Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Jesse Michels: UFOs, David Grusch, Venture Capital

Starting point is 00:00:00 Why would these things travel thousands of light years away and just crash? For all we know, it's more like they're sending us a gift. Rush sort of touched on this as well. Jesse Michaels, the CEO of American Alchemy Holdings, is at the helm of private venture investments that reach into the nine-figure realm. His tenure includes a four-year stint at Peter Thiel's family office, where he was instrumental in investing. Michaels has also made substantive contributions to the world of media.

Starting point is 00:00:32 He was the producer of the podcast The Portal with Eric Weinstein. His professional journey also led him to Google, where he served in operations under the Research and Machine Intelligence Department. Michaels holds a degree in history from the prestigious Columbia University. He continues to share his insights and engage with some of the most intriguing minds of our era through his YouTube channel, aptly now named Jesse Michaels. Welcome. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:00:59 Thanks, Kurt, for having me. I'm a huge fan of yours, so it's an honor to be here. I feel very unqualified on some levels, but I do feel like we've talked a little bit off air about the UFO thing. I feel like I'm doing sort of a vigilante job. I feel like you are among two or three outlets that are seriously and in-depth covering this topic,

Starting point is 00:01:23 and most quote unquote UFO ufologists or people who claim to be really deep into this stuff it's either you're super sensationalist and you believe everything or you're very smug and dismissive and so I'm excited to have a hard headed conversation

Starting point is 00:01:40 with you about this well same, I hold you in high regard. It was nice meeting you a few months ago back in March. And I've been looking forward to meeting up again or speaking again. And so welcome. Yeah, man.

Starting point is 00:01:56 Thanks. I really appreciate it. And I'm excited for that episode. For all Theories of Everything fans, I did an interview with Kurt. It was right before I took a long break on the media front. And so I'm putting that out soon and it's a great interview and please tune in and wait for it.

Starting point is 00:02:14 And for those of you who don't know, Jesse is the only person to have interviewed David Grush outside of Yes Theory and outside of Ross Coulthard, at least not in a major way. And no one knows how you were able to secure this, not even me. We're going to talk about that. But first, what was going through your mind

Starting point is 00:02:32 prior to that interview, just prior to it? I was freaking out. I was like, this is world history. And a part of me is like, you know, it's a total imposter syndrome. Like, I shouldn't be here. This is crazy. And I just wanted to do it justice.

Starting point is 00:02:48 I wanted to, you know, luckily I can do stuff and I can edit and post. And so if I screw something up, you know, royally, I can sort of make up for that. And I'm decently good in conversation and somewhat polymathic and can talk a lot about a lot of different things with people. But I was just really nervous. I was like, why am I in this position? This is insane. I don't want to screw it up. And so, yeah, that was what was going through my head 24 hours before the interview.

Starting point is 00:03:16 If you could ask David Grush one question and get a straight answer, like an actual answer that he said he won't give you any qualifiers, what would that be? I think the hardest, the most important thing is characterizing the NHI who are these NHI and what do they want to do with us there are all these questions I think you could ask him which a lot of people revert to around

Starting point is 00:03:40 who was involved in the government which private aerospace contractors were involved, how should they be recriminated against and treated. All of these questions, I think, are very important. I think where I land, and I imagine you land based on me being a big fan of your show, is this is the nature of reality that we're talking about. If we're not at the top of the food chain,

Starting point is 00:04:02 we're not apex the top of the food chain, we're not sort of apex predators or apex consciousness, then who are these NHI? If there are different races, what races exist? And then what are their agendas, if you can speak to that? That would definitely be my main question. Would that be the same question that you would ask Lou, Lou Elizondo? Absolutely, yeah. Same, yeah. What if you were allowed one question to anyone, anyone, even if they're dead?

Starting point is 00:04:35 Oh, man. Who would it be and what would that question be? Oh, that's such a good question. That's so hard. I would probably, you know, it's so hard, but I think I would try to just be in the presence of somebody who's a known mystic. So like Jesus would be kind of a classic proverbial example, but I think Muhammad and Moses, I think these are a few of maybe many that have experienced the transcendent in some way and have come back down to earth and are trying to spread a message, but there's some sort of translation function issue

Starting point is 00:05:13 where, you know, Grush actually said this in our interview, it's almost like the symbol rate of language is too slow to actually get across what they're trying to say. And so if you read the New Testament, just as an example, Jesus is speaking in riddles. You know, it's, it's, it musteria is the Greek. It's, it's, it's mysteries. And, you know, I think John Locke even talks about, you know, how, how he speaks. He's sort of misdirecting maybe in certain cases. And, you know, maybe, you know, there's a famous political philosopher, Leo Strauss, 20th century. And he talks about how a lot of philosophers write in code and maybe Jesus was sort of Straussian, maybe he was sort of

Starting point is 00:05:54 speaking in code. And that allows for multi layers of meaning that, you know, it's like you have to have ears to hear. And so you have to be at a certain level to sort of hear, to get the message. And then I think it also allows for this sort of Lindy effect of the message lasts for a very long time because everybody's sort of poking at it and picking at it. The meaning is not obvious. And then maybe the Occam's razor explanation

Starting point is 00:06:24 is there's nothing actually behind all of it. But I tend to think in cases like Jesus and other sort of very mystical characters, there is more behind it. There is more substance. And so there's sort of maybe hermetically sealed meaning that is sub-linguistic. Do you think your degree in history provides you a unique advantage in studying the UFO phenomenon? And also to venture capital. Yeah, I think both. I think history does for sure

Starting point is 00:06:54 because it's like you read a certain thing and you're like, okay, I'll give you a good example actually. There are these documents that came out about supposedly FOIA documents where FDR is writing and he says that we've been given this like very destructive force. Presumably he's talking about the atom bomb or a precursor to the atom bomb from extraterrestrials. And it doesn't read like his writing.

Starting point is 00:07:28 I don't think he would use the word extraterrestrial. There are like a million ways in which it doesn't make sense. And I think that the history thing sort of helps with that. And I think venture helps too, because if you get something wrong in venture, you just lose money and it sucks. And I've been there. It's the worst thing ever.

