it in the late 50s or the early 60s, but it's called, I think it's called flying saucers. Yeah. Yeah. It's also, like, I think it's possible that some people have more of a sixth sense than other people, for lack of a better way of describing it.

Like, you know how sometimes when people, you know how sometimes when people, People are close to death. They explain being able to talk to dead relatives. You think they're just going crazy. Yeah. Well, maybe they are. Maybe something in their brain is opening up and they can like see something or communicate with something that's actually always there.

But we just, it's our, our brains are crystallized and rigid. So we can't break through to that. If something like that is real, there's actually this guy, Gary Nolan who's doing these studies at Stanford, I believe. And he's studying the basal ganglia of. of people, of humans, that he's, and he's, the correlation that he's found is that when there's more neural density

in the basal ganglia, somehow these people have more UFO and like paranormal experiences. Interesting. Yeah, and they correlate it with trauma somehow. Yeah, I'm not familiar with this, but, yeah. But I do, I do think it's fun to explore that because like you're, it's still that fundamental way

of saying, how do we understand world around us and even understanding ourselves. And I think I like that idea that, because Carl Sagan was kind of tipping into that in his novel contact, right? That the experience the character has of communicating with an alien life arm happens in like four seconds of everybody watching the ball drop, right? But it's a lot longer. And it just means playing with the idea that we often want to insist that because of the

way we experience the world and understand um physicality uh that we it's difficult to imagine um there being something that doesn't operate that way you know and so we you'll you find people go no no no none of it can exist there can't be anything else you know your conscious it's just the head on the beer right and there's other people saying well that's one way it's one way to view it yeah um but we don't know i think the from a science standpoint the fun part is trying to say okay if you take the hypothesis, how would you test it? Right. How would you do it?

And, you know, some people don't want to test it because they just enjoy it. It's like saying, I'm going to figure out why the meal you served me was so good. Right. It's not really the point of having a good dinner unless I have to make it again, right? Yeah. But you know from a science standpoint or you can go, well, I can tell you why you taste wine or why you taste the meat, the receptors in your tongue. And it never adds up to what makes for a fantastic meal, you know. or great sex.

You can tell you about the physiology of it. Right. Now I get it. Right. Well, maybe, right? So I think that there's always this, there's two ways people can approach experiences. One is the experience itself and what meaning does it have for them, whether it's a psychic experience, whether it's an alien encounter or an experience. And then there's this way of looking at things from a science perspective where we're just trying to figure out how the natural world works.

And so it is fairly reductionistic It's saying let's look at the parts And looking at the parts Can we figure out how it works? And they're both really valuable Because understanding parts and pieces Like in some of the stuff I mean, we figure out how something works

But it doesn't tell us whether you should value it Doesn't tell us what it should mean This is this is how it happens So for me like This is what memory looks like Yeah Knowing knowing this is how it functions As far as we can tell

doesn't tell me how you value memories and which ones are which kinds of experiences are more important than another one. So people always want to push you into one box or that, especially when you do what I do. You know, like, for example, I do a, I wrote a book during pandemic on Toro. And I was drawing everything. And I thought, you know, my friend Enriquez, he's a terologist in New York. And so I was studying with him. A tourologist. Okay.

Terro cards. So I redesigned a whole deck of 78 cards. It did all the art. and everything. And that was about the same look that like my other neuroscience guys was going to say, hey, I redesigned a whole stack of tarot.

You know, and they're like, well, I said, they're fascinating. The original, the oldest Toro in the world are actually at the Bainiki at Yale at the Reraberk Library. And now my cards are there too. They put them in the collection. Wow.

But it's really funny. I've done these lectures and people, if they experience the reading, they go, well, how does it know that about me? Right? when they haven't told you anything. And, you know, it's kind of weird, isn't it? Isn't this connected to astrology somehow?

It is in some people's minds. In my mind, I think of it related to the phenomenon that we call paradigolia. It's like where you look up in the sky and you see a man in the moon or, you know, face on Mars, or you see Jesus or Mary in a tree. Oh, yeah. You know, Jesus and toast. Chimpanzees do it too. There was a bank down the street a couple years ago that, uh, you know, uh, you know, uh, you know, The sprinklers stained the windows, a glass bank, all glass,

and the sprinkler stained it to look like Mary Magdalene. Yeah. And a church bought it. I remember that. You remember that? In New Haven, we had the Jesus tree. Like, people said like, Jesus in the tree. Protestants had a harder time than Catholics at seeing it.

Like, I went, and I'm like, got nothing. Got nothing. My friends are Catholic. Like, there he is. He's right there. I'm like, I don't see it yet. Right. But we do that.

It's all like cloud watching. And when you see shapes in the, the clouds, it makes sense. The areas associated with the identification of those areas are lighting up in your brain. So when you see a dog, it's the same area that lights up when you see a dog, right? And it was, COVID gave me a lot of time to talk to people on the internet around the world. And I talked to this researcher in Japan who was really interested in the relationship between rhythmic, non-rhythmic music and religious experience and also seeing things that may or may not be there. So he was showing his students these pictures of like snow

like you'd see on the TV screen, just that static black and white dots. And he would have them look at this. He said, just tell me how many images you see. And in those images, there's nothing. But the average person could see five or six different things in it. And he found that he could increase the number. If when they looked at them, he was playing a rhythmic music versus having asynchronous beats made by this computer.

So he's looking at how we construct meaning, and I thought it was fascinating because I'm like, this is really cool, because when you're working in intelligence and you're looking at ambiguous material, right, you're trying to create something from it. A pattern. And patterns, right?

