The Why Files: Operation Podcast - The Basement: Quantum Compilation | From Particle Colliders to Parallel Realities

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

-Explore my Hungryroot Digital Cookbook “Gertie's Hump Day Recipes” at https://hungryroot.com/THEBASEMENT -Download Cash App Today: https://click.cash.app/ui6m/re0kp2pw #CashAppPartner Terms apply. Bitcoin services by Block, Inc. See the Bitcoin disclosures at cash.app/legal/podcast. -Discover how to move your IRA or 401k into physical gold and silver — with no taxes or penalties. Get your free portfolio review and free gold & silver guide from GoldenCrest Metals: visit https://GoldenCrestMetals.com/thewhyfiles or call [phone] now. Some of the sharpest minds in physics have sat down in The Basement, each pushing at the edges of what we understand about reality. We start with the fundamentals, the Higgs boson, the Planck scale, the search for gravitons. Theories tested, published, and confirmed. From there, things get stranger. Entanglement, the double-slit experiment, the idea that reality itself is a simulation, and the possibility that the future is shaping the past right now. Physicists, astrophysicists, and researchers wrestling with the same question. Where does the universe stop making sense, and what happens after that. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode is a little different. We pulled together some of the best science conversations we've had in the basement. Physicists, astrophysicists, and researchers who spent their careers staring at the edges of what we actually understand. You'll hear from Dr. Travis Taylor on his theory that our universe might sit inside a black hole. Oh, like those Russian nesting dolls, except every doll is on fire, and also everyone we love is inside it. Daniel Whiteson breaking down the Higgs boson and why the plank scale isn't the wall people think it is. Avi Loeb on the search for gravitons and whether extra dimensions are hiding in plain sight. And it gets even stranger. Eric Wargo on quantum retrocausation, while the future might be able to

influence the past. Oh, so future me already knows how tonight ends. It must be nice having someone that reckless making all my decisions for me. Tom Campbell and Riswan Verk on entanglement, the double-slit experiment, and whether reality itself might be simulated, along with a few other insightful guests. We start with the fundamentals, and by the end, we're deep into consciousness, time and question science still has an answer. Question science hasn't answered. My favorite game. This one's a journey. Let's go down to the basement. Everyone starts with Skim Walk with you, but I got to do this for me. I want to start with

the universe in a black hole. Is that the paper you're working on? Yeah. So for your next PhD, you need another one of those. Well, so, you know, a lot of people ask me why so many degrees, while this wanted to do all these different things for the longest I was trying to get in the astronaut program and you know if you look at like story musgrave for example that guy's got umpteen master's degrees he jumps out of planes at you know 30,000 feet

and all sorts of things you know test pilot all that stuff and so I thought well you gotta compete with those guys you really you got to bring your A game and and also my goal when I was a kid I was about 10 years old my dad who was a

master toolmaker. He brought me a book. It was a beat-up paperback book. And he said, son, I've been reading this. I think you would really enjoy it. Won't you read it? Then we'll talk about it. And it was Eric von Danikins' Chariots of the Gods.

Wow. And so I read it, absorbed it, read it again, bent pages on it so that we could come back and talk about it. And my dad and I, since that time, you know, 48 years ago, we, we, still to this day, we discuss new ideas that we've discovered, say, in some religious text or theological book or even just a poem, somewhere written in history, and we say, well, that sounds a lot like that they're describing technology, you know, not, and that's what got me into understanding the universe from the ancient aliens sort of perspective.

Georgeo Suclos likes to say ancient astronaut theory I keep explaining to him a theory has a much larger acceptance this is a hypothesis right

it is an ancient astronaut hypothesis but that's okay you know he's not a scientist he's a researcher and and I applaud everything that the guys have done even if sometimes they go off in weird rabbit holes

and lead you down a path that isn't the right answer that's okay that's how you learn right there's a and the other reason. So not to skew too far. There was a, when it came out that I had been the chief

scientist of the UAP task force, there was a guy who wrote a article in, I think it was the Washington Post, it said government, it says something like critics mystified or baffled by the government's choice of guy who believes in paranormal for the UAP task force chief scientist. I've never once said I believe in anything paranormal. I don't mean like the word paranormal. Because if it's paranormal, paranormal means not within the universe. And if it's within the universe,

or if it's not within the universe, then how are we seeing it and studying it? Right. It's something that's happening. It's something that I don't believe in the word fringe, because there's no such thing as fringe science. Science is science. If it's an unknown, you've got to study it.

But in that article, it even, the guy even went so far as to say his alleged education. Alleged. alleged education. He didn't do his homework, man. And I'm like, you're going to take pictures of my diplomas on my wall and my study at home? I'm sure my mom's got pictures of graduations, you know,

not like other folks who claim they have master's degrees from somewhere, and they can't even prove they went there. Not to get into that, but my point about that is, yeah, he didn't do his homework for a reason. And that's where there's somebody, there's an active source. of people, whether it's an act of general conspiracy just culturally, or there's officially something being driven, to discredit anybody who's asking questions. For example, you know, Michael Shermer's a smart guy.

He's a really smart guy. But his answer is always the skeptical answer from the start. And that's actually a violation of the scientific method, honestly. I think he's getting his directives from somewhere. Yeah, so I think that's the point. And that's what I'm going to, and I wanted to make a point about something. That's why I brought that up. I'll give you a real simple example so that you can use to explain to anybody.

Let's say we have the videos that have come out, and somebody says, well, we believe we can show that why invoke UFOs? This could just be some phenomena, airplane light gleaning off of it. You know, as Will Smith said, light reflecting from Venus. Right. Well, that's fine. That is a possible solution. It's not the only solution. What's the square root of four?

Right. Two? No, it's not. Square root of four is plus or minus two. That's true. Think about that, because minus two times minus two. That's true. It's still four.

There are two solutions to that question. And either one are equally valid. So is it light reflecting off of swamp gas from Venus or what? whatever, you know, or could it be something else? If it is a solution, a viable solution, it is still a possibility that has to be investigated. And so that's why I wonder why there's something saying, well, don't look at that set of solutions. It's never minus two. It's always two.

Right. That's the Collins group. Yeah, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, We don't call it. We don't know who they are, but within the task force, we called them the antibodies. Yeah. And we would run into the antibodies often. And we, just for asking questions, right?

And when we became the official UAP task force, the National Defense Authority, Authorization Act, NDAA of 2019 and 2020, gave us authority to be briefed at all classifications. at all, all classifications. So, and they didn't have to, they didn't have to brief us in and say, this is how it works, but if we asked them, was this you, they had to tell us bylaw,

and it said that there was a felony if they didn't. And we had, we had multiple star officers tell us that they would commit the felony before telling us. Of course. Of course they would. So to me, that is,

they're admitting that they're going to break the law. It's treason. Yeah. Sorry, I got us off on a tangent. No, that's okay. But that's why I've tried to learn everything I possibly can since I was 17 years old to get behind that door to see these things, understand these things. And number one, what if we need to be doing something? We don't have an Avengers initiative.

Right. That's true. That's on my list is when you were 17, how you worked on SDI. But black holes. Oh, yeah. Archipathria That said universe is a black hole in the 70s We've got Poplowski in the 2010s

So this is not new But your paper I think says Our universe could fit into like five to ten solar masses Yes So the paper that I It's really weird if that came about I was actually working on a simulation hypothesis Presentation for a conference

I forget which conference it was and I was looking at world maps of video games. Okay. Like, say, Minecraft, you got the square world map or, you know, whatever. And how they worked. And I realized that since you couldn't go, they weren't like the old Atari in an asteroid where you go off this side and you come back on this side, right? You know, that's actually a sphere.

People don't realize that. But I was looking at the world map and I realized you can't go outside the boundaries of that. And so the video game itself has an event horizon. I just published a cookbook with Hungry Root called Gertie's Hump Day recipes. Because by Wednesday, who doesn't want a little hump day treat? I built this cookbook around the food that hits that certain mood. You know the one. Not that one.

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Go to hungryroot.com slash the basement to access my cookbook, Gertie's Hump Day recipes. Okay, that hit my, and at the same time, I pulled a picture that was made by a cosmological. group. Anybody can go find it. It's a circle that shows sort of a logarithmic plot across time and space to the edge of our universe. And it's a big circle. It shows we're somewhere near the middle.

And then you got the giant galaxies that when they were beginning to form and all this out at the edge of time when the Big Bang allegedly occurred. And there's nothing beyond that circle that you can see. And I look at it. Well, this is exactly the same world map as in Minecraft. There's an event horizon on our world map that we can't see beyond. And I said, the only thing that I know of like that has an event horizon that traps all the information on the inside of it is a black hole. And then I realized, well, Stephen Hawking actually wrote a paper with a guy named Beckinstein that black holes actually do emit a certain amount of radiation.

But it's so tiny that the amount of radiation, it's such a long wavelength and so low energy, we can't build detectors to detect it. So it'll be decades before anybody can prove or disprove Hawking's concept, his hypothesis. But it matches with the math and everything. That works. It's probably true. Probably true. It's just we can't prove it for a long time. We get better at building instruments.

But I realized I said, well, if there's energy leaking out of this black hole, well, then that energy is a signature of what's inside it. And so you know how you can take your radio. dial in your car back in the old days when you could turn it, you could see all the numbers there. That's the frequency spectrum of all the transmissions your radio can do, right? In time, it sends a signal, but across the frequencies, you can see all these spots on the dial. Well, I thought, now what if the signal, if we look at its spectrum, if it tells us all the information that's inside coming from the inside of the black hole?

And when I did certain types of math, it let me reproduce what we see is modern, modern cosmology running backwards from the outside looking in. So in other words, we believe we have models of our universe, right, going this way, expanding outward from the Big Bang. Well, in a black hole, if you look at it from the outside end, time's reversed, and it would be falling inward. And I thought, well, now, that's an interesting corollary. And so I used all the math from hawking and everything, and I ran a bunch of my

It took me a lot. It's such a long Python code that it took me forever. I had to vibe code a lot of it with, you know, chat GPT because I'm not a supercomputer hacker, you know. But you have to always go back and make sure the math is right because, you know, AI will give you fake stuff. It will. But anyway, so once I ran the models over and over and over and convinced myself that the code was right, it showed that any black hole between five and ten solar masses should have similar cosmology as our, our universe, which suggests, now I'm not saying it proves it, but it suggests that we live in a black

hole that's about somewhere between five and tens of our masses. And my model stopped somewhere about 7.2 solar masses. So Poplowski said that we would inherit the characteristics and spin of our parent black hole, but what I can't square is the swarsh child radius. Well, so the sworeshild radius is only something you see from the outside. Oh. That's the event horizon. Right. So we can't go past it. We can't get out that.

Well, explains worse jobs for the folks listening. Yeah. So if you take an amount of mass and you squish it as small as you can make it, there is a radius around it spherically. Makes a virtual sphere, say, a geometric sphere around it. And at that radius is the race where light can't even escape the gravitational attraction. Even light will fall in right there. So there's no way, unless maybe you have a warp drive that you could escape or quantum tunneling.

Right. And so the interesting parallel, though, AJ, when I was doing this was it led back to my simulation hypothesis presentation. Because like Elon Musk has said that he doesn't believe there's any chance that we're in the prime universe, that we're in a nested simulation. One in billions. A simulation within simulation within simulation? Sure. Sure. Well, look across our cosmology how many black holes there are. And within our universe, we see black holes everywhere, right? And if we're in a black hole, that means that there are black holes in our black hole. And those black holes probably have black holes in those black holes. And those black holes will have holes in those black holes, and it's turtles all the way down and all the way up. So could our universe be a black hole in someone else's sky? Yes. That's the point. It's turtles all the way down and all the way up.

Yeah. Okay, so you worked at U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command, principal scientists of quantum entanglement and space technologies lab. What does the Army want to do? What's the Army messed around with quantum mechanics for? Well, many reasons. One is, are there sensors that would use new methods of quantum physics that would give you more information on battle assessment, battlefield awareness, and so on. the other would be communications. If you can do quantum entanglement encrypted communications. And what I was specifically working on as my main project at the time

was to create a satellite experiment that would use quantum encrypted communications so that no one could eavesdrop or spoof or jam the comms to the battle groups on the ground. Didn't China just do this? Well, you're thinking of the, it's spelled Misha, so I think they pronounced something like Mosa or something like that. I don't understand Chinese spelling and pronunciations. But they're talking about that experiment where, yes, they did a what's called a QKD, quantum key distribution experiment where they flew a satellite in 2016, 2017 time frame, and they encrypted a video transmission with their quantum key and did it from one point on one part of, the globe to another part, which was really impressive and exciting. There are a lot of people who tried to debunk it and say that they didn't really achieve it,

but I was on one of the teams to look at what they did, and as far as I can tell, it was functional. And it's really interesting, not tooting my own horn, but myself and one of my first mentors, Dr. Francisco J. D'Worte, Frank D'Orte, he and I wrote a paper in 2015 that Laser Focus World nominated as one of the top 10 papers of the year. And we showed that quantum communications would be the key for encrypted satellite communications. And then within a year, the Chinese did it. And so at least we thought of it. But they did it.

But they went and did it. But my lab was a hybrid lab between University of Alabama, Huntsville, and the Army, Space and Missile Defense Command, to get small. young folks in there working on it, hands on building the experiment, building the space hardware. And we'd already flown one project on the International Space Station for 28 months. And our second mission was to fly the quantum communications package. And we got the first prototype built. And then politics changed within the Army.

And some group said, well, we're the only group in the Army that's supposed to be doing that, so they pulled our funding and put it there. And we sort of limped along. But I also, that was about the time that I got pulled into the UAP task force. And so my focus was sort of reoriented. Well, I understand how quantum encryption would work, but why would entanglement be necessary? So that way you can, over large distances, create your key on both ends. Oh, that's right. So you have your entangled photons, right, flipping up or down. And if you measure over here, whatever it is, you know what the other one is supposed to be.

And so what happens is this person gets a key, entangles it, sends it over to the other person. And then they send through a regular comms channel, I use this basis, this measurement tool to measure it. And so then they take that measurement tool and do some, you know, adjustment to it, measure. And whatever they get then, it tells them. them what their key was. And so if they don't have both of those, the actual entangled piece and the classical com piece, then you can't get the key. You can't open the door.

And so it's a perfect encryption. And it's not breakable? Well, there are some quantum hacks that have been discovered since, but it's not, I don't think it's really been done in application. Right. It's theoretically possible. In theory, you should be able to break it, I guess, instantly, right? Well, but if you do break it, the other guy knows that you broke it.

So if anybody eavesdrops on you, you know that you've been eavesdropped on. And so that's useful as well, right? Yeah. And so that's what we were working on. And it was an exciting project. It was hard. I mean, it's one of those things that, you know, nobody had done yet. So, I mean, it's other than the Chinese, but nobody had done it in this country yet.

And the problem was, the problem with this country is for the research funds, you got so many people fighting and stabbing each other in the back over getting something done, that we're our own worst enemy in that regard. Instead of saying, oh, these guys have done great work, we should go look at what they've done, and maybe we can get funding to do something similar or whatever, instead of we better kill them and get their funding. That's how it works in this country. I mean, it really does.

And our scientific community, publication community, it's all a big Spanish Inquisition. It's a mess. Were you studying quantum field theory and then decided to just write the textbook yourself? That is exactly what I did. What was wrong with the syllabus that you had to write your own textbook as a student? Well, so what happened was I noticed that quantum field theory was on the catalog for the University of Alabama Huntsville Physics Department, but it was never offered. I went to the dean and said, well, I wanted to do this.

it's not offered. You know, I've been studying. I'd want to take an official course in it. And he said, well, we don't have anybody that wants to teach it. And he said, I could, but I don't have time. And I said, well, tell you what, let me see if I can create a syllabus for you and write the course. And so I started putting the coursework together.

I got several other textbooks looking at them, like, read like stereo instructions, you know, instead of trying to explain it in a way that a student can understand it. And so to teach myself, you know, quantum field theory, I had, I mean, I had to learn it well enough that I could teach it to somebody else, right? Explain it to the third grader, so to speak. Right. Which is, that's a hard one to do, by the way. Yes, it is. Who did you study to put that together?

So there are, there's several books. The two main sets of books that I used were a book by Clowber and then one by Lancaster and Blundle. There was something like quantum physics for gifted amateur and one student-friendly quantum field theory or something like that. And then there was the standard textbooks that people have used. And I looked at what I found MIT coursework online and just everywhere I could find information. I'd read everything about this particular piece of it and be like, I don't understand what they were telling me there. This one I kind of understand. Then I figure out after putting it all together a way to understand it.

And so I said, well, I've done all this work. It might as well be a book. And so I contacted the publisher who published my rocket science book. And they said, we would love to have a quantum field theory book. First graduate course in that? Yeah, we'd love to do that. And so I spent the next year putting that book together. Did they ever take your course?

Well, I haven't taught it. Oh, okay. The book just came out, you know, six months ago. Oh, it did? Yeah. Okay. So I just finished it, not, you know, not long ago. And I've already found a couple of things.

errors in it, so I'm going to have to do an updated edition or something to fix it. But that's usually what happens with textbooks. You teach a class in it, and the students find where you made a mistake. Sure. And so I'm hoping that somebody adopts it and they'll get notes from professors said, well, there's an error here. That's, you know, that's happened with my rocket science book, too. Yeah, I get emails from fans and scientists saying all the things I got wrong. I heard, I've heard about that. Were you working on decoherence when you were in the lab? a little bit. One of the things that we were really interested in that, me specifically,

was how do we know or how does it know to decohere? What is the thing that triggers what is called the collapse of the wave function in quantum physics? And there are a lot of people that debate it, that people still think that or want to argue with you that, no, it's just statistics. And there never was this live and dead cat in the box. but we've done experiments that suggest that it is a superposition of two states at once, the cat's alive and dead in the box at the same time.

But for how long? So, you know, Penrose, Roger Penrose, this is what I was getting at. Has a theory called quantum gravity, and it's not really tying gravity to quantum physics, it's just what he called it, that based on how much mass an object has is how long it can stay in this superposition of unknown states, right? Like the cat's alive and dead. But since the cat is so heavy, it's like, you know, billions of a second or something,

a nanosecond or even less, that it could be in flux. But an electron, for example, whose mass is tiny, like 10 to minus 31 kilograms or something, that's so small you can't even imagine. So many zeros, you know, that it can stay in that flux for almost forever,

unless something interacts with it. And so where is the middle ground where there are big things, big enough things that you can watch and see it happen? And I think there were some experiments done with a micron size, a millionth of a meter size nanotubes, like carbon filaments. Yep. Like the size of a human hair, something like that, under certain field conditions. And they've been able to see it perform at both states at once, meaning it's that the cat is alive and dead in the box. It's just a little bitty box. Sure.

And a very cooperative cat. I've always said, I don't know how Schrodinger was going to get that cat in the box in the first place. Now, a cat will jump into a box if you leave it there open. Right. But you can't put it in there. But you can't put it in there. Cats do what they want to do. So Tegmark says that decoherence is almost instant and warm, wet environment.

Yeah. That's not really true, is it? Well, that's the warm, squishy brain idea. So what you're getting at is quantum consciousness, right? And Penrose and Hammerhauls. I'm thinking about bird. birds eyes and quantum tunneling through olfactory senses even before we get the consciousness well one of the things that that led me down this path was my first

child was born in 2004 and when my wife was pregnant I remember watching all these videos about well at this stage the baby grows this happens and this happen how the hell do they know what why does it do that and it's it nobody knows why these things are happening. They've watched them so long, so long, they say, this is what usually happens. It's just observation. It's not knowledge. Right.