Starting point is 00:07:51 And so if your thing is falsified, it's not just like, oh, I'm wrong in a Socratic debate or whatever. It's like, I just lost money, in many cases, for myself. In many cases, I have fiduciary responsibility for somebody else. And it's not fun. It's not a fun position to be in. And so I think there's a level of rigor there. And bringing that to the UFO thing, I think, can be helpful too. And I think thinking probabilistically as well, where with venture, it's like, the whole point is you want this sort of asymmetric risk-reward profile.

Starting point is 00:08:18 Like, you want to have an asymmetric understanding of something. You want to understand that you want to see a risk-reward that other people don't see. And so maybe the risk is less than other people think. Maybe the reward is higher than other people think. But you want to somehow have a ratio there that you have an asymmetric understanding of that other people don't. And I think the point is that that makes you think probabilistically. You're not thinking in these sort of like, is this a psyop? Is this real? You can't pre-crystallize knowledge.

Starting point is 00:08:54 You're trying to get to a certain confidence level. And once you get to that certain confidence level, it becomes a good risk-reward. And then you decide to make the bet. level, it becomes a good risk-reward, and then you decide to make the bet. And so, to me, I think that in some cases, to put it in annoying financial terms, the UFO thing is like this interesting arbitrage opportunity because you have outside of you and, again, one or two other people, it's mostly snake oil and it's really bad people kind of attached to it. And yet, I think there are a lot of facts compared to that.

Starting point is 00:09:26 And people can't think probabilistically. They can't not pre-crystallize. It's either bullshit or it's real. And it can't be like, well, there's clearly something worthy of investigation here. I'm like almost 100% sure of that, just that it's worthy of investigation. And then let's go forward without having to kind of snap it to a grid of like, this is, you know, this is definitely ET or it's definitely time traveler or it's completely bullshit. So you talked about that there's so much BS in this,

Starting point is 00:09:55 in this field. Yeah. So how do you vet some people before you interview them? How do you know who you should speak to? I, I, I actually try to initially cast a really wide net, and then I try to demarcate where I think things are super speculative. So I guess I think it's sort of our duty to speculate a lot. If something involves really bad thinking, just like on the face of it, it just feels like there are way too many leaps of logic. I just, I won't entertain it. I'll give you, I guess the thing that I entertained on the show that is probably the most out there

Starting point is 00:10:31 on the UFO front that I think is probably wrong when it comes down to it. But I think it's an, it's interesting, it's an interesting way to possibly think about it. And probably you or a fan of your show could better falsify or corroborate this than me, is I had Deep Prasad on. And he's talking about reverse engineering UFOs. And I actually, again, I don't think it's probably, it's probably not the best approach. But I do think there are ways in which UFOs

Starting point is 00:11:01 kind of look like maybe quantum macroscopic objects. Like it looks like they're like tunneling or whatever, or it looks like they're sort of not local. Sorry, what's not the right approach? What's not the right approach with that episode or with the deep? So his idea is that you cannot solve Schrodinger's wave equation at scale. You can only solve it for like a few electrons. And so you have to use, I think it's like density functional theory,

Starting point is 00:11:30 these sort of calculus workarounds to scale that up. And his idea is that a quantum computer could be able to solve Schrodinger's wave equation at scale, and then you can do all sorts of novel material science. You can basically, and I think this is even from a Paul Dirac quote, you can predict how any material, its attributes, essentially. You can do

Starting point is 00:11:51 synthetic material science at scale if you figure that out. I think as a startup, it's really hard, right? You're betting on being able to build a quantum computer, then you're betting that that can solve Schrodinger's wave equation at scale. It's like Peter, who I work for, Peter Thiel,

Starting point is 00:12:09 talks about companies are a miracle. You don't want to bet on a three-miracle company. Again, I'm a huge fan of Deep, so don't take this as too hard a critique, and I'd love to talk with him more but it feels a little like a three miracle company. It's like you're building a quantum computer then you have to build Schrodinger's wave equation then building a company at all is a miracle.

Starting point is 00:12:33 It's really hard to build a company. There's a lot there but I think it's generative. There's plenty of marketing and hype around quantum computation. I'm speaking to Scott Aronson soon. Oh, sweet. He has this whole critique. It's great that you know who that is. He has this whole critique of Michio Kaku's book saying, look, it's not going to solve.

Starting point is 00:12:56 Okay, well, we'll have to wait for the episode. Well, I can't wait. I'm excited. He's a genius. He's in Austin or something? I don't know. I don't know where that's based. Okay, so continue. What were you saying? So I guess that was a super long-winded way of saying, I think that his deep line of thinking is very generative, but not, I wouldn't necessarily say I agree with it, right?

Starting point is 00:13:21 And so I think you could speak to certain people, you find all these people in ufology where it's like, everything is everything. Right. It's like, you could literally tell them it's, it's reptilian snakes and, but it's also tall whites and it's this and that. And it's like 50 different species and the Nazis allied with them and also

Starting point is 00:13:40 this and that. And you can, and it's, it's just bad thinking and it's, it's, it's, it's Kabbalah and it's this and it's that or whatever. And it's Kabbalah, and it's this, and it's that, or whatever. And they'll agree with all of it. There's completely indiscriminate.

Starting point is 00:13:49 And there's no underlying truth, because truth isn't malleable. I do believe there is sort of objective truth. And so- Sort of? Well, the reason I somewhat qualified that is I do believe in, I think consciousness and parapsychology is an interesting inroad on the physics front. And so I do think there is underlying truth, and then I think what we perceive is not necessarily that underlying truth. I see. I find the character of the conversations and the UFO topic

Starting point is 00:14:23 to be of a drastically different tenor than those of the usual topic, at least on this channel of physics and math and computer science and philosophy. There are some ideas that someone believes that most people in that field would say that's not correct. For instance, Stephen Wolfram believes you can base all of physics and math in hypergraphs. Many mathematicians and physicists disagree with him. So let's call that a wild idea. It doesn't mean it's a wrong idea, but it's wild in the field, in the UFO field. It's not that you have one or two wild ideas, which is the general case when I'm interviewing physicists.

