The Chris Cuomo Project - Harvard Professor Avi Loeb on Antisemitism and Alien Life

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

In this episode of The Chris Cuomo Project, Chris speaks with Harvard professor and astronomer Avi Loeb about the recent controversies surrounding Harvard president Claudine Gay's response to antisemitic statements. They discuss academia's apparent contradictions regarding free speech, as well as Loeb's scientific research into the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Loeb shares his perspective on recent UFO disclosures and his Galileo Project, which aims to systematically search for evidence of extraterrestrial technology. Join Chris Ad-Free On Substack: http://thechriscuomoproject.substack.com Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday: https://linktr.ee/cuomoproject Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We got a big one today that's a twofer, a great mind that is looking through the lens of what's going on in our campuses and how it seems alien to him. And this is a guy who studies the existence of potential alien life. I'm Chris Cuomo. Welcome to the Chris Cuomo Project.

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and you will get content that no one else is going to get. Yes, I know people will sign up for sub stack and then they'll leak the information. That's okay. But it will be context for people who are really seekers, professionally, personally, about your wellness, about your philosophy in life and your struggles. I will let you go to school on my own experiences

so that hopefully you don't repeat the same mistakes. And as always, thank you for checking me out on News Nation, eight o'clock and 11 o'clock, every weekday night, Eastern, eight and 11 Eastern. Okay. Thank you very much. And free agent merch. You can go to free agent sales, free agent sales, and you'll see lots of great stuff there. And you can buy it. And the part that goes to me, I'm going to use to give to charities that we crowdsource together. I'll make the choice, but I want your ideas. So what a treat. Professor Avi Loeb, big deal, okay? He's the Baird Professor

of Science at Harvard University. He is the Director for the Institute of Theory and Computation at Harvard University. Now, I keep saying Harvard University. Now, because of what's happening with us on campuses right now, where it seems like the people at Harvard are doing things that aren't too smart in terms of common sense, when it comes to protecting the Jews, like every other minority group, you might be like, so what? Wait until you hear what he has to say about Harvard University. And the letter that he wrote to the president,

a letter that, to the point of what I'm saying right now has not been responded to. What he sees in the inconsistencies on campus and where they come from, what he has discovered. And then we get into a deep dive with a guy who has been studying the realities of interstellar activity and extraterrestrial activity for years through science, and he believes he has answers to some very important questions. Dr. Professor Avi Loeb. We don't fake the funk here, and here's the real talk. Over 40 years of age, 52% of us experience some kind of ED between the ages of 40 and 70. I know it's taboo, it's embarrassing, but it shouldn't be. Thankfully, we now have HIMS, and it's changing the vibe by providing affordable access to ED treatment, and it's all online. HIMS is changing men's health care.

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It's required. Plus, price is going to vary based on product and subscription plan. Professor Avi Loeb, as I live and breathe, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. It's a great pleasure, Chris. Now, when people see and hear you,

they're going to want more. Medium.com, the professor puts out essays on a regular basis. His book is interstellar, okay? There's a Netflix documentary coming out about his work on an expedition and just the fascination with him and his thinking and his discoveries. He is the Baird Professor of Science at Harvard. He is the

director for the Institute of Theory and Computation at Harvard University. So he's a big deal, or at least he was until Harvard shit the bed by being one of the universities where their president couldn't answer a very simple question that you think any Harvard graduate would be able to answer. Professor, thank you for joining us. And let's talk about this most recent drama that includes your university and other elite universities. Why do you think the president couldn't answer the no-brainer question that threats against Jewish people and mass suggestions of suicide, suggestions that Jews are somehow a problem, should be met with the same protection and action as any other targeted group. Well, thanks for having me. And I think

the problem is that common sense is not common in academia these days. And it's part of the culture where, you know, many people in academia are trapped in a narrative which violates its own principles that it tries to promote. So when you are arguing that you want to promote diversity, you know, the best way to promote diversity is to pay attention to excellence, irrespective of whether people come from unprivileged backgrounds. You want to promote everyone, irrespective of the background they come from. But when you say that you cannot measure people to decide whether they're excellent or not. When you say you can't judge people, you cannot pay attention to metrics that were used in the past, then you lose the to be vulnerable to people who promote, for example,

views of the Nazis from Second World War or genocide of Jews, as was asked about. So the point is that an educational institution is supposed to educate. And that means telling young people who have no sense of history what is right and what is wrong. There is a way of educating people. You can't allow, tolerate everything because then you end up with a system that is going in the wrong direction, which is exactly what happens right now. So what happened on Capitol Hill is not a result of a fluke of something that happened just recently. It's a decade-long deterioration of attention to values that we all believe in, you know, in a society like the United States. And frankly, I never expected these circumstances to come to the forefront because it hurts me on three levels of my identity as a Jew,