And what's triggering these things to happen and how does it know? And the things happen in ways that seem faster than they should be able to happen. They still don't really know. No, they don't have any idea. No. And so, now I've got to think, well, if you get a splinter in your finger, the immune response happens immediately. and it's much faster than the ion channel to travel from your arm up to your brain and back down your brain and back to say send stuff there, right?

So could it be through a quantum connection, through an interaction? And that's what led me to start studying Penrose and Hammerov's orchestrated objective reduction and the warm, squishy brain thing, right? And, you know, for people who haven't really paid attention to that, the idea is that there are these proteins in your brain. And there's more of these proteins in your brain than there are grains of sand on the beach or stars in the universe. Cryptophan? No, they're called tubulence. Oh, the microtubes. Yeah.

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See the Bitcoin disclosures at cash.com. slash legal slash podcast. And the protein, the tubuline protein. Oh, it's a triptophenzy amino acid in those. Yes. Okay. Go ahead. So Penrose and Hammeroff hypothesized that these tubulins can trap an electron like the cat in the box, right? And so that protein becomes what's called a qubit, a quantum processor. And that's what we're building right now at Google, at IBM, you know, these quantum cubit processors.

And where the programs that we've built quantum computers physically, there are tens to hundreds of qubit processors. There are like 10 to the 20 or so of them in your brain. And so doesn't matter if they decohered quickly. This is where Tegmark didn't pay attention to engineering. Right. So even if they do decoher so quickly, there's 10 to the 20 something. of them. That's a good point. And they could be decohering, but they could be reinforced

by the next one not being decohered yet, and so on. Cryptophan does reinforce these. Well, and there's other, so here's the thought about that. Is there architecture in your brain to do error reduction? That's why you would, you know what, when you do error reduction in computing processing, you add extra processors. Right. Guess what? There are 10 to the 20-something of these processes. professors in your brain. And so I believe that that's, that,

that your brain is a quantum computer, whether it was organically grown, designed by, you know, the Ananaki or whatever you want, I don't care. But that's what's happening. And, and it's led, it led me to write a book in the early 2000s

called The Science Behind the Secret. And I was watching, my wife and I were watching these, it was when The Secret came out, was all popular known. And I don't know, there was people on Oprah talking about, it. We all read it. Yeah, we all read it. And they started talking about, well, you know, it's like electromagnet, um, electro-magnetism. And I'm like, well, that's not right, like electromagnetism, because in, in magnets and electricity, like things repel each other. And you're saying, like

things stay. And so the only thing that does that that I know is quantum physics. Because in quantum, quantum, uh, quantum wave functions will, uh, have constructive interference if the wave functions are similar. And they'll be destructive if they're dissimilar. So like things. would stay and unlike things would go away. And that started leading me to think, well, what they're saying in the secret isn't, they're not physicists, they're like self-help people, philosophers, whatever. They don't understand what they're saying, but they're saying it right. Right.

And so I started looking at the quantum physics of the human brain and how the universe works, and it led me down this path of looking into ancient texts, even more so than just for things like from ancient astronaut hypothesis, right? more than deeper than Van Danik in, you know, more of the William Henry sort of direction. Sure. And it led me into really wanting to understand quantum physics at a level of, is there an observer effect that are we influencing every experiment, everything that happens? And, and here's the thing that gets me is, how do I have dreams of people I don't know in detail? We all do.

Yeah. But you know them in the dream. Yes. And I know these environments in the dream that I've never been to. Am I that good at making up stuff? Or is my brain in idle mode and the noise floor is brought down because all my other systems are shut down? And I'm connecting like a quantum transceiver to other quantum transmissions that are happening. and I'm decoding it.

And I'm like playing that game. I'm part of that reality for a minute. And that leads me down the path that because we don't understand dreams, because we don't understand things like DMT, because we don't understand that when people are hallucinating, that their brain function actually goes into a coma-like state instead of hyperactive, that leads me to think that we're doing something more on the,

lines of detecting quantum information because you got to, it's very sensitive to noise, right? And so if you brought the noise down, then you're seeing things that aren't usually there or detecting things that aren't usually there or having experiences you don't usually experience, it suggests to me that sounds like quantum physics. What was that first experiment, that first reading? Well, the, wait a minute. So, I mean, I'd literally been there 30 minutes to an hour. That's it?

Yeah. First time to visit Brandon Fugel, the other. owner flew me in on his helicopter. We landed at the helipad. We got out and had lunch and then walked up to the top of the mesa where they had just put out a new sensor. They were going to show me the sensor. And I carried a spectrum analyzer with me as we went.

And the other scientist there had one with him, Eric Bard. And we were there up on top of the mesa. We just got there. And then suddenly my spectromanalizer pegged out in the microwaves. and I mean pegged out like not not popping popcorn on the inside but if you were popping popcorn

and held your microwave detector right by the door that's how much microwaves I was detecting coming from everywhere wow and what was the frequency it was around 1.6 gigahertz and and that's you know that's right where gps is that's where space to ground is 1575 and iridium is 161

yep that's a busy frequency that is a very big it's all space to ground to space kind of stuff And it was pegged. Pegged. And it was coming out of the ground. What is it? I don't know.

I mean, I looked for it. I was like scratching my head, running around crazy. Like a chicken with his head cut off, not understanding what's going on. I was literally like a cockroach in a microwave running around. Yeah. I was running like trying to figure out what was going on. Well, you drilled, you dug? What's down there?

Don't know. So we drilled in a spot where ground penetrating radar told us there was some big. anomaly in there. And when we, we hit something and we put pressure against it, 8,000 pounds of pressure against it for like minutes, many minutes. And you'd think a drill bit would have got high, didn't it, cooled off, which is odd. The friction would have been enormous, unless it were frictionless. Odd.

Impossible. Impossible. Right. Right. Unless it were frictionless. Or something. But what we found in the spoils pile, when we pulled the, pulled the, drill bit out were these pieces of metallic fragments and ceramic-like.

And when we went and had them analyzed, they were, they had been centered and built in a blast furnace in a way that the experts in the material, in the metallurgy lab said were like tiles on the space shuttle that are used for reentry. or they're on Starship now, right? They use the same kind of tiles. It's not the exact chemical makeup, but we're built or manufactured in the same way. So there's something manufactured inside this mason. This was 377 feet in and 78, 75 feet, I think, down.

Was this an alloy? It's a mixture. It was a compound. So it was made. It was made, yes. What were the metals? What were the components? Well, so it had a little bit of aluminum in it.

Oh, what's really interesting is it had a lot. It had a mixture of 50% aluminum and 50% iron in some of the metal fragments, which we don't do that. We don't mix 50-50 aluminum and iron. No. Why? What is that? Where did that come from? And then the ceramic-like fragments had all sorts of materials in it.

Like there was some thorium. There was a, there was. So that's radioactive. Yeah, it was very, very, very low level. It was a, what else was in it? There was, of course, there was a lot of carbon. there was a little bit of aluminum. There was, it was almost like aluminum cutting blades.

It was almost that kind of material. I originally said it was kind of like a brake pad. Right. I thought somebody's buried a car down in there, right? But it wasn't exactly a brake pad, right? It was more like, it was hard on the outside and more fragile on the inside. And we took it and put it in an electron microscope at University, Utah Valley University, in the physics department there

and when we'd hit it with electron beams it would open up and we turned electron beams off it would close back up in exactly the same configuration it did it every time like self-healing metal well that's what we thought it was

we thought we were blowing holes in it first and it was healing itself but it appeared to be more like an umbrella that it was opening and closing or a pom-pom when you put it in a static electric field or your hair will stand up and then it'll go back down

it seemed more like that but we're still doing a lot more experimentation on that to figure that out. And some of the metal fragments we found were in layers. It had the iron and aluminum mixture as the middle, the Oreo part, and then the cookie part was on one side was almost pure tellurium, and the other side was almost pure europium. And that's really similar to how we build solar panels. And that's really odd also.

You know, how did that get inside this mesa, you know, 30-something, at the maximum, the maximum height are the closest to the surface that our holes got to was 38 feet down. But the materials, we believe, came out around 75 feet down and 370-something feet in. How big is this object, according to the GPR? Well, it's like 20 meters wide and it could be as much as, you know, 50 meters. It's like a cigar shape. It's cigar shaped? Yeah, it looks. What do you tell you what it looks at. There are smaller pieces all around it. It literally looks like, like an airplane crashed debris field. It literally looks like something crashed into the mesa and there's pieces spread out in there. I mean, and here's the most bizarre thing. we were looking at the material, the metal fragment, and from the elemental analysis of it,

the night we found it using equipment we had on a ranch. And I said, well, it's not a meteor fragment. And Eric Bard said, well, the only thing it's missing to be a meteor would be to have some nickel in it. The next morning, the archaeologist, pulled out of the same spot, 370-something feet in, 70-something feet down,

down a 1964 nickel. What is going on in that ranch, man? How can a 1964 nickel get inside the mesa? It can't. Well, so we went, so, and I, it freaked me out, right? Our archaeologist said, well, that means there was a dig here. So what do you mean? He said, oh, it's standard protocol.

The archaeologists are trained that when you finish a dig, you drop a coin from that year in the dig. So future archaeologists will know there was a dig here. And he said, I'll bet you anything. There was a dig here in 1964. So I went and got, man, the other guys,

we went and got every publicly available aerial photograph of the property all the way from 1935. And what's interesting is from 1963 to 1968, 63 is the last one, and then 69 is the next one. There are no images from 64 to 68 that are available publicly. None.

Zero. I don't like it, man. None. Can't be. And so it's really bizarre that something happened there and it's been covered. And we wonder there's this mythos of people say bad things happen to you if you dig on Skinwalker Ranch. Makes me wonder if it was more of a nondisclosure agreement saying bad things will happen to you if you dig on Skinwalker Ranch. It sounds like it.

I mean, we were talking earlier. I said I didn't really watch the show because I thought it was like another Oak Island thing. And you're like, no, man, it's all real. what we're doing there. Yeah. What did you find on the ranch that compelled you to go to Washington and getting a skiff? Yeah. So, well, that first day when I started detecting these microwaves, they were at levels that would be in violation of FCC regulations, right?

Oh, I guess it could jam the satellites. Yes. Oh, so that. And I was like, this is, somebody's doing something nefarious, is what I thought. I thought, is it Russians? Is it Chinese? some kid doing something stupid. Think about the battlefield disruption if you could do that.

Oh, Lord, yeah. And none of our GPS stuff would work. Right. So I'm thinking, oh, somebody's jamming GPS and why? No guide into ordinance? Well, think about airplanes landing at an airport. Right. It really was kind of freaking me out.

So I went to my, I had a security clearance. You know, my day job was still with the Army, and I went and told our security guys. I said, well, I don't know what to do with that. Let me see, we can call around, see who you need to talk to. And they kept handing me off up the food chain. And at the same time, one of our other guys that was there with me that day, one of the scientists on the team, he had contacted some contacts. And they kept doing the same going up and trying to figure. And eventually, we got handed off to, well, you need to have a meeting with these people in the Pentagon.

And so, all right, so I flew up to the Pentagon and briefed them on all the data. We were going to Skiff and these two guys come in. And I noticed that one of them had a copy of my alien invasion book, which is a serious book I wrote in 2003. with one of my mentors in the intelligence community, Dr. Bob Bone, we were at a three-letter organization meeting. Is this a serious book called Alien Invasion? Yes. It's a textbook on how we would defend the planet and what we should be doing to prepare.

Okay. Yeah. We need that. Yeah, we were in this meeting, two years after 9-11, we're in deep in Operation Anaconda, all that stuff's going on. And so this is a top secret meeting on how to come up with clever ways to understand asymmetric warfare and all this stuff, right? You know, we were on the high side, of course, the Iraqis and the Afghans and all those were on the low side.

So we're in this meeting, and this three-star general makes this comment. They're going to, well, we need to put ourselves in our enemy's shoes and walk a mile in so we can understand how to think like them. And I laughed. And at this time, I was, you laughed out loud. Out loud, yes, yeah. At this time, I was like a GS-14 equivalent. And this was a three-star. And he kind of harrumped, you know, and my boss, my mentor just, he said, he's like, oh, what, what's coming now.

But our boss was a one-star equivalent in the three-letter organization. And he kind of looked at me like, I don't know if you should say anything. But you know, you have something to say. And I said, well, sir, our poor people have Xboxes and two TVs and a car in the driveway. And they have $100 shoes. It's unlikely that they'll ever. be able to understand these people that we're fighting because they have a completely different world they live in.

The only way Americans would ever be on the low side of asymmetric war was if we were invaded by aliens. I was doing a typical southern thing explaining by exaggeration. Well, the general just kind of rolled his eyes and moved on. So after the meeting, or at a break in the meeting, we're in the break room and I'm getting a soft drink or whatever. and the three-letter boss comes up to me, three-letter organization boss comes up to me,

he says, what would we do if we were invaded by aliens? That's my next question. And I said, we'd probably die. Oh, no. And he said, well, do we have a plan? And I'd say, well, I think you would know more about that today. He said, well, why don't you two look? And he just talked to me and my mentor and said,

why don't you two look and see what you can come up with? And so we spent the next year studying warfare, warfare models, intelligence models, technologies, and it led us to, we kind of threw together this book on all the things that we'd studied. And, of course, we briefed it at other levels, but we asked us, can we publish this as a book? Are we sure? We don't care. And so we did, and it's interesting on the cover of the book, the first version of it, the chief scientist of the NRO actually put on there that it was fascinating. Rome had a pretty good run, until it didn't.

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That's 63825. Goldencrestmedals.com slash the Y files or text the word files to metals to receive a free investor kit, a free portfolio review with no obligation or hard sell, and unqualified purchases up to $25,000 in bonus silver. You sit there and go, maybe there's something smaller than the plank number. Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. Really?

The plank number is widely misunderstood. Okay. People talk about the plank scale. Yes. Like it's, you know, the resolution of the universe. You know, what is the plank scale? You take a bunch of constants, you multiply them together, you get a distance. That's the plank scale.

It's like 10 to the minus 35 meters. What's true about the plank scale, which is often said, is we can't know anything smaller than 10 to the minus 35 meters with our current understanding of physics. Ah. Okay, so what happens there is that we have two pillars of physics, quantum mechanics, which describes even little particles and how things move and general relative which describes gravity and space and all that stuff. Mostly, they don't intersect because you're talking about big stuff for relativity

or small stuff for quantum mechanics. Right. But at 10 to the minus 35 meters, you need both of them. And those two theories, we don't know how to get them to play well together. Like there's no theory of quantum gravity that makes them come together in harmony. They disagree. They disagree by the nature of space, by the nature of time, about everything. So we have these two pillars of physics.

And mostly they're fine, but sometimes they overlap. And at 10 to the minus 35 meters, we don't know how to proceed. That doesn't mean that there's no explanation for what happens below 10 of the minus 35 meters or that there can't ever be. It's just like the current horizon of our understanding. So you see people say like that's the pixel size of the universe. It's more like the limit beyond which we cannot predict with our current theories. But tomorrow somebody makes string theory work or comes up with a new theory of quantum gravity. that predicts past that point, boom, now we can see deeper into the history of the universe

and into the very, very tiny. So it's not a fundamental limit at all of our understanding. It's a limit of our current theories, which of course are not the final story. Is that a common opinion among physicists or are you, because I've heard you say that we only understand 5% of physics. I don't know if every physicist likes that number, but in that 95% is, you know, Is unified field theory in there? I mean, do your gut?

Yeah, so there's a couple of questions there. I think that almost every physicist sees that the same way, but there's often a gap between the way physicists see their work and the way the public understands it. You know, the way like mass is misunderstood and black holes are misunderstood. The Big Bang is widely misunderstood and misexplained. So I think that almost every physicist would agree with me

that the Plank Scale is not a fundamental limit to our possibility of understanding. I think that's pretty widely understood inside physics, though in popular science, it's not often described that way. And it frustrates me that there's this gap between what physics has revealed about the universe and how scientists think about it and how it's described and understood in popular science. And that's unfortunate because I want people to know what is the real story. What are scientists thinking? And I respect that sometimes that has to be translated and sometimes those translations go wrong for good reasons and in good. intentions, absolutely. It's hard to translate it. But when there's that persistent gap,

I feel like that's unfortunate because people are being not intentionally misled, but they're misunderstanding what we know and what we don't. That's why I encourage everybody to check out your podcast because you and Kelly do a great job of making this accessible. It's also super fun. Like you guys are funny. Yeah, Kelly's a great friend of mine. She's a great scientist and it's just two people talking about science. And we talk about. We talk about about topics that she understands and so I'm learning about biology and history of cholera and talk about stuff that I understand and so she's learning about particles and dark matter in space and then the listeners get to learn about you know a huge variety of topics in science

and I hope have a good time at the same time so to get beyond to get smaller than plank is there an experimental way to do that it is or I don't know look You know how they say there's no stupid questions? Today you're going to get a lot of those. No, there are no stupid questions. It's a great question. It's an important question because, you know, physics has more than one branch to it. It's got the theoretical side, like how could the universe work?

And that's really important. And often we feel like the answers are there. But it's also got the experimental side, which is going out there to just ask the universe, hey, show us how you work. But, you know, that requires efforts. It requires cleverness. Sometimes people think all the smart guys are in theory, right? But the experimentalists have a different kind of cleverness

because they have to force the universe to reveal the answers. You can't just sit on a rock and think your way to the understanding of the universe. The Greeks tried that, right? Didn't make a lot of progress. Right. You got to force the universe to reveal it, which means coming up with clever situations where if the answer is A or B, you'll get a different outcome, right?

That's the whole idea of experimental physics. It's like, how do we force the universe to show us? But we're limited with our tools, right? And the frustrating thing about understanding general relativity and quantum mechanics is that mostly it's hard to bring them near each other. So if we could see inside a black hole, we would know the answer to how do you unify general relativity and quantum gravity and quantum mechanics? We can't see inside a black hole.

Too bad. If we could see the early universe, we could as well. Because the early universe had a stage where things were denser than the plankton's scale. The plank scale you can express as a distance or as a temperature. And so things were hotter than the plank temperature. And a time as well, yeah? Yeah, absolutely. So when you say the early universe, we know that Big Bang acceleration, everything happens. Are you talking about that first femtose second? Like before the, what happened right there? Right. Exactly. So this is all related to what we're talking about earlier. And I think the Big Bang is deeply misunderstood. So let's be

very careful about what we mean when we say the Big Bang and what we mean by like a certain time. So, you know, we know the universe is vast and it's pretty cold and it's pretty dilute. But we look back in time by looking out into space and seeing how things looked earlier, we see it was denser. So the universe is less dense now, it's more dense in the past. You rewind the clock, what happens? Things get denser and denser and denser and denser and denser. And our theories work really, really well predicting things when they get all the way up to a certain temperature or a certain density.

and that's the plank scale. That's the plank temperature. That's the Big Bang, is the expansion of the universe from that plank scale density, which, and going earlier that is another thing, from that plank scale density up till now. That's the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is widely misunderstood as the universe began as a point in space and it exploded out into existing space. That's what most people's impression of the Big Bang is, and that's basically totally wrong. widely described that way. Of course. It's wrong because the Big Bang doesn't claim to explain the origins of the universe.

It's not the beginning of time. It says, look, we understand from this point forward how the universe expanded and cooled. Before that, big question mark. We don't know. That's part of speculative. And there's lots of theories there we can dig into, but that part we don't know. So everything from Plank scale forward is the Big Bang. Before that, question mark.