Starting point is 00:15:01 It's that you have 20 different ideas that are all connected and they're all a standard deviation or two standard deviations away so it's like you buy you don't just buy one you have to buy 15 so that's something that i've noticed i don't know about about you yeah and also it seems like people get extremely offended in in either regard whether you say that it's there's something to this or there's not something to this or there's something to investigate or there's not something to investigate. It seems like this is a contentious field. Yeah, there's a lot of ego and there's a lot of like, everybody I feel like wants to be

Starting point is 00:15:36 the disclosure person or whatever. For me, I try to, and look, I'm not going to lie. Like, I have an ego. I think everybody does. But it's like, I don't like the fact that I'm the tip of the spear. I would much rather somebody take the stuff that I'm talking about, like in the Gresh documentary, which I think was pretty comprehensive. And it's like, okay, investigate, corroborate or falsify. Like the stuff we're talking about with Oppenheimer or Saarbacher or Townsend Brown, all of these historical characters.

Starting point is 00:16:10 Amazing. It's like, I'd love for somebody to come out and be like, no, this is definitively wrong because of X, Y, Z. And I'd be like, okay, great. We can talk about it. But it feels like we're stuck on home plate. Like we can't even get to first base. I also wonder, is it even true, like to rebut what I just said, is it even true that there's

Starting point is 00:16:29 more discord in the UFO community than the average community that's large? So for instance, in the Amber Heard versus Depp case, you can have the same mentality. And then in religion, you have the same. And for me, I see in physics, there's something similar between string theorists and the rest and between different factions. I see nothing of that in chemistry. But I'm sure if I was to speak to a chemist, they would say, oh, what are you talking about? It's just because you're from the outside, you don't know. So we're so ensconced, we see it and we think, well, man, there's so much dirt thrown to other people. thrown to other people. Can I flip this on you for a second? I don't get to talk to you that much. You're so smart and I love talking to you. So the string theory thing you just mentioned, what would you say are the similarities between string theory and maybe its detractors, if you were to find common ground there? I mean, what do they agree on? Yeah, what do they agree? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:17:24 They agree that there's a finite amount of parameters and it's meant to be predictive. So what that means is that here's how physics works. It's a fun way of thinking about how physics works. Is that you have observables. So you observe, you get data. Then the problem is that this data is underdetermined by the theories. In other words, there are multiple theories, like an uncountably amount of theories

Starting point is 00:17:43 that can predict the same data. You choose a theory. And this theory, what you want this theory to have as ingredients in it is something that's finite. So it means string theory hopes to do this with one parameter. The standard model has about 27 parameters or so, depending on how you count it. Because you have complex numbers, maybe that's two dimensions. And maybe there's the seesaw mechanism.

Starting point is 00:18:04 Other mechanisms aren't known. But the standard model is something like 20 to 30 parameters. complex numbers. Maybe that's two dimensions. And maybe there's the seesaw mechanism. Other mechanisms aren't known, but the standard model is something like 20 to 30 parameters. There is a way of combining quantum mechanics with general relativity, but then you get an infinite amount of parameters. It means you need to put in an infinite amount of data to get your answer, which we don't think is, which actually the universe could operate like that. We just don't think it does, or we don't like it. The majority of physicists agree that what you want is something that's predictive, meaning you can specify initial data, and then you can evolve it forward.

Starting point is 00:18:36 And by the way, when I say the majority, there are exceptions. Like, there's Chiara Marletto, who believes in constructor theory, which says that this predictive model is not the right way. And it's been the way since Newton. Like you specify initial conditions and you say, what is the velocity of the ball and its position? And then you know it's arc. She says, maybe what's required is stipulations on what is possible and what isn't possible. And that's called constructor theory. So in other words, the second law of thermodynamics is one such law. It says that it's impossible for entropy to decrease. She's trying to find a way to reformulate physics, thinking, okay, perhaps we have this incorrect. Yes, we've gotten the standard model

Starting point is 00:19:15 and general relativity from thinking in terms of predictivity, but maybe we need a new paradigm or a new framework. Anyhow, your question was, what do the string theorists agree with the rest of the community on? And I would say the majority would be that it's predictive and you want to find an amount of parameters and you would like to treat gravity and quantum mechanics

Starting point is 00:19:38 in the same theory. Awesome. Cool. Thank you for educating me. Okay, so theory. Awesome. Cool. Thank you for educating me. Okay. So explain your relationship with Grush. Sure. So two years ago, I had a friend, I have a friend, but I had him then and he served on the Air Force. He was in Space Force and I'd pick his brain on UFOs because he's in the Space Force. I'm like, come on, man, like, I know you're in the Space Force. And, you know, what do you know? And he'd be like, look, like, I'm, you know, I'm sympathetic to a lot of this stuff. And like,

Starting point is 00:20:18 it was clear, like, he didn't know, like, an insane in-depth amount, but he's sort of vaguely believed in UFOs. And I sort of got to a certain point in my questioning, and he's sort of vaguely believed in UFOs. And I sort of got to a certain point in my questioning, and he was like, I do have somebody you should probably meet if you're really into this topic. I mean, you could tell I was super into it. He was like, I do have somebody you should meet. And that person was Dave Grush. And so I met him probably like literally like two years ago.

Starting point is 00:20:43 And yeah, I think initially he was probably like, who's this crazy kid who works in kind of a private venture context who knows like a decent amount about the UFO field? And I was just flinging questions at him. And I think a lot of them, I think he probably was like, wow, like, you know, he's probably barking up some of the right trees here. And that probably intrigued him. And yeah, we just stayed in touch.

Starting point is 00:21:07 Like, you know, I had sporadic phone calls between, you know, now and then. I saw some of the stuff go on kind of, you know, behind the scenes in terms of his frustration with the government trying to kind of move it from the inside on the UAPTF. And that not really working as a strategy. And then I think at some point he was like, fuck it, I'm going to, you know, from the outside, you know, I'm going to defect and leave, say what I can, but in a limited capacity and really try to get the executive branch to say a lot more than me as far as real full

Starting point is 00:21:41 disclosure, which is really his whole goal. And I think a super important thing to preface this entire conversation with and for the public to understand is I get why if you knew nothing coming into this and you saw some 14-year intel officer with a bunch of three-letter agencies as credentials, I get why if you heard him just say, there are crafts and we have biologics with the craft. Why he'd be skeptical? Why he'd be like, well, wait, why are you being so vague?