And our brains... What is it called? What kind of rhythmic beat? Oh, he had synchronous and asynchronous, sort of meaning that... Synchronic and asynchronous. Yeah, so one of the... rhythmic and then the others out of whack where you're getting an odd rhythm. The rhythm isn't

synchronized with the other beat. So you might call it modern or something. But yes, either in sync or not. And that facilitated it to see more stuff. And I thought, well, this is really interesting. I wonder what's the best environment then for an analyst to look at vague information. Yeah. Because your job as an intelligence analyst, when information, when you don't know what you're looking for, you're trying to figure out a pattern, is you want to create, you want to be creative in like making patterns. And then you have to systematically try and knock them all down to see probably if any of them might be true, right? Because we do tend to see what's on our mind, like see what we believe is the old adage. We don't believe what we see.

We end up seeing what we actually believe. But some people have a hard time seeing patterns in vague stimuli. So his work caught my attention. I'm like, oh, this would be really cool. I wonder if people who, because people vary in the trait of paranoia, sort of seeing things in clouds and seeing things in mud or seeing shapes. And I don't know if they would be better at finding patterns in ambiguous information to help us discover something we haven't discovered.

or whether the tendency to, would you see too many patterns, would you overshoot it? But I was thinking, I was thinking of it that way. How would you select for who would be exceptionally good at finding hidden patterns in things? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting, man. So I took my clarity. I was just drying out. There we go. Yeah, especially when you're, like, trying to analyze mundane data, right? Or intelligence and trying to put it all together

to make a picture. Because that does make sense. Like, you see what you believe. So people are going to, their conclusions are going to be affected by their bias or whatever it is. That's why you should line them all up and become, when we're training as the sat and runners at the CIA as well, you're trying to train people to come up with the alternative and then knock them all down. Because it's really easy to find something that makes sense to us. It's easier than we think to like make a pattern and come up with it.

Yeah, there it is. Nice. I love the washing machine one. Yeah, the man in the mountain. Yeah, it's Peridogelia. And it's really interesting. People who are higher in emotional reactivity in the personality dimension, we'll have more of this.

But also so do artists. There's a wonderful quote. I don't know if you find it from Leonardo da Vinci about staring at mud. And he was staring at mud and the cracks in mud pretty soon. He could see figures and battles. And there's a famous girlfriend. I'm like, oh, that's this. And he'd like to get inspiration.

and that's what I was doing for relaxation. Excuse me, during COVID, I'd make my coffee in the morning, sit in the window, and I'd scribble all over a sheet of paper, and then just turn it around and around and around and see what popped out. Really? And we'd do drawings. Yeah, there it is. Leonardo Ventry once suggested that one should look into the stains of walls,

ashes of a fire, clouds, or mud, and see, and these can provide marvelous ideas. Interesting. I do that sometimes in my shower. I have this crazy tile pattern in the floor and I'll stare at the tiles and I'll see faces in the tiles. Yeah, that's this.

Yeah. And you can play with it because the more you do it, the better you get at it. And then it's really kind of wild. Yeah, this is the kind of stuff. Oh, wow. That's bizarre.

So people who are better at this are more open? On the psychological testing will score higher in openness. Because you're entertaining a new way. If you're super low, you'll look at this and that's what it is. Nope, those are the lines, right? Oh, there's the face of the moon up there, yeah.

Yeah. Oh, the face over here, that's on Mars. Oh, that's Mars. Oh, okay. But yeah, people are higher or no, they will see more of those kind of figures. But that is the fun kind of, that's the fun work, the fun kind of drawing stuff that I love. That's fascinating. I can take a leak real quick.

Sure. Quick break. We'll be right back. So that, that one you just clicked to is the first one. So there's the first one. So that was the original scribble. It might have even been the other way around, but I turned it around and around. Full screen it, Steve.

Full screen it. And when I had that in that configuration, something caught my eye. Okay, okay. So there's the first one. That's just a scribble. Random scribble. Just took your pencil on the paper and just scribbling around. And I turned it around.

around and and I saw that that I saw that arc and I went huh that's kind of like an arm uh-huh so then in the next one you'll see then I outlined it I thought well if there's an arm I guess there should be a head so and then it all evolved oh wow from there so she's pouring something into a cauldron yeah and see here this now there's three streams of whatever this is being poured and one disappears so now are you trying to make it into something or are you still just uh at this point I now see what I've got and then I'm now just filling it in. Got it. Just tiny scribbles.

So if like if he's zoomed up, you'd see this is all just with an ink pen. And so these are all tiny dashes. So incredibly relaxing when you've got nothing else to do. You can obsess on how to scribble stuff in. And at the end, you know, we, I think, yeah. So at this point, it's basically putting tiny little little. lines and the reason why I drew all those other little lines is because then it gives me a I can just fill it in it gave me a sense of accomplishment that's incredible filling in a row yeah right

so you can see the hash marks and that's when it's almost done and then one of the pictures is the complete thing probably the next one would be the completed drawing wow but yeah that's the but the wacky the wacky part and fun part is that now because I was just at the psychic entertainers convention. Psychic entertainers convention? Oh yeah. Yeah, it's an awesome group. So, because I, I, ever since probably grade school, I started doing magic and high school, I started performing and in college, I'd been down to the Magic Castle and did stage shows. And really, in the last probably 15 years, I had mainly done things like performing mentalism, sort of mind reading sort of shows. And, but then in COVID, when I started thinking,

about, oh, this would be really fun. Let me try something. So I'd spend all this time designing these cards. And my partner, Calvin, goes, hey, come on down here. I have something for you in the backyard. And I walk out in the backyard. This is a little tent set out and go, psychic reading. So what's this? He goes, well, I have signed you up for the Sunday in the park across the street to fundraise for the, for the park. So you're going to be reading cards. I'm like, and what? He goes, yeah, you know, you've drawn them all. you should just read cards for people. And I was thinking, this is going to go very badly. I don't know what I do.