So we don't know how the universe began. The Big Bang does not claim. how the universe began. It does not, it's agnostic on that question. And the other thing people don't understand is there was never a point

in empty space. The Big Bang was everywhere. The whole universe was always filled with stuff. Wait, hold on, hold on. The whole universe is all, the universe was there, and I have to put there in quotes,

before the Big Bang? So we don't know where all the stuff came from. Right. Right. There's some hot dense date 13.8 billion years ago, unexplained. I'm singing the theme now to Big Bang Theory. Okay.

That, the universe then expanded and became more dilute, less dense. Right. So the Big Bang is about density. Right. Now, if the universe is infinite today, and we don't know, but let's say that it is, then it was infinite then. Because you can't go from a finite universe to an infinite universe. Right.

So that means if we start with an infinite universe that's big and not, and not very dense, and we rewind the clock to an infinite universe that's dense. It's an infinite universe filled with infinite matter. It's an infinite Big Bang. The Big Bang was everywhere. It was not an explosion of a point out into empty space. There was no empty space.

It's just all of space is already filled with stuff. Now, people listening are gonna be like, okay, but where did that stuff come from, right? You can't just say, we don't know. And we're not just saying we don't know. We're saying the Big Bang doesn't explain that. It's not an infinitely dense point which exploded out into space. Lots of theories about where that stuff came from, inflation, et cetera, but we don't know if there was a beginning. We don't

know if it goes on forever backwards in time. We don't know what happened there. And so when I say, you know, maybe the early universe can help us understand how to bring general relativity in harmony with quantum mechanics, I say that we could just watch it. You know, if we can look and see what happened before the moment of the plank density, then we could know. And so that's hard, right? Experimentally, that's very, very challenging. Of course.

I've heard everything from quantum foam to in the beginning. Yeah. So where, I mean, if you, if you had to, we have to, we're going to do a lot of speculation today. Sure. Where do you go? Where do you lean? Yeah, well, we're going to know.

We're going to figure it out. We are? We absolutely are. I have confidence. Look, humans are clever, right? And when we want to know, when we are driven by our curiosity, we're going to figure this stuff out. And anytime somebody tells you, this is impossible to figure out, like, that just means we haven't been smart enough yet or the right kid hasn't been inspired yet. And that's, you know, one reason why I want people to understand what we don't know about science, because there's some kid out there who's thinking, oh, science is mostly figured out.

I'm going to go and be a rock star instead. And like, no, I want that genius to come crack these problems, to be inspired by the mysteries. But, you know, we have a path forward already. Like, the earliest thing we've seen in the universe is not from T-equal-0 the moment of plank density. It's like 400,000 years later. That's when the universe became transparent. Universe was hot and dense, like the center of the sun.

So if you made a photon, it just got reabsorbed, right? Right. Like, if you turned on a flashlight in the center of the sun, it's not, the beam is not going to get to Earth. Right. The sun is opaque. The universe was opaque. And then it became transparent. And light created right at that moment when the universe became transparent is still around.

We can see it. Incredibly powerful scientifically tells us about the early universe and proves that there was dark matter already back then. Amazing. But that's like 400,000 years after the point we're interested in. How do we go deeper? So the key is that the universe was opaque to light before that point. Right. But, you know, the universe can be transparent to other stuff.

for example neutrinos neutrinos can pass right through the earth you know there are neutrinos passing through my fingers right now like a trillion every second pass through my fingernails and can they exceed the speed of light they cannot they can't okay so nothing can't cannot nothing can exceed the speed of light and they have a tiny little bit of mass so they move just below the speed of light

okay yeah but they were flying around the early universe and the universe was transparent to neutrinos just like a second after this Plank moment. So if we could see neutrinos from the very early universe, we could see 400,000 years earlier than we've ever seen before. We could see the structure of the universe, the shape of the universe, what was going on? Was it foamy? Was it smooth? Were there purple dragons? We don't know. That's exploration, right? We have ideas. We have theories. We can use, you know, our ideas to figure it out. But the best part of science is when you're surprised. Yes. When you ask the universe something

and the answer is something nobody expected. Those are the reasons I got to. into science for those moments, right? When you're like, what? That's the way it works. Nobody expected that, right? What's it like at CERN? What, I mean, you go in, you got your, your thermos, you punch your clock. I mean, like, we all know what it is, but what's like to just to be there and spend a day there? It is so exciting. It is the center of the world for particle physics. It's like the nerd capital of the world. Everybody is there and they're buzzing with excitement. You know, when the machine is running, you never know what day is going to be the day you make a discovery. Every day could be like, look what we saw in the data. Look what the

universe delivered. Something I think a lot of people don't understand about the collisions at CERN is that we do the same experiment over and over again, right? It's two particles, very high energy smashing against each other. And every time we do it, every 24 nanoseconds, the universe decides what comes out. Every 24 nanoseconds. Every 24 nanoseconds, there's a collision. Okay. And quantum mechanics tells you that you can do the same experiment twice and get two different outcomes. I mean, essentially infinitely and get all the outcomes. That's right. That's exactly it. We don't know what the universe can do, but if we do the same experiment over and over again, eventually everything it can do is revealed to us. And that's what we want to know is like what can happen when you

smash two protons together. If you're thinking of protons as like little billiard balls and you think, well, I smash them together, then they're going to bounce off at a certain angle and the initial state determines the final state. That's classical physics. The initial state determines the final state. Take the same shot and pool over and over again. If you're really precise, you get exactly the same outcome.

But quantum mechanics says what's predicted, what's determined is not the outcome, but the probability of various outcomes. Right. And that's how we explore the universe with collisions, is that, you know, we're looking for things that are really, really rare. One's a trillion, once a quadrillion collisions. And you do enough collisions. Eventually, the universe will show you the rarest of rare things that it can make.

You know, what's on its secret menu of what it can do. The things that I want to know, like, what is the smallest thing? What is everything made out of? What is the heaviest thing? And so it's exciting to be at CERN. It's also really fun. Like, the cafeteria at CERN is filled with people from all over the world. You hear like Italian and English and Japanese and Romania and people are eating all sorts of weird foods and probably the best summer of my life I spent as a student at CERN when I was very, very young.

Really? Yeah, hanging out with a bunch of Italians who taught me Italian and how to cook and bake and make pizza and, you know, drinking with the Czechs. And it's just a wonderful, wonderful place. It's open. It's collaborative. You know, CERN was built after World War II. It was an effort to like, hey, let's connect scientists from around the world. we're all humanizing each other

and we're not like building weapons of mass destruction and put at each other, right? It's all about peace and science and harmony and, you know, there's arguments, for sure. And you also, it's fun to learn how different people argue. You know, when somebody from Italy tells you no, it means something different from when somebody

from Japan tells you know and you learn these things. And it's fun to hear people argue in English and all sorts of different accents, you know. It's fun to argue with people about like Where do you put a comma in this paper? Don't get my wife started on the Oxford comma. Well, we have 5,000 authors in every paper, which means everybody gets to weigh in on the comma. The comma goes in, the comma goes out.

The comic goes in, the comic goes out. It's comical, you know. But it's a lot of fun. It's really exciting. Every time I go to CERN, I'm just reinvigorated by the possibilities, you know, what we can learn about the universe. It's incredible to me that we know how to find the secrets of the universe. We just have to go do it. You know, if you gave me $100 billion, I could build you a collider that would reveal secrets of the universe.

We just have to do it. We just have to decide. We built new space telescopes. We would see things in the early universe that would shock us, would blow our minds. It's happened with every time we build a telescope. We see something that goes, what is that? Right. And these things are cheap.

I mean, on the scale of countries and GPs. So we just have to decide to do it. And the universe is there and waiting for us to decide we want to know its secrets. But Daniel, if we build all these colliders, how do we fund our wars? I mean, how do we have to, we have to choose. Oh, my goodness. I don't think we have to. Actually, I don't think we have to.

I think it's a zero-sum game. Agree. Every dollar we spend on science comes back to us two-fold, tenfold, a thousand-fold. It's a good investment. I believe in America. I believe in humanity. I believe in people. I believe in smarts.

We should invest in ourselves by spending money on basic research. It's the best investment you can make. Honestly, and the more we learn about the universe, and I don't mean that as just as a fortune cookie, I mean, the more we actually learn, the fewer conflicts we're going to have. Yeah. Yeah. I hope so. I think, I hope that's true. I mean, I'm not a politician and I'm not a sociologist, but I do think that understanding the universe is something that brings us all together. Yes. We're all curious. We all want new answers. And I've worked with people from, I think, 172 different countries. And we're all just people.

We're all just curious about the universe, right? Yep. It definitely brings us together. How much data are we talking about every 24 nanoseconds? Every 24 nanoseconds, we read out 100 million channels of data about the collision. Wow. And so it's an enormous tsunami of data, so much that we have to throw most of it away. Why do you throw it away?

Because you already know what it is or because... it's too much to ever analyze. Like we couldn't effectively store it to tape and search it. And also most of it's boring. Like mostly what happens when you collide protons is they bounce off each other and state protons. Yon, we've seen that a million times. So we're interested in the rare stuff. So we have a filter at a very, very early stage that decides keep it or kill it.

And that makes downstream analysis much more efficient because you don't have to search through all the boring stuff to find the interesting stuff. But it means also we have to be smart about what we're keeping. and what we're killing. That's actually what my team works on. And I found that's super fun. You have to make this super fast decision and you don't have a lot of time to do a lot of really fancy calculations.

It's killer to keep it every 24 nanoseconds. Right. So high-speed computing, I thought, was a really fun challenge. How do you know you're not throwing out the next Nobel Prize? Yeah. I mean, if we're talking,

I'm assuming you're using machine learning or AI of some kind. Well, the first, The very first stage is very simple. Okay. And then it gets more complex. And we're definitely using machine learning and AI. We don't know that we're not throwing away some, you know, treasure out with the garbage.

But we do have some filters that just randomly select events. Let's just keep, you know, one out of a thousand randomly. So that if there's something crazy that we didn't expect, we'll probably find it there. But we can't, we just can't keep all of it. It's just too much data. We're talking about petabytes and petabytes every day. It's insane how much data. to produce.

How do you train machine learning if you don't know what you're looking for? Yeah, this is a big question in machine learning and more broadly in artificial intelligence. It's a whole field called anomaly detection. Okay. How do you find something that's out of the ordinary if you don't know what you're looking for? Because that's what I want, right? I want to find the big surprise, the thing that makes us go, what is that even? And so we have techniques there.

anomaly detection says, well, let's learn to describe what's expected. And then we'll think about anything that's different from that. And so you train machine learning. You give it a bunch of examples. You say, here's the kind of thing we're expecting. Figure out how to think about that so that if we give you something you haven't seen before, you can flag it. And so what machine learning does is, for example,

it takes all the things that you aren't interested in. and it learns to like transform that into some internal mathematical space and then transform it back. And it becomes really good at doing that for the kind of things you've been training it for. And then when something new and weird comes, then that transformation fails. It's like, well, I don't know how to transform this there and back. And so it's just an example, but there's lots of ways that you can train machine learning to flag something unusual. But it's hard. And you never really know if there's something.

thing there that you've missed. It's got to bother you a little bit, right? Oh, for sure. Keeps me up at night. And we might have thrown out the one thing we needed, but we don't know. But that's always the case because we always have to make decisions about what kind of thing to look for. You'll give you another example.

When we analyze our data, we're looking for particles that come out of the collision. And we expect particles to move in a certain way because they have electromagnetic charge and they have a magnetic field and we can use our physics. to say, okay, particles always move in this particular path, a helical path. And if you look at like pictures of collisions, you see particles whizzing out in these spirals. Right. Right.

So spirals are everywhere. And most of our software that looks for particles looks for spirals because we expect everything to move as a spiral. And is that what you're mostly analyzing is just the paths of the particles from the collision. That's what it is. Yeah, exactly. Because the thing we're looking for, like the Higgs boson or something else new, it only lasts very, very briefly, like 10 to the minus 23.

seconds. So you never see it directly. You see what it turns into. So we like see these spirals. We see the particles and we say, okay, that looks like there was a Higgs boson there. But it's not like I can say, oh, here's a higgs or here's a handful of them or I got a bunch of them in a box, right? We can only say that there probably were there based on the path of these particles. So figuring out the path of these particles is important, but we only tend to look for these spirals because that's what we know how to look for. So a couple of years ago, my team was like, well, could we look for other things? Could we look for things that are moving in some weird, unexpected way?

And we've been training machine learning algorithms to do just that, to look for particles that don't move as a spiral that will move in some new weird way. And it's funny because it's hard for computers to find that. But if I showed you one, if I, like, found a collision that led to something which moved in a weird way, your eyes would be like, oh, that's something. What's that? Right. That's weird.

Our eyes are very, very good at seeing patterns, but I can't, like, print out collisions every 24 nanoseconds and put them in front of my students and be like, find me the weird ones. Right. We have to use computers. That's because we need them because they're much more effective at this high speed, high volume data analysis. And so we're developing these algorithms to look for new weird non-spiral paths,

and we're hoping when we run them on the data that they'll spit out something. Be like, hey, Daniel, look at this one. and then we'll get to see something exciting. So I'm working hard to try to sort of push the boundaries of what we can discover, but you never know what you're missing. Is there a mathematical model that shows that the particle could move differently? Or are you violating? Because you're a rogue, you're a maverick.

Yeah. Is there a model that allows for that? There are a few models that do predict that move, that predict weird paths. For example, a magnetic monopole. particle that has like just a north or just a south. Yes. But my hope is that we find something that nobody predicted, right?

I want to make the discovery that violates people's assumptions that makes them go, what? That's impossible. That means we're going to have to tear up everything we knew. And like, yeah, that's the whole idea, right? So, yeah, there are some predictions, but I'm not a fan of any of them. And I'm hoping we discover something that doesn't match to any predictions. That would be much more fun.

Have you ever found anything that maybe isn't a huge discovery but made you go, whoa, I didn't see that coming? Have you been surprised? Anything in the data yet? We had a moment in the data about 10 years ago when we thought we had a discovery. We were looking at events and we saw a bump, right? And a bump is how you make a discovery, a little pile of collisions that all look very, very similar. And it was in a place we didn't expect at all. And I had tingles.

I was like, oh, my gosh, is this? Have we done it? And we spent six months cross-checking it. Is there a mistake? Did we miscalculate something? They were re-biasing ourselves somehow. And there was nothing we could do to make this bump go away. And I started to believe, I thought, oh my gosh.

And, you know, this is big stuff, right? We could be discovering something that changes our understanding of the universe. Oh, yes. I started to think like, wow, this is, you know, we're making history here. But the problem is that we look at a lot of data. and so when you look at, you know, 10,000 different distributions of data, occasionally you're going to see one that looks weird. Just like if you try, you know, flipping a coin 10 times and you do that a thousand times,

you're going to get some weird ones, right? Where you get lots and lots of heads. So we didn't know if we just like sifted through so many examples of data that we were just picking out the weirdest one or not. So we had to wait for no, for more fresh data. So we ran the collider a few more, you know, a couple more months and waited. and then the bump went away. So it was just a random fluctuation, unfortunately.

Now, something in my gut tells me a random fluctuation is not a thing. Yeah, it's not a thing. It's just, you know, everything that happens that comes out of the collider is random. And sometimes they pile up in a weird, unusual way. Just like sometimes, you know, you flip a coin four or five times,

you get four or five heads. It happens, right? And that's what happened this time. So it was exciting, but it wasn't anything. It was disappointing. And, you know, we haven't discovered anything of the Large Hagen Collider since the Higgs boson. We saw the Higgs in 2012.

We've been looking ever since. But it's exploration. Just like when NASA lands on Mars and sends a new rover, they don't know. Are we going to find, you know, something weird under a rock, or is it just going to be dust and rubble? It's exploration. So I heard you say,

um, is the Higgs are real? when nobody's looking. I thought that was so funny. Can you retell the story and kind of tell us, why is Higgs important? Everyone knows what God particle Higgs-Boson. Everyone's heard of that.

Good luck trying to explain it. We don't know what that is or why it's important. And that statement when nobody's looking, that's wild. Yeah. Yeah, so Higgs-Boson huge advance in particle physics. we discovered it in 2012. I was predicted 50 years earlier.

And I love this story because it shows you the power of mathematics. Like this was predicted based just on mathematical symmetry. You know, Peter Higgs is looking at the way the forces are and he's wondering like, well, look, electromagnetism is so similar to the weak force, but also very, very different. Like why, if the structures are mathematically so similar, why is the photon have no mass? It could travel at light speed.

And the W and the Z boson really massive. Very slow, very short range. Why is there a difference here? Why is the symmetry broken? And he was looking for a way for that symmetry to break. And like what would require that to happen? And he said, well, you know, this actually would all work out perfectly if there was one more particle out there, one more field.

And so you add that one piece and suddenly everything makes sense. And that's cool, but it's a math game, right? It says, well, look, the math is nicer in this scenario. But is it real, is the question. And it's another example of, like, math leading us to discoveries because it turns out it is real. It is how the universe keeps the photon from getting mass and getting the W and the Z to have mass.

And that's incredible because it tells you that, like, there's real mathematics at the heart of the universe where, you know, it supports that argument. I can also make the other argument. We're going to talk about it. Yeah, but, you know, what is the Higgs boson in the end? It's the thing that tells you that the particles we see are not the universe's fundamental particles. Like, when you look at an electron, we measure an electron in the lab, what are we interacting with?

What are we measuring? It's not just a pure electron. It's an electron bound up with Higgs bosons. Okay. Because an electron just moving through the universe would have no mass. and would move at light speed, just like a photon does. But in a universe with the Higgs boson in it, it can't do that. Every step along the way, there's a Higgs field that's interacting with that electron.

You know, it's like you trying to walk through a crowd of people, and they're all like, AJ, AJ, AJ, AJ, come stop talk to me, right? The same way, you know, we say that photons, when they move through a material, don't move at the speed of light. Right. It's a little bit of a slate of hand because there's no time at which, like, there's a photon moving slower than the speed of light. It's an effective description. We say light is moving through the material as if it was moving slower than the speed of light.

What's really happening is, you know, it's being absorbed and emitted, it's interacting with the material. And so that changes effectively how a photon moves. There's no scenario in which the photon is actually moving slower in the speed of light. The same way, an electron moving through the universe, it would move at light speed. have no mass, but it interacts with the Higgs boson. And so we step back and we say, well, in a real electron, the thing we measure in the laboratory is this thing, this electron that's interacting with the Higgs, it's an effective description.

And so like a pure electron is this theoretical thing we never see. The real electron is actually this like buzzing interplay between two fields, the electron field and the Higgs field, which are very tightly coupled. So that's why electrons that we measure have mass. They don't really have mass in a pure sense. But the electron we interact with that we see in the laboratory that is used to build up me and you is this effective description. And what's really happening is this is an electron field and a Higgs field tightly bound together.

And so that explains why electrons have mass and why W's and Zs have mass. And that's what was important about the Higgs boson. But it's part of our model. It's our explanation for what we see out there in the universe. It's powerful because it describes future experiments. it describes what we see. It accommodates the universe. The question, though,

is the Higgs boson real? That's a different question. That asks, you know, is it the only way to describe the universe? Is it there when nobody's looking? What do you mean by that? I mean, is... This is not a wave function collapse argument, is it?

I mean, is the Higgs boson the map or is it the territory? When we describe what's going to happen out there, we use the Higgs boson. When the universe decides what to do, what's going to happen in the universe, is it using the Higgs boson? Or is there something else going on in the universe's true description of reality? Is this our effective description that works really, really well? Or is it reality itself beyond our ability to probe it and to think about it and ask questions?

