Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Eric Weinstein & Michael Shermer: An honest dialogue about UFOs (#157)

Episode Date: June 17, 2021

What is the nature of the abundant accounts of unexplained aerial phenomena? Are they harbingers of advanced extraterrestrial engineering, math, and physics, beyond our standard model? Or is there a more prosaic, though no less significant explanation, ranging from military operations, unreliable witnesses, or confirmation bias? Is our government sharing all it knows? Or is there really anything 'there' there? Beyond wanting to believe, do we have any evidence for our beliefs? 00:00:00 Intro 1:00:00 - Technology 1:02:50 - Antigravity Programs dating back to the 1950s & Feynman? 1:18:36 - Centralized Narratives! 1:28:15 - Science funding and obligations Join me and  @Eric Weinstein  and  @Skeptic  Michael Shermer to discuss this fascinating topic. Recent interest in alien craft sightings, documented in my interview with @Mick West is at an all time high: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJtTgIKDUZw. and also see my chat with  @SETI Institute  scientist Seth Shostak https://youtu.be/IZ9wxV_MWVI Watch my interview with  @AlienScientist  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVX2sKo3LKE&t=1s Please join my mailing list to get resources and enter giveaways to win a FREE copy of my book Losing the Nobel Prize: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 📝 🎥 🎥 Watch my most popular videos🎥 🎥 Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_conf... Weinstein and Wolfram https://youtu.be/OI0AZ4Y4Ip4 Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_conf... Michael Saylor The Physics of Bitcoin https://youtu.be/CaN_CDKqXOg?sub_conf... Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner: Sir Roger Penrose: Are Singularities Real? https://youtu.be/57SMQj3lOm0 Sara Seager Venus LIfe: https://youtu.be/QPsEDoOTU6k?sub_conf... Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_conf... Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_conf... Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM 🏄‍♂️ Find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔥 Find me on Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating 📖 Buy my book LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA 🔔 Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeatin... ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 📧Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 👪Join my Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/losingthenobelprize 🎙️Please subscribe, rate, and review the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/i... 🎙️Listen on all other platforms: https://wavve.link/into A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating And please join my mailing list to get resources and enter giveaways to win a FREE copy of my book (and more) http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 📝 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. It is a great, great pleasure to have two of my friends. Actually, the man who gave me my start in podcasting during pandemic podcasting, Dr. Michael Shermer, who has influenced me and set me up my initial interviews a year and a half ago almost. When I started my pandemic podcast journey with his book, Giving the Devil His Due, Michael is a professor. He's the publisher of Skeptic magazine. He's a noted skeptic, an avid cyclist, an all around, all around good guy. And I look forward to chatting more and learning from you, Professor Shermer. How are you today? Well, given the alternatives, yes, life is good.

And on my left on the screen, at least, is Dr. Eric Weinstein, who is no stranger to the into the Impossible podcast. We have been together for many, many decades it feels like, but it's been less than that. And also coming up on our anniversary, our YouTube first conversation, this I think is our ninth one. So it's great to have you too as well. Dr. Weinstein. How are you today? Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Very interesting. Also to be with my friend Michael Shermer. I really am glad to have this crew assembled for this topic. So what's so interesting to me is there's sort of this phrase in German. The Germans have the best words for everything. Michael knows that better than anybody, I'm sure. But they have

words for everything, like ambulance. The word for ambulance, Eric, do you know what the word for ambulance is in German? No, I just know that exit is Ausfat. Yes. I think the word for ambulance, Michael can confirm is crank a wagon. So, you know, if you're sick, you get hit, you go to the cranker wagon. And but one of the other things they have is zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. And it seems like right now we're in an interesting age where people are kind of being affected by this notion that there may be extraterrestrial visitors. It may be other factors contributing to a rash of sightings that have been popular in the news media. And I thought we would kind of discuss it today in a friendly debate and really hash out some of the issues on the,

the skeptic side is Michael Shermer. Eric is coming from a side, I think, of curiosity and of great interest in particular in some of the second order implications of these sightings, if true and if not true. So I think it's quite interesting that you guys were both able to join me. Hang on here. As a guy who never talked about UFOs ever, because I deeply detested the topic up until April of last year. I think we have three skeptics and three open-minded people. I don't want to put anyone in pigeon. Yeah, I agree.

I concur. All right. Well, I can't really say that I concur them because look at this is one of my air tags that I got from Apple. And you can see the symbol on it. Maybe it'll focus. It's a, there it is. Oh, there you're going to.

So I'm not a skeptic. I want to believe. And don't forget, Brian, you're the one that did the cover story of in the beginning. You rewrote Genesis. So what does that say? That's right. So I was talking about this for, you know, several weeks. I've been having a lot of individuals on the podcast ranging from debunker, famous debunker, Mick West, who may be watching. He sent me a question to ask of Eric, Seth Shostack. I've been on other podcasts, my friend

Jeremy Reese, who runs alien scientist, that podcast and kind of fleshing out implications, if true. I've talked to the pilots involved in some of the encounters that have been in the message in the media. But I want to ask you, do you guys see something else, some other reason why this particular moment, this particular issue is so much in people's forebrains? I'll start with Eric. Why is this issue taken hold? Not the alien or whatever you want to say, but this issue as an issue itself.

Why is it so important? Why is it so popular? Why is it so such in demand for people to discuss? Well, I think it's been forced on us, which many of us resent. I think that the idea of, I don't even know how to put this, but I've been able to avoid UFOs, Sasquatch, remote viewing ESP my entire life with relative ease. And when our government takes a position that makes it impossible to avoid that by hiding its data and making provocative statements, involving a thermonuclear narrative. You know, thermonuclear threat did not disappear with the Cold War,

and it is fashionable to treat it as if it is a solved problem of our past when it will be a problem throughout any future we might hope to have. I come with an unfun, curmudgeonly get off my lawn perspective that you don't mess around with thermonuclear narratives. and I think it's wonderful that, you know, the Internet generation feels so secure that we can have fun with giant bug-eyed aliens and, you know, Skinwalker Ranch and cattle mutilations. But when you actually are talking about things probing your airspace or areas in which military presence is found, you're talking about something that potentially could lead to a conflagration. And so, you know, just the way I don't expect people to be, you know, singing popular songs in church, I don't really enjoy narratives about UFOs in military airspace.

So I think it's really important to recognize that we have now been taken by the New York Times, by the Pentagon into a very weird place where our scientists don't seem to have any data. there are a tiny number of videos, all of which seem to me to be rather low quality. There's some anecdotal reports, and there's enough claimed behind the scenes to warrant a change, indicating that we were either lying before, lying now. But whatever it is, we've been putting a tremendous amount of pressure on people not to report things, apparently, that they see because we don't want career-ending behavior in pilots. This is one of the few issues that I've never been able to fit any curve through the points.

Normally the problem is you can fit too many curves through a set of points. Then you have to discriminate between which is a likely narrative and which is a less likely narrative. I got nothing at the moment. I don't know any story that I can tell in which it makes sense what we're doing. Either we've become incompetent, we've become bored, we're being visited by something that would be the story of the millennium, or we've been leapfrogged. Every single narrative goes to some place that makes, I think what we're trying to fit is a sheet that is too small on a mattress that is too large. And every time we get one corner of the fitted sheet onto the mattress, another one pops off. So I've never seen anything like this, and it has beaten me in the sense that I don't have a story that I can tell.

Michael, when you look at this issue, do you see, you know, other narratives, besides the simplest Occam's-like explanation, do you see other narratives, media-driven or, you know, popular, you know, pop science-driven? What do you see as bringing this to the forefront of the popular culture, 60 Minutes and every newspaper in America and baited breath? And what do you attribute that to? Yeah, so having some institutional memory here helps. Something similar to this happened in the early 1990s. You know, we founded Skeptic Magazine 92. And the Roswell incident was all the rage.

And there was a lot of pressure on the government to issue a statement. What really happened? And all the way up to President Clinton, you know, when he was president, said, all right, I will look into it. And, and then finally, 1995, the government issued, Benegon, issued a report on Roswell in which they said, okay, that stuff back in the 1950s when we said it was a weather balloon. They're referring to this crash debris at Mac Brazell's ranch outside of Roswell, New Mexico.

You can see pictures of it online. It looks like balsa wood and tinfoil and so forth. And they said, okay, it wasn't a weather balloon. Like we said, it was this high altitude surveillance balloon, listening for the acoustic signatures of nuclear explosions in the upper atmosphere, because we thought that's what the Soviets might have been doing. So that's what crashed. Then they offered other details.

Well, what about the alien bodies that some people said that they saw? Well, those were some other experiments. We were doing these high-altitude balloon tests where we would heave a crash test dummy out of the balloon at 90,000 feet just to see what happens. and so maybe the people saw the crash dummies being hauled away by the military, that kind of thing. So there was a lot of excitement and build up to this report, like, oh my God, oh my God, they're going to tell us what really happened. And then when they told us, none of the UFOologists said, oh, okay, now we're satisfied. And we'll, you know, we'll go home and work on something else.

No, no. They just figured the government is still lying. So whatever the report is going to be released later this month, if at all, I'm predicting it's not going to say, anything particularly revelatory about super advanced drones that the Russians have or alien visitations or anything like that. And UFOologists will not be satisfied with it because, you know, it's short of them saying, yes, it's aliens and we have the bodies. They're in Area 51 and we have a camera and you can go live and see it yourself. They won't be satisfied. So I think Eric's got it perfectly, said it perfectly well, that it's being forced on us.

That is a commentary on the, sort of the media landscape. You know, when the New York Times, you know, the paper of record, all the news that fit the print, you know, the gray lady says, UFOs are real, then of course everybody has to, you know, take notice. But let's deconstruct that for a minute. Now, this wasn't a report in the New York Times conducted, an investigation conducted by New York Times, that are sent out by their bureau chief to look into something. Two of the three authors of that 2017 paper are UFOologists. Leslie Keane wrote a best-selling book called UFOs. You know, pilots and generals go on the record.

The second author, Blumenthal, wrote a book on alien abductions. It was a very positive report about the whole 1980s and early 1990s alien abduction narratives that were recounted, you know, in breathless tones of like, you know, it's here, it's real, it's true. And so this is, you know, this is not a disinterested report by investigative journalists. It's an article by believers. And so it's astonishing to me that people seem to miss that. And all the way up to last week or today, you know, real.

