Decoding the Gurus - Interview with Mick West: UFOs, Aliens, and Conspiracy Psychology

Episode Date: June 17, 2023

UFOs are all the rage now, and it's certainly a topic that excites many of our gurus *cough* <Eric Weinstein>. Hidden mysteries, advanced technologies, conspiracies, and government cover-ups. What's not to like!?The truth, as Mulder so eloquently put it, is out there. And sometimes if you combine the outcome of some posterior technical analysis with some basic priors about the fallibility of human perception and memory, then the truth might be a little prosaic (happy Bayesians!!?).Joining us today is the esteemed Mick West, retired video game developer, who has a long track record of investigating UFO footage, along with a range of other outré phenomena. Mick is admirably positioned to provide practical advice on how to apply critical thinking while being empathetic to friends and family who may have fallen down one or more conspiratorial rabbit holes. Chris and Matt enjoyed the conversation with Mick a lot, and we think you will too!LinksAn example of Eric's UFO Tapdance Lex's Reddit thread for the Matthew McConaughey EpisodeMick West's Book: Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and RespectTheories of Everything Channel: Eric Weinstein and Mick West: UAPs, Evidence, SkepticismOther LinksOur PatreonContact us via email: [e-mail] DTG Subreddit

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Music Music Music Music Music Music Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Matt Brown and with me is my junior co-host, younger, less senior in other respects as well, Chris Kavanagh. How you doing, Chris?

Hi-dee-ho! How you doing, Chris? How are you doing? How are you doing, lad? I'm just trying out different things. I don't really like that one. I'll come up with a better one next time. Yeah, that one wasn't great. That was from South Park. Oh, wasn't it?

It's the poo. The little toilet. Yeah, he does do that. That wasn't what I was going for. But I will tell you that, you know, we're're gonna do a decoding of matthew mcconaughey but he he recently just went on lex's podcast and i've been listening to a bit of it and oh god it's just like it's uh if you ever wanted to hear like endless vapid truisms spun through a Texas drawl, like McConaughey is your man. It's quite impressive.

He's such a good actor. I know, I was going to say that. It's such a shame that I want to go back to the time when I just thought of him as a good actor that I enjoyed. I'm wondering if his advice will be too generic and saccharine for lex's audience i'm kind of curious is this their candy you know that they will love his homespun philosophical texan outlook or if they'll find it too insubstantial for their tastes it's not actually rigorous enough i can't tell i i suspect that they

will like it but yeah it felt like licking sandpaper well well how how vapid is it compared to lex's normal it's much more vapid it's much more yeah really really you had my interest and now you have my attention. So, yeah. I don't recommend anyone does that. I'm just saying that exists in the world. Well, that's good. You could have been spending your time wisely.

Productively. To that. Speaking of which, you know, we decoded Yudkowsky. We're not going to spend that much time on it. We did a Garometer episode. We've talked about ai to death but there wasn't just one or two little random things of pushback so a lot of people wanted us to mention he wrote an insanely long harry potter fan fiction 660 thousand word actually

well reviewed by the way the name was harry pot the Methods of Rationality. But that does seem important context that we might have missed. A lot of people wanted us to go more into, you know, the whole rationalist community and that kind of thing. And, you know, it was a long enough episode. Other podcasts and deep dives are available. Yeah, we can't do everything. Can't do everything.'t do everything i was vaguely aware that he wrote fan fiction before we recorded but then when i was writing the show

notes i saw more specifically that it was harry potter and that he'd written quite a bit of it it's a lot 660 words but he doesn't do things by half that and the other thing mart which i i feel i need to give you a chance to defend yourself because you were unfairly besmirched all over the internet by people thinking you credulously consumed that news story about the ai missile destroying ai or killer thing yeah you know what we talked about on the episode about the the tests were in a simulation and the ai took out a person and then took out the control tower right to try and stop them that's right so if you don't remember what we're talking about go back and listen to the whole episode again so you really thought that was true you were very disturbed by it and you would tell

me chris chris the ai is coming to get us right, in case it wasn't clear, I brought that up because I was immensely sceptical of the story and I thought it was a good example of the kind of ways in which the discourse about AI melds this fiction or hearsay slash fantasy as kind of evidence. And since recording, it has become totally clear that it is exactly what i suspected that it was a totally basically trumped up story that wasn't actually real see matt knew

that and i can verify that he did he was pointing that out to me before we discussed in the podcast so he's not retroactively claiming ahead and if you listen to what i say i say i don't care if it's if it's true or false because i'm just not that shocked in general like this event didn't happen it could happen somebody could make a little program or an ai kill someone in a game so what like bots kill me in games all my teenage lives it's not news um you always think it's bots but you know actually it's just 15 year old kids who are much better at it than you are they're all bots right no they bots and humans but actually i'm thinking of quake prior to internet when it was hard but you could run bots locally so they were bots matt, Matt, okay? There were real bots.

No, it's good. There's a lot of discussion about AI, and rightly so. It's a hot topic, and also rightly so. There's a spectrum of opinion. We're not able to reply to everything. But just to be clear, I think it's fair to say you and I are skeptical about Yudkowsky's claims of AI, dot, dot, dot, we're all going to die. That's the bit that we probably strongly disagree with but that's not to say that it's irrational or unreasonable to have

concerns about ai safety no or to be thinking through what might happen next you know that's that part's all fine it's just that there's a lot of missing gaps between the various parts and they're they're generally filled in well well then like the outcome as opposed to the actual steps of why we would get there if there was an evil ai that was intent on sneaking past this is something that could do right but that's already positive the conclusion that the evil AI is there. Anyway, so that was the AI episode. That's not what we were looking at today. We are looking at the topic of UFOs rebranded as UAPs, but they're the same, people. Don't let the slight change in letters confuse you.

Unidentified aircraft. What's the P stand for? Projectiles? Aerial phenomena. Phenomenon. Phenomenon. unidentified aircraft what's the p stand for uh projectiles aerial phenomena phenomenon phenomenon yeah or unidentified flying objects choose your poison they're the same but we're going to have an interview with the investigator writer skeptic mick west who has covered a whole bunch of topics, but is quite well known for investigating, some would say debunking, various claims made for the given UFO encounters. And yes, so we are doing an interview with Mick West, which you'll hear shortly. And we're also going to decode episode that he recorded a discussion with our good friend, Eric Weinstein, discussing Mick's dismissive attitude towards UAPs

and how badly he's treated Eric online. And during that, we will hear various things about Eric's opinion. But we're not doing that today, but that's coming so it's coming this is i'm looking forward to it i'm looking forward to it yeah we it does feel like somebody needs to call out what eric did in that conversation and make us far too polite but so one one thing though that is worth discussing i think eric is a very good illustration of this trend. I won't spend long on that, just a couple of minutes.

But, you know, strategic ambiguity where you're both endorsing and not endorsing positions. We've seen Eric be a master of this throughout the pandemic and in general. be a master of this throughout the pandemic and in general. He cannot make a kind of statement or thread on Twitter where he doesn't include some level of ambiguity so he can slide out of any interpretation as necessary. And with these accounts, there's a particular interview with a so-called whistleblower david grush who is purporting to have all this information this classified information about alien spacecraft and alien bodies and eric is tweeting about it but the thing that eric is doing is he's managing to constantly balance on the knife edge of promoting it saying it's a big story and it's important and still simultaneously saying but of course i'm not falling for it if it's not real and it might not be real i have concerns but it's isn't it a huge story anyway so yeah

he's doing that little pop dance yeah and he's he's very very good at it um to emote the very strong impression that something huge is going on the stuff that we don't know but you know big things are happening we need to be paying very close attention to this and investigating, get to the bottom of it without actually committing himself to a position in which he could get egg on his face. Yeah. Yeah. So allow me to read.

This is one of his initial threads. This is Eric. I have no direct evidence that this is real, but what you're hearing here has oddly spread quite far within the defense and intelligence sectors. You pick it up from multiple high-level informants, and we'll hear some more about the informants in the interview. Assume it is all BS, then that BS is absolutely compromising our security. Try it the other way. Assume that it is not BS, then the stigma and the knee-in-stove pipe security strategy of keeping this

away from our own scientists is totally compromising our security. Both ways, we have a security problem. The answer is to investigate the claims either way. We either have a paranormal cult running around our nuclear strategy, a disinformation campaign targeting our own people, or something unprecedented kept away from our own scientists you don't need to know which is true to know that this needs to be cleaned up pronto as i've been saying yes thank you chris and just to provide a little bit more evidence here this is him on june the 7th commenting on a slightly irresponsible article by the guardian which sort of kicked a lot of this off.