And this is a hard question to grapple with because it's not a science question, the philosophy question. I mean, is the Higgs boson real beyond our ability to test it, beyond our ability to do experiments? Because obviously, the experiments match up with the theory. Sure. So scientifically, yes, it's part of our theory, it works, that's all good. I mean, is it there beyond that sense, in some deeper philosophical sense that you can't probe with experiments? But a more concrete way to ask that question is like, well, are there aliens out there doing science, building up their own explanation from the universe, do they have a Higgs boson in their theory? Or have they found some other way to describe the same set of phenomena that they observe in their particle colliders, right?

Is there an alien Higgs, you know, eating haggis and doing all that stuff? Or is there not, you know, are there possibly other explanations? because if there are, that means that our explanation isn't necessarily true. It could just be a map. It's not necessarily the fundamental reality. So doesn't there have to be more

because of dark matter and dark energy? So, because we have no, we don't know what that is, right? That's the placeholder. Yeah. Is that, does that tie into Higgs? Is that maybe it's found in there somewhere? Maybe the aliens don't know what Higgs is,

but they, they're dark. matter energy is some other field. Yeah. A lot of really fascinating ideas there. It's true that we don't know what dark matter is. We can't explain it. We don't know if it's made out of particles and what those particles are, et cetera, et cetera.

That doesn't invalidate what we've learned about the universe. Every experiment we've done about atoms, our theory there works. And, you know, it might not be fundamentally true. It might be one of many options, but that doesn't make it wrong. It means it might have the wrong context. It means that, you know, the way Newton's theory worked for all the experiments they could do in their day, but, you know, it wasn't the true story of the universe. In a broader context, Einstein's description is better, though who knows if Einstein is right,

we may one day replace our theory of Higgs with something else, right? And that doesn't mean that Higgs was wrong. It just means that, you know, it works under these circumstances. but when you replace it with something else, you also sometimes get to replace like the backdrop, the story about what's happening. Like think about what happens when you replace Newton with Einstein. You don't just get better predictions for mercury

and details about high-speed stuff. You tell a different story about gravity. That's true. Right? What happens when somebody jumps off a building? Newton says there's an acceleration, right? Gravity is a force. There's an acceleration of the person.

who's coming down to Earth. Einstein says, no, no, no. The person who jumps off a building experiences no acceleration. And he's kind of right because if you took a scale with you, you jumped off a building

and you put that scale under your feet, what would you measure? Nothing. Nothing. Zero. That scale is an accelerometer. Right. It would measure zero.

You feel no acceleration as you jump off a building. Why does it then seem like you're accelerating? Because the Earth is accelerometer. upwards towards you. So Einstein says, you measure an acceleration because you on the surface of the earth are in an accelerating frame. So we can dig into that more if you like, but the point is you don't just replace Newton

with Einstein, you tell a different story about reality. And so it's possible someday in the future we have a different theory of particles that doesn't include the Higgs and we're telling a different story. The story I told you about electrons moving to the universe with Higgs's and whatever. somebody on a future podcast could be telling a very different story about reality. So absolutely. And dark matter could be the key. You know, one thing we don't know about dark matter is, where does it get its mass?

The electron gets its mass from the Higgs, right? But anything that gets its mass from the Higgs has to have a weak interaction, has to interact via the weak force. And so far, it seems like dark matter doesn't feel the weak force, which means it probably does not get its mass from the Higgs. Right. Which means, is there a dark Higgs? Is there another particle that gives mass to dark matter? Maybe.

And dark matter, there's more dark matter than normal matter. Right. So if there's a dark Higgs, then it's the dominant way you get mass in the universe. And our Higgs is just like a little bit of the story. Right. And so that could really help us understand, like, the bigger picture of how particles get mass and the whole context. So, you know, I don't want people to go away thinking, oh, our theory.

the universe is wrong. It describes what we've seen and it works really, really well, but philosophically, we have no proof that it's the only description, the unique description, and we couldn't one day replace it with something better and deeper

that works in a broader context to describe experiments we haven't done yet. Can you tell me about how we can turn every cell phone on Earth into a cosmic ray detector? Yeah. There's this great mystery in cosmic ray physics. Cosmic rays is a fancy name

for just like particles, coming at the Earth. You think of space is empty, but it's actually filled with particles, right? Very, very low density compared to like our atmosphere, but high-speed particles whizzing around the sun makes particles.

That's where the government gets their zero point energy. Of course, zero. The sun is making all sorts of particles, black holes emit particles, all sorts of stuff out there in space. And the amazing thing is that there are particles out there

with such crazy high energy that nobody can explain it. How high? So the large, The georgon Collider can make collisions up to 10 to the 12 electron bolts. 10 to the 12. 10 to the 12 electron bolts. So that's like 10 to the 12.

So that's like a trillion times the mass of a proton. I'm trying to do it too. I have to let the physicist. He'll be faster. So that's like a thousand times the mass of a proton. Okay. And that's pretty impressive. but there are particles we've seen from space

that are like 10 to the 9 times more energetic, right? So like a billion times more energy. And that's amazing. The universe has an accelerator that way, way outputs ours, right? It puts ours to shame. What fraction of the speed of light would those be? These things are point, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Oh, wow.

And they're like, they are really redlining it. Where are they coming from? So some of them come from like the centers of galaxies or from really big stars or other stuff. But some of these things we cannot explain it. Like there's nothing out there in the universe. You ask an astrophysicist like, give me a particle of this energy. How do you do it? They're like, we don't know.

Start from a supernova, whizz it around a black hole. Nobody knows how to get particles at this high energy, especially because the universe turns out to be opaque to these kinds of particles. meaning it likes to absorb them. So you shoot a particle out of this high energy, it shouldn't go very far. It interacts with the cosmic microwave background radiation, and it loses its energy. So not only is there something new out there

that nobody understands, capable of making particles a super high energy, it's not very far away. Nobody knows what it is. It's not very far away. It's not very far away, because these particles cannot go very far through the universe. So if we're seeing it,

them here on Earth and we're seeing them, then they can't come from like all the way across the universe. They have to be coming from our galaxy or one of the neighboring galaxies. They can't go any further than that. So they're in our cosmic neighborhood. The challenge is they're rare. We've seen like in decades of looking, we've seen a handful of these. So we can't even like say, where are they coming from in the sky? Are they all coming from the center of the galaxy? Are they all coming from this one planet that's orbiting that star and this is like aliens shooting a message at us. We can't even do that kind of pointing because we have a handful of them. And the reason is that they're very hard to spot.

They hit the top of the atmosphere and they create a big shower of particles. So one energetic particle turns into two with less energy, which turns into four, which eventually by the time it hits the ground, it's like a trillion particles. A trillion. Oh, trillions, absolutely. Wow. And so you get this like wash of particles. over the surface of the earth.

Like super high energy particle hits the atmosphere, then you get a big flash across the surface of the earth. And so to see more of these things, you either need to build like really big detectors. They have these dedicated detectors they built like in South America and in a desert in Utah to see these things, but they cost like $100 million. You can make those bigger if you had billions of dollars,

Elon call us. Or my idea was, look, why don't we, piggyback on existing technology. Instead of spending money to build dedicated scientific instruments, is there something that's already out there that we're spending a lot of money on that could see these things? And so your phone is effectively a particle detector. How does that work?

Well, it has a camera in it. Sure. And what is a camera other than a particle detector? And these days, cameras are little C-Moss chips. There are these little piece of silicon. and when a photon comes through, it liberates a bunch of particles, then it gets red out.

Yep. If a muon goes through, same thing happens. It does? Absolutely. In fact, we use the same technology to detect particles

at the large Hajon Collider. Same silicon technology is used at the heart of every detector at the large Hajon Collider. Is that something that you would see in the photo on your phone?

Absolutely. Oh, wow, I got a lot of mouons today. If a muon goes through, it'll leave like a little white spot. Or if it comes through at an angle, it'll leave like a little track across a few particles, across a few pixels. And so, yes, you can absolutely see it. Mostly it's washed out because you have a lot of light.

But if you put your phone down on the table, so the camera's face down, not getting any photons, but if a muon goes through, it'll pick it up. So we have this idea a few years ago, about 10 years ago now, and I thought, hmm, I wonder if I can write an app, which can scan the camera to look for me. muons while it's like on my table at night and see these things. So I spent Christmas writing my first app. Let's see if you can get this thing to work. Learning Lula. Yeah, exactly. It was actually on the Android, it was mostly in Java. Nice. And it works. You can see muons. So I thought, whoa, my phone. You saw some? Yes, I saw some. How did that feel? It was, it was amazing.

You know, to see a signal emerge from the noise. It's, it's really awesome. You had to hold a family meeting Because your wife is a scientist, right? Molecular biology? Yeah, she does microbiome research. She understands, like, how the gut works and all the microbes in it. Do you guys ever fight about, like, whose science is more fundamental? Just to let her win. Yeah, well, her science is definitely more useful.

Yeah. That's for now. So it worked. That's crazy to me. So it works. And that's amazing because there are billions of phones out there. And each one is connected to the internet. and has power and has a person taking care of it.

And at night, they mostly just sit there. Imagine if you could take all those phones and turn and connect them in a big network. They're spread out across the whole planet. And we thought, how many phones do we need in order to build a cosmic ray telescope, the size of the Earth that can do science at the level of these like 100 million dollar observatories? The answer is like only five or 10 million phones. That's it?

That's it. You get enough of those and we can see these super high energy cosmic rays at the same rate of these big observatories. But there's no limit. There's no like upper edge there. You have 50 million phones. You have 100 million phones. You have a billion phones. Sure.

You could do cosmic graphics the way nobody has ever done before. You could see these things at a higher rate. You could figure out where they're coming from in the sky. So that's the excitement of it. And so that's the project we're working on is to figure out like, does this actually, work if you have a bunch of phones can you really reconstruct where this thing came from so we have an app and it runs on our phones and we got a recently we got a grant from the julian schringer foundation which is a foundation that likes to fund proposals that have

been rejected by the NSF and I love it it's like hey let's invest in the crazy stuff love it right out-of-the-box thinking and we pitched this to the National Science Foundation like 10 years ago and they were like we love your idea but first build it, prove that it works, then we'll consider funding it. Which on one hand is like, that sucks. And then like, I get it. You know, they either have to give their money to us and like our idea is not proven or to like some existing experiment that they know is going to yield solid science. And that's the frustration, right? If you're at the NSF, you have to say no to lots of good ideas you'd love to fund. Why? Because they just don't get enough money. The NSF has

intelligent people pitching them great ideas all the time, and they have to say no to most of them, because there's just not enough money to go around. So they've got to be conservative. I get it. But we pitched this to the Schringer Foundation. We said, give us enough money to build a small version of this so we can test it and prove it,

and then maybe we can go global. So that's the idea. And it's a lot of fun, and, you know, potentially one day we'll have an app that can run on everybody's phone. Well, you know, at night, while they're not using it or everybody's got an old phone they're not using. Of course.

Plug it into the wall and turn it into a cosmic ray detector. So if your app worked, is that something that we can beta right now or? It works, but the problem is that if everybody runs it, it's going to cost me a lot of money because you've got to upload all that data to the cloud. Oh, that's right. We've got to figure out a way to make it cheap and scalable and get real institutional support. So we don't have the funds to support. a global network right now.

Even if the phones exist already and they're already paid for, the infrastructure to gather that is expensive. How much data are we talking about that gets pushed? Not a whole lot of data. Like we've really shrunk it so that it runs really slim on your phone, doesn't heat it up, doesn't need a lot of battery, doesn't upload a lot of data. Also, we don't want to be uploading photographs

from inside people's bedrooms at night. No, no, no, no. So, you know, a lot of layers there, privacy only upload individual pixels when we think there was a muon there. So not a lot of data, but scale that to 10 million people, 100 million people. It's a lot of bytes. And cloud storage and cloud compute is expensive. Yes.

Especially these days when we're competing with, you know, AI companies. And so that's the hurdle is, can we prove that this thing works? And then can we figure out a way to scale it so that it doesn't blow the bank to do the cloud computation? this idea is brilliant. Are there other applications for our cell phones that we're missing out on? Because it seems like it's a pretty complex device. It is.

There's a lot of citizen science you can do with your phone. Absolutely. Phones can detect earthquakes because they have a little accelerometer. Right. You know, you can like, if you take hikes, you can see like the birds there. You can take pictures of them, contribute to all sorts of stuff. They're very powerful devices. And, you know, think about the scale of our investment in our,

phones versus how much we spend on science. It's dwarfed. It's absolutely dwarfed. Right. It's nothing. How much money do we spend as a society on phones? It's big compared to science. And on one hand, that frustrates me. Like, why don't we spend more in science? On the other hand, it's an opportunity. Yes. Look, we have these things. We've invested in them. Let's figure out a way to use that investment to do some science. Because, you know, you got to operate in the real world. Okay. So the, we get the, we get the funding, the apps work, the data comes to you, what does it mean? What do you do with that? Yeah.

So that's when you get to start asking questions. Yeah. Okay, so we see these showers. They're all coming from the center of the galaxy. Okay. What does that mean? I mean, is something at the center of the galaxy capable of creating these super high energy particles? What could it be?

Now we can start training other kinds of telescopes there, optical telescopes, infrared telescopes, ultraviolet telescopes. This is multi-messenger astronomy to understand the universe in several layers. You can get trajectory information. Absolutely. You can get directions. That sounds important. Yes, absolutely. That's the goal. It's like figure out where in the world, where in the universe are these high energy particles coming from? We can make a map of the sky, the galaxy, and say where are they coming from? And we can't do that because there's only like a handful of examples. So if we could get 10 times, a thousand times as many, we could start to see the universe in this new way, right?

And we know that the universe is emitting particles of this high energy using something that's new to us. Something that bothers me about aliens being here is I can't get my mind around the distances. So you're aware of some theories of Albuqueri's warp drive and all of that. How practical is that? How feasible is that? Can you explain that how that works? Yeah. So this is a solution to Albert Einstein's equations of gravity.

which regard gravity as a curvature of space time. So the way to think of this, we know the Earth moves around the sun, and we tend to think that there is a force, gravity, connecting the Earth to the sun. However, another way to think of it, which was Einstein's insight, was to think about a marble moving on the surface of a trampoline,

the rubber surface, which is curved as a result of putting a heavy object in the middle. And so, like a bowling ball. Okay, you put in the middle and then the, and then if you give the marble the right speed, it will move on this curved rubber in a circle, just like the earth moves around the sun.

And it's simply because of the curvature of space time that the earth is trying to go along a straight line, but the space time is curved and therefore it moves in a circle. And if you were to remove the sun, the source of gravity, the earth would leave the solar system on a straight line. In the same way that if you remove the bowling ball from the trampoline, the marble will continue to move on a straight line on the flat surface of the trampoline. So that's the way Einstein thought about it. Now, you can imagine a solution to Einstein's equations that involves curved spacetime.

And indeed, there is this solution where it's curved in a very unusual way such that it can propel an object at a constant speed. So because light speed is the limit, so this is a way around the light speed limit. As long as you can reach the configuration that this solution embodies. And it requires some form of energy that produces negative gravity, which we don't know. have we never engineered it the universe accelerates so there is some repulsive gravity acting on the expansion of the universe but the substance that causes that expansion dark energy you know you would need to somehow engineer it in a different way because it it fills uniformly the universe just as if it's the vacuum energy density but the question is is there any anti-gravity sort of

that we can shape and have quantum gravity engineers design an object like that. The object itself is a solution to a steady state where this object is moving, but we don't know how to produce it and what ingredients you need to put. I mean, you can imagine a cake that is extremely tasty, but you just don't have the ingredients to make that cake, or you don't have the oven to make that cake. So that's the way you should think about it. I can give you another example of a situation where you don't need rocket fuel to propel yourself.

Just imagine we had access to a negative mass. All the masses that we know about are positive, and that's why gravity is attractive. But in electromagnetism, we have positive and negative charges. So imagine that just like electromagnetism, we would have negative masses, and they would repel an object close to them. So now I take the negative mass, put next to it a positive mass of the same value, and the total mass of this system would be zero. And that means that if I put it here in the middle of this room, it would float.

Gravity will not bring it down. If Newton's apple was made of a negative mass, half of it, negative mass, half of it positive mass, the apple would never fall on Newton's head, you know, like... Right. And if I were to make it next, negative, you know, in principle, next to a negative mass, you can produce repulsive gravity that would propel objects away. Now, the point is, this zero mass object, which with positive and negative, it's like a dipole, that you can just give a nudge and it will escape the pool of the

earth. And just think how much energy we invest in lifting a payload away from the earth. the most of the size of starship, the rocket that Elon Musk is working on, the biggest rocket we ever produced, most of the mass of it is their fuel reservoir, and getting rid of that and just taking the payload, putting next to it a payload of negative mass of the same value, and you can just nudge it, a kid, it will just float like a balloon and escape the pool of the earth. No investment of all these rocket fuel in it. in lifting it out. And such an object would be an ideal vehicle

because you can accelerate or decelerate by pushing the negative mass relative to the positive mass or vice versa. And so we just, the only problem is we don't have access to negative mass. We don't know how to produce it. Do we have to solve the supersymmetry problem, the hierarchy problem first?

We have to understand how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity. And the most popular idea in this direction is string theory that we discuss, but at the moment, they don't make any predictions not to speak about engineering prospects for doing something with quantum gravity. So we are sort of lost. But if we do detect an object manufactured by another civilization that maneuvers in ways that are very different than rocketry. and accelerates to very high speeds. And perhaps they mastered this technology. So we cannot say that it's impossible.

By the way, if we had access to negative mass, we could build a time machine. You could go back. You're going through my whole list right here. That's great. No, because if you control gravity, you control time, it's the same. Yeah, you can get back in time.

And then the question is, well, if you were to meet your grandparents convince them not to get married, how can you actually exist? The grandfather paradox. Yeah. So most physicists, if you were to ask them, would argue it's not possible because you get into logical inconsistencies. But maybe it's possible with some caveats.

Like any legal document has caveats. So maybe you can never speak to your grandparents in a way that will convince them not to get married because you won't be able to say that. Or you wouldn't remember your brain, the memories. depend on the arrow of time so maybe you wouldn't you wouldn't be able to design a system that will go back and do a task for you because as you go back in time the system would change there's a somewhat recent theory about time travel regarding block universe theory where you can't go back and kill your grandfather because you didn't well how do you know i didn't because

you're here so you didn't so that's that's kind of solves a paradox um one way that i phrase it is um that no Jew, no Jewish person, had access to a time machine in the future. Why do I know that? Because they would go back in time and kill Hitler. Sure. And avoid the loss of 6 million Jews. And the fact that still the history books and all the evidence we have is that Hitler existed means that no Jew had access to a time machine.

We called it a parallel universe intersection, a P-U-I. And I found a lot of other people using the term now, which is, Cool, because I do think we need to research this. Yes. I'm not saying it's actual. I'm not saying it's real. I'm not saying that what happened to me isn't some strange confluence of crazy, I don't even see.

I don't even know what the word to put for that. Until we know why the wave function collapses, I think everything's on the table. It's all there. And you're absolutely right. So until we know what's really going on in the quantum world, we're not going to find out what this stuff all means. So this also gave me another revelation, and that was maybe people that see ghosts and people that think there's parallel universes, maybe they work together. Maybe two things can be right at once.

And maybe there are ghosts. And maybe there are multidimensional being seen across universes. And maybe they just appear in our four-dimensional universe in the same way. So maybe they both exist. so I can see Aunt Mabel, okay, and it's really Aunt Mabel. It's really her. Yeah, it could potentially be. But maybe I'm seeing a lady in a long dresser.

