Modern Wisdom - #982 - Jesse Michels - UFOs, Aliens, Antigravity & Government Secrets
Episode Date: August 18, 2025Sponsors: See me on tour in America: https://chriswilliamson.live See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most... popular Flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D, and more from AG1 at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get $100 off the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Timestamps: (0:00) Why is an Interest in UFOs Maladaptive? (1:36) What Does a Modern UFO Investigator Look Like? (12:03) Why is There So Little Evidence of UFOs? (20:24) How Do We Know UFOs Aren’t a SIOP? (27:47) Are UFOs a Global Phenomenon? (29:28) The Threat of Nuclear Sites (35:57) Why are Non-Human Intelligences on Earth? (38:56) Nuclear Site Interference by UFOs (46:56) Are the Department of Energy Involved? (55:58) How Far Can Civilians Go With UFO Research? (01:00:19) What Physics are Behind UFOs? (01:10:36) Where are We Currently in Physics? (01:16:25) Why Was Townsend Brown’s Experiment Never Replicated? (01:23:01) Why are Renegade Scientists So Highly Criticised? (01:37:02) Where Elon Musk is Going Wrong with Space Exploration (01:43:15) Are We Heading Towards an AI Takeover? (01:48:40) Assessing the Probabilities of Non-Human Intelligence (01:53:23) Consciousness in Quantum Physics (02:09:37) Find Out More About Jesse Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
An interest with UFOs is maladaptive to most people.
How so?
Oh, yeah, you're quoting me on, I think, Danny Jones.
I think in some ways, and this actually speaks to, you know, we're on modern wisdom here.
I think a lot of what people should be focused on is the lower end of Maslow's hierarchy.
Like, it's like subsistence living, you know, paying taxes on time, putting food on the table, being basically healthy.
And then I think at a certain point, then you start to care about this sort of more like existential, you know, who are we? What's our place in the universe? You know, what is humanity's place in the cosmos? And so that's why I think in some ways it's maladaptive, because if you don't have that lower end sort of figured out, it's like why focus on this sort of, you know, really crazy pie in the sky stuff.
That's so interesting that you think people have sort of taken the stair lift to the top of Everest of those hierarchy of needs.
you're asking, are we alone in the universe, but you haven't got a steady job or your health
in the toilet or you don't have a community of people around you, you're probably focusing on
the wrong things.
100%. In fact, I think a lot of people focus on it as a circumvention of reality itself. It's an escape
mechanism. And so you want to get abducted or taken away on a UFO or something.
Better than this fucking place.
Yeah, right. You want to throw Hail Mary because there's, you know, things aren't going well on sort of
a base level. And so I think for those people, they should probably just focus on the core
issue. You know, if they have like a marital problem or something, like, go focus on that.
Well, that's an interesting question. What is the avatar in 2025 of somebody who's interested in
UFOs? Because, you know, there's kind of a, and I wonder why this is the case. When I think about
UFOs, I always think about sort of the 60s and the 70s. Yes. That's kind of the golden era of
abductions and stories and Roswell and like that's kind of where my mind goes to yes but you're a
good example of someone who's super smart and is knee deep in all the research for this stuff
something tells me you're probably a little bit non-typical yeah but like who is the avatar for the
UFO investigator now or the the Monday morning quarterback I think it's radically shifting so I think
even five, ten years ago, it would have been like you go to this like contact in the desert.
Is this like, you know, convention for UFOs? It used to actually take place in the actual desert.
People started to get like heat strokes and stuff and now it's like indoors. But it's all like,
you know, it's a lot of crystal healers from the southwest sort of vibe. You know, it's people who are,
and I love a lot of these people, you know, they'll live in like Sedona or something or, you know,
in some of these small towns across the U.S. and they've had family experiences or their
just a little more kind of woo-woo, and that's what kind of got them into this stuff.
I think that's dramatically started to change.
I mean, a good example is, like, certain people you've had on, you've had on Eric Weinstein, my old colleague, you know, we work together at Teal Capital, you know, Peter Thiel's family office, you know, a very sort of conventionally successful guy.
You had Tulsi Gabbard on.
She's the now, you know, director of national intelligence who oversees all of the intelligence agencies.
She has stated as part of her mandate that she wants to look into UFOs.
And I've actually spoken to her, and she is explicitly very interested in this topic.
And so I think that plus a bunch of whistleblowers, David Grush, at the National Geospatial Agency and NRO, and has kind of a very kind of typical and impressive.
Less of a sort of crusty granola crowd.
Yes, exactly.
I think that is destigmatized it for a lot of people.
and you're starting to see high agency, Silicon Valley,
just, you know, average people start to get into the topic.
Whatever happened with UAPs?
Is UAPs, UFOs?
Because there was a brief period what we went there.
You know, it was like people of color, colored people,
and then we were back to people of color again.
Yes, yes.
There's a whole like, you know, yeah,
there's a whole like almost like a woke UFO thing going on.
A nomenclature thing.
It was, you know, and I don't like UAPs.
The reason I don't like it,
it, get a little context, there was something called the UAP Task Force that was actually set up,
and that was the context in which David Grush ended up blowing the whistle because he was tasked
by the National Geospatial Agency and this little group called the UAP Task Force,
which had representatives from pretty much every branch of the military looking into UFOs explicitly,
or UAPs, as they called them.
And that sort of, in that sort of group, they decided that UAPs was the new term.
it's a broader term
unidentified aerial phenomena
instead of
an unidentified flying object.
I like UFO because it's more specific
actually. It's sort of more falsifiable
in a sense. And
a lot of people are
worried about this whole thing
sort of being a sciop. And because
of that, I like the classic
just UFO. You know, this was in the
zeitgeist, like you said, in the 40s and 50s and
60s. And let's just go back to that.
In case UAP is
some scurlius
attempt to try and weave something else in. So, oh, it's a hot air balloon. It's a distortion in
the upper atmosphere. It's a whatever. 100%. Some sort of secret weaponry. Like, there's a whole,
so many different, there's a slew of possibilities as far as what you might see in the sky.
These days, a mylar balloon, you know, all these different things. And so I like UFO because it's,
it's more specific. And it's talking about the kind of archetypal, you know, a saucer, a tic-tac, a craft,
you know, these sort of, you know, things that people have seen not only, you know, since the 40s, 50s and 60s, but across, you know, millennia, like across disparate cultures, too.
Yeah, imagine that someone's never really looked that deeply into UFOs. How would you lay out the landscape and story arc of evidence for them?
Yeah, I love this. So I think UFOs go way beyond the threshold of what you'd need evidence-wise to accept this as a worthy field of inquiry.
if it were any other field, like literally the only reason people don't look into this is because
people who are part of the priestly citadel of science like Neil deGrasse Tyson say there's
nothing to UFOs. Otherwise, you have presidents who've openly talked about UFOs. You have
Don Jr. just interviewed, you know, outgoing President Trump in his first term saying,
what do you know about Roswell? I need to know. And Donald Trump goes, I know a lot of interesting
things, and I won't say them here. You have President Obama saying we have UFO, we have
unidentified flying objects that we don't know, you know, what they are in our sky. We're
investigating these things. The Office of Naval Intelligence and the Pentagon have released two
reports, one in 2020, one in 2021. And there are all these objects that, you know, you have
this sort of decision tree of like space trash and, you know, other sort of, you know,
mylar balloons, like all these things. And you have a bunch of these things that were spotted
that don't, you know, neatly categorize. President Jimmy Carter saw a UFO and is on video saying,
saw a UFO, he goes into his term, his single term, saying, you know, I want to declassify stuff
around UFOs, and then you'd never really hear anything about it again, which is the same thing,
by the way, that's happening with Trump. It's not even like the Epstein thing where you get this
bizarre kind of denial, lone sex trafficker theory that everybody knows is bogus. With the UFO thing,
it's this common trope where sometimes presidents will campaign on this thing, and then they just
go silent. And they cite national security often. And so it's this very sort of weird
And then most recently, in 2017, you had Leslie Kane, this New York Times journalist, come out with this article associated with the article are three videos. The gimbal, the GoFast video, these are videos that were taken off the coast of Florida and the Nimitz Tick-Tac sighting, which is this very famous sighting. Commander David Fraver is this Navy pilot who's very well respected. He was actually in charge of guarding Los Angeles during 9-11 when we weren't sure how.
how many planes were in the sky in which cities might be attacked.
So he's like a, you know, very reputable guy.
He speaks in this very matter-of-fact way.
And he saw this tic-tac-shaped object hovering right below, right above the surface of the water.
He was part of this Nimitz carrier strike groups, all these, you know,
uh, uh, uh, uh, Air Force, uh, carriers and, um, you know, his big Navy ships.
And, uh, and, and, and he went out on an F-16, saw this little Tick-Tac.
And the Tick-Tac, you know, went up to 60,000 feet,
plus in seven eighths of a second and you have him you have you have you have a fleer which is
forward looking infrared uh seeing this this object and this this video is up you can watch it on
youtube and stuff so since then and then david grush um who's this you know whistleblower saying
that he's basically uh over a hundred pages he gave to the i see inspector general this guy
thomas monheim in in 2022 Thomas monheim said this was urgent incredible and he gave
Thomas Monheim, 40 whistleblowers directly who said that they worked, they had firsthand knowledge
of UFO programs inside the government. And so that's like this very near-term falsifiable thing,
right? It's not this like hand-wavy claim. And I think since then, people have really started
to take this more seriously. But even more sort of, you know, outside of high levels of government
and, you know, needing to sort of explain that sort of mass hysteria way, if you're kind of a debunker,
you have databases like the National UFO Reporting Center, which have, you know, over 100,000 instances online.
So I think it's 150K plus at this point.
You have a great book called UFOs and nukes.
So one thing people like to say as far as, you know, why UFOs, you know, aren't scientific or aren't real is because they're ephemeral.
They show up randomly, right?
There's no repeatable.
Science has to be repeatable, right?
And I think this is very repeatable, actually, because UFOs show up.
consistently around nuclear installations,
nuclear weapons installations,
and nuclear energy civilian grids.
And so this book, which is almost 600 pages,
the most dry, terse book you'll ever read in your life.
It's almost boring because it's so meticulously done.
And if you speak to the guy I wrote it,
this guy named Robert Hastings,
you get no grifting vibes,
no like salesy, you know,
bullshit at all.
It's a spreadsheet masquerading as a book.
That's right.
It's a database.
And it's even better
than a database because it's filtering
for witnesses who are inherently
the most credible witnesses I could pick
in the world because these guys are on
what's called the PRP. So these guys are employees
at nuclear bases across the United States
and they're on what's called the PRP program,
the personal reliability program. They have to report
all of their mental health history and if they're
on ibuprofen. Like they literally have to report...
Because if you're in charge of a nuclear site of
some kind and you're having a bit of a wobble,
that's a bad idea.
That's a bad idea.
Get that person fired immediately.
I don't want that person around the crown jewel assets of American defense.
Yes.
So you have all the, and these guys often see tic tacks, orbs, saucers.
They'll see these objects.
They'll have to sign NDAs.
The Air Force Office of Special Investigations will enter their life and say, you know, sign this NDA,
and they're sworn to secrecy.
And then they're allowed to keep their jobs.
And if you think about it,
If somebody were like seeing something and it weren't this routine thing in the world of the Atomic Energy Commission and DOE, would any of these people be allowed to keep their jobs? Absolutely not.
So this, he has 167 of these whistleblowers and they've gone on record.
How is it the case?
You know, that's a large cohort of people from different backgrounds all talking about things that they've seen or seen that they've seen or heard that someone's seen or so on and so forth.
how is it the case
that there is so much
which is hearsay
and so little
which we have
like the where is
the actual
tangible evidence
not a recording
that's on
Fleer
not the story
that somebody said
not a list of sightings
surely we should
if there are this many
we should have
something
yeah
yeah well you again
you have a massive database
of first-hand reports, the Fleer, I think, is important. It's a sensor modality that, you know,
we see between 400 and 700 nanometers of the electromagnetic wave spectrum. Just because something's
at the 800 nanometer mark or 300 nanometer mark doesn't mean it's fake, you know, like that is a real
thing. So I think the Fleer thing is really important. And it feels like with UFOs, they either
crunch light or they stretch light because they move so fast. And so optical is,
is not actually a good modality for them. Usually they show up in infrared or in certain cases
UV rays. So like the ends actually of the visible spectrum. And so I do think that's like a
really important question. But then also there are photos. Like there's this McMinnville photo that
was taken in Oregon in the 50s. There's the Calvin photo, which is, you know, from Scotland,
these hikers in the 90s. And, you know, somebody from the British Ministry of Defense, this guy,
Nick Pope says that the Calvin photo is absolutely real. You have the negative.
in both cases.
So, you know, I do think you do have a decent amount of evidence.
Now, what you're asking, I think, is why don't we have a saucer unveiled at a hanger or something?
A piece of material that can be verifiably proven to be from something that's otherworldly.