That word real is doing a lot of work in those headlines. You know, finally the government, the Pentagon says they're real. They mean the videos. The videos that have been passed around since 2007. And they keep getting released like, oh, there's new videos. They're not new. They're the same videos that get recycled over and over. And finally, the Pentagon said, okay, look, they're not fake.

They're real videos. They were actually shot by Navy jets. They're not made by some, you know, hacker in a basement with his laptop or CGI and some Hollywood. studio, there are actual videos. Okay, that's all it means. But the problem is, is that when people hear real, their brains auto-correct to extraterrestrial. The government has said aliens are real. No, that isn't what they said. Nobody is saying that. And that's the problem. And Eric's right, how can you ignore it? You know, 60 minutes. Oh, my God. How can you ignore that? All right. Well, we're done here. You guys are both in agreement. There's a boring debate.

Thank you all. Good night. No, I'm just kidding. But one of the things that bothered me most, and I think a scientist are to blame, and I think the military is to blame, but most of all, I think the media is to blame, as I'll explain in the second, the topic comes up in the New York Times, in the recent headline, Pentagon, you know, or Navy can't rule out this, but they can't prove it either. And, you know, this is like unfalsifiable hypotheses, you know, and with no discriminatory, no sensitivity. And then on the other hand, you have pilots like Commander, favor. And again, I have, you know, less courage in my entire body than he has in this little cuticle over here. But isn't that part of the problem? He says things like, you can't, you know, criticize it because if you're not a fighter pilot, if you don't know what a cap point is, if you don't know what a thread vector is. Or he says, you don't know how to operate a flare camera on one hand. On the other hand, we as scientists, and we're all trained here at different branches of science and or social science. And the point being, how do we communicate to the public that, no, you don't have to be a pilot to say something about a phenomenon and the

viability of something as a phenomenon. Physicists can do that. Likewise, you don't have to be a physicist to speculate on the existence of perhaps sightings, eyewitness testimony, et cetera. So, you know, Michael, I think it's an interesting time, and I keep asking, who's benefiting from this? When you have a headline that's like, you know, unicorns could exist, They can't be ruled out either. You know, my daughter, you know, likes to claim that there's an invisible unicorn. And the proof is that he visits her room every night is that there's no residue of their unicorn ever found or discovered when I go on a room. So the absence of evidence, as our friend Carl Sagan and my listeners will hate me if I don't put up a sock puppet to their finger puppet.

But, you know, absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence. But nevertheless, we're in this narrative now where people are being asked to speculate on the nature of what scientific proof constituent. you know, is constituted by, and getting scientists to say things like, well, science never proves anything. I mean, it's a very dangerous time to be. And on the other hand, I can't say anything because I didn't have the courage to put on the uniform. So where do we go?

Where do we, where do we make an impasse, pass this impasse? Eric. I'm slightly worried that we've misframed the problem that I think we've got the portion that we all agree on. And can we all agree that the videos to an untrained observer, I think all three of us are untrained observers. I mean, I don't know if you could train for this, but don't seem very impressive. Is that a fair statement, Michael? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, impressive of the weird. They're weird. But they're not like super high

resolution with, you know, data, the infrared, you know, optical, thermal radar, blah, blah, blah, blah. And okay, so put that to one side. The concern is that many of us are hearing a great deal more from other sources that are not usually, I don't know, unreliable. People who I've known, who I've tracked their histories, people are reaching out. And the claim that I don't know how to evaluate is that there's a great deal. more. It's higher resolution. It's actually data rather than sort of video anecdote. It appears that none of our top scientists have access to this at an official level. They may have secret access to it, but I certainly can tell you that I've poked around in, you know,

differential geometry, general relativity, and quantum field theory, which would be three places I would want to consult if I thought that I was being visited from another dimension. in another part of the galaxy or that there was a major breakthrough that allowed alien civilizations to visit us easily or even our own future selves, what have you. And that's the data that really I find fascinating. It's not that, look, these videos, you know, to the extent that they're actually just straight-up videos of something, they certainly seem weird. I'm not claiming that it's nothing.

But I don't think I've ever said the words, Fravor or Tic-Tac or Nimmig. or any of these things during the entire discussion, which I've been relatively focused on, not because, well, because I don't think that's where the story is. I think that the story is the Pentagon authenticating the existence of a program. I'm plugging in.

I'm seeing all of these papers, like 38 papers. They seem to be from relatively obscure academics, for the most part. There seems to be a UFO community that has security clearances. There seem to be top physicists who don't know nothing about this. I mean, I think Brian and I surprised Lee Smolin, who didn't even know that there was any change in the UFO narrative recently

when we were on a live podcast with him. And all of this, I find to be that it is the data. The data is the absolutely pathologically bizarre. bizarre disconnect between what appears to be the strength of what has been released and authenticated with what is being claimed, with the extent to which things are being hidden, and the absence of any adults in the defense complex or the intelligence community to shut down what seems to be some sort of arguable fever dream on the part of people who desperately want to meet aliens. Now, I would say I desperately want to meet aliens,

but not so desperately that I don't have other things to do on this planet if there are no aliens to be met. And so my question is, where's my goddamn data? Wishing you could be there live for the big game, soaking up the atmosphere of the crowd. But too often, life gets busy, or the price holds you back. Priceline is here to help you make it happen. With millions of deals on flights, hotels, and rental cars,

you can go see the game live. Don't just dream about the trip. Book it with Priceline. Download the Priceline app or visit Priceline.com. Actual prices may vary, limited time offer. So Michael, to that extent, when you have multiple reports from multiple pilots, these are trained professionals, great cost,

great sacrifice to our country, even if there's, you know, the type 2 error probability is small, you know, that might be a false negative and could be a false positive. You know, don't we have an obligation to investigate, you know, to protect our pilots at some level. Don't we have an obligation, as Eric says, this is our data. I mean, you and I, you know, have a right to see what data are being promulgated. And by the way, you put a lot of faith, Michael, for a skeptic in the efficacy of our Pentagon and our military apparatus to be both transparent and accountable.

And I think the lessons of the last 15 months should have disabuse all of us of that. notion. So what do you say about that? Not to mention the, not to mention the lessons of WikiLeaks in all the way back to the Pentagon papers 50 years ago this week. Well, so one of the most revealing statements by the pilot, one of the pilots on 60 minutes was that he sees these things every day. And Bill Whitaker, the journalist for 60 minutes, says, what? Every day, he goes, oh yeah, every day. Like it's a common occurrence. Okay. If that's true, what else should be true? What else should be true is we should have thousands of high resolution, high definition, clear photographs and videos of whatever these things are, shot by passengers on commercial jetliners, people sitting at the

beach. You know, there's, you know, 100 million or more, you know, cell phone, smartphones with high resolution cameras on them. You know, we should have tons of videos. And yet, as Eric points out, we have a handful of these grainy, blurry videos. I've been in the, you know, you know, UFO business for 30 years. They're all, you know, grainy, blurry. It's, I'm almost beginning to think the aliens are just blurry. That's just what they look like. You know, the UFOs are blurry that's part of their stealth technology. They're trolling us. They're trolling us, though. So, and it's not to say that, you know, pylons are trained and, but they're not immune to the normal perceptual misperceptions that we all have, misperceiving the size or speed something at a distance when you're moving, it's dark, whatever. You'll see these reports, like one in Leslie Keen's book on UFOs, of where, you know, the pilot gives this description, you know, the craft is 150 feet long and it's traveling 350 miles an hour. How do you know?

I mean, this is, and there was no radar measurements of this. This is just his visual sight. Okay, this is very difficult to take seriously without some corroborating measurements. Now, To your first point, that the pilots are corroborating either each other or their visual reports with what was seen on radar on the ship or something. Okay, that confirms what the Pentagon said when they said they're real. That is to say, something out there is being filmed. It's not just an artifact of inside the lens, like a lens flare. For example, the history of ghosts and haunted houses is fraught with lens flares. Okay, just the light is bouncing around inside the series of lenses in a 35-millimeter camera.

So it's not that. It's obviously something else. Okay, but what? And, you know, to his credit, you know, Mick West did the heavy lifting on this by, you know, kind of looking at each of those videos like the one you're showing now and looking at what those numbers around the edge of the frame mean. You know, I don't know what they mean. And, you know, most of us looking at have no idea and, you know, Mick looked it up.

Well, presumably someone in the Pentagon or the Navy or whoever knows exactly what every one of those numbers means, why aren't they telling us? Okay, it's not actually shooting off to the left at a high rate of speed. The zoom is going from one to two. This is one of the things that Mick pointed out. I think this is the one there where you see it says one, and then if you go forward a little bit, it jumps to two. So the image is blowing up twice as big, which means the object is. is going to move suddenly there it's about to go to the left and you know why is it that it's mic west has to figure this out for us why didn't the pentagon go out and go guys guys calm down that this is

nothing zooming off anywhere this is not anti-gravity technology this is not a chinese russian super secret drone it's the zoom on the camera all right presumably if they issue a report they would at least do what mic west is done for us yeah and i want to point out i did uh have it in contact with Alex Dietrich, his lieutenant commander at Lieutenant Junior Grade at the time of the incident. And actually, Mick had her on her, on her, on his podcast yesterday. I want to point that out that she's incredibly gracious. She has, you know, she's, she's talked a lot about this. And I think, you know, her recollections, you know, there are discrepancies between her and favor. I don't think that's particularly germane to what her argument is, you know, she wants to make it less of a, of a taboo for pilots to come

forward. As do I, I want our military men and women who are, as I say, a million times braver than I am to have the best equipment, the best training, and the best protection against threats like this. But, Eric, I want to go back to your take on this. So when absent these videos in the New York Times, I feel that there is only one institution that stands to benefit. You've done a lot with the gated institutional narrative promotion. You coined those. And I think in this case, there's only one clear-cut winner and it is the media. And the media have a vested interest in making the story persist as long as possible. Even in the old gray lady that prints all in the news fit to print. And we know how accurate they are. They never make mistakes. They never have

any political agendas whatsoever, right guys? So my question is, how can we be possibly being manipulated in some sense, again by media forces that Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, has no profit motive necessarily anymore, is infinite money can shovel. into it has to do a space. Maybe it's interesting for his space missions, who knows. But the bottom line is, you know, these things in the Washington Post, from the Washington Post to the New York Times, they go unquestioned or we don't report them. 60 minutes shows one side only and doesn't report the scientist's perspective or a skeptics perspective. And they, oh, afterwards 60 minutes overtime, see what they said when they landed back on the carrier day. So how do you balance this

against quibono, Eric. And again, the Nancy Kerrigan question. I always ask you, why now? Why here? Why else? Well, okay. So I'll play Tanya Harding to your Nancy Kerrigan. I don't want to do that yet.