I don't even know who she is, and she's a parallel universe interloper, who's just as surprised to see me as I am to see her. Right, that's what's interesting as these worlds collide, but they're aware of each other. It's not like you're just observing. Yeah, yeah. Think about that. Stepping on this thing and having it yanked my leg off from under me,

that constitutes rudimentary communication across some golf. Yes. And what is that golf? Parallel universe? I don't know. The ghostly realm? Maybe. See, our terms are not sufficient to describe what's actually happening here.

So, and I've said this before, today's paranormal could be tomorrow's science. We don't know. We don't know. We don't know. But today's paranormal could be tomorrow's science. And maybe this is an example of that happening. I don't know. Think about that. Isn't that crazy?

It is. I didn't expect this story. Yeah, well, I'm not crazy. Oh, I know that. I'm very firmly grounded, okay? But when things happen, I'm open-minded enough to say, we should explore this. And I think this is one of the things we should explore. So let's see if we can explain how that fifth dimension would work. Okay. Let's talk about, in terms of propulsion.

And when I say this, it's going to sound crazy until I explain. UFOs don't need engines, in my view. They don't need them. They just need the ability to translate from one dimension to another. How do they do that? Well, we have to go down to the fundamental forces to see that. We have a strong force, a weak force, electro-magnetism, and gravity, right? Right.

And gravity's the weirdo. Yep. Physics, physicists hate that one. That's right. They do. And the reason is because the other forces we can define as function a wave function we can describe it as with an equation or as a particle. Their duality, right?

Light is a photon, it's a wave. Okay, an electron is a wave, okay, and it's a particle, right? We can define it as a probability equation, right? Yep. Or as a particle. That happens with all the quantum particles, except gravity. Which is 10 to the, what, 30-second power weaker than electromagnetism? Yes.

And nobody knows why. The hierarchy problem. That's right. Exactly. Why is it, why is that even, why is that hierarchy problem even there? We don't know. But we have a clue. Right. We have a clue. And that clue is because you're not seeing all of it. Okay. Why is it? Why is it we're not seeing all of it? Because we're in four dimensions. What if there's more? What if there's another dimension? What if there's a fifth dimension? Well, how do we even, what's that mean? What does a fifth dimension mean? Okay. Well, we have to change our physics to understand that.

because as I said before, everything we have done is in four dimensions. We've gone in four dimensions to go everywhere we've ever done. Everything is four dimensions. As such, we only know 4% of the universe. The rest is dark matter, dark energy. Whatever that means. Whatever that means, dark means we don't know.

It doesn't mean black. Okay. So dark matter, dark energy, who knows? But I'll tell you this. If we talk about the four dimensions, okay, and the fifth dimension, we want to talk about it in terms that give us some kind of grab hold into the other dimensions. So we have a new construct, and that construct partly is string theory.

String theory is not proven. We don't know that it's real. Right. Okay? We have no idea. But if we can employ, let's hypothesize for a bit. If we can have a fourth dimensional space with a fifth dimensional space too, that actually corresponds to one particular variant.

of string theory called Randall Sundrum 1, RS1. Okay? Well, Randall Sundrum 1 states that there's four dimensions and a fifth dimension. If we can access that fifth dimension, there's something that's a quality of that fifth dimension that I use my thumb for, which is very, really, really, really strange. The farther in you go into that fifth dimension, it's exponential.

It's exponential. Farther you go in, the smaller the universe gets around you. So imagine this. You travel 12 inches out here. inches out here you go 12 measured inches on the ruler go into the fifth dimension some distance you travel that same 12 inches from your personal measurement on your ship you're actually traveling a much bigger distance because when you come out that expands to the size that you actually went right okay so that means you could be at the moon but wait don't you travel all the distance from here

to the moon it looks like two and a half days to get there all right Well, no, because you're utilizing this other dimension. So what happens is you translate to the fifth dimension, all right, from this exit point in your four-dimensional space, let's say Earth orbit, you go into the fifth dimension, and you translate to a new four-dimensional point over at the moon. And you can do that because the space is,

I think the client called it compactified exponentially, so you're really just hopping out and back in. You're punching out and punching in. Right. That's right. Now, think about that. It makes no sense. Before you go on with that,

yeah. If RS 1, and for people listening, this is a published paper from, I think, the late 90s, if gravity originates deep within the bulk and it's compactified exponentially, then that would unify the theory because gravity would just be leaking back to our dimension and it's exhausted by the time it reaches

and hierarchy is solved. You don't need me. You got it. Well, so that's how that works. Now, how do we travel in that? Okay. Because that happens at subatomic level. How do you blow that up? Well, see, that's the problem.

We don't actually know how to access it that way. Mark! We don't. We don't know. No one does. Okay, but we actually have... Okay, here is the nature of this process. Back in the 20s, Kaluza incline, right?

Theorized that there were Kaluza-Kline particles. Okay. And they theorized that these particles could potentially have uses and characteristics that might be advantageous to us, right? But back then, they didn't know anything, right? Well, go to CERN now, and there's a detector on that large Hadron Collider that was built some years back called Atlas, ATLAS. Very different from 3-I Atlas, okay? That's a different detector. What's it do?

Well, in part, it was built to do what? detect Kaluza Klein particles. Why? They're only theoretical. Because if we can detect them, these are particles that are very, very interesting. Why is that, Mark? Because they allow us to take gravity

and actually quantify it in a way that would allow us to actually utilize it. Is this the elusive graviton? Yes. Ooh. This takes us, you knew that. I know you knew that. And Einstein read this paper,

I think the first paper from Kaluza, held it for two years, he couldn't break it. He couldn't break the math. Yeah, because it actually made sense. Yes. Yeah. It's difficult when you're looking at things that don't make sense when you think they, or that do make sense when you think they shouldn't, right?

And then you're going to sit on it like he did. Right. He sat on it for a long time, right? But the point being, let's draw a picture. Okay, you have a UFO, and you ask me why they're circu. I never answered that question, purposely because I want to get to this to answer that. Okay. When you talk about how we generate those particles,

we're trying to generate them by speeding protons into a circular channel and curving them with magnetic fields. Right. Okay, well, when you take a charged particle like a proton, a plus one charge, okay, made them three quarks, okay? When we do that, we put them into a ring like that. To make them go in a circle, we have to use the magnetic field and contain it. Every time we do that, protons want to go in a straight direction.

So when you curve them, they generate another form of radiation, which you probably know it's called synchrotron radiation. Yes. That's very dangerous, so we don't want that. Okay, that's why the CERN, launch andron colliders, hundreds of feet on the ground, blah, blah, blah. Okay, the ground protects. So the problem is that that is the way that we're generating particles to look at. And we're doing it crude.

It's rudimentary. We don't have an efficient way to generate particles. We just look at how they splash together at the end of the channel. Right. And we look at the basis on the basis of that beautiful collision. We can follow the trails and build digital paths that they take and say, oh, look, that's a quark. You know, this one has charm, okay?

I mean, and figure stuff out that way. But we're also doing that to try and find collusicline particles. Notice I didn't see gravitons yet. Okay. Because the elusive gravents. Graviton would basically theoretically come from the fact that all the quantum particles are dual. We have a wave and we have a particle nature. So we now know that gravity has waves.

Where's the particle? Right. It's got to exist. We just can't see it. Can't see it. And the reason we can't, it's not in our four dimensions. It's originating outside in the fifth dimension. Ah.

So this means that when we, when we, when we, are subject to gravity, we can measure it, we can calculate its effects, we can send probes outside our solar system on exacting paths using gravity and propulsion. But we aren't actually controlling gravity. We're subject to it. Because RS1 has three provable experiments that should prove that those gravitons are there and we can't find none of them work. It's null. It's three. We're over three. Our technology is not to the point where we can possibly do it. I would like to get more information and like to see that we can prove.

We have to prove string theory. We have to actually be able to live within RS1 for some period of time. We'll be able to do this. I don't think we're there yet. But I do think that this is the way they operate. And let me paint another picture. When we talk about the Large Hadron Collider, it's a big ring, right? And we're primitive.

We have a 22-mile ring that we're trying to make these particles collide. It takes us that much time, you know, in size, to actually speed these things up to near light speed, to collide, et cetera, et cetera. Alien creatures, probably being, say, 1,000 years ahead of us, would have figured out how to shrink their accelerators to generate particles that they could then use for their purposes. So when you talk about UFOs being round, I think they're round, especially the 30-foot sport model, as Lazar calls it. Right, the coop. Whatever that is.

The 30-foot diameter size, I think that they're round like that because the outer ring is an accelerator. These are particle accelerators, and they're generating particles that surround the craft and close the loop with gravity. They generate these fifth-dimensional particles

from their accelerators, and because they have generated these particles, they're pulled into the fifth dimension, because that's where they're going, I'll call it this way, going home too. Okay, and they pull every craft in, they pull anything within them into this fifth dimension. Now that's very dangerous,

especially in the compressed universe. If anything goes wrong in there, they're toast. Right. Figuratively and accurately. Okay. However, if they can pull it off, if they can get in there, and they can go in a certain distance, all right, and what they do is

they now can punch in at a new point from within there, but based on how far in they go, that point they go to will be expanded to much bigger distance. So theoretically, you can go from here to Alpha Centauri, and a Stanford physicist figured this out last I checked. He calculated that using Kaluza Klein Gravitons, if they exist, they're about 10 to 16 times stronger than the gravitons

holding us to our chairs today. Right. Okay. He said, if we can do that and use these particles like that, we can actually get to Alpha Centauri in about 20 minutes using this technology. Which is, what, four light years, four in change? 4.3. Wow. And 20 minutes? Yeah, and we're not traveling for light years. We're not violating the speed of light because we're not using it. You just hop into the fifth dimension and pop in. Right. It's probably going to be like that zigging through space between here and Alva Centauri.

Why would you bounce in and out? Because we can't probably go the whole way. We probably can't generate the energy to all so far in that we can make the massive jump. We can't. And maybe when we get the technology, we're going to take a bottle-sized spacecraft and send it to the moon in two and a half seconds. Oh, look what we did. And then bring it back.

Okay. But the fact is if we can't, if we do that, we're going to probably oscillate in and out. Okay. And this is key because it. If you oscillate in it out from the fifth dimension to our four dimensions, if you do it fast enough, well, now it's like a frequency, right? And if you can do it fast enough, you're not here, you're not there. You're sort of in between, kind of in that little in-between path at all times.

So guess what? You can be in the deep ocean for as long as you want and not feel any force of pressure. No problem. You can live down there. You can hide from us. You can actually have your UFO sitting on the bottom. You can have your ship on the bottom and just sit there. How does that accelerator protect the occupants?

Ah, well, see, that's the thing. The accelerator, okay, the central core, all right, is going to be subject to synchrotron radiation as well. Probably very intense. But not as much as the outside, no? Well, it could. It's radial in all directions. But the fact being, in the interior, you can shield that.

We can shield the craft to prevent that. But that's a tourist. How do you protect above and below the plane of the accelerator? You don't. You don't. No. You don't have to? You don't have to. Because the occupants are inside, in the middle.

And they're protected, okay? They have shielding. So that stuff is going to surround the whole ship. Metamaterial would be useful there. No kidding. Right? Maybe. Maybe. Now, keep in mind that there's another wrinkle I haven't talked about.

That's micro black holes. There's a few wrinkles here. There's a few. But I love it. You know, there's so many wrinkles that it's like, is it even worth talking about. But yes, it is. Yes, it is. Because I believe that this is the way that it may actually work.

I think you're right. I think you're right. I think so. And I think Bob Schroeder was right, too, when he wrote that book. So micro black holes. Yeah, the micro black holes, okay, here's what they do. Okay, with a tiny particle, all right, that's 10 to 16 times more powerful than the graviton's holding us down, it's going to generate a certain percentage of micro black holes, theoretical construct.

We don't see them all the time, right, obviously. So if you do that, what are they going to do? They only live a few nanoseconds, a few billions of a second. But if you keep a flow around your ship at all times, you have a certain net number. If you're seeing a ship using them, what are you going to see? You're going to see the ship shimmer. Right. You see it change color.

Wobble. You might see it wobble. You might see it vanish. And what's it going to eat? It's going to eat some atmosphere. It's going to eat some light. And it's going to eat the gravitons coming from the earth. That's right.

And it's going to prevent the earth's gravity from reaching it. So what is the block universe? So when Einstein published his first paper on special Revolutivity in 1905, I think. He wasn't thinking cosmologically, he was dealing with questions of light and how light works

and how reference frames work. But his math teacher, Hermann Minkowski, saw the implications of what he was saying that if this is true, which it seems to be, then... What's true? Connecting... If relativity, special relativity is true. If there's no objective reference frame, then there is a point of view on any moment

that feels open-ended that from which it's actually in the past and it's already happened. So you and I sitting here talking right now, we feel like we're... we are, you know, moving through a timeline and it's open-ended and you have no idea what's going to happen next. And you could say fuck in 10 seconds. I wouldn't predict it, whatever. But there's a point of view on which all of this has already happened. So just as we think of the past as solid and fixed, the future is also solid and fixed. And what he called this was the space-time continuum.

And he put a hyphen in there, space-time continuum. continuum. And it's come to be called the block universe because you can sort of visualize it as a big block in which there's one of the dimensions is time. And so we're all flowing, we're all, we may think we're just, you know, bodies moving through the universe, but from that four-dimensional perspective, we're worms, we're snakes, we're snaking through that four-dimensional block. And the present moment is a cross-section. It's a three-dimensional cross-section of that. that four-dimensional reality. And that, again, that future already exists.

And theoretically can interact with the past in different ways. You can have things like what we call wormholes now, which were theorized actually pretty early. By Einstein. By Einstein and Rosen, yeah. Oh, yeah, but before that, I think it was Gertl, who solved. Einstein's field equations

in a way to show that you could have a path through space time that actually wound up in your own past. Yes. And this was, you know, Einstein was not thinking in these terms. He was not, and in fact, he was initially kind of, he was initially just as alarmed by the idea of time travel

as pretty much anyone is because the first thing you think is like, wait, wait, no, no, no, that can't happen and that would lead to paradox and blah, blah, blah. He thought that too. But then he came around because his colleagues showing him, no, no, no, the math shows that this is possible. And then we have, yeah, things like wormholes where you could have, you know, create a passage through space.

But if you take one of those holes, one of the mouths of the wormhole and you move it in near the surface of black hole and then move it back out, then they're out of sync with each other. And you can have time travel. Right. So, yeah. So there's, and then there's other possibilities, you know, warp drives, Alcubier warp drives and so on, which are time machines as well as space machines.

So the block universe, yeah, is sort of the basic premise that makes all of this possible. And it's still not really questioned among most physicists. So this kind of throws away the many worlds interpretation, yes? Yeah, as far as I'm concerned, it does. So can you explain, because this was mind-blowing to me, as I told you earlier, I did an episode on Synchronicities based on Young's famous Scarab story. And part of my research was Time Storms, and I was halfway through the episode, and I went, well, shit, I'm wrong about all of this.

And it doesn't happen a lot where someone just changes my whole point of view on a specific topic, but you did because I think you solved the grandfather paradox. Well, do you want to talk about the Scarab story? We can do that, yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, this is honestly, this is my favorite example of a time loop. It really is the best illustration of what I mean by a time loop. Okay, so for people who don't know, this patient came into Jung's office one morning, let's say, and she told him a dream that she had the night before that someone gave to her this piece of jewelry

in the shape of an Egyptian scarab beetle. And right as she's telling him this dream, he hears a tap on the window behind him, and he turns around. And there's a rose chafer beetle, which was sort of the European equivalent of the dung beetle or the scarab. And he opens the, and he was a, whatever else you want to say about Young, he was a brilliant shaman. And he opened his window, took the beetle, handed it to her, and said, here's your scarab. And it was like this like mind-blowing moment for both of them. Yes. And, you know, he said that it was the moment that opened his patient up to mysteries and so on.

It was really a decisive turning point in her treatment. Now, he sort of described this and he used the term synchronicity to sort of collapse this sort of time dimension. to say time doesn't matter here. You know, this was, you know, she's telling the story about a scarab and then a scarab shows up. But really what was happening, you know, she had a precognitive dream. This was not synchronicity. This was something unfolding in time in the wrong direction. You know, this woman had a precognitive dream about being handed a scarab beetle.

And lo and behold, the next morning, it happens. And well, anyone who keeps a dream journal and is aware of precognition, like, yep, that's what happens. In this case, what makes it, what makes that so hard for people to grasp is that, but wait, it was her telling him her dream that got him to open the window and give him the scarab. Like without that element, you know, this would not have happened. So they think, isn't that a paradox? But it's not a paradox. It's actually a loop.

It's a tautology because her dream caused her to tell her doctor the dream, which caused the to turn around and see Ascara beetle and give her the beetle, which is what caused her dream in the first place. So it is a loop. It is a causal loop. It's what blew my mind was. She wasn't seeing the future.

She was remembering the future. Yeah. She wasn't seeing the future. She was remembering it in a way or pre-membring. So sending information back to her? Yes. To her younger self. So she didn't really have to.

to do anything. It was going to happen. She remembered it happened. Yes. That's what's kind of, once you get your mind around it, which isn't that hard. If you just let everything else go, many worlds, all that. She's just, it just unfolded. I think you call it the backstory.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So that her dream was part of the backstory of that event happening in the office. And but you can't, you know, when you tell a story like this, that's the problem I always have with my books. how do you tell these anecdotes? Because really, if causation is circular like that,

you could start the story anywhere. You can start the story with the Beatles showing up at the window, or you could start the story anywhere in that narrative. It's all sort of equally causal. And that throws us off because we're used to linear stories. We're used to stories being linear. And so it's hard to wrap our heads around that. But it's the opposite of a paradox.

A paradox is something that can't happen. Right. The tautology is something that must happen and therefore is not interesting in a way or not interesting to a logician because, you know, like, you know, it's not fair to defend an argument by its antecedents. Is it?

Yes. Yeah, right. But it's the way the world works, I think. So in a time travel universe, in any universe where time travel or time traveling information is allowed, then everything on some level is tautological. You said it must happen.

That sounds like teleology to me. That sounds like Plato and Aristotle. It's teleology. This is the whole reason why people reject this is because in the time of Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon is the one who rejected teleology from the story of science. Let's explain teleology.

Yeah. So teleology, that's purpose. So Aristotle codified these, I think, four different kinds of causation. And one of them was efficient causation. That's what we understand is causation, you know, one thing leading to another, like billiard balls. But one of them was teleological causation. That is to say the end, you know, telos, meaning the end, you know, is in some sense causing what happened before it. Now, this was a part of the Aristotelian framework for sensual.

centuries. But then in the 1500s, Francis Bacon, sort of one of the first real thinkers about trying to create what we now think of as the sciences. He wrote, and I'm blanking on the name of his book, but he wrote this book in which he, you know, basically laid out what causation was and banned teleological causations. We can't, you know, we can't accept, you know, causation from the future. And, but the reason was that teleology, at that time, the only teleology people could, could imagine was God's divine plan. Right. Okay. And the idea was getting rid of taking God out of the equation, taking God out of the scientific equation. So what they did was throw the baby out with the bathwater, really.

They threw out teleology, and ever since then, it has been rule numero uno in science that causes travel in a single direction, and you know, you can't have anything that defies that unilinear causal story. But your future is pulling you toward this result. Yes, that's what I'm, that's what I'm arguing a lot. What more and more physicists are arguing is that no, no, no retrocausation. that's the new word for teleology. Yes. Sort of a non-divine teleology. Daryl Bum's a really interesting guy.