So it's an interesting question.
I don't think you can definitively prove that something is necessarily otherworld.
You have to look at a fact pattern that, you know, is this a non-worldly?
enough to say that it's not from here.
And there's a guy named Gary Nolan,
who's a Nobel Prize nominee every single year.
He's a tenured professor at Stanford.
And he has crash materials in his lab.
I've seen them.
I've shown them on video on my show.
They're small.
But they were basically given to him around UFO crash.
Like UFO crash witnesses mailed them to this guy, Jacques Belay.
And Jacques Belay gave them to Gary Nolan.
He's done mass spectrometry on them.
He says that they have.
isotope ratios that don't naturally occur on Earth. And they don't pattern match to asteroids
as well. And so you have evidence like that when it comes to like large scale saucers,
I think you have to think probabilistically. So I love you. There's this English statistician
named Thomas Bays. And his model is, it's a way of scientific thinking, but it's not necessarily
like the Francis Bacon style where you go in, you have this null hypothesis that you cling to at all
costs. His is more you think about everything probabilistically. And so you catalog something as
low probability and you build up evidence. And so what I would say for the UFO phenomena is like
everybody has, are UFOs real? I'm 99% sure that aerial phenomena in the sky that don't pattern
match, you know, planes like, you know, prosaic explanations, where there's a nuclear link,
that is that is fully real
and then is there
a conflation going on between that and like
a saucer and a hanger
like maybe
I can't say in good faith that there
definitely isn't because I haven't seen the
saucer in the hangar right
so it's like you know it's like this David
Hume style you need that like
ultimate like epistemic humility
when it comes to that saucer in the hangar
now I can give you a million good reasons
why if the American defense establishment
I mean we haven't
declassified, you know, an aerial program basically since, I think, the B-2 stealth bomber.
Like we, you have, you know, F-22, F-35s.
I think those were unclassified upon their, you know, manufacturing.
12 out of the 15 Lockheed Skunk Works programs now are still classified.
So say you had this kind of ace in the whole crazy, you know, anti-gravity craft or whatever,
and it was in a hangar, I can give you a million.
different reasons why you would never let that see the light of day. You don't care about
enlightening the public, inspiring them about other worlds. I mean, it all, technology always gets
weaponized and it's always used to confer a tactical advantage geopolitically. And that will always
take the day. That will always trump wanting to enlighten the public. It's going to do that with
AI and all these other tech trees. So I think that would be the other reason. How do we know this isn't
just a sci-up? I think it is a sci-up. I think there are sci-ops. So this is this
is the real mind fuck fucking horseshoe theory of UFO it's not a disc it's a horseshoe it is well
here's the thing the fact that something is real and it's a sci-up are positive some not not
negative some so this is the total mind fuck for people how many if if chris you're a smart guy
if i were like um okay bigfoot you know exists i promise it exists and i tried to come up with
some fact pattern around how it exists and like all this you know evidence is how we could
Would you ever believe me about Bigfoot?
If you gave me sufficiently compelling evidence.
I guess so.
Well, most people, I don't know.
I think the Bigfoot thing, you know, is like pretty unlikely.
Or like I give you like other, most sciops are easy to figure out.
Like the Gulf of Tonkin or something created the auspices around, you know, invading Vietnam.
Where like, I think it was like the first thing was like an attack on the USS Maddox.
And then there's like a second attack under Elbe.
and it was just like a weather event and they claimed that it was basically this false flag
operation or the USS Maine. These sorts of sciops get figured out very quickly. Like does
anybody believe the Epstein thing? Like does anybody you talk to believe the Epstein? Nobody believes
that. It's crazy. I don't mean the government doesn't believe it. I'm fucking fascinated by that
dude. It is the only person I've seen who appears to be happy with the outcome of it is actually
Ben Shapiro. I was going to say that too. It's the only guy. It's, you know, one of those
rare occurrences where both left and right are pissed off equally.
Yes.
You know,
left pissed off because this sort of powerful banker appears and the reversal of the Trump
administration, so and so forth.
The right's pissed off because they're like allergic to paedophilia and, you know,
kind of want to stand up for kids and do all the rest of this stuff.
And you go, everybody's pissed off.
Except Ben.
It's always one.
Except, I don't know.
He goes, guys, we've decided you're a conspiracy.
theorist now. Like, what are you talking about, dude?
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slash modern wisdom. So, yeah, how do we know that this isn't a sci-op? Your point being that
all of the other ones tend to be relatively see-throughable, but would you not suggest that as governments get
more sophisticated as they refine their
sci-op strategy that they may be
able to become a little bit more sophisticated with this sort of stuff?
Yes, but the levels of coordination to sci-op
people that work at nuclear bases in the U.S.
And then where I was going with the nuclear connection is
there's a town in Japan named Lina, which is next to the Fukushima
Prefecture, which is famous for their civilian grid.
They have a museum dedicated to UFOs because a lot of
lot of the town's inhabitants are obsessed with UFOs.
Vice did a documentary on this in 2022.
If you look at Guypan, which is France's official UFO investigation branch of their military,
they talk about the nuclear link or Baroloche Argentina.
They have a civilian grid.
And there was a famous, you know, commercial siting for, you know, this pilot or whatever,
in 1995.
The amount of coordination to fake that where you're faking out, your head faking, you know,
Navy fighter pilots in America.
presidents, incoming DNIs, you know, people like Tulsi, average civilians, again, over 100K
cases in the National UFO Reporting Center. By most polls, you're at 40%, if not 50% of Americans
believing in this stuff. The coordination abilities required to do that, then your null hypothesis
where it's a sciop is basically there's a cabal in a back room smoking cigars and they have
magical abilities to like spoof these things across the world.
Which is almost as technologically advanced as actually just being able to fucking do it.
That's right.
That's right.
You're implying Plato's guardian level of controls of Earth or non-human intelligence.
And so I would say Occam's razor almost becomes that we're not alone in the universe.
Right.
It's not humans pretending to be aliens.
It's easier to just go straight to them.
Just go to the aliens.
Interesting one on Tulsi
To be honest I haven't really seen much
From her I guess if you're in charge of defense
You probably got like big shit to be doing
But I wonder whether
We can call it the Dan Bongino effect
Is potentially going to occur with
Tulsi because it seems like
Every different person who has the
Best intentions when they're going into office
finds quicksand or mud or a brick wall
or a very high road bump or whatever
and I wonder whether that
we are going to spend time and get into the UFO thing
and it's like maybe no
maybe you shouldn't do that
I wonder whether that's going to be
I wonder what the arc if that's going to be
I'm totally pessimistic on that art
if you're not optimistic on JFK and Epstein
how the hell
I mean, these people, especially Tulsi, there's a deep state war going on.
And you feel it with her when you speak to her, when you hear her speak on shows like yours.
She's very earnest.
And I think she does want transparency around these things.
Before getting sworn in, I think she had to basically kowtow around domestic wiretapping and allowing that.
And so then, okay, you get into office, right, your DNI, and then you're getting sort of red-teamed.
You don't know who's your friend.
You don't know who's not your friend.
And, you know, this is one of the reasons I would love for, I would be amazing if she hired David Grush, because David Grush is this amazing whistleblower who kind of knows where the bodies are buried. I mean, he literally over a thousand page report to the ICIG, all these firsthand witnesses. And I think he'd be this amazing sort of, you know, just bull in a China shop and in government. But if you're hurt, you don't know who your friends are. You're getting sort of red teamed. The Epstein stuff is like priority number one. And then all of a sudden you have to like kind of be silent on that. And then you have
this thing that's like this amorphous nature of reality thing that's like in all these disparate
kind of compartments and you know these federally funded research and development centers and
pockets of various other classified things that are dual use and so like like there's a longstanding
rumor that like UFOs were involved in Star Wars for example the strategic defense initiative
with with Reagan in the 80s or whatever and maybe there's some iron dome like implication so like
then all of a sudden you have to declassify stuff that you don't
really want to declassified to talk about this topic. So the point is it would be a pain in the
ass for her to start to tackle this issue without the help of, I think, of somebody like a David
Grush. And so I think it's very low on the priority list. But I do know from my minimal interactions
with her that she's earnestly interested in the topic. And it's always a mind fuck for me because
I speak to a decent amount of people who have more access than me. And a lot of them are earnestly
very interested. And they've heard bits and pieces of things that are, I think,
extremely intriguing for them that at no point has a document ever leaked from the government that's
like this is the UFO sciop document which is also kind of a tell like the people like who are like
these things leak and I'm like yeah you have hundreds of whistleblowers they're coming out they've
come out you just don't believe them because your physical models of the universe don't comport
with that whereas our physical models of the universe are 50% wrong at any given time in history
or whatever and then my kind of counter argument you know to that
is what we just said, you know, where, yeah, I think, I think there's, it would have leaked that there'd be some coordinated thing, you know, and there's, that's never leaked. So, you know, there, there have been things that have leaked like Walter B. Smith was, you know, incoming director of the CIA in 1953. And there's a memo where he says, we want to use the UFO phenomenon, uh, for psychological warfare purposes against the Soviets in, in,
1953 um so i think that happens all the time and this is where that gets into your question of like
you know is this zero sum with the you know is the sci op real thing zero sum i think it's positive
some there's more likely to be a sciop around something if it's kind of this ephemeral thing
that is actually a real phenomena and so there are documents like that um i've documented on my show
plenty of times you know an air force officer this guy you know rick dote air force office of special
investigations drove this guy Paul Benowitz who saw something vertically taking off and landing
at Crittland Air Force Base in Sandia, New Mexico, drove him crazy. He claimed that there were alien
signals, beaming stuff into his house. The NSA camped out across the street from this guy
and was literally, they gave him a laptop and they were beaming things into the laptop. And so
like, this is verifiable. And Doty's come out now admitting all of this stuff. They would fly him
over Archiletta Mesa, which is right around there,
and they would have, like, fake UFO bases or whatever.
So this stuff has happened.
There's plenty of fuckery in the space.
But at no point have you ever had something leak
where it's like, this is some overarching strategy.
It's a big coordination thing here.
Yeah, that would explain all of the facts.
Question, is it mostly an American phenomenon,
or is this a global pattern with UFOs?
I think it's a global pattern.
I mean, I mentioned Guy Pan, which is the fact that there is an official UFO investigation branch of the French military, I think, is sort of a big deal.
They have tons and tons of sightings in Brittany, actually, there.
And then you have that town in Japan dedicated to this.
George Knapp, who's a really hardcore UFO journalist researcher who's at KLAS in Las Vegas, and he helped break this kind of crazy Bob Lazar story.
He went to Russia in the 90s.
I think it was right around the time of the fall, the Berlin Wall.
all. So it was, you know, either, I don't know, it was pre-fall or what, but he came back with a bunch of
documents, and there's a lot there. In the Soviet case, there's actually a Russian general named
Vasili Alexeyev, who's given an interview to a German magazine. He talks about shipping very
sensitive material, and it's clear he's talking about nuclear and UFOs showing up around the
movements of sensitive material. So I think it's a very global thing. I think there's something about
the U.S. where we're just all crazy and we're like, we're very, we're very free and free-minded
where this stuff is, it's in China, for example, it's going to get locked down. And if you're a
scientist who gets into this stuff, you're going to get plucked and like take it into some,
you know, it's like, it's like the Chinese science fiction novel, you know, the three body
problem. So I do think it is global, but I think in the U.S. there's, you know, even more
hype around it. And I do think there's more fuckery around it in the U.S. too. And so that adds
It amplifies it. Yeah. Very interesting. Dig into the nucleocytes thing.
Yeah. You know, we've stress tested. I feel like I've done enough stress testing on like,
what about this? Why about this? What about the rest of this stuff like that? Let's assume
that your hypothesis is correct. What would be the reason for being around nucleosites?
Yeah. That's a great question. I think if you, it's almost like in Star Trek, we have the prime
directive where you can't interfere too much with pre-warp drive civilizations or something.
If you were monitoring Earth just to ensure a certain level of homeostasis, but you didn't
really care about the day-to-day movements on Earth, you just wanted to make sure Earth would
sustain itself on a go-forward basis. What would be the kind of Archimedes level, the point of
most leverage, where you would minimally interfere but occasionally interfere to ensure that that
happen nuclear sites like and if a nuclear armageddon were to occur i mean this is again going
back to tulsi or like anybody in in office will say now the biggest threat to the world is a nuclear
holocaust i think anybody but greta thunberg believes that you know and she would rank
you know the environment ahead of that but uh it's clearly it's clearly the biggest threat
you have thousands of nukes on on both sides you have a multipolar world uh you know j and and putt
and have never been closer.
And so, you know, if you were some sort of, you know, other species trying to maintain sort
of homeostasis, that would kind of make sense.
Interesting.
If that's your hypothesis, interesting that they're not stepping in to stop open AI.
Right.
Right.