and I'm proud of being Jewish, as an Israeli-born professor. I was born in Israel and professor at Harvard University. You know, all these levels are suffering right now from what happened. And, you know, I wrote a letter to Harvard's president, Claudine Gay, explaining that the history, you know, that 65 members of my father's family were killed in the Holocaust and therefore the word genocide, you know, brings me to, you know, I'm sensitive to that word. And when Israelis were killed, civilians that, you know, went to a celebration of music, you know, young women were raped there and, you know, they were just killed because of their Israeli identity. There is no doubt in my mind that this kind of atrocity should be denounced

by leaders like the president of Harvard and not, You shouldn't just jump from one view to another and allow everything to be said. So, you know, it just strikes me as that sanity, at least the moral compass, has been lost in academia. And it's not only that, because there is the issue of free speech, but free speech does not apply to professors. We know of examples of professors that were kicked out because they expressed an opinion that is not really shared by the majority, the progressive majority. We know of speakers that were disinvited to campus. invited to campus. So as I said, it's an Orwellian reality that George Orwell forecasted in his book 1984, where, you know, the party's slogan is war is peace. You know, ignorance is strength. You know, it basically people are violating the principles they claim to promote. And it's all about virtual signaling.

You know, saying something that people around you keep saying, but you're not really promoting the cause. So the first thing is that people should look up the letter that Professor Avi Loeb sent to President Gay at Harvard, where he expresses how this is obviously very personal to him because the loss to his family and his identity. And it really saddens me every time I hear one of the Jewish people who I love as the family I choose or I work with or I live around say, and I'm proud to be Jewish. I hate that we're in a place where Jewish people have to validate their own existence.

So look at his letter and you'll understand his context. Now, here's the problem. It turns out that people who were complaining that there's some bad shit going on on these elite liberal university campuses were right. And here's how we know. we know. This isn't a one-off. They have been practicing intolerance and making choices about what is okay to say and what is not okay to say for years. And in their own guidelines and practices, if Avi Loeb tells me my pronouns are it and they, and I say, yo, I'm calling you he because that's what you look like to me. Sorry. There will be action taken against me. And we all know that if you were walking around on campus saying something obnoxious or threatening about black people, okay, if you just changed that one fact,

you weren't talking about genocide of Jews, you're talking about genocide of blacks or of any minority community or identity community, Professor Gay would have had a quick answer. President Gay would have had a quick answer. So the question now becomes, we get that there was a standard. We get that you violated the standard with the Jews.

The question becomes, why? Are Jewish people seen as just white and empowered now in American society, even though they should just do a little quick Google about how many Jews are not white and what percentage of Israel isn't even Jewish. But do you think that's what it is that people look at Avi Loeb and say, I like his accent, but he's just another white guy. So he doesn't deserve the same protection. Well, if they say that, I'm really sad about it, because, you know, when I came to academia, I expected some values to be honored. And, you know, I had a choice between working in the farm that my father worked in and being a farmer.

And I thought that by joining academia, I will be able to promote innovative research to learn more about the reality that we all share. And I'm really disappointed by where I am right now. And I wish to make it better. I've been at Harvard for 30 years, and it's the first time that I have second thoughts about perhaps becoming a farmer because working with nature is so much better than working with people.

And, you know, I'm a scientist. For me, it's really important to have all the data before you express an opinion, to look at the evidence. And what the young people of today are missing is by going to X or Twitter, they think that the very superficial views are valuable. No, they are not. You have to study the history of a conflict before you understand the context. And when you say these are the indigenous people, you have to understand the Jews were there thousands of years ago. It was their land and they were kicked out. So you can't just go back, let's say, decades and argue that you have a very convincing argument. You can't argue for violence. You know, we know, for example, when Itzhak Rabin was promoting peace in Israel as the prime minister, and along with Anwar Sadat beforehand and begging and so forth. I mean, both Rabin and Sadat were assassinated. And why were they assassinated? Not because someone crazy

decided to kill them. It's because there was a narrative behind it that people spoke about killing them because they violate some principles. And so words matter and words can translate to action. So when someone says genocide of Jews is a matter of context, another person would understand it, that until there is killing on campus, it doesn't count as a violation of the code of conduct. And, you know, this is really dangerous. But it doesn't make sense, professor, because your campus is so hair trigger about so many other distinctions that if someone, you know, look, President Gay is the first black president. And so, you know, she is proof of our desire for progress by elevating minorities. And the Jewish people in America have shown what's possible as a minority. But we're missing something.