We're not at the quibono question because almost certainly the media is going to be humiliated for taking this seriously if the strength of this is. is what is all that we're seeing. I mean, I really, I had an interaction with Mick West the other day on Twitter, which if I had to describe it, it was sort of like white to move and mate in five. And the claim was that the story is fantastically interesting no matter what. It's a very branched decision tree, much the way you'd have in a chess problem where lots of things can move.

But every single way of resolving the story, resolves to something fascinating. So actually he has a question for you. Mick has a question for you that he said to me. Let me drive the bus unless he wants to come on the show right now. You can ask it to me later. I'm not afraid of it, but I wouldn't like to continue my line of thinking. Mick effectively, you can grant him all sorts of, you know, a rook, a bishop, a queen.

You know, yes, I don't find these videos particularly compelling. Yes, maybe pilots are star for attention. Yes, maybe some of it is bouquet. And yes, maybe a camera turning very quickly would have the illusion of something speeding off, et cetera, et cetera. Seed at all. Assume that, in fact, there is a group of escapees from Marin County deep in Wu who have taken over a Pentagon narrative about military airspace in order to amuse themselves. And, you know, effectively, this is a burning man camp gone out of control.

That's a huge story. It's a really big deal. And it doesn't really matter in some sense whether the former paper of record turned, I don't know, institution that has inscrutable motives. We all know that the New York Times has slid downhill at an incredible level. We are in a highly politicized era. People are desperate for funding. They're desperate for excitement.

They can't find meaning in their lives. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We are still a thermonuclear nation, and we need bad narratives reined in because we are not even in a bipolar situation. We're in a multipolar situation. It is simply, if Michael Shermer's best explanation were true, or if Mick West's best explanation is true, we've had a massive collapse. If we are at the level in which we are talking about incentives that one part of the Pentagon wants money, that another part of the Pentagon, has or people are squabbling and there's no one to lower the boom and say cut it out this is an extremely serious situation what that's what it means to be in the military you guys don't get it

we can't afford this i just i don't think that any of this really resolves the basic puzzle we have we've been starved for the data there appear to be i i just checked today with a friend of mine who i believe is lou elizando's attorney dan shean who i've been following since the Iran-Contra, you know, scandal. We did the Pentagon Papers, a storied famous attorney. I checked with many things that he wished to say. I said that I would keep them all in confidence. He said I didn't have to keep them in confidence.

By the way, Michael, you should know that you are of the three of us most likely to be an alien because you seem blurry to my way of seat. Right? Yeah, exactly. It's calling from the past. Michael's calling from people are saying, how do you still have those AOL compact discs? But don't be cruel to those of us over 50.

The thing I'm just shocked by is that we can't actually have a conversation. We keep getting distracted because we don't have the language that says you have to integrate over the entire decision tree. Nobody can say that it's aliens. And what was represented to me, and I checked before I came on the podcast, is that in essence, what was represented is that all plausible explanations appear to have been ruled out. That's a claim. I'm not saying it's true.

I'm saying that it's a claim. There's also a claim that there's a vast amount more data, and it is much higher quality, that it hasn't been downsampled, It hasn't been degraded so as to preserve, you know, military secrets. I don't know how to evaluate it because I'm not saying I'm not being lied to. I'm not saying that people are not themselves confused. What I am saying is that people are not representing the problem correctly. And if you set up the problem in any one of various ways, I can set it up so that either absolutely, this is a funding dispute that got out of control.

where people were trying to have some fun and it became this international story or I can set it up in a different way in which basically we know it's aliens and we just can't say the final words and what I asked Dan Sheehan today was are we at the point in your opinion or in the opinion of people who came out

of the Pentagon's ATIP program that the only is the explanation for why no one will say it's aliens that all of the remaining branches of the decision tree that we can think of have career-ending implications. I thought that that was a pretty good way of grouping the set of things like, you know, it's Atlantis or Orcas developed opposable fins, or were being visited from other dimensions,

or these are future humans going back in time along closed time-like curves, or any one of the things that would sort of get you a trip to the nuttery, are those what's left? And the answer that came back to me, and I hope Dan, if, I think I got this straight, so I will apologize if I didn't understand it, that Dan's answer was, yes, that's what's left. Now, does that mean that Dan knows? Dan wasn't part of A-Tip? He's a lawyer. Does that mean that ATIP understands this?

Maybe not. Maybe they're a bunch of crazy enthusiasts. I don't really understand what a UFO-O-O-FOL. I just found out that U-FOLogy is a word. That's how backwards I am on this topic. No, no, I am late as late can be to this party. This has had zero interest to me. I think we are not representing the weirdness of the story accurately if we're already at Quibona.

But if we isolated just to the Pentagon, I mean, you could think of many different internecine type squabbles from military fighter jet competitions to interagency squabbles like the Space Force, Air Force. Now, these are all Navy pilots. One narrative I've heard is this is, you know, kind of par for the course. And Navy's has the last gas is attempting to get the high frontier under its control before Space Force and the Air Force kick in. This is typically the purview of Air Force. These are space, space activities, if indeed that's the case. What is typically the purview of the Air Force?

Activities and external to our planet, if indeed these are UFOs and so forth, coming from other advanced technological civilizations. Maybe I'm just missing it, but I'm being reached out to by various people. I have contacts that I didn't cultivate for this purpose. I've tried to check in on. What I am hearing, and again, what I am hearing is not data. that's just hearsay, does not strike me as having any analog in my previous life.

I've never seen. The closest I've ever been to a UFO sighting is in 1988 I was lying on a pier with my now wife, then girlfriend, looking up at the stars on Lake Wobbin, and there was a light in the sky that appeared to be a satellite of the space station. I pointed it out,

It had a beautiful, very clean arc as if it was in orbit. And then it reversed. And it appeared to be a very point-like source, very, very distant. I didn't understand how something like that could do it, could do that move. I couldn't figure it out. But I haven't spent 30 years obsessed with the point of light that I couldn't figure out why it did the thing that it did. It was just like anomalously weird.

And, you know, look, I've been known to Tipple occasions. and, you know, look, hey, she was good looking. So, you know, maybe I was just moved by the moment. But I really, I don't have this part of my soul unquenched. I don't need UFOs to have a meaningful existence. I don't think we're listening. I think that what we're being told repeatedly from multiple sources is that these are daily occurrences in many cases. There are two basic loci that seem to crop up over and over again off the east coast, I guess it's around Virginia, North Carolina, and some locus of activity off the coast of Southern California. I guess there's a few Mexican islands in Baja and San Diego.

And I'm not quite sure why we're having trouble saying that the data is weirdly the withheld claims that appear to be fairly consistent from very different people and the otherwise inexplicable behavior of people who respond when queried in a profound way. I've just never encountered this before. But you're impuging, you know, potentially impugning, you know, or pointing to a monumental security, you know, vulnerability in our Pentagon at the highest level. You know, as Michael said, There are people, I think he's even a friend of ours, or at least Twitter friends as close as I can get to a real friend these days. And that is, you know, people who are reporting daily incident sighting. So that is a falsifiable hypothesis.

So fly out there. Oh, it wasn't there today. Okay. We'll come back tomorrow. It wasn't there tomorrow. We're reporting very different things. The TikTok is unique. It's sui generis.

There's nothing like it. Then there are other things, balls and spheres and spheres and boxes and so forth. And I'm not, what's that? I heard a new one over the medicare. a Terranian from this same source about we were going at incredible speeds in our fighters and suddenly I had to make sure that I was parsing the sentence accuracy. Somebody said that circles were being flown around our fighters at very high speed. And I said, you mean that something appeared to be flying much better because colloquially, you know, to run circles around means, you know, to do much

better than. He said, no, literally, this is what was occurring. Now, I keep trying to push on all of this stuff, and it doesn't resolve one way or the other. So in general, my feeling about this is that this is an invitation for the scientific and the skeptical communities to destroy themselves by not setting the problem up and not saying, give us the damn data, because we don't know what we're talking about. The major data we have right now is withheld, is a narrative involving withheld information. That is the data. And, you know, I just, I don't understand the passion for David Fravor, the Tick, Tech, the Nimitz, the pyramids, you know, is it bouquet, is it this, is it? This should leave us cold. The key issue are the consistent widespread

read allegations without the condemnation of the Pentagon that this is an irresponsible narrative dangerous to the security of the nation that provides the world's responsible use of force. Michael, what do you make of Eric's claims, you know, the meta issue here that has to be addressed is what does this say, even if it's not true, as he's stipulating, let's say all these are fake, but then you're getting these reports. what is the saying about the you know our integrity of our of the of the high command of the of the agencies that are sworn and put on the uniform and as Alex says you know raises her right hand to protect us are they off the you know off the ranch here or you know is it something is it basically

you know Eric is imputing in a perhaps malice I think more incompetence and I'd like to get your take on it yeah well a couple of things first of all we it is good to remember that the branches of the military do compete with one another for funding and, you know, budgets and so forth. I've been reading quite a few books on the arms race during the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the history of the bomb, and so on. And, you know, a couple of things that came clear in Fred Kaplan's book, The Bomb, and Martin Sherwin's book on Apocalypse. Let's see, it's called Gambling with Armageddon on the human missile crisis is that the real arms race was not between the U.S. and the USSR. It was between the Army, Navy, and Air Force.