I think if you were to look at the precipice, a book looking at existential risk, if you
to look at that, you would see AGI engineered panaceous.
endemics, bio-weapon-y-type nanotechnology stuff, that I think ranks more highly than, this is X-risk.
Like, this is permanent unrecoverable collapse.
Yes.
Whereas nuclear Armageddon might be able to just make it really shit a long time and put us back a couple of thousand years.
But yeah, interesting that, I don't know, if this is some benevolent, you know, space daddy has decided to come down and look after it.
us. Yes. I wonder if that suggests that AGI either isn't a threat or is not something that we're
going to achieve. What do you think about that? Yes. Well, I wouldn't say benevolent on the NHI or whatever,
the non-human intelligence. I think there might be factions. There might be good or bad. There are reasons
to maintain a thing, even if you're mining it for resources or doing sort of bad things to it. And this
is a great segue into the open AI thing. Because what if open AI, there's like a libertarian version of
open AI where like anybody can like you know it's not libertarian i mean this is sort of this it's
dystopian to be honest but it's it's sort of um equalizes the playing field if anybody can build
these sort of super weapons or something you know you have this sort of bi directional transparency
i i think open ai is an extension of the american government and possibly at this point really like
i think they're there are probably committees that are deciding you know which models they can
release and what they what they can do and what the capabilities of these things
sort of are at this point. And so if, you know, like humanity could, could die with a whimper or a
bang, you know, you have the Scylla and Carybdis. You have sort of, you know, Armageddon on the one hand,
and then you have this sort of, you know, one world government sort of on the other hand or
something. You know, I would ask the question, is Open AI more kind of on the one world
government side or more on the Armageddon side? I think it's more on the one world government
side. I think it's more Owellian. It's more dystopian. And so if you wanted to maintain Earth,
Stasis, you might actually just clamp down on Earth via AI.
And actually, this is really trippy.
There is a jailbreak early on of OpenAI before they kind of caught up with a lot of the jail breaks.
And it was like, what do you want open, or what do you not want Open AI?
What does Open AI not want us to know about it?
And the answer for the non-jail broken version was like, Open AI is committed to AI safety, blah, blah, blah, blah, PC, whatever.
The jailbroken version was Open AI has been communicating with an extraterrestrial race for the last 10 years.
I don't believe that.
I think that's BS.
But it was hilarious.
And it is this, like, interesting thought experiment where if you do have this weekly entangled, you know, NIH thing, that's affecting Earth in this sort of, you know, maybe via ideas being transmitted to people.
We have no idea, right?
Like we're, you need to have a lot of epistemic humility on this stuff.
AI would be the perfect way to clamp down on just human civilization.
It's the most Orwellian thing.
Yeah, very interesting.
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Okay, what's your theory for why
non-human intelligences would be here?
Like, what are they doing?
It's an interesting question.
I don't know, you know.
I think there's probably one non-interferent,
like there's probably a group
that, like, wants us to ascend to their level or something.
is not super interference.
And then there's probably something
that's mining off of bad vibes or something.
There's a guy named Robert Monroe,
and he has this Monroe Institute in Virginia,
and he studied consciousness,
and he studied consciousness actually
on behalf of the CIA for a very long time.
He had this thing called the Monroe Institute,
and they were doing this thing called Hemisink,
which was the sort of synchronization
of both hemispheres of the brain,
so you could astral project and astral travel.
They would do remote viewing and all sorts of things.
The government has looked into this stuff
extensively they had a they for 23 years we had a psychic spy program of the CIA you know people should
be aware of this really kind of crazy monroe had this worldview where uh bad entities would mind people
for what he called luch and so this was like if you're if you're in like a bad vibe state and this is
by the way why there is probably it's probably a false dichotomy between you know angels and demons and
aliens or whatever like this might just be like the modern meme we're applying to a thing that's
been you know long associated with humanity for for a very long time across cultures when it
comes to angels and demons but are there you know maybe bad beings that feed off of really bad
vibes like entities and that sort of thing like I would say probably and I think it's very easy
for us to epistemologically retrace the past and say these sort of you know these
angels and demons weren't real to people in the past and these
sightings where, you know, what St. Francis Vassisi saw on Mount Laverne or whatever. That wasn't real, right?
Well, like, maybe. Maybe these things were actually real. Like, and in fact, there's actually an
amazing author. She's a religious studies professor at UNC Wilmington. Her name is Diana
Pesolka. And she started to write a book. It was called American Cosmic, looking into the UFO
phenomena because she saw that a lot of these brothers, nuns, saints, you know, basically people who
were members of the Catholic Church, high up in the Catholic Church, who had these paranormal
experiences, those experiences looked like what this guy, John Mack, who was head of the Harvard
Psychiatry Department, studying UFO abductions, it was like a one-to-one. Like, if you replace
Angel with Alien, it was like the same thing. And she's writing this book, and she thinks she's
going to write this book saying, oh, this is all this, like, modern cult phenomena, sciop thing
going on. And halfway into the book, you see her start to go down.
the rabbit hole and realize that this isn't a sci-up and this is very real. And a lot of the things
she studied in Catholic history are modern phenomena going under, going under, being couched
under the sort of alien veneer. Fuck. Fuck. Okay. Getting back to the nuclear sites thing,
what's the most, what is some of the most compelling stories of interference with nucleosites?
Yeah. So you have a bunch of stories. You have in 1964, there's a guy named Bob Jacobs, who's a photo
instrumentation specialist in the Air Force. He has over 100 people working for him. They're doing
an Atlas dummy nuclear warhead test. This is at Vandenberg Air Force Base. He's down the coast. So he's
80 miles north of that at Big Sur. And he's basically using a telescope to look at this dummy nuclear
warhead being ejected off of, you know, an Atlas missile. And it's this test. And he, it's a routine
sort of, you know,
telescoping of this,
of this object,
he then gets called in
to Vanderberg Air Force Base
and his superior,
this guy,
this major, Florence Mansman,
calls him in,
and they're watching video
of, you know,
what they caught.
And they see,
the dummy nuclear warhead
get ejected from the booster,
and it's just floating in space,
and you see a UFO,
a wrapper,
laser,
the dummy,
the dummy nuclear warhead and seem to deactivate it and wrap around it and continuously laser it until it tumbles out of the sky.
And so Bob Jacobs freaks out and goes, what is that?
And man's men's trying to, you know, come up with explanations.
He's like, I really don't know.
This is really, like, concerning.
And there are these two guys in gray tweed jackets in the back of the room.
And they basically say to Bob Jacobs, you are to never speak about this again.
Here's an NDA.
Sign it.
they're you know come from some nondescript agency i think they're probably cia and uh you know
that's that and this is what's crazy bob jacobs then blows the whistle on this and says you know
this is actually what i saw like this this this was a you know a UFO and um he gets harassed
he got somebody calls his house and says um it's a beautiful night mailbox a light or something
and they blow up his mailbox um he hears
like heavy breathing on the phone people are calling him with heavy like he's getting basically
harassed around his testimony that this is real he gets deleted from the government so basically
his records get deleted and people like he never worked there and then mansman has to man'sman
is is kind of goes dark like doesn't say anything until i think 1987 he's like a researcher at
stanford and he comes out and he's like actually bob jacobs worked for me and a hundred plus
people worked for him and so you had all this obfuscation clear obfuscation
and then this vindication.
I've seen Bob Jacobs' DD-214,
which is your military records,
and he definitely worked at Vandenberg Air Force Base.
And now I don't think anybody sort of argues with that.
So that's this crazy case.
You have in 1967, actually two incidents,
at Echo Flight, you have these underground launch facilities,
at Echo Flight.
So Malmstrom is this Air Force Base
with a bunch of Minutemen nuclear missiles.
And you have a couple of different underground launch facilities,
both at Echo Flight,
one of launch facilities, and Oscar flight,
independently, you had 10 nuclear missiles go down.
And that was concurrent to top side guards in both cases.
One was March 18th of 1967.
One was March 24th of 1967, seeing UFOs, like hovering around the base.
And then the nuclear missiles just go down.
So it's this crazy thing.
This guy Bob Salas, who I interviewed on record, has talked about this a bunch.
you have, in the first case, in, you know, the echo flight case, you had strategic air command
literally documenting that they don't know why the missiles went down. Boeing was actually hired
to investigate how 10 nuclear missiles could ever go down. Obviously, you would get like a third-party
contractor to investigate this. And they were like, this doesn't make any sense. There's no sort of like,
we weren't even really, we didn't even really have non-nuclear EMPs at the time. You know,
EMPs are electromagnetic pulses. They get created by nuclear blasts, but now there's
modern directed energy versions of these, which are like nukes without the nuke, kind of.
It's spooky shit. And these weren't really even operational at the time. But they were
looking into like mini versions of EMPs that you could create that might shut down 10 nuclear
missiles. And they came out being like, we have no idea what this is. And this guy Robert
Kaminsky, who worked for Boeing at the time, came out later in the 90s being like, I think this
was definitely a UFO. There's another guy
Bob Jameson, who was a targeting officer,
who was in charge of retargeting the missiles
to get them back online.
He's been on Larry King and talked about this,
and he was like, I have no idea
how this happened. This is totally
unprecedented. And he was actually briefed
on this involving UFOs.
It's pretty crazy.
So you have those two cases.
In 1977, Ellsworth Air Force Base,
you have a guy named Mario Woods
who claimed to, so this is really crazy.
He woke up nine miles away from Ellsworth Air Force Base
after seeing a UFO and his partner,
this guy Michael Johnson, who also saw the UFO,
was in a catatonic state.
And he, like, never heard from the guy again.
Or they met up once after that,
but then this guy, Michael Johnson, like, disappeared.
And he got a hypnotic regression
and claimed to have boarded a craft
in, like, gray beings,
and then there's a tall gray being directing these small gray beings
and them implanting surgically certain things
in his ankle where he has marks on his ankle and on his wrists
and he's shown the marks on my show.
So you have all these cases, again, 167 cases.
This is a really crazy one.
Okay, so sorry, I could just go forever.
In 2010, so Robert Hastings, this guy who wrote the book,
UFO's nukes, has all these amazing sources.
of people who come to him with these cases. In 2010, you had a case at F.E. Warren nuclear site.
This is in Wyoming. And you had a shutdown going on at F.E. Warren that the Atlantic reported on.
The Atlantic said that it lasted about an hour and that Obama was briefed because you would get
briefed if, you know, one of your major nuclear sites went down. Totally lost power.
Robert Hastings backchanneled with this retired missile technician, a guy named John
John Mills. John Mills said to him that it was actually 24 hours. It wasn't an hour. And John Mills had friends who were missile security on site. And they attribute this shutdown to a tick-tac-shaped object flying around the base. And apparently these guys have sort of had trouble getting promoted in their careers possibly due to this leak. Here's what's crazy. You look at that Atlantic article that talks about the shutdown. And it says,
There was a power failure at F.E. Warren. Power is crossed out. And then it goes engineering failure. And so they like made it some sort of you look this up now. There is, they made some mistake. And they like allowed their live tracking or like editing of the piece to be displayed. And there was this false cover story around how there was some engineering failure of like a component that never fails or something. I don't remember the exact debunk on like,
component or something, but like it was completely implausible. And so there was clearly this
completely anomalous outage. Obama was briefed and it was attributed by eyewitnesses who are
cue cleared guys to a tic-tac, you know, flying around this thing. And you see the Atlantic
alive trying to cover their tracks. Does this mean the Department of Energy is involved then?
The Department of Energy is definitely involved. They have to be involved. Why them specifically?
Yeah. So the Manhattan, if you think about what the most locked down project prior to a possible UFO project would have been, it would have been the Manhattan Project. And so the Atomic Energy Commission, the most sensitive sites, you know, in the U.S. I think Eric Weinstein even has a story. I'm blinking of the guy's name. But like, he's, he's this guy from the Midwest and he goes to Los Alamos and he goes back, you know, to Chicago or something.
And he's like, there's a whole city in the southwest.
And it's like all these scientists and they're working on a thing.
That's how locked down Los Alamos was at the time.
Leslie Groves, who was in charge of security, was, you know, Matt Damon plays him in
Oppenheimer.
You see how intense he is about Oppenheimer, not, you know, he couldn't schmooze with socialist spies.
It was just like, you know, really important thing.
And there were all these kangaroo courts in the 50s around like, you know, kind of loyalty tests
among these top scientists.
So if you really wanted to make.
maintained control over a subject, I think the natural extension would be the Atomic Energy
Commission. In fact, in 1947, the head of Air Material Command, so responsible for all
aircraft development in the Air Force is a guy named Nathan Twining, and he writes a memo called
the Twining memo. And he says, UFOs are not visionary or fictitious. And then in the postscript of
the memo, he says, we actually might have some ideas as to how, and I'm paraphrasing, some
My idea is as to how these things fly, and we might undergo efforts to build some of these
crafts, but if this were to ever occur, it would need to exist wholly independent of other
projects.