He's a psychologist at Cornell. He's emeritus now. But he, so his story is interesting. He got interested in, he was never interested in parapsychology, really, until the 90s, I think the early 90s, when a colleague of his, I guess, a colleague or another psychologist, anyway, named Charles Onerton, who was a parapsychologist

and doing parapsychology research, he wanted someone who had training as a mentalist to be part of his experiments, because that's a good control, you know, to make sure that there's no cheating and that and so on. And Darrell Bam is a trained mentalist. he didn't necessarily have an interest in ESP or whatever, but he didn't. He wasn't a knee-jerk. He just didn't know anything about it, but he was game to sort of be part of these experiments

to sort of ensure that everything was kosher. And Anterson got, you know, very, you know, positive results in these. I think they were tell up the experiments, if I'm not mistaken. or maybe the remote hearing, I'm not sure. But anyway, Daryl Beme realized, you know, there's something to this. You know, he's getting results. And so anyway, in the first decade of this century,

he already had a very successful career on personality and various topics. You know, he was a very respected psychologist. But anyway, he did this large series of experiments in which he reversed cause and effect in basic psychology paradigms. One of them being like priming, like you're, you know, a typical priming experiment, you'd be subliminally shown some picture or whatever and then see how it affects your behavior afterwards. Right. Well, he would do an experiment in which people perform on some test and then are shown something subliminally. afterwards, okay?

So this kind of like reversal of cause and effect. Anyway, he got significant results in like eight of nine experiments that he did. Can we explain the curtain test? Yes, photos? Yeah. Like this is the most famous one. He, so he had, these were very large experiments with large groups of undergraduates. But he had undergraduates sit at a computer and choose which of two curtains on

a screen had a picture behind it. Okay. Now I'll add, there wasn't actually already a picture behind these curtains. They're just curtains. It was generated randomly after the mouse click. So, okay. Anyway, so they make a mouse click and then it shows if they're right or wrong. And they did, they performed at chance, 50% correct, as you would expect.

50% was there. When, when the. picture to be revealed was boring. Okay? Right. Like a beach scene or something like that. But when the picture to be revealed was erotic. Yep.

Emotional. Adults engaged in consensual sexual acts. Poor no. Yeah. They did better than chance. I think 70% something like that? No, it wasn't that high. I mean, the, you know, the effect size is still small in these experiments.

But statistically, because he had so many participants and so many trials, it reached statistical significance. Okay. And then there's another series of experiments that sort of reversed the typical order of a memory experiment. So at a typical memory task, you might be shown a word list. and then you engage in some seemingly unrelated task that reminds you of certain words on that list and then you take a test on the word list and you'll be expected to perform better on the words that you were reminded of. Sure.

Well, in his version, he showed, had kids look at a word list, then he tested them on the list, and then after the test, he had them engage in a task which subliminally reminded them of certain words on the list. And guess what? They did better on the words that they were subsequently reminded of. Just let that land for a second. Let that land. They were reminded of certain words later, and those happened to be the words they did better on from the list.

Yes. Retroactive facilitation of recall is what he called this. Just to be fair, the skeptics, 2023, there was a replication issue, right, with Bem's research. Okay, there's a lot of controversy about this. Immediately the skeptics jumped on this. in this this came out in 2011 right immediately skeptics were enrage I mean my colleagues at one of the psychology organizations were enraged yeah anyway and then skeptics said no this can't be replicated and here we tried to replicate it and we couldn't but a lot of teams around the

world did replicate it success successfully. And yeah, don't get on Wikipedia because you'll, you will see a completely biased. Of course. Version of this. But I think something like 80 independent, 83 independent replications. Yes. Something like that. So yeah, fascinating, fascinating evidence for something like precognition. He would call it pre-sentiment, feeling the future. And that's what he the art of the um what he called it in his original article on this so for the skeptics of bem's work i think we have um in the late 80s physicist arinoff's split laser test as a hold my beer

right that story well yeah this wasn't arinov this was um oh i'm howell and dixon i believe this is also at cornell right think um where they they took a laser beam, they put it through a beam splitter to create two identical beams. Essentially, the terms they use in physics are different, but they're essentially creating an experiment group and a control group like you'd have in a psychology experiment.

And they did what was called a weak measurement on both of these beams, which is measuring the amplitude of the beam without interfering too much with the beam. And this is a challenge that we can talk about with these kinds of experiments. This audience... Every time you measure something,

you're interfering with it in some way. Right. That's the collapse of the way. Yeah. And the challenge is to try and find ways of measuring things that don't interfere too much so that you can tell if a subsequent interaction is having a retro effect.

Well, in any event, they split the beams, weakly measured both of the beams, and then did a strong measurement on one of the two beams. And lo and behold, the beam that got the strong later measurement was amplified like 10 times compared to the previously compared to the other beam, which suggests retro causation. Now, you'll get controversies and physicists will debate the significant, you know, what this means and so on. But that seems to be evidence for retro causation.

On Wheeler's delayed choice, certainly. That would be another example. Yeah, there's, there's, So this is an active area of research, and multiple experiments have been conducted like that that I just described, which seem to show retrocausation. Then you also have the field of quantum computing, which is showing that you can have indeterminate temporal ordering of computations in a quantum computer circuit. And I admit, I am not a physicist. I'm not a computing researcher, so this is all above my pay grade, but there's so many articles have come out in the last several years, showing that you can invert causal order in a quantum computing circuit. Yeah, in Cambridge, they're solving problems with information from the future.

Yeah, yeah. Can we explain just a little bit about delayed choice, what's happening there, how it connects to time, the photons going back to the source, is changing their state, that sort of thing? Just to remind folks. Yeah. Okay, so there's, let me take the example of... Or if you have a different favorite?

Well, like one of the experiments that I think excited John Wheeler. So his idea was that you could take light from a distant quasar, say, and choose to measure it a certain way. and it would show that how your choice of how to measure it had influenced the light from that distant quasar. Well,

a blanking on his name, Allie, I think, an astrophysicist, I forget which university, but he heard Wheeler speak and had an idea for actually testing this using mirrors placed on the moon by the Apollo astronauts. Because they placed mirrors on the moon

to bounce laser light back to sort of measure the very minute like changes in distance between Earth and moon in different phases of its orbit. Well, they used, you know, they shot a laser at the moon and that takes like, what, I think a second

for light to get to the moon and back. So that's enough time to change the parameters of an experiment. Unless you're Nixon on the phone, then it's instant. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And it showed indeed that you can change how you're going to measure light,

and the light somehow seems to know. It seems to know. It seems to know how it's being measured. Yeah. Well, you know, seeming to know something that you shouldn't be able to know, that, you know, that seems like telepathy, you know. But another way of looking at telepathy is that it's really precognition, that the light was influenced by that subsequent measurement.

And that information essentially from the future traveled back in time along the world line of that photon. Right. It fulfilled its destiny. It fulfilled its destiny, yeah. So, yeah, there's all kinds of reasons to think that, yes, retrocausation is a real thing. at the smallest scales in nature.

Now, you know, that quantum realm where you're talking about individual particles, you know, behaving in seemingly impossible ways. But there are certain circumstances where you can scale up that quantum magic. And that's when this topic of entanglement comes in. When you entangle particles together, you can create a larger and larger object

that enters the realm of, of objects that we're used to interacting with. And you can demonstrate that quantum magic at a large scale. That could be the strong force measurement, right? Just this entanglement of the equipment. Or a quantum computer. A quantum computer is a bunch of particles that are entangled together to create essentially an object that performs computations.

And in those settings, you can, again, we talked about quantum computers, reversing cause and effect. Sure. You can have a material thing that is responding to its future. Yes. Okay. And, okay, then set aside those ideas and enter the realm of biology where more and more people are thinking that the brain could be a quantum computer or have quantum computing properties. And if that's the case, you know, add all these up and you get the idea that the brain could be.

a four-dimensional information processor that is presponding to its future as well as responding to its past. So on the show, I've covered quantum biology with the cryptochromes in the bird's eye, which has been proven that they're entangling with the magnetic field. Quantum processes in plants

where they're finding the... Photosynthesis is a quantum process. They're checking all the paths simultaneously. It's superposition in real time on leaves. So clear. clearly the quantum state can be held in a wet, hot place. Right, right. And that's always been the point of skepticism.

Oh, you can't have entanglement occurring in a warm, wet environment like the brain. But it's increasingly being shown that actually you can and that living, that life is a quantum, is scaling up these quantum effects. I want to ask you about microtubules in a second, but before we move to that, what did Nealzboar, how did he address retrocausality? I know he didn't like any of this. No, he did not. And he, yeah, Nealzboar is a really important figure in the sort of, I'd say, century-long denial or refusal to look at retro causation. Because ever since the 1920s, there has been this idea.

that retrocausation could explain a lot of this spooky quantum stuff. But the idea just keeps getting shoved aside, partly because of Neal's personality. I mean, he was just a very forceful personality. And he sort of got the whole field of physics to just basically agree, to not interpret what was going on at a quantum level and just say it's random. and just accept that the world is random on a fundamental level. And that's the answer. And you just have to wrap your head around that.

Well, a lot of people have not wanted to wrap their head around it. They have not been satisfied with that answer. Einstein famously said, God does not play dice. That's right. But Niels Bohr basically dominated the field until really the last couple of decades when what's called the Copenhagen interpretation, and he was from Denmark, so it's called the Copenhagen interpretation when it's kind of broken down. And now you have this kind of flurry of rival theories going on in the field. So you've got, besides the Copenhagen interpretation, you have

many worlds theory that we talked about. You've got BOMS pilot wave theory. You've got multiple rival theories, but retrocausation or some version of retro causation, and not all physicists call it retro causation. The problem is they use different terms sometimes to mean the same thing. Like what? What do we look at it? Well, they'll tell you that to be really precise, you can't talk in terms of causation anymore and you need to talk in terms of constraints.

And like they'll use different language because they don't want to give this impression that somehow energy is traveling from the future to the past and stuff like. that. To be, there's a there's a team that wrote a book relatively recently called Beyond the Dynamical Universe, which is basically making this same argument that I'm talking about, but they don't use the term retrocausation and they take pains to distinguish themselves from other physicists who use the term retro causation, but they're basically talking about the same thing, which is that that something happening in the future is constraining what's happening now and thus that's a kind of information traveling backward in time. You know, for us, us ordinary humans who need to be able to grasp

this somehow, we need, we need these clumsy expressions like influence or information traveling backward in time. We need to be able to put it that way so that we can wrap our heads around it. But that's, you know, a physicist will have a more precise way of talking about it. But the basic idea is that what happens in the future influences what's happening now and what's happening now influenced what happened in the past it's so elegant i don't know why there's such resistance to it's so elegant well it takes away free will or it seems to it it does that's that's something kind of stressful about your theories is determinism and free will so if everything that's going to happen is going to happen regardless because we're on this timeline then why does anything matter well right that's

That's where people's heads go. Right. But the more you sit with it, you get to another place. That's, I think. That's a devil's advocate because I'm on board. Yeah. That's what hangs people. That's people's hang up.

It is a literal hang up. People get hung up on this question of free will and they think, oh, well, then if it's going to happen anyway, what's the point? But, you know, just think about that for a second. you can't know the future. That's the thing. This is the what I call the precognition paradox. You cannot know the future.

Right. You cannot know the future. And you don't know how any, you know, how the future is going to unfold based on your actions. And just laying in bed in the morning and not getting up and putting on your pants and going to work. You know, that's an action just as much as getting up and putting on your pants and going to work. That's true. So it's like it doesn't make any. You know, you got to do something.

And when, so I'm a Zen guy. All right. Really? Yes. And when you sit with this, when you sit with the block universe as a co-on, as a kind of, you know, co-on, you reach a point where you go, holy shit. That's, it's beautiful. And it's like, it's liberating. It's liberating to get rid of the.

the baggage of free will determine it like who fucking cares it's not it's just easy for you to say well you know but it's honestly this is a point you can get to when you treat this as a co-on as a as a you know as a riddle to be solved and don't just like turn away from it but that's unfortunately what's what generations of physicists have done they've turned away from it because this this trespasses on some philosophical idea that's really important for us as westerners True. And it's distorted their interpretation of the science, which is that's not scientific either. You know, we've talked about ways people, ways in which scientists don't behave scientifically.

Well, generations of physicists have avoided a very obvious and elegant conclusion or a very obvious and elegant hypothesis about nature simply because it is filled. philosophically and culturally kind of uncomfortable. And that's not behaving scientifically either. No, it's not. Fortunately, they all haven't. So eventually the evidence is just going to stack up. Yeah, but it's the, you know, it is acquiring that evidence is tough because of this, because of this problem of distinguishing between, you know, when you, when you measure

something, you're interfering with it. So how is your measurement, you know, is it, is it simply changing the future or is it It's it is very hard to test this experimentally. And for exactly the same reasons why it is hard to prove that my dream about two buildings with corrugated facades that were mosques on the morning before 9-11 wasn't a coincidence. I mean, it's, you know, you can't prove that. That will always be the counter. The uncertainty principle.

So that uncertainty principle is right there at the heart of the topic of recognition. So before we talk about Penrose and Hemaroff, which everybody listening knows, let me pull another story out of you because I love the bootstrap paradox but the bootstrap paradox is my favorite I mean it's it's another way of putting a time loop basically it's

the idea so say you have a here's an example that David Deutsch the physicist and quantum computing pioneer uses it in a paper that he wrote in the 1990s he says okay you have a a Nobel Prize winning

physicist. I'm sorry, Nobel Prize winning mathematician. And he has access to a time machine and he goes back in time and finds himself, his younger self studying in the library and gives him the proof that he later won the Nobel Prize for solving. And so he basically just gave it to himself in the future. And there's no way. nowhere in that causal loop where anybody actually did the work right of solving that math problem okay

well that's what makes steam shoots out shoot out people's ears you know it's like bother me since star trek for the voyage home exactly how do we know you didn't invent the thing exactly it's it's it's it's there at the heart of any time loop is this bootstrap paradox but again it's we're not it's not really a paradox bootstrap paradox is a misnomer. It's a tautology. It's not a paradox. In fact, I think that that everything is bootstrapping. Wow. I hadn't considered that. It goes all the way down. That in a time travel universe, in a universe that allows time travel at all, ultimately everything is bootstrapped. Everything's a bootstrap. I guess it has to be. And this is why I love the topic. This is why I wrote my last book,

where was it before the dream? Because it is an answer to that question of, of, you know, you know, where does a new idea come from? Well, it's literally like that proof that is given to the younger self by the older self.

And it doesn't come from any. It literally comes from nowhere in the sense that there is nowhere in the history of an idea where somebody like actually did the work of solving a problem. It just literally is given to your younger self by your older self.

And that's... Plagiarism of the future. Plagiarism of the future. So this is, this is, this is the time loop at the heart of creativity, I think. And it's literally creation X Nilo. So it's literally we're gods. Okay. Creators are gods because they're creating from literally nothing.

There is literally nowhere in the history of an idea that some, that some little imp is hammering it together or putting it together. nowhere that your brain is piecing together things and creating a new thing. It's receiving it as a gift from its future self. You are the muse of yourself. When I'm having good ideas now, I find myself thanking my future self. I appreciate that. You should.

That's great. That's good idea. Yeah. Yeah. Is that driving some of your work? Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, I think it's an inspiring way of thinking about it. about art and creativity, but about, you know, just creative solutions in general. You know, I think that's, I think that's what's happening. It's easy to show, it's easier to show with art because, because, you know, you have an artwork that then is something like a dream journal that you could then compare to a later event or whatever in a person's life. It's a little harder with things like inventions and scientific theories and stuff like that.

they are not as amenable to that kind of confirmation process and that kind of comparing with a person's biography. But I think that that's what innovation really is, is bootstrapping. What do you think is happening with flow state and sort of unconscious behavior? Yeah, that's a flow state is when you are cooking in terms of that bootstrapping. That's your future self just kind of giving. flowing into the, yes, flowing unimpeded. Yeah, I mean, anyone who, and it's, yeah, and it goes beyond creativity. Like anyone who's, who's doing some skilled activity, a martial artist or, you know, a jet fighter pilot or a brain surgeon, you know, they're in a zone.

Yes. They are not thinking about their free will. This is another reason I tell people, stop working about free will. You know, your best self always comes out when you're not. thinking deliberately about your will. Every time. Exerting your will. Your best self is that in the zone when you are a machine.

You're part of a machine and you're part of what I think of as a sort of four-dimensional machine. That's like, you know, cycling through time as well as space. It's, you know, that's what, you know, it's a Zen thing. You know, the Zen masters are all about finding that state where you are not freely willed. You know, you are doing what must be done. And this, I'm going to go off script a little bit because something just occurred to me as you're saying this is, as a martial artist, as a performer and sitting here in this room, when things are moving well, it's very automatic. But I will find myself with a second dialogue, almost observing.

It's happened here a couple of times today where I'm just sort of observing, oh, that was a great question. Oh, this is really interesting. It's going well, that sort of thing. Or if you're performing, you're doing. Yeah. You're doing stand-up. You're like, oh, the audience is kind of rough of tonight. Let's try this material.

What do you think is going on in the mind when we've got these split monologs? Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I come back to, it's an idea that I talk about in time loops a bit called Liebitt's Gallum. Benjamin Leibet was a neuroscience researcher. Terrifying, terrifying research. Terrifying research about how, you know, we're out of sync with reality. We may have to describe experiments. But yeah, well, that would be fine.

But the thing is the upshot, I think, of his research is that we are actually pulling our meat puppet strings from the future. And that those moments that you're describing, you know, like I'm a martial arts too, you know, you have those moments where you kind of mentally replay something really great that you just did. Well, what if that's your freely willed. pulling your meat puppet strings in the past, you know, what if that's where your free will is being exerted is on your past behavior? That's, you know, again, how do we prove that? I don't

know. But it's one way of interpreting. It exists. Whether we want to prove it or not, it happens to people in flow state. Even when you're sinking a bunch of baskets. Yeah. Something's going on. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And talk to psychics. Remote viewers go into that state too when they're, you know, when they're cooking. What do you think remote viewers? Are they remembering the future as row of viewers? This is a big debate. There's a big debate at the field. I mean, I think that's a hypothesis that needs to be tested and no one's testing it. Well, I saw you criticize Pat Price. I'm a huge Pat Price fan. And when you kind of describe what Pat was doing, it made a lot of sense to me. Because he was, because remote viewers are wrong more than they're right. But when they're right, they're definitely right.

Yeah. So they're just remembering they were right. That's the hypothesis that needs to be falsified. Right. Before we assume that remote viewing is actually, you know, sending your consciousness across space to some other location or to some target, it needs to be falsified that you're not previewing or pre-remembering, the feedback you're going to get afterwards.

True. And this is, you know, Some very small experiments have been done to try and test this, but not on any scale. And I always tell Romoviors you've got, I'm unfortunately, I'm not an experimental, you know, parapsychologist. I don't have the setup to study this myself. But I think someone who has the means should set up experiments where they you, and unfortunately, these are kinds of experiments are the kinds that would be done in any psychology laboratory

where you have to deceive your subjects. And I think that's why these experiments don't happen because they're happening. We're just, you know, Stargate never ended, I don't think. Right. But are they, but are these experiments that would falsify the precognition hypothesis? They're probably not focused on it. I don't know. Did you remote view your wife's shoes?

I did not remote view my wife's shoes. I precognized being on a floor hunting for an Advil that it dropped among my wife's shoes. Yeah. So remote viewing. But I'm saying it's an open question. Sure. I put it out there because no one else is voicing it. And I think it's really something that the field needs to address.