And each of them wanted the bomb because they could get more funding. And this is why we have a triad. We have a triad because the Navy said, well, we want a bomb, so we've got to put them our submarines. And the Air Force said, well, we want a bomb, so we have them in our bombers. And the Army said, well, we want a bomb, so we have missiles. That's why we have a triad. So basically it trialed the overall military. budget just on that alone. And, you know, it's staggering that that was far more competitive than

that we were competing against the Russians. There never was a missile gap. When Kennedy ran against Nixon, while Eisenhower was finishing up his term, there was this whole thing about the missile gap between us and the Soviet Union. That never existed. That was only in the minds of, you know, politicians. And so that's a concern. So whatever it is we're talking about here, we should keep in mind that the forces do compete with one another for claims on things that are going on, especially as it affects their budgets. In terms of why this interest, well, how could you not be interested if it was true that were being visited by aliens? Of course, that would be the discovery of the century, if not of all time. And so let's put that off on one side and then

say, well, what's the other hypothesis? They're super advanced. Russian or Chinese assets. But somehow that they've gotten decades or centuries ahead of us technologically, and without us knowing, you know, I make the case in that Quillette article, I did that this is just not how history of science and technology evolves. You know, it's very incremental. Everybody knows what everybody else is doing. They all scientists and technologists read each other's journals. Nations steal each other's secrets and so on and so forth. The Manhattan Project, the most secret project of all time. In our country, the Russians had everything we knew within four years. They stole it. And, you know, Apple and all these

tech companies, you know, they have super secure systems and protect their property rights through lawsuits and so on. And yet all cell phones and computers are roughly within six months of each other in terms of development. So the chances that whatever we're looking at are super advanced Chinese or Russian assets that we just don't know about is pretty slim. So what does that leave us with? Two things. One, it's the kind of things that McWest is talking about, you know, camera motion, distance distortions, the movement of the cameras and zooms and things like this. Or anomalies we just can't explain.

And, you know, so this is called the residue problem. There's always a residue of unexplained anomalies that no current scientific theory can account for 100% of observation. So what do you do with that? Well, I don't know. We just live with it or we wait for the Pentagon. Somebody knows. I think, in my opinion, somebody knows. And they're just, you know, why they're not telling us, I don't know.

Michael, let me just ask you a question. You and I had a friendly, skeptic-on-skeptic knife fight on Twitter. Oh, yeah, that's right. And my claim was that's not how innovation works. Innovation works. Sometimes you have an incremental aspect to what has been learned or understood, but it may unlock what appears to be discontinuous power. And so, you know, I put the problem to you, that you've proven that Renaissance technologies on Long Island doesn't exist because we have a secretive hedge fund that has maintained an advantage over every other investment system known to man that cannot be easily. related, you know, if the idea is that it's not actually a hedge fund, I think that's a fascinating idea. We know that there are, you know, I gave the example of Hiroge Sato in table tennis,

who was the one who figured out that if you put rubber on both sides of a sandpaper bat, it muffled the sound and he was able to be the worst player on the Japanese team who won the entire world at Table Tammuz Championship in Bombay. Bob Beeman's long jump, he did something on that one particular jump that produced an outcome that wasn't a few millimeters difference, but, you know, just an unimaginable. Fosberry flop. Well, that was the same Olympics in Mexico City. And I don't need to tell you that Eddie Van Halen and Jimmy Hendrix both represented a complete discontinuity. In both cases, people got a chance to understand what they were doing.

but generally speaking, I would say that nobody's really figured out what generates the majesty of Jimmy Hendricks. I don't think that what you're saying is accurate, not because the input may not move incrementally for the most part, but that the consequence of getting something a little bit better may be an enormous difference. And so I asked, if I recall correctly, you were citing Matt Ridley, how many years difference, is 1900 or 1902 from 1952. In one case, you don't even have powered flight. In the other case, you're dropping fusion devices. You know about neutrons and antimatter, relativity, quantum theory.

We're in a situation in which, if you think about the early 20th century, I noted that my friend and our mutual friend, Sam Harris, made the same thing, same claim, about tens of thousands, if not, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of years in the future. No, you can't tell how much more advanced a civilization is in that metric because the amount of power that's unlocked need not be consonant with the discovery that unlocked it. But I think you're missing one of the points Michael was making in that tweet was that innovation. The Fosbury flop, it wasn't like people stopped, you know, didn't adopt it. everybody adopted it really quickly efficient market thesis applied technology and michael's

talking primarily about about let me just finish the thought michael's talking primarily about it not being an adversary on earth because in that case you know they would be likely look the chinese have yet the russians have we beat them to the moon they have yet to send a manned mission to crude mission to the moon right so if you look at it he's saying innovation wise not speculating about the physics of the 25th century visited upon us by some distant galaxy like we would all be quite thrilled to witness, but he's saying it ruling out the adversary. Let's take this as a Bayesian problem. So what kind of credence can you put on eyewitness testimony? It carries some evidence. Michael was abducted at one point on his race across America. He can talk about that in 1992,

I believe. He's actually been abducted. So we can talk about it. So eyewitnesses, we can put some Bayesian prior on that. We could put on technology so advanced it can get here, but not advanced enough that it can't evade ages 2 radar, etc. And then you could go through the list and how you could maneuver in the Earth's atmosphere and why you'd want to go to a warning area off the coast of Southern California, but not be

spotted, you know, over the white. Anyway, you could go through this whole list of things that we could try to pregame and gondk an experiment till the proverbial cows get mutilated. No, I hope no cows would get mutilated by these aliens. But the point I'm trying to make is the question, if

it's a physics problem, you and I can talk about it. If it's a sociological problem, you and Michael can talk about it. But if it's a Pentagon problem, if it's a data problem, you keep saying, this is our data, this is our data. You know, we own NASA has as a Hubble Space Telescope, right? So I can show you data. Now the Hubble Space Telescope's data, I'll put it up on my screen right here. It's beautiful. Oh, that's not the data. I want to show. I want to show my firefight. There we go. What a pun on. There it is. Okay. So there's the Hubble Deep field. Is this data? As a scientist, is this data. It's very weak data, but you actually have access to it. You can get,

you can, you don't need a FOIA to get this data. Actually, it's not a very weak data. It was, it was, it was constructed for a very particular purpose. And actually, the data relative to that particular purpose is fairly compelling. No, actually, there's far more data. There's far more actual data that we astronomers use from the individual spectrum of the end of the luminosity, the photometry, the aperture. We can do a lot more with this data than just look at it on our screensavers. We're talking past each other. The reason for collecting that as data, I mean, you and I agree, I think, as to what you're saying, but it's the framing of it.

We had this question, if we tried to find the blankest part of the blank sky, what would we find if we left the lens open for a very long time for a long exposure? And we were somewhat surprised. So relative to that question, this is actually very interesting data. for a smattering of a different questions, it's very cute. Sorry. It's very weak data. But, you know, when I tried to make the point that Renaissance Technologies is a different paradigm

because it hasn't been copied, it hasn't diffused, that's a different issue than the Fosbury flop replacing the scissors. you know, that was the previous high bar maneuver. And so in that situation, there was radically quick adoption. I mean, I find it very interesting, for example, that nobody has bothered to just to ask the question, why do Ashkenazi Jews overperform in physics? Why do two countries overperform in the Boston Marathon? I think it was before, I was it, 1967?

and nobody from Kenya or Ethiopia had ever won, and then those two nations completely dominated the results. So you can say, well, that's the ability to diffuse heat. You know, there's been competing explanations. There are different things that go against Michael's broad claims based on the assertions of Matt Ridley. And Michael is a very reasonable guy we've talked for a long time. We're not trying to get each other.

We're just trying to say. So, Eric, let me address that because it's a good point. Let's say the Chinese have a lab. Let's say it's in Wuhan and it's next to that viral lab. And they're not only inventing viruses, they're also inventing super fast technology that allows a jet to go faster than the speed of sound without making a sonic boom. Something like that's claimed.

after this episode. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay, that's possible that, you know, somehow our scientists missed that their scientists are not publishing in the journals that our scientists would read to see the incremental improvements because they've been kept isolated by their government, something like that.

If that were true, then, of course, I don't think the Pentagon's going to tell us this when they released this report. You know, oh boy, we fucked up. You know, the Chinese got way ahead of us in this one, you know, fell swoop in the last five years. And so now we're going to copy their technology and we promise we'll catch up. We just won't hear about it.

So your hypothesis is possible, but I don't know how we can test it because, again, that data is, you know, they're not going to share that with us. And so that would be the only way I could see that that's possible because the diffusion would happen pretty quickly after that if that were the case. It reminds me of the scene in the movie airplane where they're trying to help land this jet. and they said, should we turn on the runway light? And they say, no, that's just what they'll be expecting. So we're going to starve our own top scientists of the data that would be necessary to keep pace with China. What I'm trying to get at is very different. None of these simplistic explanations work, right?

You can't get rid of it by saying that there are no secrets. You can't get rid of it saying that there are no permanent advantages. You can't get rid of it by saying that all progress is incremental. Every time somebody's asserted that, I think I've tried to be relatively. diligent and saying, no, here's a, here's a counter example, here's a counter example. Now, if you said it's rare, I'd appreciate that. It's not that usual. It's somebody is something wholly discontinuous that can't be copied, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think that's where we are. And I think that it just, it's very frustrating because I look at the number of permanent clusters. There's a cluster

out here of people who believe that China in particular has zoomed ahead of us in hypersonic technology. This is a closely guarded secret, and that's the explanation. There's another group of people who believe that we, the U.S., have lodged secret knowledge inside of our aerospace companies, maybe the Glenn Martin company in particular, who knows, where the secret knowledge is all about technology. It's not about physics. They're working with the same physics as everybody else. There's a different group, right, which claims this is a funding thing. It's a Psiop. There's the SIEP group. I've talked to each of these communities. None of these communities can answer all of the questions. That's my point. And the problem that I have to answer all the questions,

though, Eric. Is it necessary to approve every rule out every possible explanation for a UFO siding by McWest or does you just need one? No, no, no. I don't know why this is so confusing. We have, I would expect almost all of us would go through all of the explanations, and say, I've noticed that every time I get these three corners on the mattress, the fourth corner doesn't get anywhere close, and the mattress is bowed in this really a natural shape. At some point you say, I think I have a twin-size fitted sheet for a queen-sized mattress,

and that's what I'm trying to say. I'm trying to say that I have a category which I can't explain, which is none of this makes any effing sense. And the skeptics don't make sense. The bug, you know, the wild-eyed dreamers don't make sense. Every single thing I can run through this doesn't add up? And what I keep hearing is, can't I get back to one of the positions that I feel like, you know, it's propaganda, it's fighting, it's infighting, it's people who don't understand the difference between anecdote. It's social pressure that pilots pressure each other.