So I decided, all right, that's what I'm going to do. A person would sit down and say, have you ever had your cards read before? And they go, now. And I said, well, this is entirely for you inside your head. So while you mix the cards, just think of a question that's important to you that you don't know the answer to, but you'd like some insight about. And don't say that a lot. Just focus intensely on that. It has to mean something to you.

and when you're done, I'll lay out the cards and I'll tell you what I see and then you can tell me what makes sense to you. And so I do this. I think it was like 400 people later. You know, people are like,

how does it know that about me? I'm like, man, that's just how it goes. So I don't know which questions I answered. It was really meaningful. People sometimes who would tear and they'd go, oh God, this is like exactly what I need to hear. This is like, this really helps me see things. And I think what's happening

that's so my magician friends are like you didn't even ask the question you don't know what the question is like no i actually found the experience is even more powerful when they never say their question out loud they haven't written it down it's in their head um and i said i think this is what's happening um there's this this frames a lens right this focuses your mind on something that's important to you and then now I turn these around and read them like a narrative and it makes meaning to you in your head that makes sense. I don't have to know what it is. And so it's been a really cool thing. I've done like four or five hundred people.

I'm like, hmm, I'm going to do this formally and I'm going to do a paper on this. But because people really love it. And I'm always amazed. When I was in France last week, the guy. who they had rented the house to have us all come. They were celebrating a big birthday party. It had 15 or 20 of us in this chateau. I thought it was going to be like an Agatha Christie murder novel if nobody got along. But there's a billowed room. No, it was really phenomenal. I'm walking around. And Julian, my friend Julian, came up and he goes, so I've told everybody

you're going to read their cards. I went, you what? He goes, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I've already told them. They're all expecting a reading. I'm like, great. You know, so, but no, I'm going to do it. And, yeah, everybody is, I said, but here's the rule. You can't tell me your question. Yeah. Because otherwise, you'll play around in your head thinking, oh, you know, he knows me. This is this.

And I said, I think the experience is best if I don't know anything. And, and walking through it. So it's a really fun phenomenon. And I think, because I've been thinking about it, about what I think's going on. And I think it's rooted in that period. a doily phenomenon that's motivated now by what's on your mind that's important to you. So I think it's a way of looking at how we do things as a human, how we make meaning. And the meaning is real to people.

But yeah, that was my COVID experience for doing that. But I have found, because you know the classic sort of magician community, they want to know what trick you're going to do. what are you going to do? And so I was at the convention last year, not this year, I was going to do the classic thing where, you know, I have tried to figure something out about people in the audience in order to do the mind reading stuff, right? Yeah, how does that work? Well, this time it didn't work well at a whole because the person who was supposed to get me

something went, yeah, I didn't get you anything. So basically, I know nothing about anybody in the audience. I thought, I'm going to treat them just like people in the park. And so I do this whole gallery reading thing to read for people in the audience. Like they have questions. They put in a bowl. I'm laying out cards. And they're going, yes.

And you can see the magicians are getting really perplexed because they don't recognize the method. Right. So wait, wait, wait. Explain, break this down for me. So people are writing questions, putting them in a bowl. They all drop them in a bowl. Okay. And I don't know if you saw the movie Nightmare Alley or something,

but they were showing one way of getting them all is you might swap out the bowl, right, and read all the questions ahead of time. But none of that happens. So I get out there on stage, and I knew about two seconds before I stepped on stage that the person who was supposed to get me some information on people to make this entertaining

had not. And I was like, huh, they'll never invite me back. This will be interesting. And so I thought, well, no, in the park, I never had to ask anybody their question. and they all found it really quite fun. And so that's what I did. And I remember afterwards, the magicians were all,

they were very complimentary, very nice. And one sat me down, he goes, I have to buy you a drink. And I said, well, why? He's like, well, he goes, would you share the method? Because I've seen a lot of these methods studies, but like, I can't figure out how you got information on people.

And I went, it didn't. Wow. I said, I had to rely on the power of the way the human mind, works to try and do something fun and entertaining. And he's like, wait, wait, nobody gave you anything on any of us. I'm like, no, not at all. I said, that all happened. That's, that's the magic that happened in your head, right? Um, it's taking it. So it's like taking this principle and, and building it and going, how can I take a principle of how your brain works and do it in a way that might be for fun. It's for entertainment.