Well, that's going to move forward. Because when I read your work, I put it down and I just like, oh, shit, I hadn't considered it. That's why I ask you these, I'm asking you questions. Maybe it's not even your field, but you're here. So might as well pick the brain. Yeah. But it's, you know, remote viewers will get understandably touchy about it. Because it's important, you know, it feels it's validating of a certain belief system about consciousness and so on, that it leaves the body and so on.

And I get it. You know, people don't want cold water thrown on that. And I'm just, I'm saying, look, this is, if you're going to really believe that, you need to test it. You know, that that's the point of being a materialist scientist, which is, you know, really, testing rigorously and taking the most reductive version of a story and seeing if that reductive version can explain the results. And maybe it can't. You know, I'm open that maybe there is, you know, more remote viewing than precognition.

I certainly talk to people who are very convinced that that's the case. But it needs to be done in the context of studies that are public. or you can look at the evidence. And hard to get that published. It's hard to, yeah, it is. Probably not an accident that Jacques-fil-A was hanging around SRI in the 70s, no. Probably not an accident. Probably not an accident.

And he was like the first, one of the first people to raise this possibility, by the way. I mean, it's in his journals. Like he's, you know, he had lunch since this was 1978, I think, with the SRI guys and said, like, how do you guys know this isn't precognition? You know, you're treating this all like this is clairvoyance. and this could be all precognition. And he was very early on that kind of bandwagon that this may be precognition.

Has Valé addressed the microtubules and Pemrose Hemorrhoff work yet? Not that I'm aware of. Where do you stand on that quantum process? I'm very much in favor of Hammerov's work. The anesthesiologist stuff. Yeah, like a microtubules. I think microtubules could be the answer.

I am not personally that interested in the question of consciousness. You're not? No, I think it's a red herring. I think if something's going to come out of this search for consciousness, it's going to be a sort of serendipitous discovery of the mechanisms underlying precognition. And I think that's where the significance of microtubules is. So we were talking about memories being consolidated.

Yep. Okay. So guess what it is in neurons that reshape the synapses every night when you're dreaming and creating new memories? Microtubules. Microtubules. So if these microtubules are the little quantum computers that are presponding to their own future states, it makes perfect sense. You know, it really creates a perfect little hypothesis for how precognition works.

Would your model track with that being reducing entropy if you make those good moral choices? Yeah, exactly. You make those choices. You reduce your entropy. every reality frame that you get in, whether it's a night dream, a daydream, you go to some other reality frame, which is what we were going to talk about,

all of them give you choices in which you can de-evolve or evolve. If you make choices out of caring, you make it on the love side, then you evolve. You make it on the side you de-evolve. So you're just there trying to make choices, and the choice you make in a dream will level you up or level you down

just as much as the choice you make here awake. Sure. They're all the same. It's just different environment. So you get different choices. To be on the third floor of a five-story apartment building that's on fire isn't the kind of choice you want to duplicate here because it's going to affect a lot of people really badly.

You know, it's a terrible thing to have happened. So you're not going to do that. But in a dream or in an out-of-body, oh yeah. Now that gives you a set of experiences that you can't get or you couldn't get easily here without a doing. doing a lot of damage and hurting a lot of people as collateral damage to your lesson, you know, well, that's not good. So in these other realities, when you go out of body, that's what you're getting.

You're getting an opportunity to show who you are. And so free will is required then, right? Free will is required. Consciousness is awareness, free will with a choice. I just have a choice, but that means you have free will, absolutely required. So that's how the reality works. So an out-of-body isn't such a big deal. You're already out of your body.

You're a piece of consciousness. This body's an avatar. It's being rendered. And it's rendered according to the rule set. The rule set's what we call physics, biology, chemistry. Those are the rules. That's what scientists do. They figure out what the rules are.

And to the level at which this is rendered, then you interact with it. And you have choices. But because of this being a multiplayer game, choices you make affect others, just like they do in World of Warcraft. If you decide to run away and let your buddies fight the demon, well, that's a choice. And now they have to deal with that. They got one less person, you know, to help them fight that demon. So the choices you make affect others. If you're not very good about dueling with demons, then you're not that big of help. So if you're a level 40 or a level whatever they are now, you know, then you're very welcome

on their mission. But if you're only a level three, you can stay home because you're really not going to help us very much anyway. That's Leroy Jenkins for everybody. Yeah, so that's the game. This is a virtual reality game. So what happens when my avatar dies? When your avatar dies, the consciousness doesn't die.

It's just a piece of conscience playing that avatar. When your barbarian dies, you don't die. In World of Warcraft, I think you have to run back to the graveyard and get your stuff. Get your stuff. get your stuff, you know, or something. But of course, if that was the end, you know, if you got to play once and your character dies,

you're out of the game. Well, nobody would play the game. That wouldn't be much fun. No. And you wouldn't learn. I mean, the whole thing in World Warfare is you have to learn. You learn how to use your tools. You learn how to use your spells.

You learn how to use your equipment. You get smarter and more capable as you go. Well, that's like that here. And you can't do that in one turn. So you have multiple turns. They call that reincarnation. I call it in my book an experience packet. So you get experience packet because what you're trying to do is make better choices.

Lower the entropy of your consciousness, which lowers the entropy of the whole system's consciousness because you're a part of the system. So anyway, that's the name of the game. And you can't do that in one turn. You have to do multiple things. So what happens is that when you die, That avatar is gone. Now it's dead flesh.

And you find yourself aware somewhere else. Am I still my individual self? You still your individual self. But your memory of what you just experienced, your memory of that life that you just exited starts to fade, just like dreams fade. You know, you wake up with a dream, and the instant you wake up, it's really clear.

A minute later, it's a little. a little fuzzier. Ten minutes later, you barely remember the strong points, and after that you really don't remember the dream other than that you had it and that it was nice or something. So that's the same way. Once you die, you start forgetting all the stuff that you were just involved in in that past life like a dream. Where does that consciousness go? Consciousness just exists now. You're not in this virtual. You're not getting a data stream anymore. So there is no places within, you know, in this physical world, we think there's places, you know, there's Chicago, and that's different than, you know, Las Vegas, and they're different places, and if you

go to Chicago, you can go to their planetarium and look at it because they have one there, and if you go here, you know, you can go to Las Vegas. But these places are information. There are no places in consciousness. There's just a simulation of places. Right. That's all. Just a simulation place. So where do they go isn't even a good question. There is no place to go. There's just suddenly now an awareness that is not getting a data stream other than I'm here.

Where am I? And some people will see a tunnel because a tunnel then allows you to move. You can't move unless you see... Space. Unless you see something going by you on the other side. You're not moving. So that's why you have tunnel. A tunnel is there to give you the sense that you're making progress

and you're moving toward the light, say, or towards something else or toward some other beings. And the whole process is one that just gets you to let go. The dream is fading. You had a lot of worries. You let three kids behind and have all this stuff going on, but that just starts to fade and you relax, but it takes a little time.

and if you were really obsessed with something that something may hang on there longer because you were obsessed with it and that may take you a little longer than the process through but if you're not really obsessed then it all falls away like a dream

and then you just kind of see well what's that over there and somebody's going like this and you move toward that with an attention and then you get the tunnel effect because you need to see the stuff going backwards as you move forwards otherwise you don't feel like you're going anywhere and so you get there and there's somebody there that's very friendly you know I make a joke I say it's like a Walmart

greeter you know you walk into Walmart and somebody says hi welcome to Walmart you know come on in and that's about all they say you know but they just welcome people you're a Walmart greeter where's where's Bob now where's Bob I kind of went and see him a couple of times right after he died yeah but i didn't really see you know bob's doing whatever bob does now bob was a was a was a another plant he was here to do what he did that out of body happened to him because he was supposed to write the book and a hundred million people were supposed to read the book and have their minds open to a bigger reality that's what he was all about that's why he had to write it even though as as a business executive that wasn't

necessarily a clever thing to do. He knew that he needed to do that. So he kept a diary. His books is basically the diary he kept on what happened to him. So I looked at his, once I had been around for a while, I was able to see oras and do all those kinds of things. All the paranormal things, you know, we learned to do and we learned to do them precisely. So I looked at Bob one day and looked at his aura, and he was a very developed human being. And this was what he was here to do. No question. He was going to introduce that to all these people, and that was his thing. That's what he did.

He did a good job of it. Now, all the things he said in his books were his experiences. It's like an out of body. He said, you know, I go out of body. That's my experience. And he didn't always, you know, it's your interpretation of the data that becomes your reality. He didn't always interpret things correctly. He mostly did.

He told you what he saw very well. He was good about that. and he remembered well, but sometimes he got information and he didn't get it right because his own background, his own kind of history and the way he put things together in his mind, put it together in a way that wasn't what was intended. That's what happened with this big lushe thing.

I know if you know about that, but Bob, when he had that out of body, the next day he came down and says, I want to share something with you. I just had this out of body yesterday and it's very disturbed. He was very disturbed by it. And he said, I found out that we, humans, are, what did he say? We create a thing called luch. And when we create it, there's other beings that are kind of above us in this hierarchy that need luch.

So we're like farm animals. We're here in this reality creating luch and we're created here to do that. and it's really we're being farmed, you know, we're like cattle, and they're taking the lusche that we create, and that's what they need. They need this lusch. So he got that. That was his own interpretation.

What he had asked is, what's the bigger picture? What's going on here in the bigger picture? And that's what he got. He came from a farm family in the Midwest. That's the way he interpreted. What they were trying to tell him is that there is a bigger picture, the larger consciousness system. And as we evolve and as we grow up and make our choices,

it grows up too. So we're part of its evolution. So we're growing and as we create love, not loose, as we create love and caring, the whole system grows. And that's what this was all about. This was made to help us, you know, evolve ourselves and evolve the whole system. So they were trying to tell him the big picture,

and he turned that into we were here doing the things we did because it served this other thing. Well, yes, it serves the larger conscious system. It serves us too. But in his farm boy mentality, we were cattle, and these were the other people in the system. And we were just being, we were the herd of cattle who were making loose for those people. He missed the point, and he did it differently. And at the time he told me he was kind of upset. He just found out that he was a cow and a cattle,

and we were creating luge for some other race of people. What did you tell him about that? Well, he said, after he told it to me, he says, and what do you think about that? And I was probably 30, maybe then, early 30s, late 20s. And I said, that's okay with me. I said, I don't see the problem. I don't see there's a really big problem.

He says you don't. You're livestock and you're feeding this other bunch of people with the things you do, with the emotions you have. He said emotions. You know, the motions and feelings, well, it's emotions. If your emotions are anger or your emotions are love, you know, that feeds it. And I said, well, there's nothing I can do about that. And if there's nothing I can do about that, if that's the way it is,

then I'm not going to worry over things that I have no control over. If that's it, that's it. I'll go about doing my life and living it the best way I can. And if somebody else benefits from that, you know, it's not a problem. But Bob was really upset. He was bothered by it, and he put it in his book with the Lush and so on. And now you see all over the place, Bob says, luscious, there's evil beings waiting for you.

Don't go to the light. And this is the prison planet. And you get all this stuff, all this fear junk. A lot of sci-fi has spun off of that idea. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that, you know, when you have fearful people, they see and hear fearful things. It's just, that's the nature of the way people are.

So if you're fearful. Bob was fearful? He was not generally fearful. He just misinterpreted that because he was a farm boy. And when he got the, there's others up there that are benefiting from the things we do down here, he could see that, the farmer and the cattle, you know. And that was it. There's something else up there.

It's the larger kinds of systems. up there. It's evolving because we're part of it. As we evolve, it evolves because we're pieces of it. That's too abstract. And he didn't get that abstraction. Instead, he turned it into a farm metaphor rather than that abstraction.

And that's what's been feeding the prison planet and never go to the light and all the rest of that stuff ever since has been feeding off of Bob's story about the luch. So Bob was good, but, you know, and Jane Roberts was good. You know, did Seth. speaks and other Seth books. She was good, but she didn't always get things

right either, because it's your interpretation of the data that you get. And Jane said a few things. It was just wrong, but she was trying her best to do, you know, Bob tried his best to do it, but you have

personalities and you have backgrounds and you have, you know, things the way you interpret the data and it just gets lost. I'm one of the things that that Jane said as Seth was that there is no time. The present and the past and the future all happened together, it's all one thing.

Well, that's because people made some errors in interpreting relativity with speed of light being constant and so on. And they had these cones of light and everything was contained within the cone. And so the future was already there contained in the cone. And that's not the way it worked. That was just them making up a story to try to explain some idea that they thought they had.

But it was all the rage. Everybody was talking about how there was no future, there was no past. And since everybody was talking about that, and the physicists, the high priests of Western culture, because they said it then, it was the truth. Yep. So now when she was getting this stuff from her, from Seth, it had to come out that way because that's what the physicists had already said. said, and she wasn't going to buck the physicist, because they're the high priest, and they tell

everybody what's true. So she knew that had to be the answer, because we had already discovered that they're all the same and whatever. So when she asked Seth about that, that's exactly what came out, was exactly the way she heard and knew that it was. And she repeated all of that, too. But that's not because that's what Seth told her. That's because that's what she interpreted it to be, because she already knew the right

answer. If you already know the right answer, then you tend to take things and turn it into the right answer that you already know. That's just the way people are. Sure. Once you believe something, it's hard to change. Yeah. So anyway, so you look at these books and mostly the CESPEaks was very good and very informal, but there are bits and pieces of it that weren't. Same with Bob's books. Mostly he did a very good job, but there are bits and pieces of it. It was his own interpretation of the data he received. He had these circles of people who were stuck between moving on and whatever because they were religious and that religion kept in, it's not like that, that's not the way it is. But that was his idea, religious people are stuck in their beliefs.

It's not about the bigger reality or understanding, they're just stuck in beliefs. Well, in that case, they're not going to go on very far because they're stuck in their beliefs. So he imagined this circle of people who were stuck in their beliefs. And for him, it turned into geometry of a big circle around Earth and so. That was just his best interpretation with things that he knew and he felt, you know, it wasn't that that's actually the way it is. It's not the way it is. It's not like that.

It's a virtual reality. And you don't have circles of people who are stuck. And it's here for people to grow. And the system tries to help you grow. Because if you succeed, it succeeds. The other popular interpretation of quantum mechanics with it with physicists is, Now, they didn't like this idea that you needed an observer. No, they didn't.

Especially a conscious observer. And so they're like, okay, can we find an alternative? So, you know, one of my favorite physicists from the 20th century is a guy named John Wheeler. Mine, too. Yeah, he was a great. Delayed choice, yes. Delayed choice. And so he not only was at Princeton down the hall from Einstein, but he was also the supervisor, a Ph.D.

supervisor for Richard Feynman. Yep. It was a Nobel Prize winning physicist at Caltech. And many people know about him from the Challenger explosion. Was it the Challenger or Columbia Challenger in 1986 when he took the little old rings and put him in ice water and said, look, let's look at what happens to these. That's right, yeah. Yeah, and this was much later in his career.

He also wrote the paper. There's an interesting story here about how quantum computers came about, but we'll come to that later for the time. And so Wheeler was a supervisor for him, but also he was a supervisor for a guy named Hugh Everett, who was looking for an alternative. and he basically said that all these wave functions get separated, and that would kind of mean that there's multiple worlds where each of these things happened.

So that became known as the multiverse or the many worlds interpretation. Right. Is the more formal representation of that. And Einstein didn't like it. No, no. And Boer, who was the other kind of really big giant at the time, didn't like it either.

And so Wheeler said, take out this stuff about there being multiple, physical worlds. Just stick to the math. And so if you ever needed a job and he's like, okay, fine, I'm just going to finish this dissertation and go off and get a job in industry. But that became the basis for, you know, a lot of great science fiction today. Why do you think Niels Bohr and Einstein didn't like, I know that they didn't really like quantum mechanics, but they accepted it? Why didn't they like many worlds interpretation? Because you could still have your block universe theory just in a different universe. I think Einstein just didn't want to go there for the implications because, you know, he had

that his, the universe, God does not play dice. That's right. That's true. With the universe. And that became, you know, it wasn't so much that he didn't like, he didn't, it wasn't that he disagreed with the math that was in the dissertation. And he tried to disprove it, but he couldn't. Yeah, he couldn't.

And then he didn't want to get into this, the interpretation element of it. And then Boer didn't like it because it was different than his Copenhagen. In fact, it's called a Copenhagen interpretation because Boer was in Copenhagen and he had his group of people around him. And a bit of ego. And a bit of ego. Of course, yeah. Okay.

Happens a lot in science. Yeah. And so that's the other big interpretation of quantum mechanics. Where do you land? So this is what's interesting is when I looked at both of those and I said, okay, what are the problems? The first one, you know, they don't like that they need a conscious observer. There's no way to define what this collapse is. That's the real mathematical problem.

It's like it goes from all these possibilities to this one. Nobody really knows how it works. It's like magic. It's like magic. There's this old cartoon comic where it's got a professor on the board writing a whole bunch of equations, step one. And then over here, step two, and then step three has got the answer. And his professor or the other professor is sitting there saying, can you tell me more about step two? And step two says, then a miracle occurs.

That's what happens. That's what happens, right? But if it's a video game, well, then we have a mechanism for that observation. We have a player. We have an actual conscious entity that exists that causes the collapse to happen based upon the choices and what they're seeing. And so that's where it ties to the video game. Now, the big problem, I mean, there's great, you know, superhero movies. I've probably seen the Spider-Man meme where you've got like the three Spider-Man's, Andrew Garfield, Tom Holland, and who's the third one?

Toby, Toby. Yeah, they're all pointing at each other. Well, you know, they're coming from a different branch of the multiverse. That's what we're told. That's how you can have all these different stories. But the problem from a science point of view is they say it's not parsimony. And what that means is it requires too much faith. You're creating a new world.

Not just every day, not just every hour, not just every second, but at each quantum determinacy point, at each choice. Which would be at the plank scale. At the plank scale, and maybe even at the plank scale. and maybe even at the plank time. At the plank time. Which, you know, by the way, the plank scale is another reason why I think, you know, same.

Physics is showing us that we have pixels in the universe. Sounds like pixels. It's the smallest measurable distance. And plank time sounds like frame rate. Exactly. A clock speed or frame rate. Yep. Which is, and now we do know that the universe is probably quantized.

Scientists don't agree on whether time is quantized, but it might be. And that would make sense if it was inside a simulation. Most people have bought like, you know, a math. or that's like X megahertz or gigahertz. They don't know what that means. What it means is Hertz is instructions per second or cycles. Right. Per second.

And so you can only do so many and you can't really do anything in between that minimum time. Right. And that's what the plank time is like the amount of time it takes speed of light to get through the plank length, basically. And so if we have a minimum pixel and we have a minimum frame rate or a minimum clock speed of the processor of the universe, then everything is a multiple of those, and it's more likely we live in a,

in a pixelated type of reality, which is like a computer program. That's a lot of universes. That's a lot of universes. So it's not parsimonious, and you have to create all these universes. Right. But there was a physicist named Amit Goswami.

He wrote, what did he write? It was the conscious universe. I forget his book, but he wrote a few really. He's a physicist who writes about consciousness as well. And I was listening to one of his talks. And, you know, somebody says something that you kind of store away and you don't think about until later. And he said, look, those probabilities aren't really probabilities in the sense that we think of

them. He goes, it's what would happen if you did it again. If you kept doing it a bunch of times, right? Then it's a probability. Yes. Right. So where does probability come from, by the way? There was a mathematician, I don't know if it was Pascal.

I was one of these French mathematicians to begin with a P. And some guy was rolling dice. He was playing dice, and he asked him, hey, can you quantify how I can win at dice? So he came up with this idea. He said, if you have one die, a single dice, a die, has six possibilities.