We've got a mystery, and that's where we are on. I mean, one, so I have to, because I said I would, our mutual friend Mick West, he asked you a question. I suppose that Robert Bigelow's A-Tip-style Wu had started to seriously overlap real issues like drone, airspace incursions, and human equipment identification limitations. In other words, the A-Tip had exposed some weakness that's vulnerable and real. How long could the Pentagon shut that down before the report is released? In other words, do they have this? I mean, are you really, you know, overestimating how good the Pentagon is, how monolithic they are, or are you more worried about them having the keys to the Cadillac at, you know, at age 14 and doing something extremely dangerous potentially with it?

If I were the Pentagon, one thing I would do is I would come and talk to me and people like me very quickly and say, you're on Team America, right? I'd say, you got it. You got a big audience. Yeah, I guess I do. You're smart guy. You've got a degree. I don't know. The latter is true.

We need to talk to you. We need you to understand that there's some real sensitivities and we need your help. We need to get the toothpaste back in the tube. We need to get the genie back in the bottle because we've got real problems and we've got a woo narrative intersecting with a crazy narrative. This is where I got to with Mick before, which is, isn't that a huge story? Now, is that a story that I would be willing to keep? keep quiet. Let me be entirely honest. I would keep that story quiet. If the issue is that we had a

really serious threat, we had a really garbagey narrative, the panic when I were to reach out to me, I'm on Team America, and I know what to do. If you don't reach out to me, I'm going to behave like every single scientist. I'm going to try to set up the problem, try to figure out what I know, what I don't know, what I believe, what seems anomalous. And my claim is that I hear, silence. But I've reached out to by one or two groups, not kind of say more, if what you're saying is that we have an overlapping problem of real drones and fake aliens, somebody has blown it in our national science and our national intelligence complex. And they've got to get their act together. It's a big deal. Why do you have more faith in their

ability to craft a media narrative when we know the plethora of failures in their own purview, in their bellywit, the F-35 lightning, trillions of dollars, a project that is still, by all accounts, completely inadequate for the pilots that fly it, putting potential of our brave men and women at risk. That's their job. That's their day job. In other words, if you ask me, Brian, you know, why aren't you good at crafting this narrative of the media when you go out, that's not my job. I'm a professor of astrophysics at UC San Diego. You're faulting them or you're using that as sort of evidence that the trains off the tracks at the Pentagon, when in reality, they're not even good at some of the things that they've done in terms of monitoring threats. How about this, Eric, we had a threat that they knew about in 2019, 2020, and all I could hear about is, oh, it's great.

The Chinese can build a hospital in nine days. Ha, ha, look at them. We should have known at that point. I was buying stuff on Amazon, you know, when I started to hear. that because i was like hmm that's unusual why are they building a hospital yeah they're awful human you know treatment of human beings welding them in or doing whatever they never were reputed to do but we have trillions of dollars in the nsa in the pentagon the do d why didn't we catch that how come how come you're not more concerned about that what do you mean i mean i just put myself

at risk as a noted xenophobe and racist for claiming that a wet market that does not appear to sell bats is an unlikely source and that the Wuhan Institute of Virology before John Stewart decided that the rest of us could say what was obviously true. I'm very tired of these people. And at some point, and I don't mean to be rude, you have to ask people with an above 80 IQ for help. And if you're not willing to do that, then we are not in possession of, we don't, I don't understand something. I don't mean to be rude about it. But we developed the world's best factory for producing smart people out of ordinary human beings. And I know those people.

Those are my friends. They're your friends. And we've got a large number of them. And they're completely in the dark. They are so far as I can tell, unless they've all been taken to, you know, method acting school. And each one of them can put Dustin Hoffman to shame. Nobody bothered to wake the scientific community. The idea of saying we're going to have a Manhattan project by getting middle school teachers together in the desert and make PowerPoint presentations to each other is not what you do.

You'd go call the Institute for Advanced Study first and foremost. There are like five guys. If I were just to go one place, I'd go pick up, and Brian, you and I have fought about this before, I'd pick up Edwitt and Robert Diagraph, Nima Arkani, Hamer. Juan Maldesana and Natty Cyberg, just before breaking a sweat. I'd call up Jim Simons and ask for his help. I would make sure that I was talking to people who have domain expertise with respect to general relativity, particle theory, differential geometry. Every time we get into this conversation, I hear about material science.

And I say, I really don't care that much. you know at some level if it's just a change in technology if somebody figured out hypersonic technology fine i get it but this has become completely crazy the idea that we avoid smart people at all costs we make sure that there are no smart people in our covid narrative there are no smart people in our physics narratives there are no smart people in our threats this yes i i understand i'm stepping into the following bear trap eric you sound elitist No kidding. Look at the prosperity all around you if you happen to live in an advanced country. You're welcome. Now, get the data to the smart people and stop effing around. And maybe they are just to be a devil's advocate as Michael's written about and his book Giving the Devils Doe behind me there.

Just a reminder around Michael Shermer, he has a wonderful channel on this very channel, which will hopefully not get banned or taken down anytime soon. and that is called Skeptic. So, At Skeptic. And Eric Weinstein has a channel as well. I put that in the show notes as well. He's the proprietor of the portal podcast with the prosity and the popping. And I've got my good SR71 Blackbird filter on top of my SSL2 microphone. I'm Brian Keating, Chancellor's a Signished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego,

and the proprietor of the Into the Impossible podcast. But Eric, perhaps, as a devil's advocacy method, Perhaps the Pentagon and our rulers, they do know that this is actually nothing to waste the time. And you remember, you know, the mathematician Erdos, who was forced by his colleagues and students to get off methamphetamines for some period of time for a month in the 1950s, I believe it was. And at the end of the month, he came to his colleagues and his students' door and he said, congratulations, you've set back mathematics exactly one month. Now, I'm wondering, what if they know this? What if they know that there's nothing? There's no there, there's no there there.

And why waste Ed Witten's time, your friend with the same initials? Although there's only one EW that I care about. There are multiple EWs that we care about. Ed Witton's an amazing person who I don't think it was a very good steward of the physics enterprise. It's not the issue. The issue is, I mean, I don't know. You have to appreciate. Every day I get up, I look at the world.

The world is so far shifted from what I expect. I write about it on Twitter. I used to do podcasts. I will do them again. The reason people listen to me is that I'm perpetually just scratching my head and say, did somebody let off a neutron stupid bomb all over the world? Now we're having the craziest discussions about narratives that make absolutely no sense. We either have a significant threat or we don't.

If you have a significant threat, you hired the people, you train the people, you go talk to them. In the 1950s, for example, we appeared to have two separate programs. programs that were dealing with anti-gravity and involving two separate philanthropists. One of them worked through an aerospace company and a military air force base. The other one worked through the university system. I believe that the Higgs mechanism bizarrely came out of all of this stuff. You know, we have dabbled in this before. I looked through the list of names on this 38 papers of atyp.

I don't know that A-Tip is the only thing that's been tasked with. you know, understanding this. We are not behaving as an advanced technological society facing a genuine mystery with military and safety implications. And I will, you know, you will see people writing things like, wow, Eric goes on at great length. He says the same thing. You know, Paul Erdisch wasn't that important of a mathematician.

He was very good, but he was like a combinatorist. He was, you're not talking about Alexander Grothendique. You're not talking about Michael Atia or Ed Witten. I'm saying that we have people who would, I believe in general, if we have real data, would go through this like a knife through butter. Now, somebody in the comment said something about it. Has Eric never heard of the Jasons? Well, one, how badly degraded are the Jasons?

If you know that this is supposed to be our super elite advising group, I believe we tried to shut them down because we can't figure out why we still train smart people. We're behaving like lunatics who built the society that was able to build the blackbird, to build the bombs, to do all of the amazing things that we do, are chip factories. Nobody in the private sector would put up with this kind of avoidance of scrutiny. And one of the reasons that is least likely to be aliens and is least likely to be anything really exciting is that is the need. no one's scared enough to make a trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts, Berkeley, California, Princeton, New Jersey, Hyde Park, Illinois. I don't know. I just don't know how to think about people who avoid smart people and continually have discussions about nothing.

I mean, look at these papers. This is not what we're supposed to be doing. Okay, Devils have to get back to what Michael said earlier, which is you could have made the same argument back in 19, 49, Michael. Richard Feynman needs to know about this, this strange material, this found crash stuff. How come we're not talking to Richard Feynman? Michael, we were talking to Richard Feynman. About UAPs?

Sorry, when Richard Feynman tells the amusing story about getting off in North Carolina at the airport, and he doesn't know which university to go to, and he says to the cab driver, you know, the genius Richard Feynman says, were people going to any university saying GMU knew? And they said, oh, yeah, that's UNC Chapel Hill. Well, that was Bainson Institute, something like the Institute for the Study of Physical Fields, extended a position to Bryce DeWitt, his wife, Cecil Morit DeWitt. That was about anti-gravity. And, you know, it just, it bothers me that nobody has David Kaiser onto their program

to know the history of this stuff. He was on this program talking just about that and you can look for a link to it. Why do you think I come on this program? I mean, Brian, you're doing stuff that nobody else is doing. But what I'm trying to say is I call up MIT and I call up David Kaiser and I say, look, here's the history that I know. You know, we're not talking to people. I deal with colleagues who believe that peer review is an intrinsic part of science,

which is clearly not true. The brainwashing of our scientific institutions, the fact that we don't know the history of the golden age of general relativity, that we don't understand the way in which anti-gravity intersected, the way that we don't understand that we distributed programs in the interstitial regions between nonprofits like universities, government agencies like units of the military, and private corporations like our aerospace corporations. We used to know how things got done.