We have to be missing something because for Jews not to be an obvious answer, was it wrong when that happened? Should they be protected? Should those kids who were saying those ugly things be acted upon? The answer has to be yes. It's a no brainer. You don't have to go to Harvard to know the answer. So why didn't she give the answer? Because, because it's not just her. It's behind her was the provost of Harvard, who is Jewish. You know, the head, the chair of the corporation that controls Harvard above the president is also Jewish, Penny Pritzker. The provost is Alan Garber. So this is a culture, a narrative that is not unique to the president. And she feels in a safe space.

So the Jews who are in power are OK with Jews being targeted. That doesn't make sense. That doesn't make sense to me. But apparently that's the case because they supported her. And they supported most recently with a decision by the corporation to stay with her. And so what I conclude is that in order to change the reality on campuses, there needs to be a change in the narrative. Not just one individual is responsible for that, because the fact that President Gay is the president is a result of a culture. And there is a whole community of people that actually voted to keep her in her position.

So I think this shows a breakdown of society. It might be the result of social media that promotes extremism. The fact that even the newspapers nowadays, you know, are really attending to the subscribers. If you read the New York Times, you get a very different message. But what is behind the choice to exempt the Jews? I get that it's a culture. I get that it's more than one person. But there's still something missing because, look, this is an easy answer. Have people on campus who don't believe in transgender.

Do I agree with them? No. But let's hear out their arguments. even transgender. Do I agree with them? No, but let's hear out their arguments. Let's have people on who believe that black students aren't measured the same way as white students. You don't let those voices on campus. I remember a long time ago when Ahmadinejad was in charge in Iran and he wanted to come here and get an audience. And I think Columbia gave him one or something. And there was all this drama that he shouldn't be heard. And they had to find all these different ways. I thought it was a mistake then. I think it's a mistake now. So fine, have all those voices on. They won't. And yet there's something about

the Jews. And that's why I come back to this proposition. Is it that you guys are seen as white people now, so you don't deserve the protection. And she just didn't want to say that. And she's got two Jewish guys sitting behind her, or a man and a woman, who are okay with that idea as well. Yeah, I do think so. I think the biggest problem is really that free speech is not promoting free speech. It's only people that agree with the opinion that is prevalent on campus that are allowed to speak. And, you know, this is a violation of the principles of academia, where you are supposed to have a dialogue with people that disagree with you.

And they say that they want to promote that, but in practice, it's not being practiced. So it's really unfortunate. And I must say something really has to change because it will come to hurt the Democrats in the elections, given the situation right now. How do they not lose Jewish voters and Jewish donors when this is almost entirely populated by the far reaches of the left fringe, right? I mean, kids on campus, you know, who knows that they even vote, but the universities are seen as extensions of the left. And you have the squad in Congress. Sure, they're a small number, but they're not getting shouted down very vociferously by their colleagues.

How does it not hurt the Democratic Party? Oh, I think it does, definitely. And the point is that, you know, on campus, you can live in a bubble disconnected from society. But in the political arena, you can't be disconnected because you have to be voted into office. So, you know, we will see what happens next year. But I think it's important for academia to adjust, to change its narrative, because half of the kids, you know, grow up in a, you know, in a home where different political views are being aired, different than you find on campus. And I'm sure that they feel very bad as they come to Harvard and have to pretend as if they agree with everything around them, just so that they can get, you know, along within that environment. That's bad because academia is supposed to represent the country.

You know, we are supposed to echo the public's interest. We are relying on taxpayers' money. We are educating kids from all kinds of backgrounds. This is the real diversity. The diversity is not just a matter of the color of the skin, but also of opinions. And, you know, I don't feel myself privileged. I grew up on a farm. I signed my letter to Claudine Gay as a curious farm boy because I don't feel that I'm superior to the public. And my privilege being in academia is to

ask questions and address them myself without listening to the adults in the room. That's really my narrative. And so I feel betrayed when I see what is happening right now in academia. But, you know, since I've been at Harvard for 30 years, it's just like my home and I will continue to fight for a better future. I don't, I'm not willing to surrender to others who came to my home and violate my principles. So do you believe anything is going to change on campus? They're allowing President Gay to stay. There are some questions about whether or not it's because she's the first black female president and Harvard didn't want to have to get rid of the first black female president because it would be somewhat of a stain on their move towards diversity. Because we saw the UPenn president have to step down.

And by all accounts, she was seen as equal to or better as a leader than Harvard's. And maybe it's because she's a white woman. They felt more comfortable getting rid of her than they do with President Gay. But do you think President Gay will have to change things now because the silence is deafening? Well, you see, the organizations

tend to not admit in mistakes. And the best way is to maintain course. And that's what happened. I forecasted it beforehand. I thought the corporation will side with her. But I do think that the friction with the outside world will only grow and the endowment of Harvard will suffer as a result because many of the wealthy donors will decide not to contribute. And that will take a year or two before there will be a reality check. And at some point, you know, it might get to a point where even people within Harvard would recognize that they cannot continue in that path.