The way it wouldn't be for entertainment and may or may not be helpful is when you think about it like in training analysts and pushing people to like see meaning, create meaning, and now destroy it. Now undo it. Uncheck your hypothesis. Figure out, give me another pattern using the same material. Give me another interpretation of all that material. Right. So then we can figure out what would we need to know if this, if this interpretation was true that matched the outside world, or if it just all connects the dots, but it's not really what the enemy is doing or something like that. But it's the same phenomenon in my mind that you're trying to make sense of ambiguous information because you have the drive. There's a need to make sense

of something, right? And in the entertainment lane, you're saying, hey, think of something. It really mean something to you focus on that lock in on that that that you don't know the answer to so i never get anybody going tell me what the lottery number is i'm like i don't know right you know um but that's that phenomenon oh that's so bizarre yeah you know there's there's this there's this other phenomenon that people explain that i think might be similar to this where like things in their lives are um like things that happen to them in their life are foretold by like dreams they have. Or they're like, oh, this all came to me in a dream

and then it happened in real life. I always wonder, is that real? Or is that just like you connecting meaning where there's really no connection there? Well, so even if you go with the, I call it serendipity, something matches, right? Yes. When you really think of it on the face of it,

asking if it's real doesn't make any sense because it is real, right? You have this delightful experience like, oh wow, something, these two things happen, and it corresponds to something in my life. And you feel like you've had a revelation about it. So in that sense, it's very real. When you get into it from a science perspective,

you're trying to figure out, well, which is the chicken and which is the egg, right? Yes. Yes. You know, is it that I remember what I dreamed because there are features that I'm now reconstructing when I have an experience ago, this is exactly what I dreamed when the nights ago.

Right. Right. Or is it that that's been on my mind and that's the way I've interpreted the experience I just went through and that was the whole debate that people had with Young when he used the term synchronicity.

And they were going, because he said it's an a causal principle that makes meaning. What does that mean? So it means there wasn't a cause. There wasn't an obvious cause that said this should be able to cause this. But somehow they're magically connected

and I go, wow. Uh-huh. Quantum entanglement. Yeah. So if you think of it as serendipity is a better term because it means I've had had two things happen that somehow seemed to be connected.

And it's fun. It's like serendipity isn't a negative turn. You go, oh, my God. You go, wow, that's so cool. I walk in, you walk in. I didn't even know you'd be here today. Or I thought, I was just thinking about you the other day. And here you are, right?

And you're pleased. And so if you think about it from a human experience standpoint, that connection that seems very magical. We do think in ways that are magical is really real. It isn't real when people are trying to figure out, well, how did one thing cause the other? Like, why are they connected? That's a more interesting question is how does her brain make this connectivity? And I think that periadoria is part of the brain's principle underneath it.

Chimpanzees do it too. They don't see human skulls, but they see chimpanzee skulls. So that guy was telling you about Japan, he's done some interesting experiments about whether when chimpanzees look at ambiguous material, do they see stuff too? As far as you can tell, they do. Really? Yeah, so their brain's wired to make patterns, recognition as well. I think that's what, I think most animals probably do it, right?

That's how you adapt in the environment. You make a pattern and you go, this gives me insight on what I'm supposed to do. But I enjoy those things. That's how my goofy brain works. Well, that's fascinating. I do the neuroscience stuff, and then I think, I go, hey, that's a really cool idea. science, I wonder, I wonder if you can use that if that's happening over here and try and bridge it. I go, I don't know. I mean, you're the perfect person to be working on the science aspect of the CIA.

It's fun. A CIA psychologist should be interested in magic. I drove them nuts, I think. My second boss there was fantastic because he was the kind of guy who he'd say, Andy, the reason I hired you is because you're good at stuff. So, The only time I really need you to come to me is if there's a decision I'm supposed to make, but I guess I hired you so you can make decisions, and I trust you to do it, right? So I had permission to be playful and creative and try and say, what can we do? What can we do? Yeah. So that's the kind of environment that I really, I think that's what I love doing, testing experiments and designing research and doing it. I think there's nothing more boring than just finding out.

something you already know. What's really fun for me in life is going, can we run an experiment that will teach us something we actually don't know? We actually don't know the answer to that. Wouldn't that be cool to figure it out? Right. Yeah. So I think that's how it bridges, because I think for some people, they don't know why, oh, well, you're doing stress studies, and then you're doing eyewitness memory, and then you're doing detecting deception, and then you're doing this magic stuff, and I'm like, oh, they're all play. In my mind, they're all forms of creatively playing. And with the environment you're in trying to figure it out because deception's fun right people love it when they play poker yeah you love it when you can hide for people what right well like as well also

is strategic deception is fascinating you know and like the history of strategic deception in the agency and like with the development of tech and trying to hide technical innovations from the Soviet Union during the Cold War or from China or whatever and that's like another one of these things in Anna Jacobson's book, Area 51, is when the CIA pilots were first flying, testing the first jet planes in Nevada. They would make them bring gorilla masks in the cockpit in case they got within visual distance of a civilian airplane. They would wear the gorilla masks. Yeah. Right. So it was like, yeah, which had to be really cool. Just to confuse the hell out of people. So people would think they're crazy if they try to tell anybody about this jet plane they saw. Absolutely. That's, I mean,

that's how you apply those principles, right? How do you play with human and understanding of something, and you can apply it to security, you can apply it to entertainment. So I think I didn't even know until I was bored one day. I think probably I've been at the CIA at least a year. And I was bored one afternoon, so I wandered over into the old headquarters building where the library is, and they have a historic section of the library, which is the best magic collection of stuff outside of probably the magic hassle. And I was like, this is really neat. I had no idea this here, but it gets back to that whole history of magicians being. involved with government at figuring out how do you deceive the enemy to do the other fake tanks how do you make people disappear to get them out of a building right if you're being on if you're under surveillance so if you think about it like we have to smuggle you out how do we do it so it's like in that book it got declassified it's on the market now called the CIA manual of trickery and deceit and there's a section in there says hey here's how you hide people in apparently a transparent cube of water bottles right or here's how you you know because you're trying to get people out of a building and the enemy's watching

But they go, wow, there's nothing there. We can see through all the bottles. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, that's fascinating. So that's how do you take something understanding how your brain works and human perception, and how do you apply that technology when it's being used right now for entertainment

to something for security? So, you know, you've seen those shows where people walk out on the stage and they snap their fingers and they're an entirely different outfit. It's probably a trick you can only do one. once if they're following you in some other country. But if you think about it, it's kind of like the Superman revolving door effect, right? Suddenly you're dressed totally differently. But that's what that book, the CIA Manual Trickering and Deceit is all about.