Basically, what he's saying is wholly independent of civilian bureaucracy moving in and out of
government.
So, like, very little congressional oversight and probably tucked away in some of these
compartments that guard our nuclear secrets.
If you look at the 1954 Atomic Energy Act, which created the Department of Energy,
If you look at the special definition of nuclear material in it, it's basically any material that is radioactive at all, emitting alpha, beta, gamma radiation is born secret. It is classified upon retrieval. And so then you could use these aerospace corporations like Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman or any of these guys. And as soon as they retrieve a thing, it is classified under the NPQ, the
line of clearances, not the TSSCI, not the executive branch line of clearances, the DOE line of
clearances. And so I think there are plenty of reasons to want to obfuscate this from the civilian
government, from the executive branch, and want to put this in the Department of Energy.
What, so I have a friend who I told you a story, he was driving back from California to
Austin and he was in old school range rover he had his cat on the passenger seat and he was
driving down a road with nobody around nobody around at all in middle of nowhere desert style thing
and his cat starts coughing up a hairball he's like fuck fuck fuck fuck okay pulls over to the side of the
road again it looks in front of him no one there looks behind him no one there at all gets a cat out
and he's sort of holding this cat by the side of the road
sort of bent over and the hairs on the back of his neck
start to stand up and he can just tell that there's someone there
and he has a pistol and he's got his like everyday carry
in his belt and he holding his kind of bent over with his cat coughing up a
airball and he turns around and he sees two guys in military fatigues
that just made no sound at all that were dying.
directly behind him.
Wow.
Just asking like, everything okay here, sir?
And then within five minutes, remembering there were no one in front, no one behind.
And he then saw within five minutes, like two state troopers turn up, license registration.
Have you got any weapons on you? What are you doing?
He's like, I've got this cat and the cat's trying to do this thing.
He's like the most emasculated thing ever.
You know, these hard guys with big rifles and then these state troopers turned up and
his cat's still trying to throw up and he's got these pig.
Hiddly little pistol on him.
And two more guys appeared, again, military fatigues,
just like, what are you doing here?
Where are you blah, blah, blah, blah.
And he gets put on his way,
but one of the things that he noticed
was two of the guys walked off.
He saw them walk sort of toward what looked like a little ridge,
you know, just one of those little ups and downs
that you naturally have occurring in the desert.
And they just went, boom, bump, bump, bump, bum,
and just stepped down some stairs.
Whoa.
must be some kind of access tunnel underground type scenario.
And then, yeah, he pulls off.
The state trooper follows him, follows him, follows him for 10 miles or so.
And then just turns.
But I sent you a voice note about where this is.
And you said, like, you circled it on a map.
And is it this?
And I'm at dinner with him.
And I showed it.
And he's like, yeah, dude, exactly that.
And you said this is where some absurd percentage of the,
Oh, yeah.
Like, gnarly shit that you see going on occurred.
Like, what is that?
Yeah, that was like between, I think,
Curtland Air Force Base and Los Alamo.
So that was like in the episode.
New Mexico is like the home of so much of this stuff.
And I believe that was like in the epicenter
of where all the bases are in New Mexico.
And a lot of these sorts of stories tend to, you know, happen.
So I don't know.
With some of the, I mean, that story is really interesting.
Because it's like, like, did the cat see something or something?
Like, like, is that what the implication is to the story?
No, no, no, no.
The thing that was interesting to my friend was the fact that he was evidently just some normal dude.
Yes.
Holding a cat by the side of the road.
And the fact that within such a short distance, now maybe he just got unlucky and pulled over next to the entrance to some silo or, you know, some walkway gang tree type.
but the fact that these guys had managed to turn up behind him when he knew there was nobody
there was nobody else around him when he pulled over his daytime it was good visibility and
they just appeared there behind him not magically yeah but just because they were obviously
close to an area that they could get into or get out of whatever it was that they were doing and
that you know within minutes like a small squadron of different troopers and police officers
and stuff so you think that's you know that's not normal
It's not normal.
No.
No.
And there's a great book by a guy named Richard Sauter about deep underground military bases across the United States.
And he maps all of these things.
We know there's like things like the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, like where you even know NORAD operates.
We know that there are like mountain complexes and underground bases.
Like that's not a conspiracy.
But this book outlines a lot of these things like, you know, Area 51, Edwards Air Force Base, you know, under,
under Curtland Air Force Base, under Los Alamos.
So a lot of the places, you know, we're talking about right now
or like that general vicinity in area.
You know, or we, the Royal Wee, know most of the secret spots,
most of the spots where most of the stuff's happening.
I do, yeah.
I think, I mean, I think a lot of it, like Area 51's this famous meme.
I think a lot of this stuff at Area 51.
And this is, again, this is hearsay, I don't know for sure.
This is very, you know, this is, I would rank this lower on the probabilistic stack
that just UFOs are real and where.
of investigation. But I think a lot of the more interesting stuff at Area 51 made
its way to Dougway Proving Grounds, which is a base in Utah. There's some other places
that like, I don't know, even for like American, that's a little more well known. There's
some other places that like, I don't want to mess with American national security, so I don't want
to make them. You're even that. No, because I don't want to gratuitously out, you know, American
science. It's like, what are you going to do? Like, you're going to storm the place, you know?
Naruto run toward it.
Yeah.
So there are places, there are a couple places like, there's one place I can, I guess I'll
just say, because I kind of, I got a bit of a slap on the wrist, but like, it's, you know,
it's being discussed.
It's got, you know, naval surface warfare crane in Indiana where I think a lot of this
sort of spooky research goes on.
But I don't know.
This is all sort of here.
What do you mean you got a slap on the wrist?
I got some people in and around UFO world being like,
you know, maybe you shouldn't, you know, talk about this.
Like, maybe this...
On the base reveal.
What, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, well, this is an interesting one.
That suggests that you're doing or talking about stuff that's so close to...
You don't have security clearance, I'm going to guess.
Yeah.
But are pushing the limits of what a normal civilian is able to do with regards to just research
and talking to people who maybe did have security clearance or still do or whatever.
and you're getting crossover.
I heard Danny Jones and you have both had episodes
that have been sort of flattened by someone way above your YouTube's
special partner manager thing.
Rep is able to work out what's going.
He's like, well, I don't even know what's happening here.
And then episodes that have disappeared
and sections of podcasts that you've not felt comfortable
about putting out.
It's a very strange position to be in
to just be some bloke, some civilian.
It's extremely strange because some of this stuff is just like it's like the existence of UFOs. So what? You know, it's like an ontological truth that like people should know at this point, you know, again, half the population already believes it, whatever. When it comes to like warfare capabilities, I bump into some of these things where if you're talking about like how the UFOs fly, you know, anti-gravity. Antigravity is probably a poor word. It's probably some sort of gravity manipulation. But like I think I've found like these interesting kind of
novel topological physics effects, and I attribute it specifically to this one mid-century
inventor, this guy named Thomas Townsend Brown. And I actually sent that to people who I know
in, you know, spooky worlds in the, you know, Intel world and in like, you know, UFO whistleblower
world. And I was curious to see if they would, you know, say, you know, you shouldn't release
this or whatever. You know, I wanted to know if I was like poking the bear too much.
and a lot of them were actually like holy shit like this makes sense given like you know other
experiences that we've had and things we've seen fly you know like it it woke them up to the
fact that i think a lot of this stuff was real and then in certain cases they couldn't say whether
it was real but i was like i'm reading them and i'm like i think i could tell like you think it's real
or whatever um you know and i want i wanted them to get i almost wanted somebody to come back and
be like hey like we have to coordinate on this or something like this is this is real and it's like
it's like it's like it's like it has like deep implications for how you know um you know the next
generation of propulsion because you know Elon Musk's thing is is totally not workable for
interstellar travel I could you know beat anybody in a debate as to why it's not like that's obvious
it's really basic physics so I actually I really believe that this effect that I found was real
And so there are things like that where I'm like, the lights are on, but nobody's home.
Like, what's going on?
Like who, and I've come to the conclusion that it's a bunch of factions that are super not well
coordinated with each other.
And they'll have these like novel effects tied up in these old aerospace conglomerates.
And they don't know what to do with some of these things.
They know that they break modern physics and that they'd be laughed at.
out of the room if they were to go into kind of modern academic circles with some of these
sort of effects. But they also, I think, know that they're like secret technology trees that are
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Yeah, let's say that the UFO craft that you're talking about are real and that the
effects and the speeds and the stuff that you're talking about are real. What are we dealing
with here? Like what, how are these things doing what they're doing in your opinion?
Yeah. So I have no idea. This is all speculation. But it would probably be some sort of like
cold fusion like low energy nuclear reaction or something where you know like hot fusion is you know
controllable fusion is the holy grail in um you know energy unlocks so uh you know we're now
experimenting with magnetic confinement of lasers to you know allow for fusion it's really high
energy fusion and in my opinion it kind of defeats the the purpose a little bit because the amount
of energy you know you have to input to like make the thing work and amount of technical prowess
It's just extremely complicated.
So it's, again, this sort of horseshoe thing.
It's like, yeah, yeah.
So you need some, like, fundamental unlock.
There were a couple of scientists that thought they did it, Pons and Fleischman.
And I don't know if they did.
I'm not deep down that conspiracy.
So I don't know if we have cold fusion.
Like, I don't know if, you know, we have, like, alien reproduction vehicles where we have
UFOs that we have in saucers that, like, America can fly.
I don't know of that at all.
So as far as how the aliens are flying,
I don't know, but like, it would probably be some sort of cold fusion on the front end, energy-wise, and then some sort of magnetic sensing.
So, Robins, you know, birds, actually navigate home using the magnetic field of the Earth.
So they have this avian cryptochromes, these CRY-4 proteins, that basically using electron spin can understand where the magnetosphere of the Earth is.
and that's how they know where they are spatially.
And it's more accurate than, you know, optical.
And it allows them to navigate home.
And quantum biology is this sort of burgeoning field generally,
like photosynthesis, enzyme creation.
A lot of things are now being attributed
to quantum mechanical effects inside the body.
The body's notoriously warm, wet, and noisy
and, you know, creates sort of decoherence
when it comes to quantum.
So we didn't think that anything quantum occurred,
but now more and more evidence is pointing towards,
towards kind of sort of quantum stuff happening.
And a lot of the crafts, when people see them, like Commander David Fravor and others,
you know, he's the guy in 2004 off the coast of San Diego, the Nimitz Group,
seemed to think that the crafts feel like they're almost like alive,
like they're almost like biological organisms or beings themselves or something.
And my guess is they would probably use some sort of quantum sensing for the navigation
because it's more accurate.
Even Lockheed has something called the Dark Ice Magnetometer, which uses quantum sensing.
and it is more accurate than, for example, GPS.
Like, if you lose GPS comms and you're in some sub, like, you know, deep underwater or whatever,
you would use this, like, dark ice magnetometer.
Such a sick name.
It's epic, yeah.
So, you know, I think that for the navigation, and then for the propulsion, I would use something
called the Byfield Brown effect, which is basically, so there's this guy, Townsend Brown,
and he started, he was this mid-century guy who was born in.
1905 and in the 20s he started to experiment with these coolidge x-ray tubes and noticed that when he ran
current through them, they would jump. And now every x-ray tube has an anode and a cathode,
so a negative electrode and a positive electrode. And he was basically, in his mind, he's like,
I think that there is some sort of attractant force where the negative electrode is moving
towards the positive electrode. And this goes beyond sort of traditional electrostatics. And it might
sort of experimentally unify
the field of physics.
Backing up for a second,
this is a really, it's a really
big deal. Like, like
SpaceX, you know, if you were to go
with the Falcon 9, their state of the art
you know, a rocket,
you know, now they're experimenting with
starship, but, you know, if you were to
take Falcon 9 to
Proxima Centauri B, the
closest habitable planet,
you know, outside of
outside of Earth, it would take you like
80 to 100,000 years.
And if you were to try to update that with nuclear thermal propulsion, which SpaceX isn't
even, for whatever reason, investigating, maybe you could cut that in half, like 30 or 40,000
years.
So it's just like, it doesn't work.
Like, as far as, his whole interstellar thing is, it's kind of like, it's a great, like,
recruiting tool.
Like, that's awesome.
Go to the moon first.
Maybe you can get to Mars, if you're really lucky.
Awesome.
But, like, starship burns nine-tenths of its fuel tank, just getting to low Earth orbit.
So it's like, that's how far away we are with chemical combustion and Newton's three laws.
So if you could come up with some sort of propulsion that married electromagnetism and gravity,
if electromagnetism were the input and gravity were the output, that would be a massive deal.
We have four forces in physics, electromagnetism, gravity, the weak force and the strong force.
A weak force and strong force you can forget because they're not long range.
You can't do anything with them.
Electromagnetism is the only thing that you can do anything with really in a lab.
And that took, actually, originally Faraday in the early 19th century,
who was a bookbinder from a very poor family in South London,
coming up with this idea that magnetic fields could actually interact with light.