And so my forecast is that within a year or two, there will be another crisis that is triggered by the present-day crisis. And at some point, she won't be able to operate, basically, as a result of friction with the outside world. And Harvard will have to take a different path of reconciliation with communities that believe differently. You just can't deny them access to Harvard, because some of them are already in. Let me tell you something, just as a personal experience with this. So we have a senior in high school. He is a good student. He could be a better student,

but he's a good student, smart kid. He's been watching these situations because he's trying to figure out where he wants to go to school. I am not somebody who believes that you have to go to an Ivy League school to be successful. I think that the four-year degree itself, unless you want to be an Avi Loeb and be a professor or be specific types of professional, I don't even know that it's a great economic tradeoff, to be honest.

But watching what's happening on the Ivy campuses, and then him listening to the kids at the University of Alabama, where I was for News Nation for the debate. And somebody asked kids on campus there, hey, why don't you have Hamas protests here going on? And they were like, well, because we believe in America and Hamas is a terror organization and we're not going to have people condemning Jewish people on our campus. It's not going to happen. Now, look, the right has had its own problems when it comes to diversity. No question about that. But my son sees it, and he's like, why do you want me to apply to these other schools? I said, I don't, especially right now. I think that you are not able to be different on these campuses.

And you can get kicked out for anything. And groupthink, it's the opposite of why you go to university. And I bet you, you're going to see a lot of kids who might have applied there applying somewhere else. Now, the universities don't care. You guys have an endowment that is enough to pay the tuition for all the students like forever. It's like $50 billion. So I don't know that money matters that much, but the perception does. And I think that there's a chance that they're going to go from elite to being seen as effete and out of touch. That's exactly the danger in the prestige in fundraising in future years. But let me propose an uplifting message, something that is a little bit

more encouraging. You know, in my scientific research, I'm really searching for a partner beyond Earth, you know, like finding someone out there, another civilization that would inspire us to do better, because this is the whole message of the messianic age. You know, the Messiah is supposed to bring peace on earth. And I don't think that it's likely that the Messiah will come from Brooklyn, the way some Orthodox Jews believe in. I think the Messiah will arrive from another planet, exoplanet. And the message would be, stop fighting on the territories, on the surface of this rock that was left over from the formation of the sun, because there is much more real estate out there that you can go to explore space. You know, we are spending $2 trillion every year on military budgets worldwide, trying to kill

each other. And if we were to decide to change priorities as a result of a wake-up call from a partner out there, then we could, and we would use $2 trillion a year for space exploration. We could send a CubeSat towards every star in the Milky Way galaxy within this century, billions of them. And so it's just a matter of priorities. billions of them. And so it's just a matter of priorities. And I think that once we show willingness to stop fighting each other and working together, someone from outside will say, OK, now you are really behaving like an intelligent civilization. Before that, I thought that you are, you know, just part of nature. you know, just part of nature. Look, no shame in my game.

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That's what happens with your first purchase. So make it. Go to drinkag1.com slash CCP. Drinkag1.com slash CCP. Check it out. The Chris Cuomo Project is supported by Cozy Earth. Why? Because I like their sheets. That's why. Check it either. But Cozy Earth sheets breathe. And here's what I love about them.

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Professor Loeb says in his letter on Medium to Professor Gay, which I'm assuming she didn't respond to, by the way. My personal belief is that the Messiah will arrive, not necessarily from Brooklyn, but rather from outer space. The extraterrestrial message would likely be that we should stop fighting over territory. As noted in my new book, Interstellar, good plug, I'm seeking to learn from a higher intelligence in outer space

what we could all aspire to be. Two problems. One, human beings have always been fighting with each other since they learned to stand upright and probably a little before. The second thing is, when you talk about life beyond this earth, even though there's so many people like you, like me, who choose to believe in a higher intelligence and power that I call God, many Jews called Hashem. They say, you're crazy, Avi Loeb. Professor at Harvard and he believes that there's life somewhere else? That's crazy talk. How do we get past that? Well, I think believing that we are alone, that Albert Einstein was the smartest scientist who ever lived since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago is actually arrogant.

Why do I say that? Because there are hundreds of billions of other stars in the Milky Way galaxy. And most of the stars, like the sun, formed billions of years ago. So if you just consider the Voyager spacecraft, it would take it less than a billion years to go from one side of the Milky Way galaxy to the other. And if a civilization came to exist a billion years before us, which is very likely since most stars formed before the sun, then they would have reached us by now. Now, why haven't we seen them? It's going back to the question of Enrico Fermi 70 years ago, who said, where is everybody? And, you know, this is just like a single person standing at home and saying, I don't have a partner. I look around and i don't see anyone well of course because we know that to find partners

you at least need to look through your window or go to dating sites you can't just say where is everybody which is what enrico fermi did and you know in the past 70 years we've been searching for radio signals which is just like waiting for a phone call at home. Nobody may call you. The alternative is to look for packages near our mailbox for something in our backyard that is different from rocks. Maybe there is a tennis ball that was thrown by a neighbor. And we haven't checked. Only over the past decade, we looked for interstellar objects.