The article saying, US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vessels. And Eric's commentary is, when I finally understood and told you that something huge, this is in emphasis, was up in this space, this is what I meant. Anything from aliens to gaslighting our own team. This headline is nuts

but we have now crossed the barrier from rumor to sworn testimony under oath but again with the just to be careful next right i still have zero hard evidence that this is real at the level of crafts none lots of rumors with no hard evidence backing up any of it nothing has changed on that front it may well be a massive sigh up but it can't be nothing it has to be huge one way or the other as you can now see here so he's very happy about this he's been talking about ufos for a long while you know feeling a bit sensitive about people not taking him seriously felt the latest claims by this fellow grush whatever his name is um was giving him validation and it validates him one either way right because it's either a massive psyop there's a faction within the thing that is the whatever the u.s

government that's doing all these things and there's a conspiracy happening either way basically yeah eric from all the various possibilities that he gives to offer himself the one that he doesn't is just maybe people are a bit credulous like me like maybe this is just somebody repeating stories that they've heard too credulously and the media paying attention yeah maybe there actually isn't something but that's not possible for eric it has to be indicative that there's there's something come on there must be something right we just have to remind people that the claims by this guy grosh which is all based on his say right what some people told him it started off with oh there's evidence of um that yeah some people saying that the u.s government has got spaceship. And then it became, they've not only got a spaceship,

but they've actually got aliens. There's aliens in the spaceship. And then it became the hardest spaceship ever since 1933. You'll hear the details in the conversation. No spoilers, no spoilers. That's it. And I can see that Eric is tweeting today as well about another story he's now pointing to a different one you know somebody testimony that he found persuasive not the one that everybody is

paying attention to it's the always the hipster you guys think this one is the big deal but actually i've been on this and yeah they will get into this more when we cover his content. But fundamentally, it's Eric being very swayed by testimony by people. And he does this thing where he presents it that he's not endorsing it, but he's not dismissing it. And so, you know, if you're going to be so certain and just dismiss things, that shows what a close-minded fool that you are. And nobody knows. And now Eric isn't saying he's got it all figured out. It's just that he knows he's not good.

He's humble. So he listens, Matt. He listens. And there's a lot of continuity to the first-hand accounts that can't be explained by any other possible explanation. But he does throw out some of them but you don't like yeah so yeah we can't we won't get into it now it's very tempting to but we won't get into it now but um yeah the saga continues the saga continues but

first let's hear from someone who does know about ufos does look into them critically with empathy and has a long history well documented of looking at things critically and designing computer games let's go to our interview yeah okay so we have with us today Mick West British American science writer, skeptical investigator, and retired video game programmer, which I didn't know until reading your profile. But for our purposes, Mick is most well known for producing investigations into UFO phenomenon or UAPs, whatever your preferred terminology is sometimes described as a debunker but i think not hugely in favor of that terminology but yes you may have seen mick on on various shows whenever people are discussing uh new footage of ufos and there's been a relative bevy in the past couple of years

um we thought it would be good to have mick on to talk about some of the recent news stories around aliens and and ufos but also more broadly about his experiences dealing with investigations in the ufos and the ufo advocacy community i don't know their preferred terminology but uh alien alien rights now yeah that's alien rights activists but um mick is there anything i'm missing uh significantly from your bio there uh well i'm not just a ufo investigator i i do a lot of different investigations of a variety of conspiracy theories i just happen to be doing a lot of ufo stuff at the moment but my background has kind of UFO stuff at the moment.

But my background has kind of started with investigating the chemtrails conspiracy theory and then moving on to a variety of other conspiracy theories like 9-11 and people who think the Earth is flat and election fraud, vaccine denial, things like that. So a whole bunch of different things. I even wrote a book about it, which I shall plug shamelessly here, which is called Escaping the Rabbit Hole,

How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect. And I do have debunking on the front of the book, but like you say, I try to stay away from that term now because when I got into UFO investigating, that term now because when I got into UFO investigating, I discovered that debunking is kind of like almost like a curse word to UFO people. And I didn't realize this. It was this very strong distinction that was made in the community between debunkers on the one side who are evil tools of the government and skeptics on the other side who are just good-natured folk who like looking into things. You know, I'm actually a skeptic because I am a good-natured folk who like looking into things you know i'm actually a skeptic because i am a good-natured guy who likes looking into things and the government isn't paying

me anything so i stay away from debunker but yeah it's all good that's that's what i do i look into ufos arose by any other name right um it's interesting that they um place so much emphasis on that i think it's fine to take the approach of debunking when you're talking about the twin towers or chemtrails and things like that but we're not going to talk about your recent discussion with eric weinstein but it was interesting to see how focused he was on that yeah yeah and i think investigators sum things up a lot better because i investigate ufos i don't set out to debunk like if someone sends me a video of a light in the sky, I mean, I can't debunk it. I can't say that's not a light in the sky.

I'm just trying to figure out what the light actually is. And quite often I succeed, but sometimes I fail. And Mick, you outlined quite a long-term interest in a whole bunch of different aspects of conspiracy, fierce communities, or various you know, various controversial topics. And I'm just curious then, so how long have you been involved in, you know, skepticism and investigation and how this isn't your main activity? So is this like a very involved hobby or how do you frame your kind of investigation work? Well, it is, it like a very involved hobby or how do you frame your kind of investigation work?

Well, it is a very involved hobby and I'm actually retired from the video game industry now. So this is my main interest, I guess. I mean, I do other things as well, but I do this and I enjoy it as a hobby. I think it's very interesting and I have fun and learn new things and discover new things. But I've been doing it since, I guess, around the mid-2000s. I set up my first website, Contrail Science, I think in 2006, which is getting back a bit.

There's a bunch of people who weren't even born back then. And I set up Metabunk, which is my bigger forum in 2010 so that by itself is like 13 years old so i've been doing it a while and uh i think the ufo thing kind of steps up in importance and interest in the last few years as it became much more of a you know public interest thing and we got these kind of interesting UFO videos from the government to analyze. So I started that in earnest, I guess, around 2018 would be like when I really started getting into it.

Yeah. So I think for most listeners like me, the recent stuff that was in the news, more semi-recent now, was those recordings, I think, US Air Force pilots sighting and apparently interesting, fast-moving objects recorded on gimbal cameras. Generally, do you want to tell us a bit about that?

Yeah, well, those were the ones that came out in 2017, 2018, and there was three videos. One was called FLIR 1, one was called Gimbal, and one was called GoFast. They're a bit long in the tooth now, really. They've kind of been superseded by others but they're still there as as the iconic uh poster boys of ufos like if you tune into a program about ufos you will very often see the gimbal video in the background because it looks like a flying saucer uh but that was one that i i spent some time analyzing now all these videos

they're taken with infrared cameras so they're all just showing the heat that comes off things rather than the actual light. And some of them were even taken at night, so they wouldn't be able to see anything anyway. But, you know, one of them, the gimbal video, it looks like a flying saucer zipping over the top of the cloud. But I did quite a lot of analysis on that over probably like a year or two. But I did quite a lot of analysis on that over probably like a year or two, and eventually ended up building a fairly detailed simulation of what was going on and kind of determined that what we're seeing wasn't actually glare around the sun or if you look with a flashlight you often can't see the person behind them behind it because it's obscured by this glare and the rotation of this object turns out it matched exactly the rotation that was required to do the movements that you could see by looking at the numbers on the screen so it is some like fairly technical analysis but i think that's been fairly conclusively shown that it's not actually a rotating object it is actually a rotating glare but we don't know

exactly what's behind the glare so there's still the possibility that it's a hot flying saucer that's that's doing this or it could be that we're looking at the tail end of an fa18 that's flying away from the camera and you know you know, different people prefer different explanations. One of them seems slightly more likely, but that's perhaps my bias. But I'm curious. So two things that struck me there is, one, just this is me editorializing, but the fact that you would spend, you know, a year or upwards on a particular video, it does counter the sort of image of you or other people that investigate this being clearly dismissive of things.

But related to that is I'm just curious your expertise for things like, you know, looking at the potential mechanics of the camera that might explain the feature like why do you why do you know that i know you have some experience uh training as a pilot but is it from that or is it from your programming background or just your you know your interest in the topic it's really mostly from my programming background. I know how to fly a plane. I took flying lessons to fly a plane. I know how to use a camera and take videos and stuff.

So I've had nice cameras. I've got a big shelf full of cameras behind me since I was quite young. But really, it's to do with the math behind what you need when you're making a 3d game and in a 3d game you essentially have a virtual camera often you have different multiple different cameras but when you're playing a game uh like say a skateboarding game you have a virtual camera that's following the skateboarder and then sometimes when you you bail you might cut to another camera and then you would show it from a different angle. So when you're programming it, you actually have to program what does it take to take this 3D scene and take an imaginary camera and then create the image on screen, this two-dimensional picture of what the camera is looking at.

And then how does that work in terms of animation? How does the camera move? How do the objects move? And what does that work in terms of animation how does the camera move how do the objects move and what does that look like so the math that's required for that it's not super complicated it's not like phd in physics but you're taking like a three-dimensional position and in the world and then you're transforming it into a point on the screen then you take another one to take that to a point on the screen so Then you take another one, take that to a point on the screen. So if you can do that, then if you've got a video of a UFO, the UFO is moving around the screen, you can take those 2D points

and you can say, where might that be in the 3D world? So you basically take the math and you do it backwards. Now, you can't do it perfectly because you lose information when you go from three dimensions to two dimensions so you've got to kind of use other clues in the scene to try to figure out uh how far away the object is which is kind of the missing third dimension and then you can do all kinds of analysis on it and i did you know when i was doing video games i actually did a skateboarding game called tony hawk's pro skater we used very simple physics in that it was uh you're skating along and you're moving over a surface or you're

flying through the air you jump and you have to fly through the air the physics of that it's just simple newtonian mechanics there's very simple equations of motion and that's all you need i mean you don't need anything complicated it's's not like you're doing planetary orbits or anything like that. So you can use the same math again that I used for doing a skateboarding game to, in reverse, and figure out how is this object moving in three dimensions? How might it be moving? How fast is it going? How big is it?