Starting point is 00:22:12 But his whole strategy is to get the executive branch to do full disclosure. And I think he's rightfully admitting and having kind of epistemic humility around, I don't understand, I don't have the full kind of top of the pyramid, full equities understanding of this. I don't want to screw with, you know, American national security secrets, with American, you know, with alliances, with like, you know, really important kind of covert R&D. And so I think- He wants to do this as above board as he can. Exactly. And he's saying that. He's saying like he's not full Ed Snowden.

Starting point is 00:22:50 And if that's your take, if you want a full Ed Snowden, like look elsewhere. But he's going through a proper kind of internal process. And I think that's super admirable and really cool, especially with a government right now that's insanely sclerotic, that can't get anything done, that can't even meet right now. Congress might be frozen for all we know. And so I think that's actually somewhat refreshing to see, but also really important for the average person to understand. You know that fitness coaches can be expensive. That's why I was excited when Copilot Fitness approached us. It's one of those apps that when you see how easy

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Starting point is 00:26:19 So the UAPTF is the, I know a million acronyms. Yeah, there's so many. It's really complicated and annoying. The Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Task Force, which was basically like an independent commission by the DOD. You know, you had people like Senator Gillibrand, you know, from New York behind this,

Starting point is 00:26:41 saying, you know, we should look into UFOs. And it was kind of prompted by the Leslie Kane 2017 revelations around AATIP and OSAP and the idea that we had a government UFO reverse engineering program that Ted Stevens and Harry Reid had sort of commissioned from 2007 to 2012. of commission from 2007 to 2012. So the UAPTF was the post-2017 kind of version of that, where it was like, let's figure out what's happening in our skies, Grush is the appointment from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. And I think initially he was thinking that, okay, he'd be doing a lot of the work that

Starting point is 00:27:22 he was doing on the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which you can think of the NRO as kind of the intel, like we're going to actually get the data, we're going to have satellites in space doing crazy stuff and getting imagery and different other signatures of interesting stuff happening in our space. And then you can think of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency as like we're the analysts on the ground classifying what these things are. And so that was his expertise. And he was put on the UAP task force. And this is a classic story. It's a story that, you know,

Starting point is 00:27:56 if we could interview J. Allen Hynek or Edward Ruppelt, you know, back in the day, they'd tell the same story. He came in thinking, I'm going to debunk this thing and, you know, it's going to be space trash and airplanes and, you know, BS, you know, I'm going to figure this out in two months. And not only were there cases in the sky that sort of baffled him where he was like, okay, you know, some of this stuff is not prosaic, you know, what I know of as terrestrial technology. But then he started to bump into reverse engineering programs where people who he had even intersected with, because he had a 14-year career in Intel, were taking him behind closed doors and being like, look, I don't know if you're aware of this, but we have some interesting programs where we have material,

Starting point is 00:28:45 we've been working on reverse engineering this stuff, the materials isotope ratios not naturally forming on Earth. They're heavy elements, so it's hard to recreate them in a centrifuge. A lot of sort of strange stuff. And initially, I think Gresh was like, maybe this is bullshit. But he got a lot of other high-ranking senior Intel people to back-channel with those people and see if they would lie to them, and they didn't get lied to. I think some of the people he spoke to had a counter-Intel background, but he found people who were more of the pure hapless engineering type. just pure hapless engineering type. He's a pretty strong first principles thinker. He basically came to the conclusion, wow, I think this is real.

Starting point is 00:29:38 That's when he started to make moves inside the government. That wasn't super effective. That's when he was like, I'm going to leave and try to make noise from the outside and did the News Nation thing and the debrief thing and all that. Sorry, you tried to make noise inside the government? What does that mean? Basically, I don't know how much I can say, but I think he basically tried to tell his superiors, you know, like in, in, in, in his, at his agency, the NGIA, look, look, this is what's going on. You know, I look,

Starting point is 00:30:13 you tasked me with this. This is, this is my job, right? I'm supposed to, you know, I'm supposed to find out whether they're, whether UFOs are, are, are possibly classifiable or real or, you know, whether UFOs are possibly classifiable or real or what's going on here. And I found all these programs. Like, what's up? Like, you should have oversight over this. And yeah, like nothing really happened. And this is, I mean, I don't know if you believe or have heard of the Wilson memo,

Starting point is 00:30:44 but there's a guy named Thomas Wilson who was head of J2, Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was supposed to have kind of supervision, like in his purview is all military technology, as exotic as it gets. That should fall under his jurisdiction. And he has a meeting with Eric Davis that I think gets actually kind of discovered at the Edgar Mitchell estate after Edgar Mitchell dies.

Starting point is 00:31:07 And it's the same story, right, where Thomas Wilson meets with this private aerospace contractor. They say that they have material. They say that progress has been very slow, that it's super compartmentalized, it's outside of the jurisdiction of the government. And he's furious and he tries

Starting point is 00:31:25 to, you know, affect change within government, presumably. And I don't know exactly what he tries to do, but he's very angry in the meeting with Davis. And so you hear this time and time again, people like trying to do things in the government and just getting sort of buzzled. And I think Dave's kind of one of the, maybe the only, yeah, the first case to just say, look, I'm just going to leave, and I'm going to push disclosure from the outside, which I think is pretty cool. So you have a friend, a space, sorry, what kind of friend? What kind of friend? He was in Space Force, and before that he was in the Air Force, and now he's in the private sector. Right. Okay. So force friend. Yeah. Force friend. Double force. And this person knows David Grush. Two years ago, you were speaking to this guy. You were telling him what you think.

Starting point is 00:32:13 And he said, you should speak to Grush. This guy, you're like, who's Grush? Then you're like, I'll speak to him. Yeah. Why not? So you speak to him. You cost Grush with your numerous speculations. And you said that some of them may have jived with Grush that made him think, hey, this guy knows what he's talking about or he's on the right track. So speak to that. That's my own speculation. Yeah, and this gets into some of the stuff we covered

Starting point is 00:32:35 in the documentary. But there's just so much out there that's actually open source that weaves together in bizarre ways where if your null hypothesis is that this is a psyop it is so much better than the second best psyop which whatever the hell that that is it is the best psyop of all time it's the most it's it's it's intergenerational it cuts across all these government agencies that don't get along together so like an example would be like gresh tells me actually a mock yeah go for it where you said if someone says this is just a

Starting point is 00:33:13 psyop and then they leave they comment that and then they leave like on reddit or whatever why are you leaving like that itself is mine right right right this is a exactly and you're totally comfortable with this being a psyop exactly oh this just the government lying to us on a massive scale and with extreme coordination no exactly even if it is why is that something that you can just say as a dismissal of it rather than oh my gosh let's continue to investigate oh my gosh there's something here we should have a church commission on that immediately. Like it's insane. If this is a psyop, throw out MKUltra, throw out, you know, Tuskegee.