That's what I'm looking for. And the reason is simple. There was a statement made by Steven Weinberg in his book, The First Three Minutes. He's a Nobel laureate. And he argued that the more the universe is comprehensible to us, the more pointless it looks. And I say, you know, from the reason it looks pointless is because scientists like Steven Weinberg, which are almost all of my colleagues, they focus on lifeless entities, you know, elementary particles, stars that have no life to them. And we know from our personal life that if we find a partner, it gives a meaning to our existence. It gives a sense of, you know, we are not alone. We have someone that we can have a dialogue with. And the same would

be true if we find a partner in interstellar space. It will give a meaning to our existence. We will not be lonely anymore. So in my mind, this is the most important thing that we can do. Look for a partner out there. And it's not the craziest thing at all. I think it's actually crazier to think that we are unique and special. And coming back to God, what you said before, a very advanced scientific civilization is a good approximation to God, because they may be able to create life in their laboratories. They may be able to create a baby universe in their laboratories. These are qualities that to create a baby universe in their laboratories. These are qualities that we assign to God. If I ever meet and encounter such a civilization,

the first question would be, what happened before the Big Bang? I want to know if the Big Bang was created by a scientist in a white coat in a laboratory? Or was it, there was something else before it? And the second question is, where is the nearest meeting place, nearest bar where we can socialize with extraterrestrials and learn more from them? You know, these are the two questions that are most important in my mind.

I remember the place in Star Wars. I hope they have a better one than that, man, because it was violent in there. Everybody was shooting everybody over nothing. Enrico Fermi, obviously always proud to hear an Italian name mentioned with any kind of greatness. Although it is interesting that his starting point of this is all there is, I wonder how that helped shape his greatest work,

which is, of course, the first nuclear reactor, and he was part of the Manhattan Project. And yes, a lot of those scientists, as we can all learn by watching Oppenheimer and see Killian or Cillian Murphy, however you say his name, and Robert Downey Jr., who's amazing in the movie, I don't think they knew what their development was going to be used for. But when people get that interested in things that destroy, it does make you wonder about what they see as the mystery of life. My first question would be, Professor, is there a God? That is absolutely what I would ask a partner

who had that kind of advantage of time and understanding. Is there something that is watching us, guiding us? You know, this question was asked by Moses in the Old Testament. And of course, then he witnessed the burning bush that was never consumed. And that convinced him that there is a superhuman entity called God. And now you can buy nowadays off the shelf instruments that would fool Moses. can buy nowadays off-the-shelf instruments that would fool Moses. If he were to see them in the desert, they would not be consumed. They would look as if they're burning. And if I were next to Moses, I would say, let me use my infrared cameras that I use in the Galileo project that I'm leading and tell you how much energy is emitted per unit time, what's the

temperature of this burning bush. And then I can inform you whether it is indeed manufactured by some superhuman entity. What I'm trying to illustrate by this is that if you take a cave dweller, bringing that cave dweller to New York City, the cave dweller will have religious awe when seeing all the lights, all the electronic gadgets. So for us, if we meet a civilization that had more than one century of technology

the way we did, if it had thousands of years, millions of years, it would look like a good approximation to God because we would feel the same religious awe as Moses did when he saw the burning bush. And so what I say is this is an opportunity in the real world, not in stories about the past. In the real world, finding an advanced scientific civilization would be just

like meeting God. In the real world, it will bring religion and science together. That's our opportunity. I love it. Professor, people are very quick to discount every sighting of a UFO as explainable. This is a balloon. This is a plane. This is fake. Now, military pilots saying that they see things starts to complicate it because we don't want to be so quick to dismiss military pilots when we're trusting them with such expertise and valuing them the way we

do that they're just crazy and they can't see anything in the sky. And now we have people coming forward who says they have knowledge of government programs that absolutely exist to study these things. And then there are leaks where people say there's really nothing there. This is a joke. And that's why the congressional leaders stay away from it. But then they classify the shit out of everything in these programs. What do you believe is the reality of whether or not UAPs or UFOs exist and what they likely are and what we likely know at the highest levels. So a couple of years ago, I was in the green room of the Washington National Cathedral with Avery Haynes in a forum that included Jeff Bezos, Bill Nelson. And I came to Avery because she

delivered a report to Congress talking about these unidentified anomalous phenomena. And she has a bachelor's degree from University of Chicago. She's the director of national intelligence. I went to her and said that, Avery, you submitted this report. What's your gut feeling? And what do you think these objects are? And she said, I don't know.