What's the acceleration? All these things are determinable from the video. And that's what you do to try to figure out what's the acceleration you know all these things are determinable from the video and you know that's what you do to try to figure out what's going on if you figure that stuff out you can see what's possible like is it a plane that's far away or is it like an insect that's flying along that's very close to the camera is it something like a reflection or something like that knowing all the math and what's actually going on in the cameras helps you determine that so that it's it's fascinating to think about the influence of tony hawks on analyzing potential year-pro videos that's a i think few conspiracy theorists have that in the like model of potential motivations but um an interesting thing nick from the videos that have come out over the past couple of years,

I think there's a common narrative now that the government kind of silencing or censorship has been broken to some extent. And that now we're beginning to see at least the tip of the iceberg of the material that they've collected over the decades and censored right and a lot of the figures that we cover in the the kind of guru space that's their preferred narrative right that it's a really quite naive if you are skeptical after what's already revealed and what more is promised to be delivered. But I'm wondering from the deep dive that you've done into the material that's been released, how you would characterize what's come out over the past couple of years with these releases. It's not very compelling in terms of making the case that these are alien spaceships

or even any kind of advanced technology. There's really nothing in any of the videos that unambiguously demonstrates anything anomalous and there's a lot of the videos that come out not just these three older videos but some of the newer videos that initially people say this is the best ufo video of all time and then when you do a bit of analysis of it it just shows nothing and you know that's true for things that were leaked there was a famous green triangle video that came out like two or three years ago and the guy who released that jeremy corbell was saying this is the best government sourced ufo video of all time and this was the big headline at the time and like 10

minutes after he released the video i pointed out what it actually was which was the big headline at the time and like 10 minutes after he released the video i pointed out what it actually was which was the green triangles which is the camera artifact and everyone's like no mig that can't be right jeremy corbell said it was like a flying pyramid and corbell says that people on the ship said it was a flying pyramid and he had all these witnesses saying it was a flying pyramid but then i had i matched up the video to a star map you could see you know this this triangle here is this star this triangle is this star these then all these triangles match stars there's one triangle that's flying along and it's flashing and the flashing of the lights is pretty much identical

to the the navigation lights of a 737. So instead of it being like a video of, you know, amazing flying UFOs that are pyramid shaped, it turned out to be a video of some stars and a plane flying over. And, you know, this type of thing is, it's kind of indicative of, you know, a lot of things like one is, you know, the claims people make, but also people in the military make mistakes. This, this video, you know, I did the analysis, but like about a year later, there was a congressional hearing where they showed the same video and then they explained essentially that my analysis was correct. They didn't mention me or anything, but they said like, you know,

that this is a camera artifact. They didn't say they were stars. They haven't even got to that bit yet. They're doing that now. They said recently say they were stars. They haven't even got to that bit yet. They're doing that now. They said recently that they're going to look at some star maps and they're going to try to fully close this case. But I figured it out two years ago. But they also released some new videos at the time.

And two of the videos they released had audio. And the audio was the guy who was called the Snoopy team leader, which sounds like a silly name, but Snoopy stands for like, I don't know, like systems operations of an integration or something, you know, some, some acronym, but it's basically the people who are tasked with taking video and photos of things that approach the ship. So they stand on the bow or the railings and they have their really big

cameras or the night vision and they take video of things. So this guy's talking about what he's looking at. And he's saying, Snoopy team leader, blah, blah, blah, blah, this location, this time, this angle, this speed. Looking at three unidentified aerial systems, which is military speak for drones, essentially. And they're showing this video, and there's these three things, there's three triangles in the sky. But those three triangles, they weren't drones, they were stars. There weren't even any flashing lights in this one. It was just three stars that he was looking at. And this happened twice. This are two different

videos. The exact same thing, like the guys like, know uss russell looking at the bow this is like unidentified aerial system which is uh i think he said like 400 feet off the off the bow and it was the star i can't remember it was a capella i think so it's a known star only said it was flashing red green and white which is the colors that the capellas flashes it's one of those stars that twinkles in different colors so military people make mistakes and this has been revealed over and over again they released a video of what they said was a drone in infrared but it was actually a plane and they haven't even owned up to that one yet it's obviously a plane anyone can see it's a plane but uh there's this this kind of i don't know there's this thread

of mistakes running through all of this this ufo stuff coming from the government and i guess it shouldn't be surprising should it i mean the atmosphere and even the ocean is visually speaking an inherently ambiguous place and it is unlike sort of normal objects that are maybe closer to us and you might encounter in everyday life things are often like ungrounded that so it seems like it should be quite easy for people to to make errors when assessing things they see sure but like you know when you're um you know what they call the trained observer this is something that's very big in the ufo community they say like this was observed by trained observers. And here we have examples of someone to, you know, not just pilots who are trained to fly a plane and look for other things. They're not really trained to observe things.

These are people whose only job is to observe. They're trained observers of things coming towards the ship. And they were mistaking stars for drones. I mean, it's pretty bad. It's pretty bad. People are reporting things on video. These triangles went up the chain of command, and people were investigating it. And they said it was a year later that they figured out that these triangles were actually just artifacts of the camera.

I mean, they've had this video, and it's like there's this bizarre triangle swarming the ship. I said, no, there are artifacts of the camera i mean like they've had this video and it's like there's this bizarre triangle swarming the ship i said no you know there are artifacts of the camera and they're actually stars which is you know i'm sure they'll release a little report on that uh i think it's coming in august or something but you know they might push it till next year but they'll eventually admit that these things are stars yeah it's it's not a good look. And even the more recent videos, they're showing videos now saying, look, we've solved this case. And they show a video and it's like three dots moving around on the screen. And you can tell, obviously, it's just the cameras moving around that's making these dots move around. And they were saying, this is something that we all thought was anomalous at the start. The pilots couldn't figure out what it was.

They tried to catch up with these three dots, but they couldn't catch up with them. And it was just three planes off in the distance. And it was moving around because the camera was moving around. They couldn't catch it up because it was 100 miles away. And there's more. I mean, I could keep going, but you get the idea here. What's going on the interesting thing there is a little bit that i i find it fascinating with the ufo community that they have a kind of selective charity which they apply whereby eyewitness accounts like you said trained pilots or whatever that that have accounts of observing

you know a ufo are are treated as if to disagree or to at least to propose alternative explanations for what they observed is like insulting of their expertise but on the other hand they're very clear that you should always be skeptical of everything that the government says and does so it's like there's a hyper skepticism towards any narrative that contradicts or says you know they investigated ufos and they didn't find enough evidence to find a credible and then on the other hand there's like a hyper charity or credibility extended to eyewitness testimony and it's interesting because it's often in the same conversation it's sometimes in the same paragraph that like both of those approaches are deployed it must be frustrating to deal with yeah it's

kind of understandable though that you would treat two things differently. One is kind of an organization doing things, and the other one is an individual doing things, just speaking for themselves. So if you think, like, a government spokesperson saying, we don't know anything about UFOs, it's very different to a pilot saying, I saw a UFO once. So, you know, you think the government spokesperson is doing their job. Pilots, you know, their job isn't to lie to people about seeing UFOs. So I think it's kind of understandable that you would get that.

But there is this kind of veneration for pilots and military pilots in particular. If I say things about pilots, not about them, but just to question their account, it's viewed sometimes as a grave insult that i i really should apologize for but what i'm doing is saying well maybe maybe he was a bit mistaken in judging the size of this object or the the distance away that this object is and you know that's basically all i'm saying that pilots are humans they can make mistakes and pilots do make mistakes you know like we've been talking about the other mistakes. Pilots themselves, they're not immune to mistakes. Sometimes pilots fly into the ground

because they misjudged how high they were off the ground. This is something that happens. There's a famous UFO pilot, Commander David Fravor. He didn't fly into the ground. He's a great pilot. But he says that when he was engaging with this tic-tac object, this supposed tic-tac object, he very deliberately flew down very slowly. And he explains why he does this. He's explained this several times. He says the sea looks the same from 2,000 feet as it does from 8,000 feet. does from 8,000 feet. So if you're not careful, you'll misjudge your altitude and you'll fly into the ocean. So you should descend towards the ocean surface slowly. So he's admitting there that pilots make mistakes and you have to be careful and you have to be aware of these mistakes. And yet we're also meant to take everything that he says about the observations of a Tic Tac object that he's never seen before as being like you know the the word of law like written in stone it must have happened exactly like that when

it probably didn't yeah i think that's one of the most frustrating things about that discourse which the immense amount of credulity i guess that is given to eyewitness accounts my background is in psychology and which is basically the study of human fallibility how our memories are often reconstructed and hazy and we make mistakes with that we make mistakes in in what we see and we we often bring a huge amount of expectations you know informed by our culture or our personal psychology um into what we think we see so i find the discourse kind of frustrating which is that it's like, I feel like the general public should know this

or does know this, that humans are fallible, yet it's not. They don't though. I mean, that's the thing. Like you think that you know all this stuff. You've probably read all the books. You're familiar with like false memories, like Elizabeth Loftus and things like that.