Starting point is 00:33:53 Oh, it's like someone finds out about MKUltra. This is just a psyop. Yeah, yeah, right. It is. It is, right, sure. Okay, so that's it? So that if- Like you're not going to- Investigate?

Starting point is 00:34:00 Yeah. No, I'm with you, man. I'm totally with you and and and to that to and to the point that it's not even a psyop which if it were a psyop it would be a fascinating story in and of itself but to the point that it's not even a psyop is it's like you have like this guy townsend brown who's dealing with curtis lemay robert sarbacher edward teller taught brass when it comes to American atomic programs by all accounts by conventional history accounts

Starting point is 00:34:30 you have Jacques Vallée who does no grush like you know they're not like close you know Vallée's been studying this thing forever and used generally from the outside although he assisted J. Allen Hynek. But like,

Starting point is 00:34:45 these guys are not like compadres. And Jacques Vallée is saying that, you know, he's questioning, would Oppenheimer have known? Would Enrico Fermi have known? Because all of the crashes seem to take place around atomic sites, which we can get into because there's a ton of evidence around that. And, you know, was there somehow a connection between American atomic programs and, you know, these reverse engineering efforts? And then Townsend Brown, who I think if there were reverse engineering programs, he was clearly at the helm of all of this, given a lot of other sort of interesting things about his work. And so you weave all these things together and you're like, if this is a SIOP, it's got to be this insanely well-coordinated

Starting point is 00:35:33 thing. And then you have Robert Hastings, right, who writes this book. It's aptly named, it's called UFOs and Nukes. He's the son of a nuclear missile man, radar operator, and he's at Malmstrom Nuclear Base. And he's actually a janitor there because his dad is the radar operator, and he's at Malmstrom Nuclear Base. And he's actually a janitor there because his dad is the radar operator. He's a janitor there. And another radar operator calls him in. He says, we caught some unknowns again.

Starting point is 00:35:55 We caught some UFOs again. And he starts questioning him. And then his superior, the radar operator's superior, comes down and is like, you know, never ask about this again, you know, whatever. And then he starts compiling. He interviews 150 nuclear missile man radar operators. These guys are literally tasked with hitting the button that send nukes. They're on what's called the PRP, the personal reliability program. They have to report if they're on ibuprofen. So they have to be, by definition,

Starting point is 00:36:25 the picture of mental health. And you think of a guy that gets into that line of work, and they are not histrionic. They're not attention-seeking. They don't want their names known. They're not interested in that. And so Hastings has this 150-person account thing. You have Townsend Brown, who's doing a lot of weird, he's working on gravitators that look a whole lot like flying saucers and forming NICAP, which is the first civilian UFO organization. And doing a lot in that area

Starting point is 00:36:58 and meeting with the top atomic brass. And then you have Jacques Vallée telling me a lot of these secrets are going into the DOE possibly, and like, you know, maybe Oppenheimer was involved. And then Grush is corroborating that Oppenheimer probably was involved because he created atomic secrecy in 53-54 with the Atomic Energy Commission, of which the McMahon Act in 46 was a precursor. And it's basically saying everything that emits alpha, beta, gamma radiation, any nuclear material, would basically fall under the secrecy that atomic stuff would fall under. And so you're basically, it's this cloak and dagger way of saying if you have um ufo craft which emits these you know radiation uh you can

Starting point is 00:37:48 keep it secret and so you have all these disparate touch points george knapp is doing you know his own research on this stuff you have all these disparate touch points pointing towards a pretty coherent story like it's not this everything is everything is story. And so that's why I want to eschew the kind of the Gaia types, you know, that are like, it's the pineal gland, it's this and that or whatever. And just like, actually, no, like this, there is, there's a real narrative here. And we should be just trying to corroborate or falsify the narrative. robbery or falsify the narrative. So was Grush saying, or are you saying, that Oppenheimer is involved with UFOs above and beyond creating the secrecy that was then used for, or the claim is that that was then used for as a guise for UFOs. So in other words, Oppenheimer comes about

Starting point is 00:38:40 and creates this framework of secrecy. This then gets used as a shield for UFO research. This is the claim. Or is the claim that Oppenheimer also took part in this UFO research? And also, yes, sorry, please, that's his own question. Let's take it one at a time. That is an amazing question. I'm so happy that you asked that question. So, An amazing question. I'm so happy that you asked that question. So I don't know is the honest answer, but there is a lot of interesting stuff around Oppenheimer. was on a cleanup crew, a UFO crash cleanup crew in Aztec, New Mexico, March of 1948, a year after Roswell, with Townsend Brown, among a few others. And so again, I don't know whether that's true. I'm working my way through the book right now. I think it's worthy of either corroboration or falsification. There's another book called The Fall of Robert J.

Starting point is 00:39:46 Oppenheimer, UFO Secrecy and the Fall of Robert J. Oppenheimer. It's by a guy named, an Air Force guy, a guy named Donald Burleson. And he makes the very interesting claim that maybe the stripping of the queue clearance in Oppenheimer's case had more to do with his UFO knowledge than actually his schmoozing with Soviet spies in the 30s or whatever. Christopher Nolan is wrong. He has disinformation from Nolan. Maybe. I have a very prominent journalist friend who I won't out in saying this, but he has a funny quote.

Starting point is 00:40:21 He's like, you don't spend $130 million to tell the truth or something like that. He's very skeptical. And look, you don't spend $130 million to tell the truth or something like that. He's very skeptical. Look, I don't know. I think Nolan's amazing. And I think the movie was incredible. But there are a lot of weird things around that case that, again, let's demarcate this, Kurt, as speculation. I'm not saying that Oppenheimer definitely was part of the research.