It's which techniques were written into this to say, hey, here's how you get a poison pill on somebody's coffee. Here's how you palm off a microdot, you know, here's how you get information out. But, yeah, it was a surprise. I didn't know. I didn't know the library was there, but then I knew what I was going to do when I was not working. I would go down and sit in the library and learn stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

There was something else that you talked about with, like, DNA and storing information on DNA. Yeah. Oh, that's wild. Where did you get this idea? Where did this idea come from? Well, there's, oh, a couple of different places. One is when you, when you, well, the first idea came when I'd read a paper on DNA, computing. So when you, so if you have a problem that would take too long to solve at the

speed of light, right? That has more than 10 to the 23rd possibilities. If you think about sort of billions of molecules in a glass and you've configured one to match some DNA thing to settle out, you can shake it all up and you can have a solution pop out. And I was like, I'd never thought about that before, that you've solved the problem working on one computer and say I can have billions of them trying to solve a problem at the same time. So it's a different, the same concept is for quantum computing. The only thing that's sexy about it is it can, since it's, you've got one, zeros and both simultaneously, then you can solve problems much faster that would take far too long for any other system to do, which is why it's good for encryption. And I was reading that.

And then I was thinking, well, DNA is a code. And so when you put a code in, if you could synthesize the code, right, the only way could read it because there's too many molecules, you'd have to have the key to find it, right? And so I started looking and there was a group who had finally, they had published a paper on DNA encryption. I think was out of China, but then one of the groups, I think in the U.S., I can't remember, is they actually encoded. a movie sequence in DNA and then had the bacteria replicate and were able to get the DNA from that sort of the offspring of it and then replay the sequence for the movie and it's of the horse running. I don't know. You might find that online say DNA coding of film. But if you just think about DNA as an analog to the digital representation

on your pad. Right. If it's a code and the interpreter is how to get the code and then you play it, there it is. And so they would encode that, they were using CRISPR. They're able to encode that information and code it as a strand of DNA between the four nucleotides that you can see. And so if you put the right sequence in, it's going to help you recreate whatever that codes for.

And so what they were able to demonstrate is, hey, we can take this little movie clip, turn it into a code strand, put it into the DNA of the bacteria. Then when the bacteria replicates, we can retrieve the code from its offspring, so to speak, and replay the information. and I thought this was great because it's not like the AI systems that will have to be super cooled. Right. And a guy named George Church at Harvard had, I think, in one gram of DNA, he said you can code 700,000 terabytes of information or something. 700,000. And that was like, I don't know, it's a big number. But he published, he said he has the most published book in the world because he put it in DNA.

And I was like, well, that's really cool. Because if you can store information in DNA, which has been evolutionarily for at least a couple of billion years, you just think it's at room temp, you know? And so the rate limiting step to make that practical, it's like the, now back to science fiction on Star Trek, remember, they had the little tubes where they could play the music because it's coded in DNA strand. Just think of it as the new digital. If you can store everything in a little tiny tube that has all this DNA in it, you just need the machine that rapidly isolates the strand you want played. So you could play your music, you could see your family photos, right? Or you could retrieve anything.

So from an intelligence standpoint, since you could use DNA, then what you need is a really efficient thing for me to take a picture, have it turn it into DNA, right? Or type of message, have it turned into a DNA strand. And who would know if that was on my body anywhere? Like, you know, no one's going to find DNAs all over you. Or do you inject it into a couple of your squamous cells, like with the hypospray thing that they know used for melanoma, where you inject material into the squamous cells because they're going to slough off in 14 days?

So do you get a secret message or plans or blueprints, turn them into a DNA code, inject them into your skin? no one's going to find those and then when you get home people can retrieve them by taking those cells pulling out the secret blueprints right so it's just

it's like saying I have this new digital camera and I can send pictures over the internet rather than the old photograph system right DNA is just a way nature's been passing on information right right

and so you say well if we co-op that can I send you information that's not really about anything but like this? And how do I get that information rapidly turned into a DNA code? And then how when I get the DNA to you, how do you rapidly turn it back? And so I found those studies really important because I thought in the age now where, you know, people track, you can track and so easy to identify who people are, this would still be a really different. way of getting you. You can identify where people are.

Yeah, you know, with all the surveillance and monitoring where people go on the planet and people tracking, you know, what you do financially. Right. And I was like, well, if you're in that kind of a world, less and less and less is invisible. And so when you think about it from a national security or intelligence standpoint, you say, as everything becomes more collected and transmitted and shared, right? Yeah. Where are the arenas where you can have something completely unretrievable by other people?

If you want to keep something secret or securely get it to people. And so that's how my, had a couple of things I was telling people about with DNA, that there's a potential way to go. Quantum computing is a different way to go to secure encryption. It just makes the number of solutions so hard. for anybody to solve, right? But with a quantum computer, you can solve those problems faster. But right now, it'd be easy then to break codes that banks use or the military use, you know,

if you, with quantum computing, because it can try out all the numbers faster. It's like trying out all the numbers on the keypad and going, right. There's too many numbers. This will take me more than a lifetime trying out every little combination. Quantum computing or DNA computing is simply a way of doing that faster because you're trying out all the combinations nearly simultaneously, right, in the DNA computing. The quantum computing is just more rapidly trying out all the possibilities. Right. Right. It's not limited by one and zero.