And you know about culture bound things where like different cultures see things in different ways. But the general public, they think memory is like a video recorder. And if I see something and I later play it back in my mind, then that's what happens. When, like you say, memories are constructed.

And when they're reconstructed later, they can change and things get added to them. And I see this all the time myself in my own memories that you you have a memory of doing something and one detail of that gets you know removed and replaced with something else like it becomes a different person you think oh i was talking to this person and then i was talking to this person then or it was at this event when it's actually a completely different event. And we ourselves can have these memories change like that. I think people trying to recall some kind of UFO encounter from years ago can certainly do that.

And people think that there are certain memories called flashbulb memories, a bit of an old-fashioned term, but it's like the camera flash going off, freezes the action. And then you remember things exactly what it was like really dramatic things. Like, where were you when you heard about, you know, nine 11, a lot of people will say that they can remember that exactly. And then, you know, I think I can, I'm pretty, I'm 99% sure that I can, but they've done studies on, on this and people's stories change over the years like they had a large cohort of people and they asked them you know describe your feelings and what was

going on at the time then they came back to them like you know a year later or maybe five years later or something like that and asked them again i don't know what's completely changed but a lot of them change very significant details so we've got these ufo cases which in some cases are going back you know say maybe just five years that's still quite a lot some of them are going back 10 15 years and some of them even further than that and we're asking whoever the the observer is to remember so what you're going to get isn't going to be what happened i really feel like somebody should tell eric weinstein this, but unfortunately he's... He's not available for it.

He's not available, unfortunately. Yeah, and the point that you make is good, and I think one that I would completely agree with, that it is right to be sceptical of government spokespeople, and there's been plenty of occasions where they've denied programs exist, which subsequently have been proven to exist well or or not you know they actually reveal anything useful but i i guess the two things that stick out to me when it comes to the the level of charity and where it's unequally distributed is you're just a guy right you you're not the head of some it's sometimes presented

as but the skeptics community is all is not exactly like a huge powerful block right it's in large respects it is a lot of individuals around some organizations but you know not not hugely well funded or that kind of thing but but there isn't a lot of charity, in my experience, extended towards the skeptics that are engaging with that content. And similarly, the case, you know, you've detailed a couple of examples where the government is clearly, it's not that people don't have expertise. It's just that they might not have particular expertise in identifying artifacts in videos or that kind of thing and yet a lot of people respond you know you're not a professional pilot in the government so how come you can identify these things that

these people with trained expertise and projects dedicated to it don't get it. So that seems to be attributing like a hyper competency to the government when it's convenient. Yeah, no, I agree. And, you know, I would just ask people to look at the track records of the people involved. Like, you know, what cases have they solved? Like I've solved a bunch of cases. And what cases did they mess up? Like, and some of these people

have messed up cases like the green triangle case for example and other cases it's very easy to kind of say like you know why should we trust you when you know a large body of experts or whatever says something else or even just one expert but you know I come back often to this one case. There was the Chilean Navy case from 2016, which was a story by Leslie Keen, who was one of the reporters on the New York Times thing and more recently on this whistleblower thing. And she released this video of a UFO that the Chilean military had been investigating for two years.

The Chilean military has a UFO investigation body, like a, you know, kind of a UAP task force in Chile. And they'd been looking into this for two years and they had a general, like a brigadier general, I think, in charge of the whole group, a whole bunch of scientists, a bunch of like pilots and researchers and, you know, lots of resources. And they looked into everything possible, interviewed people and did all kinds of research and tried to figure out what it was. And they couldn't do it. Took them two years.

Then they released the video. Leslie Keen wrote a big story about how amazing it was. Now it's going to change ufology forever. And then me and the guys at Metabunk solved it in, I believe, like three days. It took us to find what it actually was and then a few more days just to prove it conclusively by making 3D models of what was going on. So credentials don't mean anything. Results mean something. I've solved loads and loads and loads of UFO cases.

How many UFO cases have these other people solved and then way that went against the other don't be like you know this guy's got a phd mick doesn't have a phd therefore we'll trust the phd when this phd has just done nothing and got a whole bunch of things wrong that's a i again i can't help usually in my experience make of looking at your interviews you're very polite about it but i find some of this frustrating that people are presenting that they're very skeptical of authority and they they don't you know just automatically trust credentials but then they do things like that where they'll kind of point to somebody's professional or the fact that they have a doctorate and something as if it means something

and for all the reasons you've said you know it's not that expertise is irrelevant but just that like is absolutely no guarantee that a particular outcome or investigation is correct just because somebody with credentials did it yeah that they like people with credentials who are on their side they don't like you know people with credentials who are on their side. They don't like people with credentials who are arguing against them because they're obviously government shills. And they don't like authority in the sense that they don't like the government and they don't like academia and they don't like science and big money and stuff like that. They prefer individual mavericks who are going against the system. So they like scientists who tend to be a little more

maybe eccentric that more the scientists who will entertain their ideas and in some cases support their ideas but yes they definitely do like the authority of credentials when it's when someone agrees with them you're kind of describing one of the main themes of our little podcast there but yeah it is a tricky one isn't it And I do have sympathy for people who struggle to allocate the right amount of trust to various sources. It is complicated because sometimes a government department or scientists working for a government agency of some kind are the right people to trust when it comes to something like vaccines or global warming or something but it's nuanced isn't it because i i doubt that there is a government agency that employs a crack team of ufo investigators that's like a bit like the liam neeson quote it's a very

particular set of skills it is it is but you know what i do is isn't really like it's not just me like i use crowdsourcing quite a lot and there's a bunch of people on metabunk and i don't just sit in my my room and figure it out i post something onto metabunk other people will look at it and suggest other things or they'll come up with things themselves and i'll look at what they did and then we'll we'll go on like i'll say like i don't know what this is and someone will go off and spend hours and hours researching it and find out what if this thing is in a photo or where a particular location is like geolocating things or looking at the weather on a particular day so like having a team is is good but it's kind

of also in a way misleading like the you know that chilean navy thing like having a team of experts uh you really want you're more than just a team of experts you really want to have it kind of open to everybody and the investigations i do are mostly kind of just in open threads on on metabunk where anyone can read them and anyone can comment but if people are squirreled away working on things i think it's very easy for them to go down the wrong path maybe eliminate something that's what happened with the Chilean thing. They eliminated the possibility of this UFO being a plane, and they had like five different reasons as to why they'd eliminated it. Like it wasn't showing up on the radar.

It wasn't answering like the radio calls. It was dumping some kind of hot liquid out of the back, and it didn't look like a plane and you know something else as well but you know all these things were actually entirely explainable but they prematurely eliminated this possibility and this this is kind of what happens if you you get these kind of rigid structures like we're going to do this we're going to like figure this out and eliminate it if it's not that then we'll move on to the next thing if you get a much more free-form thing a whole bunch of people looking at things like suggesting things,

I make mistakes, people correct my mistakes, they make mistakes, I correct their mistakes, and eventually it all bubbles together and we come up with the answer very rapidly. So there's definitely a risk in trusting a team of experts. Yeah. Well, I like the way you framed that because it does seem like a very

positive example of like a citizen science of crowdsourced enthusiasts focusing on something. And a lot of those principles are like, you know, open science, academic principles, which is individual academics get it hugely wrong, have their own particular pet theories and insane obsessions. but the whole principle the way it's meant to work anyway is is that it's it's self-correcting because you have enough people yeah and with the whole like peer review system obviously like you know that's supposed to be like the gate you've got to get past and then other people will read it and then they'll they'll respond to it and they'll replicate things it's very very slow though

it's not it's not like a very fast process. If you want to figure out what's in a video, you can't just like say, well, I'll put a paper out and get it peer reviewed and then see what happens. And you see if people agree with my hypothesis and then, you know, we'll publish it. And a couple of months later, maybe someone else will come up with something. No, like I'm doing it in this live thread. I post something and like 10 minutes later someone says mick that's your math is wrong it's like

you know it's it's not typical academic science but it's rapid iteration of an investigation that uses essentially scientific principles and engineering principles and just general investigation principles to hone in on the solution very rapidly. Again, this is me giving a bit of an editorial, but I think the way you describe it, it could be extraordinarily healthy when the motivations are correct. I don't like to use that word, but obviously you see heaps of examples of conspiratorially minded people who are also amateur sleuths, amateur investigators going just further and further down rabbit holes. But the way you described your own motivations, which I suspect applies to a lot of other people in your network

at the beginning, which is that it's a hobby, like building model trains, and you're interested in the technical aspects. Those are your your genuine motivations and it's not that there's a broader agenda to prove something true or something else true yeah i mean that's a big problem in that a lot of people they're not investigators they're advocates they're trying to prove a certain thing rather than trying to find out what's going on you know when i'm looking at a ufo video i'm trying to find out what that going on you know when i'm looking at a ufo video i'm trying to find out what that video actually shows whereas some people when they look at a video they're trying to prove that it's an anomalous video so they're trying to eek any little ounce of anomaly out of it and

they're ignoring anything that might actually explain it that they don't want to go down that road they want to go towards the light they want to find out you know is what where there is this is this an anomalous ufo you know they don't really care to to solve it i mean they would but they have this kind of bias towards a certain explanation and a lot of people are not even investigating they're just advocating they're saying this is obviously an anomalous thing this this guy told me that this is anomalous this guy's one of us i'm going to trust him and so they just they just end up advocating but you know over on metabunk you know hopefully all that we're doing is is trying to find out what things actually are and if something was an alien