He called him six possible futures. I mean, he literally used that term. And he said, so your chances of getting one of those futures, if it's evenly weighted, you know, we're in Vegas. So he's a gambling analogy. If it's properly weighted, it is one out of six. But you can't really have a probability

until you've tried something multiple times. Like, you know, you could try the coin flip once, but you're not going to get real probability unless you flip it a bunch of times. Right. And so... A lot of times. A lot of times.

You need to get up to a certain number. Right. And then it got me thinking, well, if it was a simulated universe, you could actually run as many times as you wanted. You also didn't have to infinitely run. every single possibility. Okay, why?

Because you would, basically, if you think of it as a big tree that just keeps expanding, this is the problem with it being infinite, you could prune large parts of the tree.

Like the universe has something called fine tuning, which is if a certain number of constants like the gravitational constant or these other constants were like slightly off

by like 1%. The planets would fly apart. Right. The galaxies wouldn't stay together. And there's like so many of these. So people can look them up. There's at least 12, and there's probably more than that now.

But it looks like the universe is fine-tuned. And, well, if you were running a simulation, you would run it multiple times, and then you would basically prune the tree for all the versions which don't have life. So there's no need to go down that tree. That's right. Again, thinking like a computer scientist, you're not going to want to run all your processors on everything. You're like, that's not interesting to the simulation.

So let's just focus on this subset of possibility. Right. So you tune Avagadro's number until it's just about right. Yeah. Or Moles Constant or Speed of Light. Yeah. It's like, this is what works. Right.

Throw that stuff out. Right, exactly. And you tune that stuff. And that leads to what I like to call a simulated multiverse. So this is why I ended up writing the second book on simulation, which is now the older book because I have the second edition. And also I interviewed Philip K. Dick's wife. Tessa Dick?

Tessa Dick. Yeah. Wow. What was that like? It was really interesting. I mean, it was over the phone, but she had so many stories, you know. Oh, wow. And she's still around.

And, you know, she would tell me these stories. And I interviewed her because the Wachowski's, who made The Matrix, were inspired by Philip K. Dick. Of course. In fact, she told me, I asked her what would, you know, what would Philip think of the Matrix? And she said, well, first he would like it. That's the first reaction movie. This is awesome because it's very similar to his ideas. And his second reaction was he'd call his agent to see if he can sue these guys and get some of the money

for using his ideas. I think their deja vu explanation came from his talk at Mets in 77. Yeah. So she encouraged me to go watch that whole talk. And there's a written version of it. Everyone should. It's amazing. And there's a famous line from it where he says, we are living in a computer programmed reality.

And the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed. Some alteration occurs in the reality. And so when I, originally, I was just interesting the first part of that, which is we are living in a computer program reality. And if you see that video, the camera pans away from him and looks at the audience and everyone's like, what? I love it. They think they're going to see a sci-fi author talk and they're getting this philosophical. It's so important that talk.

It really is. And in fact, they show this woman who's like, turns out her name is Joan Simpson. She was his friend. She went with him to the conference. And even she had no idea. And if you look at the written version of that speech, The rest of the speech is there, but that line is not in the written essay, so he must have added it in his notes while he was flying over there.

But if you read the rest of the speech, the next line is we would have a sense of reliving the same moments of deja vu, that such an impression is a clue that at some point in the past, a variable was changed, and reality was rerun. And so he claimed to remember a different alternate path. And his most famous book while he was alive was actually the man in the high castle. It won like all these awards back in 1960. And for those who don't know, some of you may have seen the Amazon series, which is a really good series.

By the way, I talked to his wife. She said he would have loved that adaptation. But in that, Germany and Japan have won World War II. and they end up, you know, splitting America between them, and you have kind of a police date on both sides. And he came to believe that that was a real timeline that actually happened where the Axis Powers won the war.

And now we're on a different timeline. And he said at some point, all the memories came flooding back to him. He was writing a sequel to the book, too, by the was he? That's what Tessa told me. And she said, but once he got all the memories, he didn't want to go there because there were such bleak memories. in that time. He saw it.

He said, this happened. Yeah. But somewhere the variable was changed. Exactly. Who changed it? He called it the programmer and counter programmer. And so, you know, he used this idea of orthogonal time, which he compared it to a bunch of suits in the closet. You can try on one suit.

You can try on the other suit. But what he also said, so Tessa encouraged me to read his speech. And I looked at that speech and I said, this is really about rerunning the simulation. and changing variables each time. He also said we would need to find a group of people like him who remember an alternate time. And of course, back then it was hard to do that, but now we have this thing called the Mandela Effect.

And whether you believe in the Mandela Effect or not, it's a great way to talk about this idea that maybe we are having multiple possible history. Well, let's talk about that because people love it. Mandela Effect never worked on me until there is one that got me. otherwise the Berenstain bears all that fruit of the uh well you tell the story what's a mandela effect so the mandela effect is when some subset of the population remembers a different version of some past event or some object in the past and the

it's named after Nelson Mandela because some people remember him dying in prison back in the 80s and of course he didn't in our timeline he actually you know released from prison He became president of South Africa, won an Nobel Peace Prize and died, I think, at like, 2013 or something. They remember his funeral on TV. Yeah, they remember details. Yes. Winnie, his wife, taking over the ANC.

They remember all of these. And then Fiona Broom was the blogger who coined this term. She was actually at a Star Trek, at a Comic-Con convention in Atlanta, called it DragonCon. And it was a Star Trek panel, and the panelists were like actors from the original Star Trek series. And if you know your Trekkies, You know, they know their stuff.

They know their stuff. They know their episode. And people in the audience were like, don't you remember the episode where Captain Kirk did this, Mr. Spock did that, and maybe Mr. Sulu did that. They're like, no, we never shot such an episode.

And multiple people in the audience who remembered this. And so she started to think, is it possible that there are other ones? So she set up a website and started to explore, she used to find all these different Mandela effects. Now, someone came to me, and I always thought it was just faulty memory, by the way.

Same. If you asked me what it was. I mean, fine, a letter changed here, a word changed there. But a friend of mine from MIT, who typically, you know, a lot of my MIT friends don't get into this stuff. They're very kind of left-brained about these things. He said, you know, if you go down that rabbit hole, your simulation theory ideas are a pretty good way

in which this could actually happen. And so these, you know, between Tessa talking about it, Philip K. Dick talking about it and him talking about it, I couldn't get this out of my mind that if you reran the simulation, you would actually end up with slightly different versions. You could have small changes, like little things changing, or you could have big versions. And then if you try to merge these multiple timelines,

some people may have the memories from one of the other timelines. And so I categorize these into different categories. You know, things like letter changes is one. Then there's things like movies is another category. The events. The Moonwrecker one is the one that got me. Oh, yeah. So, yeah.

The Moonraker one. That she doesn't have braces, but I remember the braces. Right. It was Jaws who had the steel teeth. Right. He meets, was there named Dali? Dali meets Dahlia. And I remember that too.

You remember the braces? I remember the braces too. I mean, that was the whole point. That one got me. Yeah. And so there's a few like that really got me. And most people know the Bernstein Bears one. And what I like to say is if someone has proximity or significance to it and they remember

it differently, that's more interesting to me than just some random guys. remembering different things. So there was actually a blogger online. I'm forgetting her name now, but people can find it in the simulated multiverse book, where she was a journalism student and she flew to South Africa to interview Nelson Mandela. And he was too sick to be interviewed.

So she went all the way there and she came all the way back. Then she graduated, probably back in the 80s now, and was working for NPR. So again, she was in the news industry. And she heard that Nelson Mandela had died. Now, you're not going to get that wrong, if you went there to meet the guy.

No. You're not going to say, oh, that was the other black guy, Stephen Vico, which is the standard explanation. Most people remembering him wrong, I can understand it. And so if there's more significance,

and each time I look at these events, I find people who have more significance. So one of my favorite ones is Tiananmen Square. Do you remember that? Of course. The tank boy? Yep. And the tank went,

what do you remember? I remember it the way it happened, that the tank went around him. That's how I remember it as well. But I started asking people about this, and there's always a certain percentage that remember the tank running over the guy. And they remember it as one of the bloodiest things they saw on the news. They were shocked that they were actually showing that. And so usually it's like 10 to 20 percent in a group.

I was on a panel once at Contact in the Desert, Paul Heineck, and a few other people were on it. Two of the people were like, what? I absolutely remember him being run over. So I asked at a recent conference, and I always do, does anyone remember Tankboy being run over? Nobody raised their hand. So I thought, okay, this audience doesn't happen. This Chinese woman comes up to me afterwards.

And she said she lived in Beijing at the time. And she remembers him being run over there, but she didn't raise her hand and didn't want to say it. So that was the first time I met someone who had more proximity to that specific one. And similarly, there are people who are Jewish who remember asking, why are the Bernstein bear, like why are they Jewish bears to their parents? Now, they're not going to get that wrong. The rest of us might get it wrong.

Sure. And so, and then there's the Bible verses. Have you heard of Isaiah with the lion and the lamb? Do you remember that verse? Yes, I know the verse. So there's a verse about the lion will lay with the lamb. Yeah, that's not the verse. It's not the verse, but that's how a lot of people remember that one.

The lion lays with the kid. The wolf lays with the kid. The wolf lays with the lion, the leopard with the kid. Yeah. So that's a Mandela effect? That's a Mandela effect because people remember the lion and the lamb laying together. And there are even like, you know, people with a wall calendar, that show a lion and a lamb and say Isaiah.

Yeah, that's not it. One 11. And again, it's one of those things that people take a little more seriously with their scripture. Right. Because they remember. And I thought, okay, well, maybe they're looking at two different translations of the Bible. They're looking at, you know, one that happened to translate it. But people are telling me, no, in their King James Bible, it used to be the lion with a lamb.

And the physical object has changed. So recently I met someone who's actually another blogger and podcaster. named Alexis Brooks. And she said, she went to her Catholic priest. And she said, do you remember the lion? The verse with the lion? He goes, yeah, the lion will lay with the lamb. And she's like, okay, now go look it up.

And he looked it up. And he's like, what? So you have a Catholic priest. Again, somebody who's closer to it. The Qualia Research Institute, probably the most important group on the planet now, who's really studying the mathematics of the DMT state and the topology and the dimensional structure

and all of that stuff, he describes entities doing things that a human can't do mathematically, like painting surfaces with certain colors. So there's something called the four-color theorem, which states that whenever you have a surface that's got different shapes, all perfectly tessellated, like a map, you can color every shape with four colors so that no two shapes are but with the same color. So it comes back to the idea. of coloring a map of all the countries,

you only need four colors to paint every country with a different color, so no two countries have the same color kind of butting up against each other. It's called the four-color theorem. You can do it with any kind of map, but the more complex the map becomes, the more cognitively demanding it becomes. Eventually it becomes impossible for a human

to actually color these surfaces. But what he noticed these entities doing was having these extremely exquisitely complex, often higher dimensional or surfaces with strange topological structures, and these entities painting these surfaces with four colors just perfectly, as if demonstrating their abilities. And he said, I couldn't do this. It would take me hours or longer to do what they were doing in a fraction of a second.

And repeatedly, they paint the surface, and then they would reset it and then paint it again, and then do it again repeatedly. And most people, if they saw that, they would go, that was crazy or that was weird or that was beautiful, but they wouldn't understand what they were actually looking at. I wouldn't. No. Nor would I. Nor would I. Neither would I. I.

I was surprised by all the math in traces of other and in Hoffman's theories. There's a lot of math in it. There's a lot of math. And I think you need the maths to, so we say maths in the UK. I can't bring myself to say math. You need the mathematics to really kind of understand the DMT state because it is entirely different. It's not the simple three plus one dimensional world that we live in. It's very, very different.

And being able to go in there and say how it's different, why it's different, what's going on. And this is why I said earlier, you send in specialists into the DMT state. You send in people like Andres who can say, look, what these entities are doing is not just beautiful or strange. it's impossible for a human brain to do, or far beyond normal human cognitive capacities, even in the most intelligent of people like Andres. And so those are the kind of things you see, where the entities are actually betray their intelligence,

displaying it. They're not giving you numbers or giving you blueprints for the time machine. I don't think it works like that, but they're doing things that you just have to recognize are beyond human capabilities. And in that way, that adds another piece of evidence that we're dealing with something that is beyond the humanship. That's very interesting. Can you give us just a simple example of how the maths apply to this work?

Yeah, well, so... I'm just trying to get a foundation before we get into Don Hoffman. Okay, yeah. Well, we can get into Don Hoffman because the mathematics. definitely applies that. Yes. So I've been kind of following Don Hoffman, Donald Hoffman, professor, cognitive scientist, the University of California at Irvine for decades.

And he has this mathematical model that he calls conscious agent theory. It's what he calls conscious realism, which posits that consciousness is fundamental. and that reality consists of and only of conscious agents interacting. So everything we see and perceive is the result of the interaction of these conscious agents. And he has this precise mathematical model from which he can kind of boot up physical reality. So rather than this failed program of assuming that matter is fundamental and trying to boot up consciousness from dead, inert physical matter

he's going in the opposite direction which I think is the correct one assume that consciousness is fundamental try to get the appearance of the physical world from consciousness and from the interaction of conscious agent he starts with a conscious agent I think he got his math to work

through game theory like the math is legitimately works the mathematics legitimately works and it's incredible really that he starts with a very simple kind of minimal assumption model of a conscious agent. A conscious agent is an agent that can do basically three things. It can perceive other conscious agents. It can make decisions based upon what it perceives and it can perform actions which affect other conscious agents. So you have

this kind of network emerges of conscious agents. They're all interacting via perception. What we see and what we observe is this interface. We never perceive the conscious agent network directly because it's far too complex, effectively this infinite network of conscious agents. What we see is this interface that allows us to interact in adaptive ways with the environment. Everything's an icon.

Everything's an icon, right? So this is the fitness before truth method. This is fitness before truth. And so that was his original idea that he's been developing and testing various ways over the last few decades. And most recently, he came up with this, what's called the trace logic.

The mathematics are a little bit sophisticated. I don't want to get too much into that. I'll get out of my depth pretty quickly as well. But what he found is that using this new model, he could actually kind of boot up, not just the world as it appears to us, but he could also boot up relativity. So he could explain within this conscious agent theory,

trace logic model, why time dilation and contraction at high speeds and all this kind of stuff that comes from relativity, which we thought was kind of fundamental to the way space time works. Actually, he can get it from just the interactions of conscious agents. He can derive the Schrodinger equation. I mean, it's incredible stuff.

just from basic conscious agents. And so just a few months ago, actually, I got an email from a guy called Gaspar, who's working with Don. He's kind of built this thing called the Trace Institute based upon Don Hoffman's work to kind of start to build Don's legacy because Don Hoffman's kind of disorganized in some ways

and there's all this stuff that's floating around in papers and interviews and other stuff. There's no kind of kind of. kind of properly organized archive and an institute to actually follow on to his work and kind of pick up the mantle so to speak so Gaspard who's also been following my work said to Don you should you should read this guy Andrew Gallimore you know read his book Death by Astonishment because a lot of the ideas in here you know I talk about intelligent agents in a very neutral way don't talk so much about aliens or spirits or that kind of thing I'd say we're dealing with some kind of intelligent agent in the DMT state. Don Hoffman talks about conscious agents. So Gaspard,

quite rightly noted that there seemed to be some overlap here. There is perhaps some cross-fertilization between our different ways of looking at reality. There is, but there's some conflict as well. There might be some conflict we can get into. But Gaspard said, you know, would you like to meet Don Hoffman? Don would like to meet you. We can have a discussion and see where there is that overlap. And so we met online and straightaway I said, should we write a paper on this? See if we can see where the connection is.

And it was honestly, and I don't say this lightly, it was one of the most profound few months of my life. And this was a preprint just last month, I think, right? Preprint, we published just last month. And it was, it was, I kind of had this working model of what DMT was doing, that it was kind of gating access to some other source of sensory information. But I never, within the physicalist framework, there was no way for me to explain how does information come from somewhere else? It's not coming through the normal sensory organs. Where's that information coming from? I didn't have an answer to it until I started working with Don's model.

So in my second book, we just spoke about reality switch technologies, I developed this concept called the world space. So remember that your brain is always constructing the world. And so there's kind of a vast state space of all possible worlds that your brain can construct, right? Normally we sit within this very small region of what I call the world space. I call this the consensus reality space. But there are all these other worlds, world moments. A world is just everything you're experiencing at a particular moment. Your brain is constantly moving between these states.

If you take this vast landscape, all possible world moments, I call that the world space. And normally we sit within this very narrow region. It's like a well and attract a basin within this world space. The consensus reality space. And that's the normal waking world. Those are the states that represent the structure, the content, and the dynamics of the normal waking world. What DMT does, as I postulate in reality switch technologies,

is it perturbs the brain and it pushes it into a different region of this world-based landscape. This is where the DMT worlds are represented. But what I didn't have in that model was how information comes in to actually kind of modulate that, you know, modulate that experience. It was just how does the brain go from building the normal waking world to the DMT world. So then I started working with Don's model and a mathematician called Nipha Hermanson, who was absolutely pivotal in making this all the mathematics work.

And we basically, we probed the model. We said, okay, if normally we only sit within a narrow, very small region of what Don Hoffman calls, the experience base is the same idea. A conscious agent has this vast set of states, vast numbers. of different experiences. And we sit within this very narrow region of this experience base. It's the same idea as the world space.

But what Don Hoffman's work has is kind of the experience base is simply a set of states, all possible states that a conscious agent could have, all possible experiences. But what sits on top is this mathematical structure

called a Markov kernel, which is called the Qualia kernel. What that does is it gives dynamical structure to the experience base. What that means is you're in this state now, what are the probability that you'll move to this state or this state or this state? So it gives that dynamics. It determines the dynamics of how you move through around the experience base.

And as I said, normally we will sit within this very small region of the total experience base, which is the adaptive region where we experience the normal waking world. this very thin, very, very small location within the experience base. And that's determined by the qualia kernel, which is evolved within that region of the experience base to create the world that we experience. However, if you can perturb the brain, perturb the conscious agent,

you can knock it out of this region of the experience base into an entirely different region, where the normal rules that are basically applied by this qualia, internal, they no longer apply. So you enter a type of experience, a type of being within the world that is completely different, right? This is purely abstract at the moment. We're not thinking about DMT. You enter a region of the experience base where the dynamics are completely different, the Markovian rules, the Markovian dynamics that determine how you experience the world within this region of the experience base are completely different. Now, the Qualia

kernel that sits, as a saying, that's determining these dynamics, is actually composed of three different kernels, the perception, the decision, and the action kernels. So there's three parts. So together, they determine not just what is your experience like within this region of the experience base, but how are you interacting with the larger, the broader conscious agent network? What kinds of other conscious agents can you interact with? Can you perceive? Because in this region, the consensus reality space, you can only interact with a very, very limited number of conscious agents. But in this region of the experience space we proposed, you might be able to interact with agents that are normally completely imperceptible. So that's a look at where

modern physics ends and the unknown begins. Some of what you heard today is settled science. Some of it is still just a hypothesis, waiting for evidence. If any of these conversations grab your attention, go check out the full episodes. Links are in the description. Every guest, you heard today went a lot deeper than these clips. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated. Scenario 51, a secret code inside the Bible said I would. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music. So I'm singing like I should.

Now that peace fear is see things, and it never ends. the end. I got stuck inside males hole with MKL truck. I being only two of. Were the shadow people. And I'm told the name was cold. The underground stations, planet's Earth, O, too. And with a dark watcher.