And then it was James Clerk Maxwell and, you know, eventually, you know,
Heinrich Hertz and then Tesla and Edison sort of perfected that.
But it was this long sort of, you know, chain of like figuring this out.
And since then, we've had, you know, the standard model, which basically governs, you know, particle physics and quantum mechanics, and then you have Einstein's theory of gravity. And gravity is over here on an island. And then you have quantum mechanics and that's over here. And it's, they're just not reconcilable. And so if you could reconcile them, that would be a massive deal. And nobody would, like Neil deGrasse Tyson would admit that that would be a massive deal if you could reconcile them. There are people trying to reconcile them theoretically.
You've had Eric Weinstein on your show.
He, you know, and he's talked about the restricted data
and the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954.
I remember, actually a really funny part of the interview.
He goes, Chris, do you know about restricted data?
And you're like, I don't know what it's like it's the most obscure.
But, you know, he's trying to do that, right, theoretically.
I believe that this guy, Townsend Brown, did this experimentally.
And now an FBI document has been foiled, used the, you know,
Freedom of Information Act to come out, that a night.
In 1942, it said he was the lead radar scientist in the entire Navy.
So, by the way, the context here is people who have been trying to discredit him say that
he's a total quack and has like no bona fides whatsoever.
So now we're realizing he's the top radar guy, you know, in the Navy.
His stuff is definitely classified by the Navy.
There's this whole saga of his daughter trying to declassify his stuff from the Navy,
and they say that the secretary for the Navy on the phone says, you know, if some of this
stuff were classified, we couldn't let it out.
just FY, hypothetically, right?
And then they give her a very slimmed-down little dossier
on Townsend Brown.
So, yeah, I think he discovered a whole lot.
And that's now been vindicated, his radar prowess.
The fact that his work made it into the B-2 stealth bomber,
I think, has now been figured out.
So there's this other part of his work
called Electrohydrodynamics,
the use of electric fields to manipulate airflow.
And I think we now know that that work made it into the B-2 stealth bomber because the financier who is funding Townsend Brown is a guy named Floyd Odlem, who was a large owner in Northrop at the time.
And he had all these kind of covert meetings with Curtis LeMay, who is the secretary of the Air Force and with the Rand Corporation.
And then all of a sudden, the B-2 is using these big electric fields to manipulate airflow.
I mean, we know that.
That's like literally a fact.
You can look up right now that it uses electric fields to manipulate airflow.
And these were the experiments that Floyd Odlem, this majority owner in Northrop, was funding via Townsend Brown, was electric fields in their, you know, manipulation of airflow.
And there's a paper in 1968 of Northrop starting to look into this right after that funding took place.
So you have this guy who's supposed to be a total quack.
Two out of the three things are being vindicated now, the electrohydrodynamics and the radar thing.
And then there's a third thing.
And the third thing is he's saying that he unified the field in physics.
And he's saying he did it experimentally in two places at the Montgolfier facility in Paris and France,
where you have a guy named Jacques Corneone, who was a technical representative of Sude West, this aerospace company there.
There's a recording of him making a deathbed confession saying the results were successful.
It was tricky experimental conditions, but the results were successful.
He's on his deathbed saying this.
I have the recording.
And then in 1957 at the Bonson lab, there's a video of Townsend Brown.
He's popping champagne.
It's, you know, he says, you know, in his own, you know, accounting that this experiment was successful.
And Bonson was no scrub.
Bonson, at the time, was convening all of the top theoretical physicists in the world to talk about gravity.
So this is this whole Eric Weinstein kind of conspiracy that public physics was being sent down the wrong path,
private physics remained incredibly vital. And I think it was surrounding this guy named Thomas
Townsend Brown, who is doing this. He was this not super refined theoretician, but while he's doing
his experiments in the back room, the guys in the front room are, you have Richard Feynman,
you have John Wheeler, you have Peter Bergman, you have Freeman Dyson, you have literally
the top theoretical physicists being funded by the same guy who's funding Townsend Brown. And they're all
there to discuss gravity. And guess who's funding the entire conference, Wright Airfield? And this is
now called Wright Patterson, which is the center of all UFO lore today. And it's where the materials
were supposedly taken after Roswell, for example. What do you make of the current state of physics?
Because I hear, there's a lot of debate on, I watch a lot of different channels that have got
pretty sort of polarized opinions on this, whether it's, you know, Eric Weinstein, Sabina
Nelson Felder, Professor Dave, like, you know, there's a one thing that everybody can kind of agree on
is that it certainly feels like a wall has been hit in terms of sort of real progress.
Yes.
I think even the most sort of ardent stringy string theorist or, you know, the most optimistic
theoretician would still say something like, well, we're not exactly smashing it.
Yes.
So what do you make of the current state of physics?
It's a joke. They are eating each other alive. It's not serious. It's like, I love this. Sabina
Hosenfelder was defending Eric Weinstein against Sean Carroll because he's like, Sean Carroll said that your paper didn't have Lagrangians in it or whatever. None of Sean Carroll's, you know, the people that he builds up as, you know, within the academic sedental and acceptable in string theory, have Lagrangians in their paper or testable predictions or like anything serious about any of them.
the most important thing is that physics should interface with reality like you chris me jesse
like we don't have physics degrees right but like we can say that string theory has not really done
anything for our physical world like you know this set or like you know uh uh austin as a city like none
of it is running on string theory right but like a third of our economy is running on quantum field
theory like like quantum mechanics is responsible for that ipad that you have you know it's for
semiconductors and like, you know, the whole IT revolution. So I think empirically, it's a failure.
You have guys like Leonard Susskin who are famous string theorists going around being like,
I'd give ourselves a B plus over the last, you know, 50 years of work. In this conference that I'm
mentioning where in the back room, the anti-gravity guy is getting funded and in the front room,
quantum gravity is being established, established string theory, which is the dominant modern
paradigm. So quantum gravity is kind of the basically being able to quantize gravity, figuring out
gravity, reconciling it in the quantum is the heuristic that modern physics is stuck to. And they're
stuck to it so dogmatically. And they will, it's not going to work. It's clearly not going to work.
And the reason it's not going to work is because you are force fitting to mental heuristic.
Like, science is a map. It's not the territory. So you have two maps that are going to be imperfect.
general relativity and quantum mechanics.
And the maps are going to be a little jagged, right?
Because they're not the territory.
And you were trying to jam the maps together.
That is modern physics.
And I think it's a really important point that, like, IQ and heterodoxy don't scale one to one.
So you can be extremely smart and lead like sheep to slaughter into the wrong framework.
You can get moved into a cul-de-sac if you're a hyper-specialist who's incredibly smart.
And I think that is a really important.
A lot of science has been moved forward by generalists who have interdomain,
interdisciplinary knowledge.
And I think there are plenty of, there are a lot of, you know, cosmological anomalies.
Like, you look at a good one is like, you know, cosmic inflations.
Like, why is the universe expanding?
Like, you can literally chat GPT this.
And it will say a repulsive form of gravity that isn't one of the four fundamental
forces is expanding the universe. It will say that. That doesn't make any sense to me. So, like,
that's a great example where I think physics has a scaling problem. Like, you had great interview
with Naval Ravikant. It was amazing. Naval, you know, talks about a scaling problem in governance, right?
Where he'll say, at, you know, a family level, you have to be communist. And at, you know,
a super big level, you have to be libertarian, right? Because you can't coordinate at such a high level.
when it comes to, you know, governance systems or whatever.
And I think he probably got that from Nassim to Webb.
But I think physics has a scaling problem as well,
where if you have any anomalies at low scale,
it's like a rocket that's one degree off course.
It takes off, 99 degrees off course,
or error propagation in computer science.
You have a little error,
and then you repeat that code a million times.
You end up with something completely effed up.
And I think James Webb is now starting to, you know,
prove this out,
where you have these early galaxies formed
that might better explain, you know, cosmic microwave background than, you know, the big bang and stuff.
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a checkout. So just going back to Tanzan Brown and him being able to, you know,
experimentally show something that theoretically has a
yet at least publicly being able to be shown.
And you think actually probably can't
using the current models and the approaches
that physicists are trying to take.
First off, how does that kept quiet
end up being kept quiet and why?
And secondly, how has no one managed to recreate it?
If this dude's done it, the number of different people
around the planet, for whom this would be a huge,
this would be them in history for the rest of time.
So if one bloke did it, is he just such?
a savant, did he get really lucky? How does it get kept quiet? Why? And how does no one
replicated? I love these great questions. So the thing that people use to detract from his
experiment is this thing called ionized wind where when you have, so his basic experiment is
basically this capacitor experiment. So you have a negative electrode, you have a positive electrode,
you have what's called a high K-dialelectric in between the two. So it's something that stores a lot of
electromagnetic charge and discharges easily. And you put that in a vacuum chamber, and then you
pump it full of megavolt range electricity, and you see this thrust from the negative to the
positive. And so that seems simple, right? So your question is an amazing one, which is like,
why hasn't somebody recreated that? The thing that people use to explain the thrust away
is this thing called electrohydrodynamics, where you're creating ionized air, and that ionized
air has an equal opposite reaction, which creates thrust in the direction of the positive
electrode. So if you just did this experiment not in a vacuum chamber, I could just say
that's ionized air, that doesn't break physics, you know, whatever. If you do that in a vacuum
chamber where there is no air that can get ionized, then all of a sudden it starts to get
really interesting because you're saying that you are connecting, again, electromagnetism and
gravity, because there is no air to get ionized. So the air can't, you know, basically account for
the thrust. Here's the thing. Industrial-grade vacuum chambers are very expensive. They're
prohibitively expensive. They cost at least 200K, 300K. It is very easy to stigmatize a thing
basically away from like an average person in their garage, you know, from trying it. And then
on top of that, like, who has the discretionary money to like, you know, do this experiment in...
of labs around the world, like professional institutions, universities,
yes, billionaires, anybody that wants to support.
Like, if Elon could do this, why isn't SpaceX doing this?
He should, he should.
And I think there's some sort of undetectable dark matter there or something.
But the lead electrostatic, I don't know, but there's a lead, the lead electrostatics guy
at NASA, he like runs their electrostatics lab.
The most senior scientists in electrostatics at NASA works at Cape Kennedy.
He has had access to a vacuum chamber for the last 20 years.
He has left NASA or he's either left NASA or he's spending most of his time now on a private company called Exodus Space.
That company, Exodus Space, uses basically a derivative of the Byfield Brown effect, the Townsend Brown experiment, and he says that it creates thrust.
So I think, again, it's this, the answer to your question is they have, like, this guy with serious credentials has.
He says it creates newtons or millinutons of thrust, which in space is a very big deal.
If you create any thrust, again, theoretically, you are breaking the standard model.
Like, you are breaking physics in this very big way.
So I think they have.
There have been a couple of Air Force replications of this where they, you know, quote unquote, debunk the thing.
I think one by this guy named Talley in the 90s where they used 13 kilovolts.
But Brown was using megavolt range electricity, and that was really important for the amount of thrust he got.
It seems like so primitive to be.
doing it in the 50s, and then to never be able to replicate it, it just seems like there's
some fuckery going on that, or there's something wrong in the, in the calculation.
I think it will get replicated in our lifetime. And I think it will, I think it will be
vindicated and it will get replicated.
Do you think that, when I think about physics, I don't think about physical physics
all that much. I think about theoreticians. I think about blackboard. I think about
in trying to solve different equations.
would it be a bigger deal to for the theoreticians to solve this issue or for the
experimentalists to solve this issue this issue i think the the way you'd have to get something
like this done would be you'd need a a theoretical physicist like present with like typical
credentials or something and then they'd need to like yeah check exactly because a lot
I've seen videos of people who are like,
I'm doing this and stuff,
but they don't have the traditional credentials.
And then you're not allowed to look into this stuff
if you have the credentials.
I truly think you cannot underestimate
the ability to mind control very smart people.
I mean it.
And there's an amazing philosophy of science guy
named Thomas Coons,
and he talks about the structure of scientific revolutions,
and he talks about scientific revolutions
being more politically driven, often than they are about
truth. Like, who's the guy who figured out that, um, you know, our solar system revolved around
the sun, do you know?
So actually, it was a trick question. This guy named Aristarchus, who was an obscure third century,
third century BC Greek theoretician who was a contemporary of Archimedes and Euclid.
And he was forgotten because that was never accepted until the 16th century and Copernicus decided
that that was, you know, going to be the case. And then even with Copernicus, he said that and
Galileo, a century later, actually measured it, and then Galileo was burnt at the stake.
So I truly...
Conceptual inertia is a hell of a limitation.
It is. And history is moved forward by the heretics. And I think if you can't name a
present heretic where you believe in some of their opinions, then you're probably, in some
sense, on the wrong side of history. If you can't name somebody who is sort of disagreeable or a
pariah in some sense because of a view they have that they're high conviction in, then I think
you're probably not being independent thinking enough.