and i discovered it was an alien that would be awesome so i'm not against that idea it would be wonderful if that is that if that's what bubbled to the surface you know this thing actually is going at 500 g but it doesn't actually we'll have you back if you yeah we'll have you back if that happens yeah well yeah motivated reasoning as they say is a hell of a drug but uh you know where i'm sympathetic for people who might trust the wrong people or be misled is that like everybody says that they're doing dispassionate investigation everybody claims to be doing that and it takes i think you'd agree a little bit of i don't, street smarts or social intelligence or something to tell the

difference. And even then, if you're good at it, you might be wrong. Yeah, I'm sure I have some biases. When I go into an investigation, I've looked at so many things already and they all turn out to either be not enough information or some kind of mundane explanation. And so when I look at something, I guess I kind of automatically think, oh, that looks like a reflection of a light in the window. And that would be the first explanation I would check out. I wouldn't automatically think, oh, that looks like a flying saucer. So the priorities of my investigations are perhaps a little bit different, but I'm still just trying to figure things out. So if I think this is a light

reflecting in the window, then I've got to investigate that like are they inside are the outside was there a light in the room that would do that and you know what are the various settings on the camera things like that uh so you can you still kind of eliminate it you know if you're saying maybe it's a flying saucer then it's a little little harder to do anything with because you you can't actually kind of prove something's a flying saucer just from a photograph so it's uh it's kind of a asymmetric kind of investigation in a way you do end up kind of just eliminating things because there's things like about ufos is there's never something that's unambiguously anomalous and that's that's what you want even if you can't figure out what it is, you don't get something that has no other explanation. There's always potential explanations for these things.

And this is something that ufology lacks, kind of this black swan event of, say, two people taking a video of a silver orb in the sky from known locations and the orb goes zip, zip, zip with 100 Gs of acceleration and you know that would be it that would demonstrate unequivocably if these people are to be trusted uh that something anomalous was happening but we never get anything that even approaches you know that very simple level of evidence we just get a white dot moving around in the distance could be

anything could be a bird could be a plane or we get these fuzzy blobs on the the navy videos or or we get eyewitness accounts uh of things that you can't verify chris wants to pivot to another interesting topic but just before we do i have a very personal just curiosity i'd like to ask i mean because one one exception to that those these ambiguous fuzzy dots in the distance, is the totally fabricated videos, which I've seen, you know, the technology these days for doing stuff and whatever the software is, is very good. And I've seen a bunch of these posted on social media and I've also read the comments.

And it seems as though at least some people take it at face value i'm just wondering what's you you must have seen a bit of that what's going on there there's a variety of people in the ufo community and some of them are much more uh ready to believe than others you know if you want to experience it just kind of join a few ufo, and you'll see there's a variety of different types. Some of them are a bit more nuts and bolts into looking into UFOs, but very, very rapidly when you start looking into UFO culture, you get towards essentially what's supernatural. People who believe in a supernatural explanation of things

are very credulous about accepting a video at face value and you know someone posts a video of something that looks like a face reflecting in the window and it's obviously just some blobs of light or something you'll get a whole bunch of people saying yeah i can i can see what you're saying and other people say yeah i can kind of feel uh vibrations coming up this picture and with ufs like someone posts a fake video and people you know why why wouldn't it be real you know they accept it they think that there are beings coming from other dimensions and that's projecting realities and you know kinds of things are going on so there's always a range

of people who are going to view any particular video and some of them are going to view it a certain way the obvious alien autopsy in the room is the recent testimony by david grush the yeah former intelligence officer or some position in the government who has claimed too much fanfare this is you know so speaking about that people well or not they're critical or not i'm consistently amazed by the coverage of of this particular story but yeah so in any case he's alleged that i don't believe he's seen the video. He's just heard that the evidence exists, but people have presented it as very significant that he's been willing to go on the record acknowledging this. There's articles in The Guardian. It's being discussed by pretty much everyone that I can see online in the guru sphere.

And I'm just curious, I think I know, but in any case, your response to this story and how it's being presented currently? Well, the claims are pretty amazing. And if they are true, they would change the world in an earth-shattering way for forever. It would be the biggest story in human history. But you'll notice that if you go and look at all the front pages of the media, there's not really any coverage of it. And I think everybody's being pretty cautious about it. There's a few media outlets that are doing stories on it, but it's not like leading stories. And the reason is that he doesn't really have any evidence. This is one guy saying that other people have told him that there is an alien spaceship

crash retrieval program. And he's telling a whole bunch of stories that people have told him that he believes to be true, but he doesn't actually know if they're true. He believes them to be true because people have told him and I think he's seen some documents, but he hasn't even seen any photos. He didn't work in the program, didn't work in the crash retrieval program. And he's not seen any of the spaceships or anything like that. And the story broke on this media site called The Debrief.

Originally, they wanted the New York Times to do it. One of the reporters there, Ralph Blumenthal, was an old New York Times reporter. And the other one, Leslie Keen, worked with Ralph Blumenthal. And they did this original story back in 2017 about Lou Elizondo and the whole UFO thing back then. That's when the videos came out. So they actually started the ball rolling. They tried to kind of repeat that. They tried to get the New York Times to do do a story on this which would have been being huge new york times essentially turned them down because of various demands that they

wanted about it uh i can't remember exactly what the deal was but the new york times said no they went to i think politico then they went to washington post washington post needed more time to fact check it so they didn't have the time for some reason. So they went to this other outlet called The Debrief, which is just kind of like a military, small media outlet, military themed with a UFO thing, UFO overtoned. And they just, you know, pushed it out, pushed out this article. And, you know, initially this article, they just say,

we have this crash retrieval program, we have documents, people are telling me this, blah, blah, blah. Then we get a video of bits of interview of this guy, Dave Grush, done by this Australian journalist, Ross Colthart. And he starts saying things that are even more amazing. He says that not only do we have crashed alien spaceships some of the crashed alien spaceships have bodies in them which I thought really should have been the lead really should have been the lead thing we have

crashed alien we have actually alien bodies but turns out he never talks to Leslie Keen about that he never talked to the two journalists about that for some reason. And she was like, yeah, I don't want to talk about bodies. And you know, if he, if he had told me about bodies, I wouldn't have put them in the story because bodies is too much. So it's almost like she, she doesn't believe him on the bodies thing, but she does believe him on the spaceship thing. And, but she wants to do a spaceship story because she knows that's all true, but the bodies thing is a bit sketchy. And then he does like another interview for like a french newspaper i think la parisienne something like that and in that he makes a claim that the u.s acquired a ufo in 1944 nearly 80 years ago from italy and And this UFO landed in Italy in 1933 and was captured by

Mussolini's guys and held in a warehouse somewhere for nine years until towards the end of World War II when the Allies invaded Italy. And they took this UFO back to the States and they started analyzing it. And then they discovered Velcro and teflon and stuff like that and semiconductors by by analyzing this ufo which is just basically part of ufo mythology yeah it's it's this old story that that's been knocking around for a long time and a lot of people think that it's just fake story so it almost seems like you know it's not like he's discovered all these secrets. It's like somebody who believes in all the UFO stuff has been talking to someone else, telling them stuff.

And then they talked to Dave Grush and Dave Grush says, oh my God, we got this thing back in 1944. And yeah, there's, it's just all of it. All of it is essentially UFO mythology. I remember someone tweeted today and they said there's nothing in what dave grush has said today that we didn't already know it's just that he's you know a trained professional who's coming forward for the first time he's told us that he was asked what evidence do you have that these are alien craft so they've got these alien craft

with dead aliens inside them. And so he says, what evidence do you have that these are alien craft? He doesn't say like, oh, well, you know, they had aliens inside them. He says like, you know, we did some analysis of the isotope ratio of some metal, and it was an unusual isotope ratio that must have been engineered. They just ignored the alien bodies. Yeah, they just put Aliens sat around there and they're like, what is this weird bit of tinfoil? So it's

not the most compelling sounding story to me. It sounds pretty ridiculous and he apparently has receipts. Apparently other people are going to come forward and corroborate what he's saying but he just sounds like he's repeating uh ufo mythology the isotope ratio thing is is like at least 10 years old i think people have been finding bits of metal and being

like oh this isn't the right isotope ratio and then there's another piece of metal it's this little triangular piece of metal and it's made of multiple layers of magnesium and bismuth and a bit of zinc. And people are saying, like, you know, no human technology can create this. It's a metamaterial. It's a terahertz waveguide. But this is something that I believe it was sent in to Art Bell, who is this conspiracy theorist radio host, like 20 years ago, with this cover letter. this conspiracy theorist radio host like 20 years ago with this cover letter for this guy saying, my grandfather had these things from his time in the military when he was

like a telepathic communicator with the aliens. And I found this in an envelope in the attic and I'm sending them to you to take care of. And they've been knocking around the UFO community ever since. It's just a bit of, just a little bit of scrap metal essentially. Like it's got these weird layers that probably come from some industrial process like it was sputtering or something like that