And then we passed the Mansfield Amendment in the late 1960s, early 1970s, to put the kibosh on military funding of civilian research and we went completely insane. I mean, I understand their motivation for not wanting the military to be directing civilian research during the Vietnam War. But when you knock out a load-bearing wall, you are responsible for putting some support in its place before the destruction is complete. Michael, if you're in charge of the audience is clamoring to hear from Michael and make sure that he's still there. Or if he's frozen in 1997 on his AOL 56K modem dial. Michael, we love you. Michael, you're in charge of the Pentagon. You've got access to, you know, Kamala Harris, our lead, no, no, Joe Biden. And you're able to do what, what do you think is warranted at this point? What do you think is warranted to kind of address these legitimate concerns of Eric, on one hand, of the pilots, Alex and Dietrich heroes, of the others who are making claims and of earnest individuals, many of whom are listening and watching 1,200 people listening on watching.

online right now. I mean, what would you do? To what level do we apply resources? Go ahead. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

Yeah, so, you know, of course, if I, you know, transported myself into the Pentagon, and I would just release everything, but that's because I'm on the outside, and I don't know what I don't know that's on the inside. And so it's like one of my concessions to conspiracy theories that are true is that when you get elected president or whatever, and you go and you see the inside, And you go, oh, that's why we didn't pull the troops out of Iraq, or that's why we didn't close Gitmo, or that's why we can't close that base in Germany or whatever, because, you know, I don't know what they know. And so while it's easy for us on the outside to say, yeah, just release the information. I mean, come on.

There could be reasons why they don't. I mean, we didn't know about the stealth bomber for, you know, probably 20 years from the time they were building it. A really revelatory book I read was Kelly's book on the Burbank located. The Skunk Works, where they designed the U-2 spy plane. All that was going on right here in Los Angeles. I mean, people are driving by on the 134 freeway, and here's these spy planes being designed. Nobody knew about it. So it's possible that, you know, it's something like that.

And the other hand, it could be nothing. And it could be something like we're all in the middle of a psych experiment. One of these illusions with degraded information, you know, like backward masking of playing rock songs backwards to see what different people hear. Or that, remember a couple years ago, that dress that was golden and white, no, it was blue and black. And, you know, people looking at degraded information or hearing degraded information, you know, there's this pattern illusory, I call it patternicity, where we tend to find patterns. in that when you can't quite tell what's going on. And this is my sense about these videos and photographs. Is they're degraded just enough?

We can't quite make it out. You have people like Mick West, you know, crunching the numbers. Could be this. There's some trigonometry. Could be that. Okay. Somebody in the Pentagon knows exactly what the videos mean. Why aren't they telling us?

This is the question. And I don't know. Again, of course, if I went in there, I would release it all. But maybe if I went in there, I'd go, oh, okay, now I see why we can't tell what's going on. I think it sounds like we're in agreement. Like, I'm not saying we should release all the data. I'm saying that you should either release the data or you should get the smart people in one place as we have done in the past to say, look, we've got a problem. We've got a blue-on-blue situation.

our UFO enthusiasts have stumbled on our top secret drone program or on the knowledge that we've been leapfrogged by our adversaries or something like this. But you don't just like not worry about it. And why is Mick West anywhere in the story? Like the debunking. Because he's the one that's offered some actual hard arguments for what the numbers mean on the screen. and what this is as an alternative to the other two hypotheses. Why did Mick West ever, Mick,

Mick West has got other things to do. Why is he being put to this task when presumably the experts who run these cameras and these planes should be doing? It's exactly what you said before. And by the way, Michael, you know, what you just said, though, is that the history of the stealth bomber is a counter example to the idea that all information leaks instantly, you know, in some sense, is that if... Well, no, my point there was that it didn't. Because this would be a counter argument to what I usually say is the skunk works.

The skunk work was operating for decades where, you know, those of us in the public and no idea what was going on. So it is possible for secrets to be kept, at least for a while. Yeah, but in free societies, of course, is much harder. I mean, the Soviets had a replica of the space shuttle called the Bahrain, identical in every way to one of our, you know, highest performing... vehicles ever invented, ever created, because we're an open society, which puts us at an informational disadvantage. I want to talk more about science and scientists. You guys are some of my favorite,

you know, deep thinkers about science. We're living in an unscientific age. But getting back to this notion that I talked about earlier, where on the cover of the New York Times, you know, Pentagon says it's not UFO, it's not aliens, but can't rule it out either. How do we talk to people, Eric? You made this point, you know, the risk of type of... Wait, sorry, he didn't do that. It was too difficult. different headlines. Two different headlines. One revision of the other. Yes. And they use their favorite technique where they say something that's defensible to indicate something that they really wish to convey to the public. So I think newsdiffs.org still exists. Let's be very careful because

every time the New York Times plays that particular game, it's important to catch them at it and not pretend that we're just reading a newspaper trying to inform us. Right. So that's why I want to get to this core issue of the media and who benefits. It's clear. I don't think either one of a, either one of you could refute the fact that the media is benefiting. They have almost nothing to lose from reporting both sides of the story, not featuring, you know, skeptics on a 60 Minutes show, not featuring, you know, a counter narrative in the New York Times article. But how do we, science-minded people, how do we, you know, take this burden upon us? Do we have to educate the the population on what type 1 errors are, type 2 errors are, so that they'll answer Eric's

legitimate question, Michael, you know, if the risk is small, but the concept, you know, the probability is low, but the impact factor of not picking up the phone and calling Eric, and I'll give out his phone number, let me give you, no, no, but, but if the risk is incredibly high, even if the chances are low, why aren't they calling him? So that's a legitimate thing. That's type 1 versus type 2. Do we have to educate the public and fight the battles and uncover what these things are, where do you come down on that? Well, yes. Yeah, what's our obligation?

I should point out a book that just came out May 3rd. It's called The Grey Lady Winked, how the New York Times is misreporting, distortions and fabrications radically alter history. I haven't read the book yet. I want to get the author on the podcast. You know, he reaches back to the First World War, the Second World War, and how, you know, the media is just not as, unbiased as we'd like them to be, including all the news that's fit to print. So, yeah, it's,

I don't know, it's frustrating. When I hear stories like on this particular topic, and I can see the mistakes that are made in the media that are so simple that they didn't have to make, it makes me wonder, when I hear a story about Israel and Palestine or Russia and civil rights violations in China or something else I know next to nothing about, I can't help but wonder, what kind of bullshit am I getting? When I know they were wrong over here on a simple subject like that or just take the Wuhan

viral clinic and all that stuff. I mean, with Eric's pointed out and with his brother as well, but really they've been on the front lines of all this. And now we're seeing, for the first time in history, zero profit motive, instantaneous ability to disconnect huge audiences, you know,

from people who are legitimate scientists, trained individuals and basically U.S. senators. I mean, whether you agree with Johnson or not, he's a U.S. senator, it's very unusual to think about this, taking away a former president's ability to communicate using some point. Now we're in this new era where misinformation, disinformation, even if it is incorrect information, how can you check? How can you cross-check? And I just find it to be very dangerous. And I'm wondering what can we do about it as scientists are people who care about this country and want to benefit the public. As I say, I'm a public employee, I work for the state of California,

at University of California, and I view it as my obligation to give moral obligation to teach to the public in words they can understand. But at what level do we really hold the people accountable that may be throttling accounts, information, followers, videos, et cetera. So, I mean, Eric, what do you think is the next likely thing to happen? Is it cancellation of this information, redaction? Where are we going from here? Well, we don't know.

I mean, I have to admit, to be blunt about it, that if we find out that this was a, that there was really very little here at all, which is still, I guess, possible because the real data is, I don't know how they created this sort of haystack of nonsense to hide a needle of something. It's a very weird thing to call up Sam Harris and have him say, well, it's probably not aliens. I mean, you know, we have Michael Shermer here, and I don't love the whole skeptic sort of vibe because I think that these people, the best of us, and I'm really glad to have Michael on this program, are somewhat open, but, you know, recognize that it's very unlikely. to be something of such earth-shattering consequence. I guess what I feel like is if they're chewing up the credibility of everyone who can

hope to talk to the public, I mean, let me just say this. This is against the backdrop of COVID, where some of us had to say, I'm not so sure that we should be going to see Chinese New Year celebrations. I'm not sure we should be running the L.A. marathon. I'm not sure that.

masks only magically work for people who work in hospitals and the rest of us shouldn't wear them. Oh, no, no, we have to wear them two weeks to flatten the curve made no sense. What you're seeing is almost like a constant attack on the credibility of scientists with these childlike official narratives and a bunch of smart people who are held hostage to them because in order to challenge them results in censorship and expulsion and, you know, just check out the comments, the number of negative things that you see scrolling by. So what you're seeing is you're seeing the degradation of your scientific class forced to deal with inadequate information, spending their time in things that are completely inefficient because of the presence

of centralized narratives, which are then given the sort of blessings of the institutions. And so what's ultimately going to happen here is that we're not going to believe almost anybody if we keep chewing through this the way we're doing. I'm worried about what happens when you can't go to Sam Harris for sobriety or Michael Shermer for sobriety? Like I'm willing to swing it a bunch of pitches in part because I came from a family that went through the McCarthy era. And we found out, hey, you know all those conspiracies? A lot of them were really true because they were targeted on you and your family. Right? And so my Bayesian priors have to do with the fact that a spy was sent against my own family.