And I believe her. I think the government is not a scientific organization. They may have evidence because they are monitoring the sky all the time. For national security purposes, astronomers like myself, you know, we have observatories that look at a small portion of the sky. And if anything flies overhead, we ignore it. So I would believe the government may have some very intriguing information.

Last Friday, just a few days ago, I had a long conversation, more than an hour, with David Grush, who provided a testimony under oath to the U.S. House of Representatives in summer 2023. And I spoke with him about how scientists could get engaged with the kind of evidence. him about how scientists could get engaged with the kind of evidence, he basically clarified to me that there are no high-profile scientists engaged right now. And I would love to know more about what the government has. And, you know, I'm willing to go through any hoops that require access to those materials, to that evidence. But we know they can't have nothing because they have programs, Avi, where they work between the detection and the retrieval, where they use special operators and others. So if they have the system set up for a process, that's because they use the process.

And if they're going out and retrieving things, then they must have things that they have decided, oh, this comes from this government organization. This comes from this contractor. This comes from another country. This is stuff that we don't know and we have to reverse engineer. They have to have these things. Yeah, but anything that comes from outside the solar system should not be classified and hidden from view of scientists because it's like hiding information about the universe. You know, the fact that the universe expands, that it has a certain age, this is information that it should be shared by all humans, the composition of the universe. So if we have a partner outside the solar system,

it's not the role of government to keep the information away from us. And as a scientist, I'm happy to help them figure it out. The government has a day job, which is national security. That's not their day job. That's my day job. I'll be happy to help them with anything that was not produced by an adversarial country and that came from outside of this earth. So that's my basic point. And, you know, I realized the sky is not classified, the oceans are not classified. So I decided, you know, to go ahead and collect evidence myself. But this could save me decades. You know, life is short. I can work on it, you know, all my life.

But if the government already has that data, I'm here to serve and help them figure it out and, you know, understand what it means. And so I, you know, am leading right now the Galileo project. We have a working observatory that monitors the entire sky. We have tens of thousands of objects that we see every 10 days. So we have lots of them. And we are now analyzing those objects with the machine learning software. And there is an old domain anomaly resolution office in the Pentagon. I actually visited it a week ago.

You know, every morning I jog at sunrise. So when I was in Washington a week ago, I jogged on the Arlington Bridge. That was exactly the day that Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, testified on Capitol Hill. And I was wishing her well. Apparently it didn't go that well. Hill and I was wishing her well. Apparently it didn't go that well. But I visited Washington, spoke with people. They don't do what the Galileo Project is doing. They are just analyzing past reports, which are anecdotal. You know, a person happened to be at the right place at the right time. You don't know what the background of events of this nature is. So the Galileo Project is monitoring the sky all the time. And we have a lot of background objects. So we do a systematic study. In addition, I went to the Pacific Ocean this

summer to retrieve materials from the first interstellar meteor, the first object known to us that came from outside the solar system, the size of a watermelon that exploded in the lower atmosphere and released a few percent of the Hiroshima atomic bomb energy. We went there in an expedition that cost one and a half million dollars, spent a few weeks in the ocean, collected materials, brought them back to Harvard and are now analyzing all of these materials in the laboratories at Harvard University and at the Brooker Corporation in Berlin, Germany, and we are finalizing our conclusions. So the reason I do it this way is because as a kid, I would sit at the dinner table and ask a difficult question, and the adults in the room would dismiss the question because they didn't

know the answer. So I said, okay, I'll become a scientist, and room would dismiss the question because they didn't know the answer. So I said, okay, I'll become a scientist and I'll answer the question myself because I can collect the evidence. And that's what I'm doing. But I still see a lot of people around me who pretend to be the adults in the room and they dismiss the question. Galileo, of course, another Italian known as the first astronomer. I couldn't figure out the Leaning Tower of Pisa in his own hometown. Actually, he was there before. I should say, I really like Italians. They gave me a special award just a few months ago at Calabria for my book, Extraterrestrial, that was given by 600 students. I spent three weeks at Pisa about a decade ago.

It was called Galileana Cathedral. So it was a series of lectures in honor of Galileo Galilei. So I really like the Italian culture, the Italian scientific accomplishments. Do you believe that there have been incidents of things flying around Earth's atmosphere that are not from Earth? I think it's possible. And I was driven to this idea by the first two interstellar objects. So the first one was the meteor that I mentioned before that was moving faster than 95% of the stars near the sun. So it was moving really fast.