where you coat coat things and then a bit of the side of the container got coated with something but yeah these again it's just all ufo mythology being repeated in this weird framework of playing telephone where everyone tells everybody something else it's all top secret and you don't know that it was originally just this this silly story and now it's gone through to dave grush and now he's telling it to congress we had a like a slight experience of this through the content that we analyze looking at that kind of secular guru space because in particular there were a couple of other people that mentioned it as well but the the two most prominent were sam harris and eric weinstein

indicated that they'd been contacted i believe independently by someone and the person had got their telephone number this was this was part of the thing that they found very convincing and that person promised that they were going to reveal evidence to them about the exact and this was around the same time as that information was starting to appear in new york times and the stories that you just talked about and sam harris talked about it on this podcast that and he seemed quite you know he acknowledged that it i'm not all in on this i'm just saying that there's credible people who appear to be contacting me and letting me know that they want me to help break the story and see him with eric and eric indicated that this person had been in contact with him for years like uh and in your

conversation with eric and subsequently with sam i think sam ended up like disillusioned and doesn't talk about it anymore but i find that this kind of narrative that there's evidence that's forthcoming and it's going to be explosive and that the government or whoever it is wants to release it to like someone like sam harris harry kleinstein who you know influential people but not exactly i would imagine the primary sources that we need to release the existence of ufos from so i i just find that interesting that like actually the part that interests me is there is clearly someone involved who is promising the release of information and i i wonder is that something who is it you know you have experience with or is that just a constant that people do that and are they able to persist for years like without actually providing

the information or the proof yeah no there's a there's a whole group of them and they call themselves the invisible college and this uh it's going to be historical term but it was kind of coined i believe by jacques valet who's a big big ufo guy french ufo guy uh lives in america now but the invisible college is basically a bunch of people in academia and in other institutions including the pentagon uh who believe that aliens are here and they're doing stuff to try to promote disclosure they're trying to work behind the scenes to make the government admit what they know about ufos and they've been doing this for like you know at least 20 years or so and probably probably longer start with jack valet and there's a whole

bunch of other people you know at the time some of them are deceased and then there's kind of a new generation of people coming in and being mentored by the old generation. You know, Jack Vallee has a guy called Gary Nolan, who is this Stanford scientist, is kind of a neurobiology geneticist type guy, very accomplished in his field, but is also very into UFOs. And he's part of the Invisible College. He's one of the people who's behind Dave Grush. He's one of the people who's basically been going around with Dave Grush and introducing him to people and saying this is the the whistleblower who's going to tell us everything that we need to know about UFOs and then there's other people like there's um journalist George Knapp who's this guy who's behind uh Bob Lazar who's this this guy who's kind of similar in a way to Dave Grush.

He said he lacked all the credentials. He was the guy who's seen all these UFOs. He actually claims he actually saw them, unlike Grush. And George Knapp promoted this guy, and complete fraud, Bob Lazar. And he has a protege now, like Jeremy Corbell, who's doing similar types of things. He's the guy behind the Green Triangle video.

So there's this kind of almost like a generational group of people trying to do this stuff. And I think they've been approaching people. And people have described it as grooming, which the term acquired very negative meanings now, so you can't really use it. But they're kind of training these people and courting their attention and and then kind of building them up to do certain things like you use their position so they approach people like sam harris and they sound great because

they're people who are uh they've got credentials there's people like hal putoff who's a guy who's a physicist who's done work for the government but he's also done work on telepathy. And he was a big fan of Uri Geller. They get someone like him. And there's a guy called Kit Green, who's I think a doctor who's studied the brains of people who had UFO encounters. And he's worked with Gary Nolan. They're all kind of together in this invisible college. So they approach someone like Sam Harris. Sam Harris is like, oh, this guy who from the CIA, Kit Green is CIA, I think. that'd be someone else. There's a bunch of different people. CIA is approaching me and they're telling me things and they're promising that

I'm going to get to see this, this evidence, but Sam Harris isn't stupid. So he figured it out, figured out that, you know, I got to get some actual real evidence and he's kind of demanding the actual real evidence. And they're like, Oh, we'll take you to see the evidence. And then they don't take him because it doesn't really exist. And then he's like, you know, this is bullshit. And eventually he becomes disillusioned. And then he watches some of my videos.

He actually, he cited that at one point in one of his interviews, that he watched my videos and found them reasonably compelling to explain the other videos. And now he's like, you know, that was just nonsense. Eric, the same. And now he's like, yeah, that was just nonsense. Eric, the same. I think he uses the analogy of,

I don't know if you, you know, you'll know Charlie Brown, Lucy. There's this famous scene in, in peanuts where Lucy has a football and Charlie Brown is running up to kick it and Lucy pulls it away. And she's been doing this forever.

She's been doing this for like 60 years and he hasn't figured it out yet. And there are a lot of people who still haven't figured it away. And she's been doing this forever. She's been doing this for like 60 years. And he hasn't figured it out yet. And there are a lot of people who still haven't figured it out. Sam Harris and Eric Weinstein have figured out that that's Lucy over there and she's promising you a football to kick. But when you run up to kick it, she's going to pull it away. And so they've been turned away. But lots of other people are lining up to kick that football. Yes, I remember Eric signing that story from years back. And so they've been turned away, but lots of other people are lining up to kick that football. Yes.

I remember Eric signing that story from years back. So I think it took him a while to figure out that it was Lucy, but anyway. Yeah, it is interesting. And you know, the point you made about people having prodigies, we've observed amongst the kind of gurus that we cover.

It's not all of them kind of and we cover a range of people the same as you i'm sure make that there are various people that we've looked at who are relatively normal people and and they're not necessarily doing terrible harm they're just you know they have particular interests so i'm not trying to say that this applies to all of them, but some of them, they do encourage these kind of devotional communities and this very strong in-group, out-group dynamic whereby the people in the in-group are, you know, the truth seekers and the people outside are part of a distributed idea suppression complex, for example. And then those networks are quite good at generating what we've referred to

as like kind of minor gurus or satellite gurus. They're kind of followers who are very defensive of their selected guru, but they gain an independent kind of following. And then they become, you know, some of them, they don't get that big. Other ones completely spin out and get their own platform. And I observed in some of the more extreme conspiratorial content I consume, like Alex Jones, that he was grooming, in a sense, Paul Joseph Watson to be his replacement. But that as subsequently, Paul Joseph Watson became big on his own and doesn't seem to be fulfilling that role. So, yeah, I wonder if that dynamic is something that the personality type that seeks to be a guru or believes that they have secret insight cultivates. Yeah, I think with the UFO culture, there are like a number of people that are these like big wigs that people look up to like like lou elizondo and there's a bunch of people or his acolytes like people who

are like big fans of him and they kind of gets a bit of a following because they kind of have have access to this person this person will respond to their tweets and things like that so you get a bit of the fame by association like if a typical ufo fan in you know in this this culture this kind of like this this subculture not all ufo enthusiasts are really into this current group of invisible college people but people who someone who really is and if louis lezondo was to follow them on twitter they're like oh my god it's like you know a superstar has followed me they think there's this super famous person you know someone who's they've seen him on tv and stuff like that but yeah there is this kind of secondary and tertiary tier of different people and lots of people with podcasts and then people who like you say they will probably move away i mean at the moment it's

kind of pretty close-knit because everyone's focusing on on these few things and you know lou elizondo has been promising stuff is going to happen for a while and now it is you know lou's still very much in the mix elizondo he was the guy you know was revealed by the original leslie keen story back in 2018 2017 but he kind of like has stepped back a little bit and other people are kind of taking the front and things are going on behind the scenes now you've got like gary nolan is stepping up and ross colhart the australian guy and various other people and then there's these younger kids this guy called chris sharp who has a blog called the liberation times which is basically just kind

of you know in a invisible college mouthpiece and he writes things for the daily mail sometimes and there's another guy the daily mail is pretty friendly with with him and they write things about ufos together kind of promoting the narrative and these are you know younger guys like 30 or so so there's these these generations of people like doing this looking up to the older generations and then the mentoring and then the passing on and then he said earlier there's this this idea of kind of othering people and excluding them gary nolan has told all his followers that they should all ignore me and this is this has become a bit of a narrative in the ufo community uh which is in dispute not everyone thinks they should ignore me but like everyone's like you know gary said we should ignore him. And I was like, you know, why were you even talking about him then?

Let's don't say anything. Like, so people are trying to ignore me when they talk about work that I do. They don't mention me by name on TV. They'll say like some debunkers think that this is just a camera artifact, but they don't have PhDs. And they won't, they won't mention me by name. He who should not be named. Yeah. Names are far out. Yes. they don't have phds but they won't they won't mention me by name he who should not be named yes so you've not only looked at ufo stuff but going back you've you had an interest in flat earthers and chemtrails and stuff and i shared those interests with you by the way i was a bit

fascinated by those communities not to mock or ridicule them but rather just that i was fascinated by why they believed the things they did and it was very interesting to have you know one-on-one converse virtual conversations with them but what i wanted to ask you was um there's that's clearly an awful lot of overlap in terms of the conspiratorial nature of these sort of belief systems and yeah there's an awful lot of overlapping there's motivations and the psychology but i wonder can you think of anything that is unique to the people that are fans of ufos like what's what makes them if anything distinct and special from other kinds of conspiratorial beliefs well it's really that the ufo culture is to a very large extent based on personal experience and not just

believing something that you've read. A huge portion of people who are deep into this UFO stuff are people who claim to have had some kind of experience with the UFO. Gary Nolan had, when he was a child, he had like small beings visit him in his bedroom and later saw a UFO fly over his head when he was delivering papers. And even later than that, as a young man, he had an experience with some kind of entity talking to him in a hotel room. So if you have someone who has a deep personal experience that they think was very significant to them, it really makes a huge difference in how they interpret these ideas and the framework that's presented to them. And they find it very attractive, the idea that UFOs are some kind of advanced technology, some kind of higher non-human intelligence, because it explains their experience.