You think this is something that is like seriously being looked at and implemented? I don't know. I suspect that it is. There's a weird thing that happened in the literature. about six years ago there was a drop-off in the Chinese publications on DNA encryption. So they've been publishing, publishing, publishing, and then suddenly it vanished. And like, all the publications were quite positive. So my assumption is, well, they figured it out and then went dark. They figured something else. And then why should you tell anybody else, you know, what you're doing with it would be one thing.

And I never saw much published by the U.S. So I figured, eh, if they were doing it, they just weren't sharing. But I suspect because of the stuff like with CRISPR and people modifying genes, it's a very straightforward step. And because it's relatively stable, you know, at room temperature, there's no super high, sophisticated measure you have to tape keeping something super cooled or anything, you know. So I was just like, I, if they're not. paying attention to it, then, you know, that's what happens with a number of things. But I'd like to think we are. I don't know. Once I left, I didn't track that. But I did notice that less has been published from the group that was publishing in China on the time. So my

suspicion was, yeah, they've been doing fine. Out of all the stuff that you've seen be proposed to CIA or all the stuff that you've seen, even heard being discussed, what to you, what to you, was like the most frightening or like what is there was there one thing to you that ever stood out that was like like this could be like when you think about dual use like something that could be used for good and simultaneously used for bad like this if this gets out of hand this could be the you know the end of humanity or something along those lines from a from a tech standpoint I have to think I nothing quickly came to mind I think the I think in my in my time there uh at the the more the more salient and horrifying thing was was the enhanced interrogation program which was

it's like I couldn't think of anything really more badly thought out poorly planned that was significantly affecting it had downstream ramifications on a number of things yeah um so I think for me that was that was the scariest thing that everybody was willing to believe like the show 24 must be more right than what we know right so that It was that whole mentality that they were pushing that you just, if you just keep hurting people more, they'll give you something. And all I could think it was like the Princess Bride. It's for science. So I think that was a little more alarming.

People trying to do that. I think from, yeah, and for where I was, I was probably the only guy who was doing human study stuff, reviewing the human studies protocol. calls the, yeah, I didn't see anything that was alarming in the frightening way. I didn't see stuff that was alarming in that this, this actually is not valid and they want to, they want to dump a ton of money, you know, into it. And so I thought my job at the time was to help us not do that. I think that was the more alarming, the more alarming thing. Yeah. And I think relevant to a little bit of what people are concerned about today, the kinds of things that would happen is people are always tempted not to tell Congress what they need to know, right? So those are the, so there would be times when, you know, people say, hey, we want to know what you're doing.

And they need-jerk reaction on the part of people and intelligence go, no. Right. And I had a good boss. He's like, no, they have a right to know. Congress gets to know if they're in the right committees on what we're doing

that we know but it was it was which was nice because I think the knee jerk reaction if you're working in secret is to always assume well since it's a secret

we really shouldn't let anybody know right well the thing about the thing about secrecy is that if you have a cloak of invisibility does that enable good behavior or bad behavior right and most of the time it's usually a temptation to run to bad behavior when you think you're anonymous, right?

So I think that was that was one of our, because we met as a group of Sykes around the interrogation stuff. And we're like, you know, the more people, the more secret you make that and the fewer people you have constantly monitoring or observing something, the more likely it is that people who get frustrated resort to something unhelpful. They're cruel because it's frustration. And usually the more people that there are in the room watching you do something, the more aware you are of what you're doing and the more you think, I'm not sure this might be a good idea. Right. So when you read about some of the deaths that occurred and, you know,

and the water animas and you just start reading the sentence report on it. And it's like it reads a lot like the Inquisition where people are being cooked and, you know. Yeah. At what temperature will you confess? like that. Yeah. And you read it and you think they're really doing this to people. It just sort of boggles your mind, right?

And I think that it's easier to get into a mindset where you can justify everything when you don't have onlookers, when you don't have people watching what you're doing. So I would, yeah, I would hope that, but you never know what administration's learned. I would hope that people have learned at least from some of the stuff that's come out now of Guantanamo Bay, the decisions judges made is that you know, if you don't think it through, you miss out on the opportunity

to bring people to justice. Like I think about that. When I was down there, the people who were there were the prosecutors, the victims, families, you know, and the defense. And so there's a gallery at the back of the courtroom where those are the family members of people who died in 9-11.

Right. And they're hoping to get a trial. Right. And, and what they've been consistent going down now, what, almost 20 years, right? And there's been no trial of anybody, which is really, I think, terrible. We captured people, we've held them. And we usually used to criticize Russia for sending people to Siberia, right? And going, well, you know, they don't need one. But it's my own belief. I don't think the government wants a trial. I don't think they want to have to lay out what they didn't find or what they found. Because in a trial, you've got to do that. You've got to lay out your evidence and say, what are we going to charge a person with?

I think it's just been stalling and stalling and stalling, which is, I think, for me, it's, it looks shameful to say 20 years later, 22 years later. You haven't brought anybody to trial after this. This huge event has changed so much in our society, our access to public spaces, you know, and what you do at the airport and all this, this massive amount of money we spend on security. And you're like, we've spent a lot of money and we've paid for this. So why have we have no one convicted. Yeah. So that's my, for me, that's my biggest disappointment about it.