Starting point is 00:40:42 Yes. was part of the research. But Gordon Gray, who was rumored to be part of the Majestic 12, was overseeing that kangaroo court that stripped him of his Q clearance. And so the Majestic 12, again, is this sort of this group of top brass in the military, high up scientists and strategists under Truman and then later under Eisenhower that basically would advise on kind of the UFO issue. And so Gordon Gray, he does form the Psychological Strategy Board. That's a historical fact under Eisenhower is overseeing this sort of kangaroo court with Oppenheimer where his queue clearance gets stripped. And there are a lot of weird quotes from the transcripts. And one of the quotes is

Starting point is 00:41:30 Oppenheimer says, a lot happened between 45 and 49. He keeps saying that. It's like a trope. And it's like, okay, what happened between 45 and 49? The atom bomb was created between 41 and 45. And if anything, he got increasingly marginalized as the H-bomb was created, which was really Teller's thing. So post-1945, what are you talking about? What happened? And if you believe any of the lore, all of the UFO stuff happened between 1945 and 1949. So that's kind of interesting. John von Neumann has a very—I'm sure you're intimately familiar with John von Neumann. John von Neumann has a very, I'm sure you're intimately familiar with John von Neumann.

Starting point is 00:42:10 Genius Hungarian physicist, created the mathematical foundations for quantum mechanics. And he's defending his friend Oppenheimer in this kangaroo court. And he says it took Robert Oppenheimer a while to get adjusted to the Buck Rogers universe that we're living in. What is he talking about? that we're living in. What is he talking about? Buck Rogers was a comic strip at the time all about space travel and aliens and interplanetary colonization and time travel. And it's weird. And it begs this question, right? Like, you're super familiar with CERN. Like what is CERN doing? It's higher and higher energy output to get to better ontological truth. And do we get unprecedented ontological truth with the unprecedented energy output that we had with the first atom bomb? I don't know. And I'm not claiming that that's for sure a thing. I do think it's a possibility. And then here's the

Starting point is 00:43:05 very weird thing, Kurt. Edward Condon is also stripped of his Q clearance at the same time. Condon, who's known now publicly as this famous UFO detractor, he creates the Condon Commission later in 1966, is also stripped of his Q clearance in 53-54 alongside his friend Robert Oppenheimer. They were very close. They studied under Max Born at Göttingen in Germany. It must have been in the 20s. And he wrote the Los Alamos primer. He helped set up Los Alamos.

Starting point is 00:43:37 He's from Alamogordo. And he writes the Los Alamos primer, which is basically a document that all employees at Los Alamos had to read. And then the nominal story is that Condon actually leaves Los Alamos because he clashes with General Leslie Groves, you know, Matt Damon's character in Oppenheimer, because he thinks that Matt Damon is, you know, there's too much secrecy. So that's the nominal story. And he goes on to actually work on civilian outreach nuclear programs. And he actually drafts the McMahon Act of 46, which is, again, becomes

Starting point is 00:44:11 the Atomic Energy Commission, the Atomic Energy Act of 53, 54. So he's super instrumental in, I think, what becomes UFO secrecy. But then, so he's stripped of his clearance, doesn't have his clearance alongside Oppenheimer. And then in 66, a guy named Lou Branscombe, who studies under, who's under Don Menzel at, who's like an early NSA guy, also rumored to be on the Majestic 12. And this is all, this is all in an interview that Condon is giving to the American Institute of Physics. So this is not crackpot stuff. Lou Branscombe goes to Condon and says, hey, I think you should get your clearance back. No reason why. And Lou Branscombe is on the Jason Advisory Board, as deep as it gets when it comes to American defense strategy.

Starting point is 00:45:02 And Condon gets his clearance back. And all of a sudden, he's running this independent commission, which we know now isn't independent because there are letters that have been revealed between him and Air Force Colonel Robert Hippler, where Robert Hippler is saying, you know, I think you should show all past UFO research as a waste of money or whatever. And so he's doing this independent commission where he's not supposed to be coordinating with the Air Force, but he is coordinating with the Air Force. And it deals a death blow to UFO research, and it kind of kills Blue Book. And Blue Book ends at that point. And so I find it fascinating that maybe, you know, there is a narrative that maybe Oppenheimer was stripped of his Q clearance because of the UFO thing. Condon, his buddy, is stripped of his Q clearance alongside Oppenheimer. He's then given his—and also around—he also—they had stuff on Condon around Soviet, you know, that maybe he—he was from Berkeley. And in his 20s and 30s, he was kind of a labor—a pro-labor journalist.

Starting point is 00:46:03 And they said he and his wife had Soviet sympathies or whatever. But I find it fascinating. They're both stripped of their clearance at the same time. Then he's randomly given his clearance back. He's put on this UFO commission, which is, I think, a total fake hit job, as history has proven, on the UFO subject. And in the background, here's the kicker, Kurt. The's a, there's an FB, the most read document on the FBI's website is something called the hodl memo, which is about a UFO crash and an air force officer finds the UFO with the crew intact. And it's insane. It's on the UFO. It's on the FBI website for everyone to see. And so this, again, this document could be fake, but it's on the website and it's, you know,

Starting point is 00:46:46 been FOIAed or declassified and it's there. Guy Hoddle is the guy, he's the guy who's being written to, and that's why it's called the Hoddle memo. Guy Hoddle is creating a dossier of field reports on Edward Condon throughout his own kangaroo court where they're stripping him of his clearance. So you have an FBI agent who's the head of the Washington field office for the FBI and throughout his own kangaroo court where they're stripping him of his clearance. So you have an FBI agent who's the head of the Washington field office for the FBI and Guy Hoddle,

Starting point is 00:47:10 who definitely knows about UFOs, unless this document is a total forgery, but it's on the FBI website, who is creating compromise, who's literally creating this big, you know, has all these documents on Condon. And then Condon is given his security clearance back mysteriously in the 60s to basically do a hit job on UFOs. And so my question is, was he in the know all along because he's an atomic insider and he was clearly very close with Oppenheimer?

Starting point is 00:47:48 with Oppenheimer. And then his security clearance and its stripping and then retrieval, it was used as bait, essentially, to get him to do the Air Force and the FBI's bidding and kind of dismiss UFOs. And I think all of these are super open questions worthy of investigation or falsification, if anybody can do that. But it's interesting. if anybody can do that, but it's interesting. When Oppenheimer said that, quote unquote, there was a lot that happened between 1945 and 1949, what was the context of that? Because it could also be that he's referring to himself.