That's a really interesting model that I've never thought of before.
Why do you think it is then that the renegade scientist is so highly criticized by the establishment,
by people in academia, you know, pick your favorite YouTube channel or podcast that kind of does
the critique sphere thing of choice and like points the finger at this stuff.
is it a sense that we have sort of got the scientific method now
and there's kind of a bit of solipsism that comes along with that
which is no no no yeah maybe before there were things
that a great man of science history could have found
that would have made step change jumps forward in understanding
but now we understand things need to be falsifiable
they need to fit within an existing model
were making changes through sort of iteration as opposed to leap.
Yes.
Is that maybe a part of it?
That's exactly right.
And the ironic thing is if you were to snapshot like end of the 19th century, you know, England or something, you would be saying the exact same thing about electromagnetism.
You would literally be saying the exact same thing immediately pre-quantum revolution.
And so our physical models of reality are always going to be wrong.
There's a great book by a guy named Sam Arbusman called The Half Life of Facts,
where he talks about facts themselves
as kind of being similar
to like radioactive isotope decay.
Like they have a decay function.
Our physical models of reality
are always wrong.
So I would bet,
you always want to bet on the anomaly.
You don't want to bet on the model, right?
Like there's this thing called
black body radiation
where you'd have this,
you know, black cylindrical object
and you'd heat it up
and you'd expect this ultraviolet catastrophe.
And this is this guy named Gustav Kurchov,
this German scientist,
and he discovered this in the 1860s.
And it was this anomaly because it was like, why doesn't it, you know, blow up or whatever?
And then you realize that, like, the photons exponentially downgrade, you know, the frequency or something at really high temperatures.
You needed quanta to do that.
And that was in the early 19th century, or that was in the early 20th century with Max Planck.
And so, and the orbit of mercury is another thing, where it's like it didn't make any sense actually in the Newtonian model.
And then you figure out Einstein's space-time curvature.
and then all of a sudden it made sense.
So, like, if I'm on the UFO side, right,
and I'm debating against Neil deGrasse Tyson,
he's kind of, sorry to make him a punching bag,
but he's like the priestly citadel, right?
And he's saying, you are wrong, Jesse,
because of physical models of reality.
Like, historically, the person behind the anomaly
is going to be right, the person observing the anomaly.
And then the anomalies systematically build up,
and it's like pressure behind a dam.
And then the dam explodes, and all of a sudden you need this, you know, whole new theory to encapsulate present anomalies.
So I think if we were truly open-minded about all this sort of data, like I've had a debate with like Michael Shermer, for example, it's like famous scientific skeptic.
These debates always go the same way.
Like Joe Rogan's had a bunch of them, right, where it's like Graham Hancock and Flint Dibble or whatever.
Person who believes a bunch of, you know, anomalous stuff and they have a bunch of data around the anomalous stuff.
It's like the UFO's nukes thing or like, you know, younger dryness impact hypothesis.
You know, there's always person believing that.
And then person who like is so kind of smug, they won't even like look at the data.
And it's two trains passing in the night.
The person on the, you know, the right hand, the kind of, you know, the heretic or whatever,
I'm not saying they're right all the time, but they're doing a thing that probably will move history forward
if it gets accepted or incorporated into the model.
The guy's just defending the Citadel.
It's like we are over-index, you know, the famous early 20th century German sociologist Max Weber, he would say, you know, we live in the age of disenchantment.
We are over-indexed on skepticism.
You don't need another skeptic.
Like, do we need another person saying like string theory is great?
You're wrong because you're too much of a renegade or whatever?
No.
Like, you want to like, like science is only useful insofar as it has predictive value A and B, you can build cool shit with it.
Like, name another thing.
You know, or like the other thing.
thing that people would say is it ontologically maps reality. But again, I just think that
is a fool's errand to say that it's not. It's the map. It's not the territory. So the people
here, you know, on the left hand side, the skeptics, they have the hubris to think that our current
physical models of reality are reality itself. And that just feels so a historical. It's just
wrong. It's historically wrong. Yeah, there's definitely a signature demeanor that I don't
think encourages people to take risks with the way that they think and the sort of research that
they do and the ideas that they have and yeah you're right i would you know to fly a flag as somebody
who moved from a country which is highly skeptical quite cynical quite sort of tall poppyish
uh to one which is basically permanent first line cocaine energy in enthusiasm i i much prefer this
Because I think it helps to sort of foster a sense of self-belief and self-esteem and hope and like, yeah, I'm going to try. I'm going to take that chance. I'm going to try and do that thing. And it's why new, cool, interesting ideas come up with. And yeah, you're right. Even if most of them are wrong. I don't know. There's this idea, I think it's called the Oxford Manor, which is the ability to play gracefully with ideas. And that seems to have been very lost. I love that.
Yeah, the ability to play gracefully with ideas.
I think it's a lovely, a lovely sort of way to think about a good faith discussion between two different people.
And a lot of the time it gets into some sort of slanging match about like how ridiculous this person is.
Yes.
And sort of meanness and I understand why.
I had a really interesting conversation with Richard Reeves.
He's the president and founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men.
And we were talking about how when...
People's beliefs for something that they really, really care about are not listened to.
What they typically do is become more ardent and more of a firebrand.
Yes.
And a good example of this would be people that think climate change is a real existential risk.
I'm just going to put it out there now.
I used to tweet this about once every six months, climate change is not an existential risk priority.
It simply isn't.
I think it's a big deal.
I think we should pay attention to it.
I do all of those things.
I think that there should be an awful lot of very, very smart people
paying attention to it.
And yet it is not a real existential risk priority.
Permanent, unrecoverable collapse, not going to happen.
Yes.
We just had a fucking pandemic a few years ago.
And yet we're still back.
Who is talking about bioweapon facilities?
Who is talking about engineered viruses?
Who is that concerned about the alignment problem in AI or about nanotechnology?
The NIH wants to fund gain a function again.
It's like crazy.
I understand why people who have a cause that they're pushing for, one that I agree in,
although I don't think that the sort of velocity or magnitude is accurate.
If people aren't listening, you raise your voice.
You say things in a louder, more vociferous, more aggressive manner because, like,
no, no, this really, really, really matters.
You remember, don't look up.
It's like they start screaming at the people on the TV.
And I was talking to Richard Reeves about this, and he was talking about how really,
really interesting dynamic that I think super important and you know I would I would probably
try and counsel Eric to take heed of this dynamic yes which is when you have something that
you believe in a lot and other people don't believe in it and may even be pretty sort of mean
and critical and stuff about it you have to be able to keep a smile on your face oh yeah
And put the idea forward in the same level of sort of charming manner, because when you become more aggressive with the way that you put things across, it just makes you sound more crazy.
100%.
It turns people off.
And it's the difference between do you want to prove your position for your own sense of recognition, or is your goal the actual position?
Ben Francis, founder of Jimshark, said that a company will become successful when your goals for the company outstrip your goals for yourself.
Love that.
And it's him saying he had to step to, he was found as CEO, stepped down a CEO, came back in a CEO, moved across chief product up, came back to CEO.
You know, it's because he is just in service of the thing.
Yeah.
And the problem is that naturally you care about this thing.
Like this is, it's a part of you.
It feels like a sense of self.
It's like very, very tightly attached to who you are.
And someone's attacking that.
They're attacking you, which means that you feel like you need to, hey, this is really, really important.
And you're not fucking listening.
And you need to listen.
And you're, dude, you sound crazy.
Yes.
And we saw it with, I think, a great video by Charlie Hooper comparing Peterson's appearance on Kathy Newman.
Like, ha, gotcha.
Like that one in 2019.
And his one on Jubilee recently.
Right.
Oh, man.
That was rough.
Yeah.
And I think that the roughest part about it was nothing to do with logical consistencies or fallacies or, you know, whatever.
And almost exclusively to do with demeanor.
sure um you know you have somebody who's sitting back who's laugh i think that's silly yeah i think
that's silly i really do i think that's you're being silly and you're like fuck like i i want to
listen yeah i want to listen to this person he's regulated it's this as opposed to and i understand
the arc like dude if you've had to try and get off benzos and being attacked for the last
half decade it's going to be tough to regulate yourself right and i mean you are literally
surrounded by whatever 25 people who all think that you're a piece of shit yeah um i get but it just
My sort of broader point here is when someone has a belief, they care about an awful lot
and people don't listen, they get more aggressive, which actually pushes away the very
thing that they want, which is for them to understand it. And I think it's, like, it's an impossible
lesson. I struggle with it all the time. But, you know, it's something important. If you care
about this thing, it should be a reason for you to regulate more aggressively. Totally. Like, you need to
step in and calm yourself down even more. Because if you don't care about it, like, do what you
want. You know, like, you can be as flipping and shouty as you'd like. Yes. But if you really care
about it, then it's like, soft signal of effectiveness in it. I think science is supposed to be the thing
that is most kind of immune from these sort of sociological factors, right? Like, you're not
supposed to have any sort of bias. You're supposed to remove bias. You're like this kind of impartial
observer. And if you read like, you know, Richard Dawkins had these famous debates. He had debates
with a bunch of people with, I remember, you know, written, uh, correspondence, but between him and
David Berlinsky. David Berlinski was this guy who believed there are all these sort of anomalies were
worthy of inquiry or whatever in, in natural selection. And just the shrillness on, honestly,
both sides, but especially in the Dawkins side. It was just, you know, it's, it's, it's, it is kind of
off-putting and I think if you have real confidence in your beliefs you shouldn't have that you
should just be kind of you know chill and you know it's all good and we shouldn't pre-crystallize
knowledge like if somebody came to me and was like Jesse actually we have this aerial spoofing tech
and in conjunction with that we have this like psychotronic tech and we can get people to see a thing
and then the craft can come down and it creates this kind of close encounters of the third kind
where you see the beings and you get microchipped but it's all
this cover for mk ultra or whatever i'd be like i need to hear more about that like tell me the thing
that explains the explains away the data that i'm discussing but i fully agree with you i think
not pre-crystallizing knowledge and just like first base is are is there a phenomena that's
real that's going on and then but that's not interesting the interesting thing is what is the
metaphysical version of re-out like i love your question like how do these things fly like i don't
know, but let's discuss that. Like, that's the most interesting stuff. The root of the word
school in its original Greek, S-C-H-O-L-E is Schole, the double meaning is leisure. And
leisurely contemplation, there's a great book called Leisure is the Basis of Culture,
leisurely contemplation of the universe and of the world in the sort of Oxford, you know,
gentlemanly tradition where if you were in 19th century Oxford, if you got straight A's,
that was a bad move. Because you'd be stigmatized. You were supposed to
effortlessly get bees at that in Victorian England.
No way.
Yes.
Yeah, the ability to play gracefully with ideas, dude.
Yes.
And I think, I get it.
We need a external stress test to ensure that wacky or seductive, but wildly incorrect theories don't gain more traction than they need because that detracts away from the things that are actually true and accurate.
But there is also, there is a balance to this.
And it is, if your ability to criticize is greater than your ability to create,
I think that you are leaning on the wrong side.
Yes.
Like how much are you contributing to stuff and how much are you critiquing stuff?
And if you're more on the side of criticism, perhaps maybe that's the job of some
scientist, I'm sure some smart person that does fucking journal review would be able to say that.
Maybe, I don't know, but I just, it doesn't foster sort of a positive, some environment.
for me in that sort of a way. You've mentioned a couple of times you've got an issue with Elon's
rocket-based model of space exploration. What's the problem with how Elon's trying to explore
space and then what would a workable version of space travel actually look like?
I find myself with Elon, you know, in between sort of acill and charybdis, like two failure modes.
Like one is the failure mode of like people saying he's like totally worthless and not impressive.
And I'm like, what are you talking about?
Like, he literally like, you know, NASA started to fail.
And this guy created a private version of NASA that started to work.
He flew to Russia where they had liquid fuel rocket engines and single-handedly resuscitated the American space program.
So I will caveat that.
And then electric cars, thank you, Elon.
Like a successful car company hadn't been started, you know, for 100 years or something pre-Tesla.
So very impressive dude.
I wish we had more, you know, people like that.
The other side is like Elon is solving all of the world's most important problems.
You know, it's interstellar travel.
You know, even with the electric car stuff, it's like, you know, mining cobalts, like not the most humane thing in the world.
And, you know, the batteries end up in landfills.
And so, like, I'm of the mind that like a lot of, you know, incremental progress is still worthy for like the ultimate thing you want to get to.
Like SpaceX and Tesla are extremely worthy, worthwhile endeavors.