And when people say, oh, well, you know, that's conspiracy talk. Well, if we had known that there was a spy sent against our own family, we wouldn't have had our names read on national television and turned into pariahs, now would we? So, you know, in part, I'm going to take the prerogative of saying, having been betrayed by my government, which I still love and support, but I also know that they actually do conspire. Right now, the biggest danger we have is the. degradation of trust in authoritative voices because to sit inside of the institutions means to depend on a paycheck that is subordinate to a narrative. To sit outslide is to be is to

risk becoming a crank talking to the public. The question is why are why are these people having these conversations? Why are grown people talking about little green men? And you know, I just I have to tell you I came off a a three thousand person call on Twitter spaces because my brother just got the second strike as an evolutionary theorist talking about whether or not Ivermectin might be effective against COVID and that whether or not novel RNA vaccines might result in free-floating spike proteins that would have degradation at the level of histology and cytology. And the idea that Susan Wajiki, whoever the hell she is, has the right to shut down biologists and even potentially the

originator of the MRNA vaccine technology or one of the innovators. We have a, right now, Brian, what we have to do is we scientists have to stop being employees. We have to have our professors remember that they're not meant to be the employees of the universities. They are the fucking owners. And to subject people, to implicit bias tests. which doesn't make any sense. Or to have somebody who can compute the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron subjected to critical race theory,

to get them to be more racist as a compulsory part of employment, is a degradation of the condition of American citizenship. And it is getting to the point where I'm ready to pick up a torch and a pitchfork and march on the chancellors of the UC system and other fine universities and say, over my fucking dead body. Give us our data. Give us our dignity. Get the hell out of our labs. Get out of our classrooms. Pretty pleased with sugar on top. We've created the prosperity of the country. And it is now time for you to remember that you don't have administrative rights over me. And if Susan Wojicki starts to throw Brett Weinstein off of YouTube and if we get thrown off because

we're having a UFO conversation, I'm going to have to ask whether our society has been hijacked by a geopolitical strategic rival because this is incredibly dangerous. You don't chew through the credibility of your public-spirited smart people who are technically capable of separating fact from fiction when given proper data and autonomy and subject them to being supervised as if they're toddlers in a nursery. Michael, any response from you about the new... Eric, listening to you is like, it's like Martin Luther, nailing the 95 Theses on door. I can do no other. He's got more theses, though. He's got more

theses. I call Eric, you know, they say, Michael, most people are, if they're lucky, they're broken clocks, they're right, you know, twice a day. Well, Eric is my atomic, my atomic clock. So how do you respond to all this, Michael? Well, so I guess, well, no, I mean, these are all good points, but the question is that the way Eric describes it sounds very top down, very agent prone, like there's somebody kind of manipulating things. I do wonder if it's more just bottom-up, just the way the system is designed to end up with these kinds of sensorial actions against individuals or universities becoming these just kind of quagmires of bureaucracy that can't

seem to stop from tripping over themselves. I don't know. It's a hard call. It could be both. You know, when you start pushing critical race theory and you force people to take implicit bias tests, which we know don't work. They do not measure what you think you're measuring. We've shown that.

We ran columns seven years ago from Carol Taveris, summarizing the meta studies on this implicit race test showing it doesn't work. It's not measuring implicit racism. It's measuring the speed at which you respond if objects you're familiar with are not familiar with as a race or a gender or a size or whatever it is that you're doing. So not to mention the second part of that, which is that there's no evidence whatsoever that any of these training programs do anything to alter people's attitudes to other people, unless it ends up making them even more hostile for having to go through these programs. I'm sure it's trying to make me more racist.

Well, you can't falsify it. That's the problem. You know, if I say Michael, what are you doing for your anti-Semitism training? There's no way he can answer that question. Right. I can't answer it. Right. But my point is this.

Is this just what big bureaucratic agencies end up doing, just sort of kind of going along with the media narrative that, you know, Black Lives Matter, okay, so we got to do these following things. I don't want to do it, but, you know, we should do it. And that's kind of a bottom up, more of a bottom-up explanation of what we're going through. Versus there's a handful of people at the top kind of manipulating us into going in this direction, or some combination of both. There definitely is a handful.

I mean, as Eric said, Eric, Susan Wajicki, when I was looking on there, the first thing I thought is, like, where is there, they have a YouTube medical team? Like, that's pretty awesome. Like, you know, they're really looking out for it, but they don't, right? Who are they?

What are their credentials? If that which can be refuted by scientific evidence and the preponderance of it, we have a right for transparency and accountability, but then, Eric, can't they say to you, you don't like it? You make your own platform. Are you kidding?

me? I mean, I've been through, look, I don't mean to be, there's a point at which you have to appreciate that the more I reiterate the same simplistic points that these are communications utilities. And I have an old joke as a Democrat, should Republicans be allowed to use the roads? Lord knows, they could get up to something conservative. They might actually meet and they might have unfettered conversations behind closed doors. So at some point, point when you're having a conversation about should Republicans be able to use the roads to meet in an unfettered context, having conversations in plan political action, you have to recognize that is not a

natural conversation. That is an insane conversation. And I say that as a Democrat and maybe even a progressive Democrat, what we're talking about, all of us have enough years on us that we remember a very different world. Whatever this thing is, you know, as I say, everyone can prove to them by doing any research that peer review is not naturally a part of science. There is nothing that I am held up as a crank for more than reminding people of this truth. Anyone who speaks a particular truth becomes a crank in the eyes of the narrative. This idea of calling Vichy France France is intrinsically offensive to a Frenchman, sheltering in England, plotting and caucusing with the English as to how to retake the nation of France.

Right now, what we need to do is we need to retake the nation of science. We need to take our own universities back. And, you know, nobody believes in this stuff who's smart. We just all sit around cowering like spineless invertebrates every time somebody threatens to call us a name. And what I'm trying to say is, Brian, you remember how to do physics, you remember how to do science, you remember how to communicate it. But what we don't do is we don't stand up and say what Jordan Peterson said or Brett Weinstein said or I say, we have to effectively say no mas, you can fire me. And as Einstein said, so brilliantly and clearly, it is the obligation of the public intellectual to face financial ruin and prison. And if we are not willing to face

financial ruin and prison to defend our values which provide the prosperity and security under which everyone else shelters, then we deserve to learn Mandarin in our schools in preparation for our future. Now, I personally would like to avoid that. I'd rather learn Yiddish or Hindi, but I think it's extremely important to recognize that this is the moment and you can't slither away from your destiny forever. And, you know, kind of turning now to some questions from the audience that people are asking things, you know, that I find are legitimate. Again, I don't have the courage to put on a uniform and fly in an FAT. I'd love to do it. It would be a lot of fun, and I'm hoping somebody to have the courage to talk about Jeffrey Epstein and the intelligence community.

Do I? Yeah. Not to the level of you, but I find it fascinating. I'd love to know more about it. I think we've covered, I think I have a one conspiracy limit per episode, so I would love to keep talking about it. But no, seriously, I would like to talk about it, but obviously you've taken that issue. No, you're saying that you can't ask the same people to load up on. the Wuhan lab leak, Jeffrey Epstein, the madness of critical race theory. We've got these designated expendables, right?

And they have to hit every single thing to keep our society from going in this extremely degraded direction. Do you think it's coming primarily from the university? Michael, you teach at Chapman University. Your classes are, you know, renowned for their clarity, for their excellence and for their popularity. you know, what do you see on campuses? Do you see us being outmoded? I've talked to Eric about this in the past. Are my days numbered? Are our days numbered as faculty when we can get instantaneous access to information, perhaps filtered? Perhaps not. But why I learn from me when they can learn from, you know, Galileo or Carl Sagan or whoever? Do we have existential threats to all these institutions, including media and academia?

If it was just the knowledge, then maybe. But the value of the degree of, having gone to the brick and mortar buildings at that particular Ivy League or prestigious university that carries weight according to the current narrative, that's what you're supposed to do. Then, no, our days are not numbered. You know, that will continue. To those autodidacts that don't care about that, they just want to learn, they can do all that without going to the brick and mortar buildings. And I think they will.

I just think the levels of education will increase dramatically through, you know, internet sources and so on without having to do that. But the universities will continue. I think it'll be interesting to see, you know, the fallout from the pandemic, those universities that were just kind of on the margins financially anyway, they may fold, much like a lot of restaurants that closed that just could never reopen again. That may happen. It remains to be seen on that after they got their PPP loan. you know, and now they still can't bounce back, you know, we'll see in the next year or so. But the big ones, you know, they have endowments. They can last for years being hammered financially.

And so I think they'll continue because we continue to overvalue a college education, I have to say, even though I'm in the academy and I value it, you know, I just, you don't need that to have a good life, to have an enriched life or even to be rich for that matter. You don't have to have a college degree. So I think, you know, that's it in general. I think we're going to have to move away from, we're going to have to decouple teaching and babysitting from research, though. I think that it's very important to recognize that the.

Babesity. Rockefeller University, the University of California, San Francisco, Perimeter Institute, the Institute for Advanced Study, are all effectively universities, without undergraduates. And in the case of the Institute for Advanced Study, it's without graduate students, not to say that you can't be on loan from Princeton, the university. I think what we're coming to understand is that the danger of housing weaker subjects next to stronger subjects and teaching next to research with actually a tremendous hazard and that what had previously been seen

is a symbiosis, whereby teaching and research both aided each other in a particular life is actually a tremendous risk when the culture of academics has been lost. The culture of academics being lost has to do with a bunch of different things. It has to do with the Eilberg Amendment of 1976, the Bidol Amendment of 1980, the Immigration Act of 1990, the Mansfield Amendment of the late 60s, early 70s. I think that you have to recognize that something has marched by making structural changes through time that leave us less free. Our professors have less autonomy. They are now thought of as teachers.

They are subordinate students. All of this is completely wrong to be called NASLUG. Have made disastrous choices for our elite research universities. And people have to recognize that they have certain. things that we have lied to the public about or at least misled the public about. The principal feature of a research university is research, not the teaching of undergraduates. And until we actually get to the point where we can say, look, this was a funding model. It has a lot to do with a guy named Vannevar Bush and something called the Endless Frontier,

which was the blueprint post-World War II. Until we're actually able to educate our people in a non-fictitious history of how we got to be this powerful, rich and smart, um, we were. We are going to assume that Americans have always been stupid, that in fact universities have always been about teaching, that all subjects, all professors are called scholars, no subjects are better than any others, that there's no relationship between the military and our science, that there's no national character of science that just actually, you know, sort of is something that we fund with our taxpayer dollars, but all these things are for the good of the planet, that

our graduate students aren't students, they're workers. The problem is that when we wake up in the morning and we have a steady diet of lies that can be detailed, but there's no place inside of the establishment in the institutions that is keeping an accurate version of our history. So imagine you're living in a house where the plans to the house are completely fictitious. And every time you try to do remodeling or you try to fix a water main or a sewage pipe, you find out that the plans to the house aren't actually corresponding to the house at all. That's the problem with lying to yourself about your own system. By the time the people who started the lying pass on and their great-grandchildren are manning the system, the family no longer knows how the house works.