And also it exploded only at very high stress. So we concluded that it had material strength that is even tougher than iron meteorites, tougher than all 272 rocks that NASA cataloged over the past decade as meteors. And, you know, it suggested to me that it could be a Voyager-like meteor. So imagine our own spacecraft, Voyager, leaving the solar system and eventually colliding with a planet like the Earth. It would appear as a meteor of unusual material strength and unusual speed. The second object was Oumuamua, spotted almost four years later in October 2017. And it was flat, most likely flat in its shape based on the reflection of sunlight, and also exhibited an excess push, some mysterious non-gravitational acceleration that was pushing it away from the sun.

And I suggested maybe it's the reflection of sunlight. And for that, the object had to be very thin, like a sail. And of course, nature doesn't make such things. So I would say based on the first two interstellar objects, we should stay curious. You know, we should not pretend to be the adults in the room. Is it wrong, Avi, when people say the headlines are that you believe aliens have visited, you know, and then they'll say, but his peers are dubious? You know, because obviously you can't prove it. Although you did get one of the first big findings with this interstellar object and what it is, you got to try to figure out. But is that a fair headline? Do you believe

that aliens have likely visited or you think it's just a possibility? I think it's a possibility that is very intriguing because it will carry great consequences for the future. So we can't ignore it. You know, we're spending $10 billion on the biggest science projects like the Webb telescope, like the Large Hadron Collider. If only 1% of this budget would be spent, let's say $100 million on the search for objects from other civilizations, we would know much more. And this is a question that resonates with the public. Now, people say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but the mistake they're making is they're not seeking the evidence. So obviously, you know, it will not fall into your lap. And it's a circular argument. I say extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding. It requires an effort. You have to work. I mean, we know that because the Large Hadron Collider required decades of work. The LIGO experiment to detect gravitational waves requires decades of planning, more than a billion dollars in investment.

more than a billion dollars in investment. So how can we just say we don't have evidence, therefore we shouldn't engage in this? This is the most exciting question we can ask in science, and it should be one of the most funded endeavors. And once again, we talked about academia, and I think something is wrong in academia not attending to the public's interest, not attending to the government's interest in this case. Avi, have you felt pressure to back off the idea of believing that we've had alien contact here because the rest of the scientific community pooh-poohs that? And, you know, you want to be at a great place like Harvard. You can't be seen as too controversial unless you're attacking Jews.

And then it seems to be OK. But do you feel pressure to say it's possible as opposed to, yes, I think it's happened? Well, you have to understand, I served as the chair of the astronomy department at Harvard for nine years, the longest serving chair. I was the founding director of the Black Hole Initiative. I was part of the establishment for many, many years. I chaired the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. So people cannot just dismiss me because I know how science should be done. And when you have popularizers of science or bloggers raise doubt about my research, if you check their record, some of them call themselves

astrophysicists. You check their record, they haven't published a single scientific paper over the past decade. They behave just like commentators looking at a soccer match and telling the players how to pass the ball. How dare they? And then at the same time, you have people like Steve Desch from the Arizona State University who keeps sending emails to members of my research team. These are young, you know, undergraduate, graduate students and postdocs who receive emails from him. He's trying to dissuade them from engaging in the research. And I say, how can you do that? You are a senior professor.

And that's the biggest damage to science. When you, by voicing negativity, you suppress innovation of young minds. Because we don't know what most of the matter in the universe is. We've been searching for its identity for by now 90 years, since Fritz Zwicky first discovered dark matter. We don't know what most, 83% of the matter in the universe is. And so I worked on this question for several decades, And it was completely acceptable and actually appreciated. If you were to suggest a solution to the dark matter problem that experimentalists can check. So if we see weird objects around us, why isn't it just like dark matter? Why can't we say, okay, well, maybe it's not a rock. Maybe it's not a stone. Let's check that possibility. Why is that

dismissed on the spot? Well, in the context of dark matter, this is the culture, you know, and the way I see it is that we will never find the answer with such an attitude. And, you know, I call it the stone age of science, where everything in the sky must be stones. That's a good line. Do you believe that we're going to learn more from the government, that they have found things that are not from here, that may be from other countries, or things they're not sure about, but that they've discovered and saw worthy of being classified?

Yes, I do believe that if the government has such information and materials, they should disclose it to the best scientists in the world. And I'm happy to go through the process of helping them because it's really important for our future to recognize that we are not alone.

It will change everything. It will change politics, religion. And by the way, some people are worried, oh, this will devastate society. Well, think about Galileo's finding that the earth is not at the center of the world. It's not flat. Yeah. And, you know, they put him in house arrest. If we were to continue to believe that and just to maintain the stability of society the way the church wanted to do it politically, then we would keep sending rockets towards Mars, assuming that Mars moves around the Earth and we would never reach the destination. So I say it's much more important for us to adapt to the reality that we share rather than, you know, keep repeating mantras and saying that's an extraordinary claim. We don't want to invest any funds in it

because then we will never discover something new. You know what I don't like? I'm reading that headline and giving you a chance to comment on it because I don't like that journalists hype and exaggerate what you say and bait you into making statements that are provocative so that they can then go and have other scientists who are either less curious or have a different basis of a safe analysis so that they can shoot you down. And that becomes a proxy for insight.