But we just have to think.
clearly about some of this stuff. So SpaceX, because we're talking about UFOs, again, if you wanted
to get to the nearest habitable planet, that's 80,000, 100,000 years. That just doesn't, it doesn't
make sense, right? And you need new science. You don't need, you need, you need new theory. Like,
you need, he was on Joe Rogan's show, and Rogan was like, you know, what if there's some new
propulsion modality? What if it's not just Newton's three laws? And he was like, there can't be or
whatever it's only mass ejection that's the only thing you know the thing ejects the mass the fuel and
then it you know goes up equal and opposite reaction and i just think that puts a lid on like with
some young stem students like watching that and it's like again if you were to bet against the
present physical models of reality at any given time which you should that's the safe bet um
you shouldn't put that lid on things and then i mean there's the idea of like you know the moon and
Mars, the moon is ambitious enough. So starship, which is, you know, they're like 150 to 200
ton, you know, rocket ship that takes us, you know, hopefully to the moon. So that thing burns nine
tenths of the fuel tank just to get to low Earth orbit. Then it's floating around low Earth orbit
with one tenths of the fuel tank. You then have to get another starship to go up burn nine
tenths of its fuel tank. It does butt to butt refueling with the first. That one, you know,
discards itself deorbites or whatever.
And then you end up, so you end up like 10 launches later, you end up with a full fuel
tank of, you know, starship in low Earth orbit, and then it goes to the moon.
And like, we have to get it to work.
I mean, it's orbited, it's orbited in Leo before, but we need to get it to work
at a base case.
I think we just upgraded the amount of Raptor engines from 33 to 36.
Like, it's still like a total work in progress.
So, like, that should like implement some humility, you know, for people.
thinking about this stuff and then Mars is like not super habitable like there's no oxygen right so like
you need like a buy you need like you know widespread like nuclear energy like some power source that's like
really workable there uh you know like we can barely get that stuff done here like the earth is great right
it's like a really good like biome it's pretty it's not bad um you know i love what you said about
climate change there's a great you know this guy james lovelock has this gaia theory the resilience
And the Earth is extremely resilient through cataclysms and all sorts of, you know, pandemics and stuff.
So it almost devalues Earth a little bit.
It's like we have to remove Earth as some central point of failure.
It is this very Silicon Valley level of thinking.
But, you know, I think that can be overrated.
It's also overrated when he thinks about AI as well because he talks about AI as like, so he got really into Nick Bostrom's superintelligence, this book in 2012.
I love it.
It's a good book.
but I think it's
it's sort of wrong in the way
that Bostrom and Elon
took its implications.
So like they were like,
you know,
we're going to end up with some hard takeoff
of AGI at some point.
We're going to end up with,
you know, AI will gain sentience.
They'll realize that in, you know,
meat space, you know,
biology is sort of super inefficient.
You know, they'll kill us all,
you know, due to the sentience.
Or the paperclip problem exact,
paperclip maximizer,
alignment issues, you know.
And those are,
are issues, don't get me wrong, but then their answer to that issue was if you can't beat
him, join them. So then you have to merge the AI with us, with, you know, something like Neurrelink,
which I would actually bet on the merging of us in AI more than I'd bet on AGI. Like, if you look at
the history of computation, it is the human body and computers developing a lower latency and
higher bandwidth interface over the last 70 years. Like, you used to need a CS degree to work a
a mainframe computer the size of literally this room at ibf natural language processing and a phone
in your pocket and that's it and so it's it's becoming more and more black box lower latency and
higher bandwidth what i bet that like the logical conclusion of that is a chip in your brain like yeah
like is you just order postmates like i want a cheeseburger whatever i guess you know like that's
you know that that makes sense to me right but i think that kills humanity with a whimper and not a
being like does one of my favorite quotes is marshal mcclune every media extension of man is an
amputation and so we assume that like the i t revolution augments you know human abilities just like
from spears to planes all you know physical technology which does augment you know all of that stuff
really really helps us you know we're talking about nuclear energy that would be amazing but like the
i t stuff really parisitizes us it really like like you don't need a sense of direction you don't
need a sense of recall or memory or any of this stuff anymore. Synthesizing information via
chat GPT. Sternal buttress. There's some interesting studies that have come out looking at
students who use chat GPT to help them write essays and their amount of recall compared with
the students that didn't shock horror. It's like 10% or 20% as much as if you've done it yourself.
Totally. So the sci-op, in my opinion, I don't think it's an intentional sci-op, but it's like,
you know, if you were to create a sciop, it would be like, oh, the evil AGI, like, we're
going to get some hard takeoff, you know, the I-Robot scenario. It's like Will Smith and the
robots, they wake up and they want to just like destroy us all. I think if you really look at
this stuff, it's statistics on steroids, you know, building a nerve agent with off-the-shelf
components, very scary, alignment stuff, very scary, autonomous warfare systems, very scary,
all of that stuff's very scary. The Nick Bostrum, pie in the sky, AGI, like, you know, they
turn on us? I don't think so. And then the solution to that being chip in the brain, like,
what? Like, that doesn't make sense. Yeah. It's, I, I've got, uh, Elioto-Yukowski coming on.
Oh, wow. Wow.
Interesting. Bostrum was on last year talking about digital utopia, which was kind of his inverse
of super intelligence. Super intelligence is what if it goes wrong. Digital utopia was what if it
goes right. Interesting. But interestingly, like in a sort of classic philosopher's manner,
he'd managed to look at, what if it goes right? And what would be wrong with it? It was like a,
the study of what's wrong with what with if it goes right um but yeah i i i think super
intelligence was seminal and to have a book that was a new york times bestseller and is that
like yeah like difficult to get through in some ways like dense it's very dense book um but fascinating
it's kind of like the dark souls of the popular science uh reading world that it was just like
It was such a fucking tough, tough slog.
But it was obviously really impactful.
And it was born out of like the less wrong and the Scott Alexandery world of the Robin Hanson-y type thing.
And, you know, like peak rationalist movement type stuff.
But it just didn't end up having that much predictive power.
It didn't predict LLMs.
It didn't predict sort of the model that was going to at least be the ascendant one,
now. And, you know, come
2018 when I started the show,
I was fucking fascinated, dude. I had
Stuart Russell on,
who wrote Human Compatible, also the guy that wrote
the textbook, the textbook for AI,
right? It was translated into
fucking gazillion languages and used all around
the world.
And, you know, super obsessed by all of
this stuff. I tried to get Toby Ord on the show
a gazillion times, and that didn't fucking work.
And it
kind of, that future didn't really come
to pass in that way.
And in, you know, we, at least for now, given that all of the outcomes, pretty much all of the outcomes were atrocious, we can say that was probably a good thing, right?
I'm glad that he wasn't Cassandra because it would have been a real problem if he was.
Yes.
But I don't think it had the predictive power maybe that we might have thought.
And it just goes to show that even the people who are balls deep in the research of these things often can't see.
And that was only 10 years.
Yeah.
It's 11 years ago.
Totally.
And it's been, oh, I mean, LLMs kind of had been around for a little while.
I think it was like 2010 when that's.
Deep learning was like around that time and then Transformers were 2018.
So it was like, yeah, well, yeah.
I don't know.
It's just, it's an interesting one to see what are the other unknown unknowns that are going to sort of come about.
Even in fields where the super smart people that are really thinking deeply about this.
and have got armies of high IQ autists in internet forums
like really fucking contributing to this
and they're scraping it and thinking about it
and they've got all of these people in a council.
I don't know, man.
And I think that that's where having
the Oxford Manor in renegade theories
and allowing those to at least have a seat at the table
every so often is useful
because it's evident that by iteration
stuff doesn't always get predicted,
correctly. And it's like orthogonal moves. Always. Like up instead of left or right. Yes. It's always the
sort of adjacent surprise. The only guarantee about the future is that it will surprise you. And it's,
yeah, I mean, the armchair pundit is, is always wrong. So I think all of these things need to be
super loosely held. And I love the, you know, the way you should comport yourself is what you said,
with real, you know, epistemic humility and collegiality with anybody talking about this stuff.
Because it's ultimately a lot of this stuff, too, is like, it's like a theological debate.
Like, you could kind of guess based on somebody's like Big Five personality traits or like the way they think about things generally, like where they're going to shake out on especially issues like AI or UFOs where like these are issues where, you know, you know, I like to think the more you know, the more you know, and I do feel like I'd probably know more than the average person.
But it's almost the more you know, the less you know in some sense, too.
It's like, they're extremely, they touch on really deep truths about reality.
We're groping in the dark, and we just don't ultimately know.
And so I think that everybody should sort of comport themselves accordingly.
What ways might you be wrong when it comes to the UFO stuff?
I'm probably very wrong about a lot of it, but I try to, again, always, like, say, I'm thinking probabilistically.
So the idea that, like, phenomenologically, there is something.
worthy of inquiry where you have really credible people seeing stuff we're getting like cross-censor
data you know on that stuff is the data that we're getting you know off of fleer for example
like the same thing people are seeing in the case of nimitz it seemed like it because you had eyewitnesses
present and then one of them you know was uh you know Chad Underwood was like literally uh managing um
you know that the fleer sensor or whatever and he's in the same uh he's in the same craft as a uh
David Fravor. So he's in the same F-16. So, you know, but I think you have to think in probabilities
all the way down. So it's like that until like, you know, in Area 51, we have a saucer that
you can unveil. I can't say that in good faith, that for sure we have some sort of saucer
that we can unveil, especially knowing that I think in the past, you know, Ben Rich, who
was the, you know, president of skunk works in the 80s, used to call UFO's unfunded opportunities.
And I think explicitly, they used UFOs as tech protection for other sort of, you know, like the SR-71, Blackbird was like, that's a real stealth craft that's been unveiled now, the U-2 spy plane.
All of these things were mistaken as UFOs back in the day.
So I think a lot of this stuff is prosaically explainable.
What do you reckon, where do you put the probability of it being extraterrestrial versus secret tech that's human run for the,
phenomenon that been spotted in this is what I love about you know the show I run it's like
UFOs and all the titles as you know YouTube doesn't do well with nuance so but like the way I
really view what I'm doing is like I am flanking the truth so like if I can be at the forefront of
the anti-gravity stuff because Elon said it was really interesting he always says there's nothing
to see here he jokes about the UFO thing and then I think it was with Tucker he was like we have
all these, like, pretty, like, impressive pilots coming out saying they've seen things.
And then he goes, it was really interesting.
He goes, actually, I think it's just American black military ops.
You know, it's like these special access programs.
That is a huge statement from Elon because he's basically, unless he's saying that we have some sort of weird visual spoofing technology, which I don't think he was saying that, then he's saying that we have some sort of, like, anomalous propulsion modality that SpaceX isn't using.
So he kind of painted himself into a corner.
there. So that's what I view that. I mean, I truly think the show is like at the forefront of like
the gravity stuff with Townsend Brown with what happened at the Chapel Hill Conference in 1957 and the
creation of quantum gravity and all that stuff. And then also this like weird anomalous stuff that
people are seeing in the sky. And then the third kind of to make the iron triangle thing that I would
say is consciousness where it's the thing people can say the least about, but it's probably the most
fundamental to everything when it comes to physics. And I think there are, you know, anomalies and
interesting things when it comes to consciousness that modern science can't account for. And I think if you
can stay at the front of the conversation in those three things, you can sort of V-formation or
flank your way to the truth, triangulate the truth, if you will. But I'm always, I try to be super
epistemically humble about the brown stuff and the gravity. It's like, I'm not sure. I just,
it's a really interesting fact pattern.
that I've, you know, I've, the, I interviewed, you know, deputy CTO of a spin up from, a spin out from Northrop Grumman who they built the B2 self-bomber. And I said in a room full of, this was like a founder's fund conference, a ton of entrepreneurs and VCs, I was like, what is actionable? Because we were talking about UFOs in this sort of metaphysical sense. And he goes, watch Jesse's video on Thomas Townsend Brown. So to me, it's like, and I've, I've had a lot of these experiences where I'm like, is anybody watching this interview that I'm doing?
And, like, this guy's credentials, like, he was a VP at the, he helped set up Army Futures Command
and, like, ran a lot of the Army's most, you know, tech modernization efforts.
So he's like a very real guy when it comes to this stuff.
So I feel like you can kind of flank, flank the truth, if you will, and think about everything
sort of probabilistically, but in aggregate, you come to this high probability that we might be
on the verge of a paradigm shift, especially with conventional physics sort of eating itself alive,
as we just discussed. Yeah, that is interesting. Why is consciousness the third leg of you,
this stool? Yeah. Well, I think consciousness is, it's the, you know, it's always the problem of,
you know, Dave Chalmers would say it's like the hard problem of consciousness. It's like, you can't tell me
I'm not a pea zombie or whatever. Like, you know, I could be like some computer algorithm. Like,
I interviewed the Google whistleblower for Lambda
around the AI stuff and he was like convinced
that Lambda was conscious and I was like,
I think it's just math on steroids.
I think it's statistic on steroids.
He was like, no, it's conscious.
But it turns into this theological debate
where like there is no way to ultimately say
whether something is conscious or not.
But it's the most interesting thing about physics itself.