Starting point is 00:48:20 Like for myself, there's plenty that happened between 2010 and 2015. Grand Theft Auto was released that way. So that counts as a life event, GTA V. Great game. It's a really good question, and I'd love to read the original transcripts. The book is not the best written book. It's like 100 pages,

Starting point is 00:48:39 and I'm picking out four of what I think are the most intriguing facts around the transcripts. It is interesting. I think are the most intriguing facts around the transcripts. It is interesting. I think Gordon Gray has the full transcripts of the Kangaroo Court in his archives, and he donated his archives to the Eisenhower Library. The one thing he asked to be kept out of the archives were the Oppenheimer Court transcripts. So I do, I find that very interesting. So I think a follow-up from this conversation that you're now motivating me to do is like, we should go through all the original transcripts, read all this stuff in its proper context. Yeah. So I don't have a great answer to that.

Starting point is 00:49:21 When you're reading transcripts, books, or whatever it may be, how do you retain all that information? What is your process? Yeah, I don't know. I'm really stupid on some things. When I hear you talk about physics, I'm like, I'm a chimp. I'm not the same species as you. I think when it comes to memorizing names and dates and stuff,

Starting point is 00:49:44 I'm good with that i don't know why especially when they're very meaningful uh to me like in terms of like fitting together a narrative of what's what's happening you know i think hey yeah here's something you might want to know yeah you know who also had a history degree or at least started in history i know who you're gonna i think i think i know you're gonna say is uh ed ed wooden yeah yeah how crazy that's crazy right yeah yeah it's so interesting and then he you know when he was asked why you know what he said why did he say he said young people do stupid things he said said, basically, he doesn't know why. He said, I have no good answer for that.

Starting point is 00:50:29 It was just young people do stupid things. That's hilarious. Because he was also great in math when he was in high school. So it's not like he discovered he was great in physics and math when he was in his master's or late undergrad. Totally. I think, was it Steven Weinberg read a recommendation for him? And he was like, he's way smarter than me. Like you should take him or something. Yeah. Do you know this story about von Neumann? I don't know if I told you this in person.

Starting point is 00:50:54 No. About the fly between the cars. No, please tell me. Okay. So this is how much of a genius von Neumann is. So mathematicians say that the most brilliant mathematician, maybe that ever was, was von Neumann.. So mathematicians say that the most brilliant mathematician, maybe that ever was, was von Neumann. So it goes Newton and then von Neumann. He was asked the question, okay, let's imagine you have two cars coming at one another at 10 miles per hour. So they're just driving slowly coming at one another. The space between them is initially 100 miles.

Starting point is 00:51:22 Okay. There's also a fly that starts at one, say the one on the left, and it can, it's a fast fly, so it can go like 50 miles per hour. So it speeds, it goes from this car,

Starting point is 00:51:34 it reaches the next one, but the next one has moved a bit because they're both moving at 10 miles per hour. Oh, that's a hard problem. Hits it, yes,

Starting point is 00:51:41 exactly. Hits it, turns around, comes back, hits it, hits it, and then, so this fly is moving moving moving and then it stops and then because it gets killed but between these two cars the question is then how far did the fly travel i'm not gonna attempt to answer yes exactly so

Starting point is 00:51:59 there's a way of doing it with an infinite sum okay. So you could just add up a series, but you have to write down the formula. But the trick is, is that, okay, if these cars are coming at one another 10 miles per hour each, then it's as if one is stationary, the other's coming at it at 20 miles per hour. Okay. If there's 100 miles of a distance, then it takes it five hours to get from here to here. it five hours to get from here to here. Okay. This fly moves at 50 kilometers per hour. Five times 50 is 250 miles. Okay. So that's the easy way of doing it. The quote unquote easy way is to realize there's a trick. Just reframe the problem. You don't have to worry about the fly's perspective. You just worry about how long does it take for them to crash? And then you multiply that by the fly's speed. Okay. So this question was given to von Neumann.

Starting point is 00:52:46 And then von Neumann just gives the answer almost instantaneously. It says 250 miles. And then they're like, oh, you know the trick. And then he's like, what trick? I just summed the infinite series. That's crazy. That's crazy. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:53:01 Speaking of genius, a common rebuttal about UFOs is if they're such an advanced species, why do they crash? So explain, why do you think they crash and why does it occur after 1945 more? Yeah, totally. I think this is, again, demarcate, this is speculation. I have no idea why they crash. But the possible interesting things people have said, so I guess the theories are if you have a nuclear blast, you have gamma radiation fallout, you have kind of an EMP effect. And so maybe that pops into whatever interdimensional space they're in and either

Starting point is 00:53:40 messes with their flight path or sends a signal that they should sort of enter ours. Again, I don't know if that's true. Another just interesting thing would be like, they're sort of trying to protect their resources and monitoring nuclear stuff. And every time we detonate a nuke, or we're about to detonate a nuke, or things become aggressive,

Starting point is 00:54:00 it's more like they're sending us a gift. that's that would be the jacques valet theory so they're sending maybe they'll send us like and and rush sort of touched on this as well like they'll send us like a little like civil propulsion get like where it's like you guys didn't need to create nukes you could have gone the civil propulsion route or whatever like here's like a zero point energy machine like figure it out you So I think the, it is a very valid question. Like why would these things travel, you know, from, you know, thousands of light years away and, and, and, and just crash? Like if they have that capability, they probably wouldn't crash. But I think a common trope of all, you know, alien encounters of the first or third kind,

Starting point is 00:54:42 you know, whether you're seeing crafts or, you know, we can, we can believe it or not, you know, interacting with any sort of beings, there's some sort of absurdity element. And I do, that's where I do, I do sort of like the Jacques Vallée idea that intermittent reinforcement, like behavioral reinforcement techniques are sort of used as a way to sort of nip at the herd. And so it's like, why are they abducting Betty and Barney Hill, of all people, or Travis Walton? These people aren't like, it's not like the president of the US, or it's not like the most important. But maybe there's some sort of ripple,

Starting point is 00:55:18 a la cellular automata or something. There's some sort of ripple effect, whereby you're like a node node and you transfer the information. You get it. So I don't know. I don't know why they crash. But I think we're so limited. If we're speaking from the perspective of an ant colony,

Starting point is 00:55:41 like wondering why humans do certain things, we're just so epistemologically limited would be my sort of main counterpoint. So, do you want to hear my unsubstantiated conjecture? Okay, again, this is just if I was to speculate completely. It could be the case that it's just the nature of these devices. So that they're so temperamental that it's a miracle, like 49 out of 50 are supposed to crash. And it's a miracle that they only have one out of

Starting point is 00:56:17 100. Okay. So it could be that. And it also could be that they just don't care about them in the same way we fly drones into volcanoes. And so we're like, all right, well, whatever. They're so inexpensive. So it could be like that. It could also be that, well, something else that I don't agree with is when people say, if they have anti-gravity, then they're so much more advanced. I don't see that as being the case. So for instance, it may be that it's an independent technology. So, for instance, it's conceivable one country could have developed the steam locomotive, whereas another developed superconductors.