And part of it that's contributed to that has been the torture program. So I think that's what I think is it was really destructive to me really disappointing because I think there's nothing wrong with saying hey I want bad people apprehended and I want them to pay for it right and we have a system and I would like to see that happen and say everybody gets a trial right you know and you know when you say hey that's what the government's supposed to do it's supposed to lay it out and go we think that's what you did they got to prove it yeah. So that's why I pick on the, that's why I pick on the enhanced torture program. I think it was so destructive in a number of ways. Yeah. I mean, I think it destroyed a lot of confidence within the site community that people felt it would be good or ethical to consult the government. There were big movements in both APAs.

Well, this was going on saying this is completely evil for any doctor to be involved in. Right. Where I do think there is a role for having doctors consult to the government when people consult to interrogation. Because I think like in our work with the police, like I say, their mindset is the person's not talking to me. They must be hiding something, right? And they might be. And sometimes you discover they've got schizophrenia, you know, or they're ill. And that's what's going on.

And maybe it's both. And then you figure out how to deal with it. but yeah but I never saw I was never exposed to any situation I think we're like I saw tech that went like oh my god we should never do this but I've read I've you know read about people who publish the structures of viruses and you go I just can't imagine this will be a good idea right yeah the gain of function stuff that stuff's that stuff's terrifying yeah trying to find viruses and make them more deadly yeah whether no matter what their excuse is like if it's to make viruses more deadly to kill more people in the context of war or like like Like if they make the excuse like, oh, no, we have to figure out how to solve these viruses in case they do ever get out. Like either way, you're creating a super deadly situation where if you don't have the right security measures or prevention measures of the shit leaking out, you know, you could cause like real problems in the world, which is what we saw. I mean, I think about it. It's a really, I'll phrase it this way. It's a really interesting question why we haven't had bio-suicide bomber. bio-suicide bomber with the explosive vest, right?

Yeah. We haven't had a wave of people who said, infect me with mnemonic plague, you know, or bird flu, and put me on an airplane and fly me through airports across the country. Right. Just infect a bunch of people, and then I end up dying a horrible death from whatever it is. We haven't had that. And I think it's fascinating. My own interpretation is, I think there's an oof. factor to like dying of a bad

bug and there's no glory because there's no big boom, right? There's no great terrorist video you make of the guy vomiting blood and finally dying, right? But when you think about it as a means of terrorizing people

or killing people, the suicide bomber approach has been pretty effective at getting concessions out of different governments, right? But people get scared. They go, there's going to be suicide bombers. But we haven't had any that have used themselves as the carriers of a bioweapon. And maybe that's what's to come.

But I've been fascinated by that. Because once you look at, I don't know if you remember when we had the big bird flu scare, was it 2008 or 9 or something? And the projections were published on how many airports were a person who is actively coughing out this stuff that you could inhale how many airports with a multiplication factor. It was like logarithmic about how many people could get infected really, really, really fast.

And I was just saying when you go through airport screening, we don't have any tests that unless you just look so sick. Everybody goes, I don't want to be near to the guy. Right. But there's a phase before you get there where no one would know that you breathing in the room was, you know, killing people. Yeah. And I always thought that was fascinating. We don't have anything that tests for active infection of something now in real time going through the security line, right? And I used to talk about that to my boss and go, I think it's really interesting.

Like, theoretically, it's an option. And if you go, yes, our goal is this. And it seems like it would not be difficult. Right. As far as we can tell, people can do this in labs in the basement. They can grow all kinds of bad bugs. So I think, yeah, it's weird. And I don't know if it's a function of what the purpose of political sort of terrorism is.

It isn't to wipe out the country you're targeting is to get a shift in government, right? And bio-weapons are hard to put back in the bag. Who was that guy who got, he got extradited? Did he get extradited? there was a nanobiologist at Harvard maybe, Charles Lieber, who got in trouble for working with Chinese spies. I think he was giving information in his nanobiology lab at Harvard to Chinese kids, basically like they were supposed to be foreign exchange students or something.

And they ended up being Chinese spies. And this guy... Our joke is they all are. Right. During COVID, they passed a law that. every citizen had to help and work with the intelligence community. So this is him. Okay, Charles Lieber, a prominent nanobiologist, Harvard professor, was arrested on January 28th, 2020

for allegedly making false statements to the U.S. federal authorities regarding his financial research ties to China. The time of his arrest, he was serving as the chief of Harvard's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and in the field of nanotechnology. And then what happened to him? He just got hired by China, right? he reportedly received $1.5 million from Chinese government and Wuhan University of Technology to set up research lab in China in addition to his monthly stipend to $50,000. So there's what he did wrong, right? He never disclosed it.

Yeah, exactly. That's where you go wrong. Right. Imagine that. Get that much money. You know, you got to. And he just moved to China and he got hired full time in China to do the stuff there. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And would that be lucrative? And I mean, the Chinese, wouldn't view it as spying anyway, right? They would do it like, you should do it for us. That's what we'd like. Of course. And I remember we had a project we did with the Brits back in 2010 or 12 where we were doing the memory study and we were working out of a Hilton metropole in London.