And they love the idea that their experience becomes validated, which you don't really have that with flat you know flat earthers they have the idea that the earth is flat you know they're sure they personally can see it kind of looks like it's flat but they're seeing the exact same thing that everybody else is seeing every day they're not having this unique experience that ufo people have people who are interested in jfk it's just purely historical nothing's going to change chemtrails it's just you know again you're seeing the same things that other people are seeing it's not unique so this the unique nature of the personal experience is what makes ufo culture this very specific thing

yeah that's interesting sorry chris but i just wanted just wanted to ask Mick, because it seems like there's a personal revelatory and spiritual aspect to part of it. And you reminded me of that fellow, Mike Cleland. I'm sure you're probably aware of him. You wrote The Messengers, Owls, Synchronicity, and UFO. Oh, you're in for a treat. I encourage you to look into it. I'm familiar with owls.

Did you say owls owls yeah synchronicity and owls you know owls are basically a trans-dimensional smoke screen for aliens in a nutshell i'm simplifying it a bit birds are not real but more specifically to ufos and owls owls yeah yeah owls you look very alien if you ever seen a little baby owl standing up that looked just decidedly alien and they also explain a few alien encounter cases because they've got their big eyes and they can look like here they're they're aliens in in low light and then they have their claws reaching out towards you yeah yeah it was it oh i will link people up to the lecture given by mike clarkland

in in the notes and he's actually an extraordinarily well-spoken person he comes across as a very nice person actually and he describes his his research into this phenomenon and he had the suspicion about about owls and synchronicity which is like seeing strange things like the letter three three times or something like that and then seeing an owl and you know these weird coincidences so he put it to research it he put out a um a call on the various websites for people to send in describing this phenomena and asking people to check with whether they'd had similar types of experiences and he got a torrent it was just very telling in terms of just just the epistemics of it it's casting a very large but very loose net you're gonna catch a bunch of specific fish it's like you put out the word for

a certain type of coincidence it's like you know you you've put out a call have you ever like thought about a person and the phone rang and it was that person yeah you're gonna get a lot of responses because that's you know something that just happens to like people and if you just filter it down to the this is something in in all these conspiracy theories there's a lot of taking the cream of the crop especially with ufos it's like random things are going to happen coincidences are going to happen some of those coincidences are going to be more interesting coincidences than others. And if you just, you know, you've got all these coincidences, some of them are low level coincidences, some are medium level coincidence,

some are like super high. Some of them are like amazing coincidences. You just like draw a line somewhere about the 99%, uh, level, take the few coincidences that are way up at the top and it's like miracles that's how miracles happen these are the most amazing things that ever happened so if you you know you filter out the amazing stuff you get amazing stuff but because amazing stuff is inevitable someone's going to win the lottery and if someone thinks i'm going to play these numbers and then they win the lottery it's a miracle but it's not someone's going to win it's going to happen to somebody i mean i'm sure there's a psychological term for it but it it's like interpreting a coincidence as being having special significance when really

it's just something that is actually inevitable yeah yeah yeah there's very well understood chris and i've talked about this and i i won't distract people from it now but yes it is quite interesting that there are there are good psychological reasons for having this trigger finger on the interpretation and over over extrapolating from events but um that's a discussion for another day yeah yeah it's a fun topic though i wrote an article on i don't know if you know the the game show jeopardy it's just a quiz show in america it's in my wife and i watch it every day. And we started noticing that there were these strange coincidences between things on the show and things that would

happen during the day. So I actually did the math on what are the likelihoods of these coincidences actually happening. So I did some simple analysis so that you get so many things you talk about during the day and so many clues on the thing and there's going to be some overlap at some point and approximately i think it was once every 200 shows you're going to get a really amazing coincidence like you know one in a million coincidence it seems like one in a million but it's actually much much more likely because there's so many things that can possibly overlap and it played out like we i see the same frequencies that i calculated so we occasionally get these awesome coincidences my wife and i will be talking about

you know what's the spanish for chicken and rice and then the same day that was a question on jeopardy it took a year for something else like that to happen but that that comes up all the time when you know like in in ufos I say, well, perhaps, you know, it was just a coincidence that they went to this spot on the radar and then they saw this thing and they said, no, that's impossible. There's no way it could be a coincidence. That's just so unlikely. But at some point, an amazing coincidence is going to happen

to a fighter pilot and he's going to misinterpret it as a UFO. It's inevitable. Yeah, people are just terrible at, including myself, everybody. I do a lot of work in statistics, but it doesn't make my intuitions necessarily any better. And have you heard of the little mathematical thing where if you have a room of, I forget the numbers, it could be 30 people.

The birthday paradox. The birthday paradox, yeah. Yeah, it's the same math actually that I used for the Jeopardy thing because it's two intersecting groups, essentially the odds that one will intersect with the other i mean it's really a set intersecting with itself but it's the same type of thing you don't it's hard to constantly miss eventually you're going to get a hit but people think that it seems like you know very odd it's like one in 30 the chance of two people in a room if you have 30

people you've got an even chance of them them having uh the same birthday and but it seems like oh my god you have the same birthday as me what are the odds yeah it's uh they're pretty good there's uh yeah you mentioned before make about flashbulb memories and actually i do research on like transformative rituals that that people go through and flashbulback memories are part of that. But like you indicated, the initial research was suggesting people have these very good memories, accurate memories for those kinds of emotional events, but subsequently emerged that they just have very strong attachments. And often these events are very core to their identity.

So they're often very important memories for autobiographical identity, but not more accurate than any other memory. And so when you were describing that one of the features of the UFO community is that they often have personal experiences, personal experiences, it does feel that that lays the groundwork for people undermining or presenting alternative naturalistic explanations to evoke an emotional reaction because you're undermining a core part of someone's personal autobiographical identity. And if you do that, it's not just a discussion about the facts or particular interpretations of memory. It's more like challenging someone's self-identity. I wonder because of that, the reaction that you get from the UFO community. So you mentioned, you know, some people don't want to invoke your name or that kind of thing.

But I wonder, do you experience stronger, more hostility from that community notably or is it much more muchness if you're talking with countryals and and flounder first as well you know you definitely do you get as much more blowback i guess from people who believe in ufos i was very surprised when i first started you know investigating ufs that people would be much significantly like two or three times more if I was to put numbers on it reactive and I got like you know the first kind of hate mail that I really got like people sending me pornographic photos and things like that which never happened before and it was a surprise to me and it wasn't until someone else pointed out that these people had these personal experiences that I really understood what that was.

But yeah, I definitely noticed it. And it's definitely something I still notice. That if someone believes in 9-11 conspiracies, they know that that's generally not believed by other people. And they're kind of all right with it because they they know that it's just something that's outside of society but when you it's actually something they personally experienced i think it just becomes so much more uh personal when someone offers a rebuttal of something adjacent to what they believed or if you even if you have the temerity to actually suggest something about their experience,

they'll tell you that, you know, I've gone over this a thousand times in my mind, and there's no doubt in my mind what I saw. And they have these super clear memories. But we know from research that false memories can be just as vivid as real memories. They seem just as vivid and just as significant, and you can replay them in your mind in exactly the same way and you know i don't know to what degree that's happened with these people and i always try to sweat stay away from it now i don't i don't even like go there

and say maybe you've got a false memory because they're gonna be no there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever about what happened i remember exactly what what happened, where I was, like who I was with, where I looked up and what this big flying triangle actually did. And it stayed with me ever since. And there's not a lot you can do with something like that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a really important point and a point of distinction

because for many conspiracy theorists the uniqueness the fact that they're not commonly shared in the general population and that they're not believed kind of makes them feel a bit superior right they're the goats and you're the sheep and it's it's been identified as one of the psychological rewards associated with conspiratorial belief but that's a bit different when you're talking about a very personal, even spiritual, transformational experience, which is a key part of your identity. And then for someone to be denying that, that is a very different thing. Yeah, it is. And the person, in some ways, it's almost like they're kind of marginalized because it's this very small thing that only they experience.