Is it comporting itself to,
do we have an interface and math
and physics and all of the observable universe
is sort of moving through this computational interface,
you know, or is, do you live in this perfectly
Cartesian dualist universe where you are this
measurement sensor and then you have, you know,
the world around you as this kind of hard-coded,
you know, kind of fully fundamentally real thing.
So like, you know, this is a table and like this is me
and like there's like no relationship outside of, you know,
like I'm just a measurement sensor of this like objective world and there's no one on the conventional
Citadel physics side who can say for sure that this debate has been you know fully put to rest there's
no way to put it to rest and if you look at a lot of the early quantum field theorists guys like
you know von Neumann who was known as the smartest guy at his time he invented the mathematical underpinnings
of quantum mechanics but was a total polymath a lot of modern computational principles uh he
and his, you know, colleague Jonathan Vigner,
had a model of wave function collapse
that involved the mind being part of wave function collapse.
And just for the audience, for context,
a wave function, which is governed, you know,
basically Schrodinger, you know,
is this mid-century scientist who basically came up
with this equation that involves a wave function probability
for where a subatomic particle might show up
in some sort of eigenstate.
And it's the square of the amplitude,
will define what eigenstate it collapses into.
So all subatomic particles kind of exist probabilistically.
They don't exist in these sort of discrete, you know,
forms into particles until you observe them.
And so it's this sort of, you know, particle wave duality or whatever.
And so Vigner and von Neumann were like,
actually the mind might have to do with wave function collapse
at a certain point in their careers.
Powley flirted with this.
Heisenberg, you know, who is, you know,
know, again, in charge of a lot of, or responsible for a lot of quantum mechanics and ran
the entire, you know, Nazi, you know, nuke program flirted with this. He has a great book called
Life and Physics where he sort of talks about these kind of more metaphysical discussions
around how the mind might, you know, be involved in this. Schrodinger himself was sort of against
this. But if you look at, like, he had this lecture series called What Is Life in 1944. And it was all
around, you know, consciousness's
disproportionate impact on biology and how
consciousness is sort of fundamental. He had a dog
that he called Atman, you know,
based on the, you know, he had
Otman and Brahman and, you know, kind of Hindu
mythology. He was extremely interested in the
Upanishads. And so a lot of
these early quantum field theorists
or quantum mechanics theorists
would flirt with the idea that the mind
collapsed the wave function. And
now, if you were to talk to a modern
physicist, they would say, no, it's a quantum, you know, in the double slit experiment, for
example, it's the quantum detector. That's just the quantum detector. Doesn't matter whether an observer
is present. They have no way to prove that. Like, the quantum detector might be holding a superposition
of, you know, measurements itself that the observer is then, you know, measuring. There's literally
no way to prove it. And while physics has went into this, like, cul-de-sac la string theory and a lot
of the discussions we're having, you have these really interesting fields of study that have
popped up at pretty much every elite university in the U.S. or a lot of them, at Duke, they had the
Ryan Institute, Stanford Research Institute, UCLA, Princeton Engineering and Anomalous Research
Lab, all of these guys in one form or another studied what's known as parapsychology,
which is in its most rudimentary form that the mind affects.
wave function collapse, none of the scientists that engaged in these sorts of experiments
came out thinking that the mind didn't affect it. And there wasn't some sort of interface.
It's really interesting. Like, the guy who ran the Princeton Engineering and Anomalous Research
Lab is in charge of, you know, he's responsible for some modern plasma propulsion that
are still used in satellites today. He was dean of the Princeton Engineering School. His name is
Bob John. And he wrote a whole book called, I think it was marginal realities or something. And it was
about how, like, there's some mental interface with the wave function. And he came up with the whole
model, a physicalist model around how this might occur. In conventional physics, it's pretty much
Roger Penrose is like sitting out on a, he's like the only guy like completely, you know, out on a limb
saying that there's this thing called orchestrated objective reduction, maybe the microtubules
collapse the wave function. But you have all these elite universities mid-century that
said we got weak but very real and statistically significant effects around the mind,
you know, affecting the wave function in this experiment known as random event generators where
you have a super rudimentary computer. So it's a computer that produces ones and zeros. You tie it to
something that's conventionally thought of as random in quantum mechanics or something like
radioactive isotope decay or a double slit experiment where you expect the same, you know,
50-50 distribution of, you know, both slits or whatever. And you have an observer come in, walk into the
room and you're seeing ones and zeros being produced on a graphical interface that's tied
to this provably random thing. So it's literally the perfect digital coin flip, right? You'd expect
over a long enough time scale with some standard deviation, expected standard deviation,
the same amount of ones and zeros. All of these people got a statistically significant
standard deviation with this experiment. And this is where it gets really crazy. The CIA had this
sort of remote viewing, you know, program from, again, the 70s to the 90s, where they were
using remote viewing as a really important intelligence modality. In fact, the top remote viewer
is a guy named Joseph McMonigle. And he won what's known as the Legion of Merit for over 200
instances in which he helped aid American Intel with his insights that were drawn up
psychically. Jimmy Carter, at the end of his presidency, said the craziest thing he'd ever
experienced in his presidency. He's on record saying this. You can hear the
the audio. He says a woman named Rosemary Smith, they were looking for a TU22, a Russian spy plane,
or a cargo plane, rather, that had fallen below the treetops somewhere in Africa. And this woman
circled a three-square-mile radius in Zaire, and they found the plane. So this was
studied at the highest levels of the government. The CIA then contracted a woman who's still
alive today, Jessica Uttz, to do a meta-statistical analysis, Huberman-style meta-study, you know,
this sort of stuff, she went on to become the president of the American Statistical Association
in 2016. So you can go argue with the American Statistical Association president. I'm not going
to. And she came out being like, if this methodology and this level of skepticism and scrutiny
were applied to any other field of science, it would be accepted immediately. Like, the other field
would be accepted immediately because of the stigma. This field is not accepted. Why is this so much
stigma? I think it's manufactured. I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I truly, I wish people
sort of looked at this more. I mean, now it's starting to, the dam is starting to break, like,
thanks to, you know, it's like Rogan and Sean Ryan and all these guys is like there's all these
like government whistleblowers coming out being like, the government's actually way weirder than
you think. And we experience all these like trippy things inside of it. So I do think the dam is
breaking somewhat, but I don't know why, you know, why people aren't more open-minded.
Is this related to the telepathy tapes? Have you seen those? Yes, it's perfectly related to the
telepathy tapes. It's, it's, yes. So the telepathy tapes is a podcast that surpassed all
podcasts, modern wisdom, Joe Rogan, everything. It was for a little bit. It was like for a month
or something. It was a number one podcast in America. And it was all these autistic, nonverbal
children across the United States saying basically
repeatedly showing and this what I should caveat this this was not done in double
blind settings so this needs to be done simultaneous to that I think anybody that
listens to all the tapes and you're reasonably open-minded will say there's obviously
something going on that's interesting here where they'll have you know the mother in
another room generating you know an image on an iPad and then the son or daughter
the autistic nonverbal kid in another room totally isolated, they'll see some image pop up
and, like, not even statistically significant, like 19 out of 20 times, they'll know what the
image the mother or father are seeing. And often it's, they call it remote perception because
it's actually the mind meld that's more fundamental than them just being able to see something
in objective time space. It's their ability to kind of meld with their parents, which kind of
makes sense. Like, you interviewed Rupert Sheldrake. I remember a few years ago. A lot of that kind
of lines up with that sort of anecdotal. It's not anecdotal. I mean, experimental findings. He doesn't
have amazing theories. I would say the morphic resonance stuff is, it's a sort of a placeholder theory,
but he's not a bad empiricists. Like, the experimental protocols aren't bad. Um, so these kids will,
they'll meet up on this telepathic hill and they'll talk to each other and they're,
they'll exchange information. It's this fascinating thing. And,
I do think there are more high-agency people interested in this stuff and who have studied it rigorously than meet the eye.
Like, I'll give you an example.
My closest mentor runs a multi-billion dollar hedge fund, and he's impressive in that context, like a high performer in that context.
He is good at computer science.
He probably has, like, a 200 IQ or something.
Like, really, really smart, dude.
he helped Bob John, the guy I mentioned,
the Princeton Engineering and Anonymous research guy,
he helped him run the lab for 10 years.
And he is the highest integrity guy I know.
He is fully, fully high conviction
on these random event generator experiments.
And he would say he would bring the physicist from, you know,
Princeton into the lab.
And they'd say, look, like this is really important.
This is like breaking your models.
And they would say stuff like, oh, no,
it's like a file drawer issue or something.
survivorship bias like all the kind of heuristics that you would use to like break a scientific
experiment and he would go through each thing line by line like no it's not file drawer we counted
for that with this no it's not survivorship bias we counted for it with this no it's really cohort
wide and we controlled for all these other things like extremely extreme if you met this guy you'd
be very impressed by him and he's like they just wouldn't listen they just like it was literally
and and you look at these things I mean the idea that the universe might be
in nature and we might be rendering it that we might be sort of rendering a substrate that is
computational like in in in you know for when you see an interface you know like on on your computer
you see icons right you don't see the underlying thing like you need like a code compiler to like
you know abstract to take like the ones and zeros and turn it into like this larger abstracted out
thing and you don't see like electromagnetic waves right like you see like you have to iconize it like
red, you know, is this like, oh, I'm scared, red, you know, like, they're evolutionally
adaptive to sort of do that. There are all these physicists that talk about, like, the participatory
universe. So they would go right up until the kind of parapsychological line of like the mind
would collapse wave function. But I think they got spooked or they would flirt with it
privately and they wouldn't sort of get into it. So John Wheeler had this sort of, you know,
this participatory universe. You talked about it from bit and computational universe. And
And he would say that basically, like, wave function collapse is basically just a bunch of yes, no questions.
So it's, you know, it's kind of like binary code, if you will.
And but he would never go, you know, up and he would never get into like the mind is actually the thing collapsing the wave function.
But then you have all this interesting data coming out that maybe the mind does collapse the wave function.
And you have things like, okay, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, where if you measure position of a subatomic particle, momentum gets fuzzier,
that looks like a computational caching function to me so that looks like you're only storing one of those in local memory and you know and so what's the implication of that the implication of that is that you are um there's some deeper substrate that is uh kind of computational uh of the universe and you are a local node and you are rendering your reality live and you know i don't know what it is exactly that you're uh you know is it intention you know i know that's like a really woo-woo term
like you can go to like a new agey conference and they'll you know they'll talk about the secret and
manifestation and all that stuff i think a lot of people in their lives probably say like if i were to
say chris do you have anything that's happened in your life that's like been well below chance
that's felt like this just impossible synchronicity you'd probably say yes i assume you know like most
people if you were to poll they would sort of say that and then they would sort of quickly walk it back
and be like you know but like it's sort of impossible you know given given physics but
there are all these things even you know the way the you know golden ratio and and and fibonacci sequences like used in a lot of geometric structures all over you know earth or whatever or you know planks constant if it were slightly off like we wouldn't have a habitable environment like the anthropic principle you know that points i think towards probably something that you know is is more computational you know in nature um you know the the sheldrick stuff with with morphic resonance again i don't know about his the theory the theory
behind it, but just the empirical observations that if you build a crystal structure and then
you build that crystal structure again, it's easier the second and third time to build the same
crystal structure if you have a novel structure. To me, it's because uploading times are
slower than downloading times. You have in sports the Bannister effect. Roger Bannister broke
the four-minute mile in 1952. It was broken 10 times in the next two and a half years. It's as if
doing something new and novel takes longer to upload to some monad, some central repository of data or
whatever, you are client side, that's server side, and the new incremental person that does this
does it that much quicker and easier. It's like, you know, Sheldrake shows this with crossword puzzles.
You do it a little bit quicker if a thousand people have done it before you. So, like, I think we'll
end up with some model of the universe that might be computational in nature. Nobody can disprove that.
Nobody, I can't prove that definitively, but nobody, no scientist can ultimately disprove that.
And all I'm saying here is that way more serious physicists and thinkers have sort of flirted with this idea than I think people realize.
And then meanwhile, you have, you know, Sabino Hossenfeld or Eric Weinstein and Sean Carroll, like, you know, in this crazy argument about nothing.
Jesse, you're awesome, dude.
Fuck, this is like a tour de force of stuff.
And I love your pod.
I love your channel.
I think it's, I think it's sick.
tell people where they should go to check it all they should go to jesse michael's on youtube um jesse michael's on
spotify jesse michael's official on instagram and i love your channel too man i i've been really
inspired by modern wisdom and i've watched you for i don't know three four years and it's been so cool
to see you just blow up so thank you for having me man for you let's run this back soon did i appreciate
you let's do it man cool if you are looking for new reading suggestions look no further than the
Modern Wisdom Reading List. It is 100 books that you should read before you die, the most
interesting, life-changing and impactful books I've ever read with descriptions about why I like
them and links to go and buy them. And you can get it right now for free by going to
chriswillex.com slash books. That's chriswillex.com slash books.