So you get these bullshit headlines that are like, yeah, this guy thinks that there are aliens all over the place, which is what you've never said. I've interviewed you several times now. And I think it's just a way of doing what we do best, which is using negativity as a proxy for insight. It is so easy for me to be elevated to the level of Avi Loeb.

Like I could be on a show with you where this guy with all these credentials and diplomas hanging all over the place. And then it's like me, who's, you know, great testament to his ability is my ability to bench press. And I say, yeah, I think Avi Loeb is full of shit. I don't know what he found down there, but it's probably natural phenomena and he can't prove it. And all of a sudden I'm on equal footing. And I feel like we've really had a disservice on this topic. Like I have people say to me, oh, you're at News Nation now,

so you believe in little green men. I said, who said little green men? I said, I don't know what they have and I don't care if they don't, I don't care if they do. I just don't like what they have, and I don't care if they don't. I don't care if they do. I just don't like that they take my money and power of my community and don't tell us anything about it or elected representatives. They wouldn't have the programs and all these budgets if they didn't do anything. So I'm not saying they're aliens. I just want to know what they know.

But people exaggerate it just to be competitive. You nailed it, Chris. I 100% agree with what you just said. And if anyone listens to what I say on podcasts, you will get the clear message. However, many journalists want to get clickbaits, and that's why they distort the message. And then it's an easy bait to other scientists to attack me without engaging in any serious work. So it's not like a political debate where you want to show both sides. You want to show to give more weight to the side that is doing the hard work of science. You know, I spent a year planning the expedition, going to the Pacific Ocean, haven't slept much during that expedition, bring the material back to Harvard, use the best instruments in the world to analyze it. And then some guy says it's coal ash.

Now, where did that come from? Coal ash? We checked 60 elements in the periodic table. We can demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that it's not cold ash. Cold ash. And nevertheless, this message was publicized by the media. I mean, there were some other examples that I can mention of reporting that was completely dishonest. And in one case, they wrote something and I corrected them. And I'm talking about prestigious outlets like Scientific American. And they said, OK, we will not correct it because we don't want to confuse our readers.

So we complain about political messages being distorted. But I thought that in the context of science, if a scientist comes forward and explains to you that there was a mistake in what you reported, you are actually confusing the public if you are not reporting about my statement. And I don't ask you to do the calculation because maybe you're not qualified, but you can just say Avi Loeb says this and that. And that was based on a paper that was refereed, peer reviewed and published. So I said, look at my paper. It shows that there was a mistake. You can't just, you have to correct your message. And they said, no, this will confuse our readers. Well, guess what? We just corrected it right here. Fuck you, Scientific American. You shouldn't have lied about what Avi Loeb said. You should

have corrected it. And I'm glad you got to do it here. I very much look forward to continuing our conversation and asking questions and hearing your questions and any answers you find, you always have a platform wherever I am. And I love the message that you sent President Gay. I am very disappointed that she has been so quiet since getting the all clear. It was the exact right moment for her to speak up. As soon as she knew her ass was safe, seeing how that's what everybody worries about most, she should have stood up and said, we screwed this up. It ain't going to happen again on my watch.

I'm going to do what we're teaching our students to do. I'm going to learn from the mistake. And I'm not going to get punished just for the mistake, but I'm going to do better than the mistake. And she should have said it already. We'll see if she says it at all. Avi Loeb, I appreciate you very much. And I look forward to seeing you soon.

And I wish you the best for the holy days in the new year. Thank you, Chris. And just to clarify, we haven't spoken beforehand about the items we discussed, and we seem to agree on them. So, as they say, great minds think alike. Avi, you are a great mind. I am someone who talks to great minds. There is a very big difference. I ask questions for a reason.

No good answers. Avi Loeb, I appreciate you to be continued. And thank you very much for making sure that you are discussing what matters, whether it's political, sociological, or from out of this world. Man, that guy knows a lot of things about a lot of things, but most importantly, he's asking the most important questions. And that's why I'm lucky to have him in my universe of guests. And I will keep going back to him. Thank you for subscribing and following Substack. If you don't

want ads and you want direct access to me, please do so. Hoping to build community there. And News Nation, 8 and 11 p.m. Eastern, five days a week. Check it out there. I'm doing there what I'm doing here. Trying to keep things straight, trying to give debate with decency, even upon disagreement. So what do you say?

Let's get after it.