So they're not really in this group of people who have discovered the truth about the world. They've got that as well in that they're part of the UFO culture, but they've got their own experience, which only they, not even the other people in the UFO community can share. Some of them will seek out groups of people who have had similar experiences. And you get these very, very self-reinforcing groups of people who do not question what anybody said so you can go into one of these groups and you can say a giant ape came into my room last night and they'll be like oh yeah that's you know that's just the type of

manifestation of an unhuman intelligence like projecting a certain type of reality into your brain and you know that's the type of thing that happened to me like that it wasn't nape it was like you know it was an alien and you know they will come up with something that will explain the experience and fit it into this framework but you know it's all these individual people and they're seeking validation for their individual experiences so he kind of ends up with this huge melange of different types of things and you have to really jump through some incredible hoops i mean there's really kind of a one overarching explanation that they've ended up coming with and this was something that jacques valet who i mentioned earlier came up with which is that these experiences aren't real experiences

this is something that the non-human intelligence is projecting a reality to you. And this reality can even differ between different people who were in the room when it happened or in the car when it happened. So different people will have different experiences, which normally when different people have different experiences, that generally means that their accounts are unreliable but in ufo culture in some some aspects of ufo culture different people having different experiences makes it more reliable because that's an element of what they think's going on they think that people are having you know essentially hallucinations of ufos projected into their brains

but of course on top of that there there's also real UFOs as well. So, you know, you get everything blended together in this explanation of everything, which really explains nothing. Yeah. Yeah, this really came through quite strongly as a theme, actually, in that recent discussion with Eric, because he kept coming back to that point that it also actually almost had like a social justice kind of flavour to it,

which is that you should respect their individual subjective experience and to deny that to deny their their lived experience is harmful and a form of aggression yeah it's a problem it's like and this is something that you know jacques valet is the prime mover in this way of dealing with people is that he has a witness comes forward, they tell a story, and you assume that their story is entirely accurate, and then you try to figure out what happened. And really the only way you can do it is this new theory, not new, it's been around forever, this theory of projected reality. And so then you've got to try to figure out what's projecting this reality. And the whole thing with just aliens and spaceships isn't really satisfactory and so they've come up with it being beings from another dimension and these are like essentially

trans-dimensional tricksters who are using this kind of reality projection thing with ufos to do things but it's really just that's all they could come up with that isn't the you know what they've discovered by careful analysis it's just if you're going to believe everything that everybody says and everyone's saying different things then individual realities is the only way you can explain it when of course it's just a big excuse tricksters could be oils that's i'm just throwing that out there. Never know. The trans-dimensional tricksters, that seems possible. But it is interesting, isn't it?

Like I don't want to compare it to like schizophrenia or something to pathologize it, but it's like a Philip K. Dick. It's like when things are approaching a Philip K. Dick novel, right? No, it's like a fantasy. It's a weird way of looking at the world that if you kind of throw out all kind of objective reality really and you're saying we'll live in some kind of projected reality and how what can you do like can you actually trust anything you get into some of the more esoteric aspects of this and people are doing

experiments in psychic powers and they say i read this one experiment that's kind of related to this thing, but it was an experiment on intentionally enhanced chocolate. So they got these bars of chocolate and they had a control sample. They did nothing to a guru, prayed over one. They had a machine that prayed over another one. And then they had another one which had some kind of computer did something to it i don't know they waved some some sage over it or something and then they measured like how what people felt after taking all of these and they found the ones that were intentionally enhanced in some way like made people a little bit happier than the control

sample but in the paper they said use caution here because i'm kind of paraphrasing you skeptics read this paper in the future then the negative intentions may travel back in time and alter the results which is just you know it's like you're coming up with excuses for better not look at the data sets yeah but it's just ultimate magic beings from another dimension projecting a reality to people or like time traveling negative intentions changing test results it's a lot of excuses and not a lot of reality yeah and i i think psychology has a lot of experience with such things because of the influence of Daryl Williams' Feeling the Future article, which posited retroactive causality that you could do the stimulus and get the result afterwards. And as a result, we had served as a potent impetus for the replication crisis. So

it did have, you know, some positive aspects, those kind of approaches. At least he didn't, he did not go so far as to say if you look at my data you might retroactively change it so it looks like it's less impressive he should have that's a that's a good one but yeah we took up a lot of your time this evening but it's been an absolute pleasure i could continue harassing you for u UFO stories and tales of intergalactic odds or other trans-dimensional tricksters. But where should people look if they want to see more of your content or investigations? Is there like a hub? There's your book, which we'll put in the show notes.

Yeah, my book, Escaping the Rabbit Hole. New edition is coming out June 20th, so hold off on buying it, everybody who's going to buy it. My YouTube channel has a lot of my investigations of things like UFOs and a bunch of other stuff. If you dig down, there's loads and loads of videos there. But the investigations of the UFOs are front and center if you're interested in that.

On Twitter, I'm at Mick West. On YouTube, I'm at Mick West. On YouTube, I'm at Mick West as well. And I have my site, Metabunk, where you can dig down into a whole bunch of interesting things or maybe even join in the conversation. Okay, great. Well, thanks again, Mick. Great to meet you and enjoy your evening. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's been a very interesting conversation. I've enjoyed it. That was a good job, Matt. You did very well. Perceptive questions. Good. Good answers. Right, Mick? Yeah. Good listening on both the parts from what Nick had to say. We did well. Collectively, we did

a good job. Nick did all right, too. He was fine. He was all right. Yeah, he was possible. was all right yeah you know he's it was possible we might have him back yeah and and those nice insights about transformative personal experiences and and kind of rituals that's the kind of thing that you don't get oh oh you mean your insights yeah it's the kind of thing you don't get at all in a glib podcast. That's why people are here, Chris, for your insights.

We've got real expectations here. Okay. Funny how you find a way to, you know, just wedge in your own personal research obsessions. I rarely say anything about my own research, Matt. So how dare you?

There was one. So the review of reviews today, I don't have because I haven't been canvassing for them enough, Matt. And as a result, they're all too familiar for me. I've read them all. And that's been sparking my imagination in seeing it. But all right. No, no, it's fine. It's fine.

It's fine. I replied to a very thoughtful comment on our Yudkowsky AI episode. You know, asking- What did you say? Well, I don't want to read it all out, but it was a thoughtful comment about the degree to which, you know, if humans have evolved and, well, animals can evolve, then isn't it reasonable to expect that we can see the same things with AIs? And it's a good point on the face of it because we do have such things like genetic algorithms and optimization for software that is based on evolution. And we have had things like computer viruses, you know, which sort of mutate to some degree and do replicate themselves

and spread that way. But, yeah, there are also… You just wanted to mention that your response to that was great. My response to it was great. It's too, I don't know, it's too technical. It's too long to get into. Yeah. Yeah, just sign up to Reddit. sign up to reddit it's free

in the reddit community that's right so our review of reviews today is a little bit odd but in any case the thing that we do need to do is shout out patrons matt that is a non-negotiable it's a deal breaker we do this at the end of the podcast we read out names and then we say thank you you know how it goes right yeah it's the most fascinating part of our format yeah yeah that's that's good so i'm going to tell you who the people that were thanking are ma today i'm starting from the lowest tier the conspiracy hypothesizers not lowest not lowest first shall be last yeah yeah that's not the way that usually goes but yeah okay the meek and the lower tier patrons will inherit the earth the earth yeah so they go first so i've got aaron boyd h farmer ian grieve christian chili grib chin my nancy heel jason edin lisa Clifford, Kevin Gojmarak, Joshua McGonigal-Elias, Carla Crane, Blake Lever, No, Jason Effridge, and Alexander Thiebaud and Mohamed Ahmed.

Those are all conspiracy hypothesizers for this week. Thank you. Thank week. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Every great idea starts with a minority of one. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Okay.

So that, that Matt, that's the conspiracy hypothesizers. Now the revolutionary geniuses. And, and there we've got Peter Clarkin, Andres Redak, Chezzy, Heller Gverding, Susan Abramson, Diane Camp, Yanai Sined, Copy, Duncan, Scott Brewer The Rick Erin in Michigan and Roddy also Marianne Hasberg and Pavel that's our revolutionary thinkers for

this week Matt fantastic well done everybody good decision I'm usually running I don't know 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time and the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time. And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm. I'm someone who's a true polymath. I'm all over the place. But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption. Now, that's just a guess, and it could easily be wrong.

But it also could not be wrong. The fact that it's even plausible is stunning. Could not not be wrong. Could not not be wrong is right. That's important. Now we've got a couple, Matt, just a couple to shout out this week for the Galaxy Brain Gurus. And there we have MetaValent Dement demididact it's a good name hustletron 9000 uh another good name res julius horsefuss and amber hi, and Keaton Patterson. Good old Amber helped host a live hangout when you weren't there.

So that was nice of her. So we should pay her. Yeah, it feels like, yeah, sorry. I feel like I haven't been to a hangout for a while. I guess it's been almost two months maybe. It's true, yeah. I'll be there. I had a good excuse, didn't I?

I was at a family. You did, a very good excuse. So, yeah. All right. I had a good excuse didn't I I was at a family you did a very good excuse so yeah alright well that's it for this week Matt bye bye we got weird energy in this outro that's fine you know they can't all be bad

it's been pleasant nice to see you again. See you soon. Ciao. so yeah you know what one reason for me is i've been doing chris's statistics for the last couple Yeah. You know, one reason for me is I've been doing Chris's statistics for the last couple of hours, and coding statistics in R leaves me feeling kind of autistic, like I can't deal with people. I'm just dealing with, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. So I might, yeah. I get it. That's the mood. That's the mood that's the mood and while you were working with statistics i was studying with the sense makers so oh god yeah we all have our crosses to bear yeah so all right well i'm out of here i'm not even gonna warn you about the

disc in the gin you already know so yeah keep your eye out yeah it'll be all right all right take it easy yeah