And we were looking at detecting deception in these different cultural groups. And one group were Chinese who were studying in London. And we thought, because at the time we were doing that, some Chinese-American had been arrested by the government as well. God, it might have been the Greg Chung case, where he had been accused of spying for the Chinese. But we remember bringing it up and just asking what their opinion was. And nearly every participant would say,

oh, that's not spying to take business proprietary information and go home with it. That's your duty. I mean, you're supposed to go bring things home and help your country. And I thought the reason why that was important in a study of detecting deception is it means that they wouldn't feel guilt about it. And part of the testing that lots of investigators use to see if you're lying assumes that you feel guilty about it. that you feel you're threatened by that like this is something you shouldn't have done right but i'm like well this is this is the morally right thing to do from their point of view you're supposed to go do right so not telling you about it is the morally appropriate lie like no i've got nothing to be right

right so i said this is an interesting wrinkle in doing deception because in some of the models we assume that people should feel either shamed about it or frightened about it or alarmed about it or guilty about it in some ways. So that's why we were interviewing me. We wanted to know what their opinion was. And I remember when we got together and we were debriefing the team, we said, has anyone said that they shouldn't do it? And we're like, they all say it's the honorable thing to do. I'm like, that's good to know. You need to know.

But yeah, the Chinese government has been very interested in it. And I think in the future, I mean, they're funding science. That's the alarming thing to me. Right now, if we look at current stuff that's going on, defunding science, you have people who want their career in science. We've got France going, come on over, you've got Denmark going. We'll hire people. Canada's four or two professors from Yale just moved to the University of Toronto. But the Chinese are all over that.

I think I probably get, I think I probably get two emails a month asking me to come speak in China. Really? And talk about like neuroscience research. Oh, yeah. They're all very gracious. And I type the same thing every time. I'm so flattered. Thank you for asking.

I'm swamped. You know, swamped. Wow. But yeah, they're very active in their state funding of science. They want to play catch up. I don't know if you remember, like 20 years ago, they say. we want our own space station in 20 years. China?

Yeah, and they're only off. I think they're only off by two years. I think COVID slowed them down, but they have their own space station, you know? And so they're systematically saying, hey, we want to play catch up, and we want to be like you guys. So we want our own space station,

but they're on the moon, right? So I think that my own view is, I think people need to rethink that. Yeah, there it is. we need to rethink that oh that private business will save all of our science stuff because it's government funding like that that takes the long-term view to say what does it take to get there you're not going to see a profit for 25 years or something yeah you know or ever uh yeah well they play the long game and everything right yeah they do and i think um sorry i think that's

something that's worth remembering like in the current debates people have about like why are we spending money, what are we doing? But that's the part that alarms me the most when I think about it from a security standpoint, I think, there's a bunch of stuff I don't know anymore because I'm out of the community, but I do know that giant government science programs tend to win over time. I would imagine it's channeling money. That's what we're going to do. And I'm like, yeah, we still haven't gotten anybody in that giant SpaceX rocket yet. We've seen all kinds of those scheduled How many times have we pushed back the moon missions,

the Artemis, they keep pushing that back every year. I think every president since what, Bush, first Bush won after we went to the moon has been saying, oh, we're going to get to the moon this year. Every single president's campaigned on that. It's really fun if you haven't seen it, the report from Congress that came out on the Chinese and Russian and a satellite sort of situation.

I think it was published. I think it came out last year. Yeah, it wasn't this year. It was last year when we heard all the people from here. Oh, my God, there's this satellite threat. It's really interesting to see where they're positioning satellites that are slightly out of our reach and why they want them on the moon, why they want a base on the moon. Who specifically?

The Chinese, they've actually drawn up plans with Russia for a lunar base, and the plans are in the report. And my joke with my students was, I said, so now you can see why we enjoy the fact that Russia, is tied up in a war because they don't have any funds to go do this. Well, they're tied up in a war. But the long-term plan is to have dominance over what's in orbit. So, yeah, because they developed their satellites to go ahead and blow up other satellites. But yeah, and they put the plans in the report from the U.S. government and what they want there and what they want to do. How did we get this report? How did we get these plans from the? I'd have to go back and look at the reference list, but they haven't, the Chinese haven't been secretive about it.

Oh, no? No. They're saying, this is our plan. This is what we're going to do. They've just been very open about it, which I think was alarming when people, yeah, they're working. But the principle is that the further you get away from what's in orbit, the more control you have over whatever the U.S. has in orbit. Right? Because then you can do satellite, you can destroy satellites.

From the moon. Yeah, or from outer orbit. Oh, from outer orbit. Yeah, it's all strategic advantage. 237,000 miles away. Yeah. Crazy. It's a long way.

And again, they're going, man, we're going to do it. I think they will. I was like, hey, everything else they've said, that's what we're going to do. Wow. They've been doing it. So I think right now for scientists growing up, like, you know, you're going, hey, I want to be a rocket scientist. This is what I want to go do.

You're like, here, you may or may not get hired by SpaceX, but, you know, you have other countries now vying for it and go, come to China, come to the park, do AI, you know, to space. It's, yeah. Crazy stuff, man. It's going to be crazy, yeah. Well, listen, man, thank you so much for coming here and doing this. This has been a fascinating conversation. It's a pleasure.

I don't envy anyone who's editing it. There's no editing, which goes straight up. We're doing it live. Tell people where they can get in touch with you, find out more about what you're doing and all that stuff. My email is charles.a.orgon at yale.edu. So they're free to email me anytime, and I love responding. I get all kinds of emails all the time from people going,

hey, can you tell me more about this or direct me to some studies? I'm like, sure. But I promise to respond. That's very gracious. It's been a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much. Of course. Yeah.

I really enjoyed it. I think about some things in a new way. I love it. Every time I do this, I think about new things. Cool, man. We'll do it again in the future. Thank you. All right.

Good night, everyone.