They live in it, but they don't actually understand how it was built and what changes were made. And that's where we are right now, is that we can't fix our own problems because nobody who's courageous enough to actually say what's true can get anywhere close to being a provost or president or a chaired professor. Yeah, we had a taste of that during commencement season, the various universities across this great state of California, where I'm privileged to teach. But again, we see, as I see, existential threats. I see, you know, if you do a SWAT analysis, we have certain opportunities, but the

opportunities seem to be, if you divide opportunities by threats, I think the ratio is not looking very good for my profession. And as you look at, I had on Michael Saylor at the beginning of this year, and he was making Public Sailor Academy, making an accredited university to teach STEM subjects. Now, he's not going to teach, you know, as he says, he's not going to teach, you know, literature and French poetry, but he's going to teach STEM, you know, can you learn to code, you can do stuff online with some class-based cohort stuff. I think it's interesting, but I'd like to know from you guys. So we know and we believe, and I am worried actually, to be honest, about, you know, demonizing, you know, China and Russia. I don't see how that serves thermonuclear nations to,

to view each other, not xenophobic purely, although that's evil and wrong and racism is evil and wrong. We all agree. But just to stipulate, you know, what, what are the, are there any bright spots? I mean, I look at India. I see them very fast to adopt things like cryptocurrencies. I see them extremely highly educated, huge population, very mobile with 4G, 5G. These are incredibly, you know, is that a bright spot? Where do you guys see as a bright spot amidst it? Or are we really going to, you know, potentially descend into a lot of potential, you know, xenophobia, anti-progress narratives? I'll start with Michael. Do you see any bright spots for either addressing, you know, addressing the claims of this original podcast or are just bright spots for

progress of humanity, technology, et cetera? given your efficient market hypothesis theory. Well, I don't know how efficient it is, but well, anti-progress has always been around. I mean, you can go back to the ancient Greeks who complained about, you know, the lack of progress and so on. And that's just human nature, you know, to focus the negativity bias drives us to notice negative things, more than positive things. And if you're a pundit, you get almost no kudos for saying things are getting better. but if you're a pundit that, you know, constantly talks about the, you know, at the end of this and the, and the demise of that, then you get a lot more hits.

And it's not that these things can't happen. It's just that they rarely do. Most downfalls are more incremental than sudden, not only, but, you know. So, again, the, you know, the end of the academy, you know, probably not. I could see, you know, many positive shifts. Everything Eric said, I think, is a concern. You know, how do you become a dean and then a provost and a president and so forth? Well, there's, you know, a lot of politicking.

And I wouldn't want the job in particular because that's like a real job instead of getting to, you know, do research and teach and all the fun stuff that we went into this in the first place. And now it looks more and more like within the last year or so that if you want those jobs, you, you absolutely. absolutely have to play the critical race theory card. I just don't see any way around it, at least for the next year or two. Many of us are pushing back on this, but, you know, it's hard to say if the pendulum is going to swing back anytime soon. I'm fond of telling the story my wife from Germany, you know, when she came here and we started noticing these trends, and she kept saying, oh, my gosh, you know, I'm worried about her kid going off to school and getting indoctrinated, And I kept up, don't worry, that pendulum is going to swing back any day now.

And it's just been getting worse and worse. And, you know, now the trans stuff on top of the race stuff and gender and everything else. And, you know, it does seem like we've lost our collective minds. But on the other hand, there's a lot of us pushing back. There's a lot of organization like Barry Weiss's new organization fair. And they're not the only ones. There's a dozen like that. And also organized groups like the Heterodox Academy.

There's a dozen of those of organizations. organized professors saying, we're not going to, you know, we're mad as hell and we're not going to put up with it anymore. Now, maybe they'll lose their jobs. I don't know. But in any case, there's an, if, you know, it's the spiral of silence problem. To break the spiral of silence, you just have to have enough people speak out, just a tipping point. It might be 3%, 5% of people stand up and say, no. And that releases the next 10% to say, yes, I was worried about the same thing, I was afraid to say anything. And then 20% more.

And then 30%. And pretty soon you have a majority that say, yeah, yeah, no, we're not going to do this anymore. And, you know, that's how it happens. And so I'm hoping that that unfolds in the next, I don't know, five years or so. I can't say it's going to turn around the next six months, though. Eric, what do you see? Is any optimism?

I mean, anything you've changed your mind on, anything to not go away and hit the sauce? like I normally do after we chat. Tipple, to make me not tipple. Is that my Japanese whiskey? No, I never gave you the bottle. I only have water. I got to.

This is Roo-O-O-O-O-N-W-SRoy, guys. But not Scotch, unfortunately. Oh, we're together. Look, I mean, it's an odd question. I mean, I just, people say, well, don't complain, do something. I do. And I, like, one thing is, is that, um, so far as I can tell, people stopped trying to unify physics. And geometric unity is in a live attempt waiting for somebody

to engage it to push beyond both the Einsteinian paradigm and the standard model paradigm. That's a direct attempt to come up with new physical fields, new forces, to question the actual standard model as it is, there are two generations, not three, and there's a reason you're being fooled about the third. The world is not chiral. It's emergently chiral. So, in essence, attempting to learn your own source code is, you know, we didn't really get to the point of saying, which would have been responsible, but terrifying, assume that it's aliens,

then what? Yeah. Right? So if it is aliens, which has to be a leg on the decision tree, the question is, how would aliens make the most sense. So one of the things that I've been trying to point out is that we always talk about extra dimensions as if they are extra spatial dimensions. But in my theory, I believe that there are additionally either four or six temporal dimensions. The ability to hack both time and space at the level of dimension is not clear to me as to whether they're accessible. But imagine,

for example, that you could enlarge rulers to shrink distances. I'm excited about the idea. of junking this fetishization of Mars and the moon and taking a look at the night sky and asking the question, if Einsteinian theory is only an effective theory, as indicated by the existence of Schwartzschild and initial singularities in our model, then wouldn't it be amazing if we could get beyond that as an effective theory and due to Einstein what Einstein did to Newton and recover him as an approximation, and find out whether a change in our understanding and actually getting to the source code would unlock something new. Conversely, the level of markets have put forward a field theoretic, you know, approach to economics together with my wife.

And I'm delighted to see that Stephen Wolfram seems to be in the process of discovering that inflation is a physical theory and that holonomy looks like the Bohm-Arenoff effect. and he will soon, I believe, rediscover our work, which will be tremendously exciting as his PR is somewhat better than mine. So the issue of finding excitement with respect to new biological applications, new crypto applications, I think distributed computing is incredibly exciting. If you supplement, Bitcoin fixes this with things like academic freedom fixes this, or geometric unity or gauge theory fixes this,

those are memes, unfortunately, to the kiddies in the Bitcoin maximalist community who just like to cause trouble for the most part. But to be honest, those guys really have a point and a soul, and they're trying to do great things. I think that what happened in El Salvador may be a disaster, but the idea of a country adopting a cryptocurrency that it does not control to try to bring fiscal discipline and freedom is tremendously exciting. and given how bad El Salvador has been in terms of all sorts of governance problems,

one of the interesting questions is, does Bitcoin fix this? So I think that what you have to say is AR and VR are tremendously exciting. Personalized medicine is tremendously exciting. Space travel, temporal and spatial dimension hacking is exciting. I think that all sorts of things that we could be doing would be, great. The really interesting thing is that sooner or later, somebody with probably 11 figures of wealth and up is going to watch one of these programs and say, you know, there's only so much I can do with one more effing Lamborghini. Why don't we try to actually do something that moves the needle

and give a small number of the people trying to push the frontier the freedom over their lives that we take for granted. Or we can just go, you know, and put one more private plane in the fleet, one more mega yacht in the Mediterranean, and just watch the whole thing crumble and burn. So what my real hope eventually is, is that doing this at scale, we are eventually going to find somebody who wants to do something very different with money. And so far as I know, none of our billionaire class, not one billionaire, is really interested in rebuilding the stuff that is now crumbling. And so, you know, if you're out there and if you're watching this, there's a tremendous amount of stuff to do. Some of us will pick up shovels.

Some of us will pick up torches and pitchforks. But somebody else should pick up their checkbook and get us the hell out of here so that we can actually do something even more interesting than this amazing podcast, which I really enjoyed. Me too. And that's actually Eric, why I invited Michael. You talked about 11 figures of wealth. And Michael's here. Yeah, right. Yes. Reacher. How many more bikes do you need, Michael? Yes, yeah. Here's my checkbook. How much is it that you need exactly? How many zeros on that check? How many is it? I forget what? Yeah, you should have said is this a few of a bike. Does he really need another? All right, guys. I'm going to, I'm going to sign off and go have gauge theory whiskey.

Great. This has been wonderful. Michael. Thank you so much. Eric, thank you so much as usual. Just point to people I've had interviews with both these gentlemen. Wonderful conversations over the years. I hope to have many more with you guys. I always enjoy the conversation. And look if you are interested. I have a lot of videos about aliens. I'm sorry to say, this is my last video I'm going to do. I have one in the can I did with Seth Shostack. But I've had a very fascinating ride learning about from different signs, doing what the military calls or red team approach. You get people on the best signs and both sides. and you hopefully come to some notion of truth. But now this expedition is over as we wait, all with our collective attention drawn to what gets released in the next couple of weeks. I am dubious, but I hope, I'm hoping for the more fantastical because that'll ensure job security for me forever.

For now, please give a subscription to Michael's channel, Skeptic on YouTube. Please subscribe to Eric's channel. Also on iTunes, both these guys, leave them reviews, leave them ratings. It really helps us grow our channels and grow the audience with the algorithm that is continually working to defeat us. Anyway, I'm Brian Keating, your fearful host here at UC San Diego, co-director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. Stay tuned for some really cool videos that I have coming up about string theory, loop quantum gravity, polarization, and also inflation in the multiverse and God.

Why aren't so many physicists talk about God? We'll get Michael and Eric back on for that. Guys, love you guys. A wonderful night. Thank you all for joining. Good night. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening to End of the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating.

Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you, and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Kee. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website and sign up for his informative newsletter at brian keating.com. Into the Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Produced by Stuart Velko and Brian Keating.

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