Starting point is 00:56:52 Yep. And then each would look at the other one and say, whoa, you're way more advanced than me. Advanced compared to what? It's not like it's a singular scale. Totally. It's not linear. Yeah, it's like the LK-99 stuff's probably BS. It's probably wrong. But say you figured out the Meissner effect

Starting point is 00:57:09 and it came out of Korea. That would be some sort of super asymptotal. That would be like a stepwise leap. It's not like you have to build on some necessary bedrock. Exactly. Or let's imagine another culture has fiber optics and another one has sustainable agriculture. Yep.

Starting point is 00:57:29 Each one would look at the other and be like, oh, you're leagues ahead and envious of the other. Totally. Or weapons of war for one versus medicine. Totally. Okay, so it could be that, that they're not more advanced than us. They look at us and they're like, how the heck are you doing what you're doing? And we look at them like, how are you doing what you're doing? So that's another, if there is even a them.

Starting point is 00:57:51 Yeah, right. at CERN is we use high energy to investigate more and more ontological reality. Okay. So we use our technology to investigate reality. I wonder if that's part of the problem. That is to say that we shouldn't be using technology to find reality, but rather the reality is right here. And like that, that you, Jesse, you're so powerful like so so effing powerful like like yeah like gohan from dragon ball z if you ever watched that

Starting point is 00:58:35 it just needs to be unlocked it's it's like that or maybe it is super sane like right and and you're super sane is your capacity to love other people and maybe that is like way more powerful than any technology and that's the most real yeah and it's this it's like satanic or or upside down to think what we should use is technology to investigate reality it's a complete reversal and it's a distraction so anyway i want to know what you yeah i think that i mean that's a typical what is the faustian bargain is for forbidden knowledge right and it's it's um you you sell your soul to the devil because you want to know the truth but maybe maybe the truth is less important in some abstract factual sense and ontological reality is less important than like you said kind of leading from the

Starting point is 00:59:27 heart or or yeah yeah leading a true honest life in accordance with virtues that for all we know the in the say there is some higher trans-temporal alien realm, maybe that's the currency. And maybe our sort of capitalist construct where we barter for things, we have currency that's fungible and we have limited real estate and we have possessions. Maybe the currency up there is actually love and the four virtues or something. Yeah. Isn't there a sighting where some other beings came to some people and said, you're so powerful because you have a, because you, what was it? Was it the aerial school or no?

Starting point is 01:00:22 A lot of the aerial school testaments, they are told by the alien, like, you don't realize how special and powerful you are. And that's a common trope among other alien abductions as well, which I find fascinating. Yeah, no, no, no, tell me. What do you think the process, yeah. I think the process of science is the exact opposite of that. It's saying, how not special are we?

Starting point is 01:00:49 Let's keep removing ourselves from being special over and over and over and over. And then we look for where are we special? But we've saturated ourselves with the doctrine of unspeciality. And so. No, I love that. I love that. Even think about the word high tech, right?

Starting point is 01:01:06 It's like the tech is on high like you are outsourcing your power to the high priest but now it's the high tech or whatever and so I think there is something about science where you do feel it's like Bertrand Russell wrote about like you looked up at the stars

Starting point is 01:01:21 and you just felt so small and there's something about science where post-Copernican revolution, especially, it's humans are becoming a smaller and smaller part of the picture in some ways, right? It's like, well, maybe the Earth's not the center of the universe. And maybe carbon-based life is like one form of life, but maybe there's silicon-based life, and we should experiment with that in labs. And maybe, a la Michael Levin's work, maybe the EM field can create interesting biological von Neumann replicators

Starting point is 01:01:55 that are non-human, but they're from human. We can rinse a primordial cell and create a xenobot. And it's increasingly, humans are kind of out of the picture picture and it's like, how do we create some like optimal functioning life form? And I do think there's some, there's an interesting possible, I don't want to say Luddite because that's too extreme, but like backlash to that where it's like reigning that in where it's like, well, you're alive and you're really, you're, you're really, there's something really special about your life and the things that are presented to you are not maybe by chance or by coincidence.

Starting point is 01:02:28 And maybe instead of being obsessed with AI, which I view of as, it's sort of, if this is a larger algorithm, if you think that, maybe you have an IT view of the universe like Wolfram, the AI we're creating is definitely a bit compressed version of that. So it's like, if we're going to explore things i think there's something really interesting about human consciousness which is why i love your show human biology and humans themselves like what are we that goes unexplored by a lot of conventional science at least yeah i love that uh well you prompted it here continue yeah yeah well something that i love that you said is that you said the word human and then you said what are we and so something that i don't like when what that people do is when they just use the word human and then they don't follow

Starting point is 01:03:17 it up with we and the reason they do that is because they want to distance themselves and show how rational they are so for instance they'll say humans are so petty you're a human why don't you say we are so petty and who else who do you think you're speaking to her or other people so just say we right right when people say human humans are such strange they break up with someone breaks up with them humans are such strange creatures who are you talking about why are you acting as if you're distinguished from them right it's like you're some sort of alien or you're too noble to like, like it's, you're not a part of that.

Starting point is 01:03:48 Like you're not. Yeah, exactly. They're clinical and operating as if they're a scientist viewing something else from a lab or distance from themselves. And so that's why I don't like when people use the word human most of the time, I think they should be using the word weed.

Starting point is 01:04:02 Yeah. And there's this, you did follow it up with weed. There's this weird, almost paradox that like, I feel like once you realize your depravity, actually, Peter Thiel, who I worked for, has a favorite philosopher named Rene Girard. Speaking of depravity. No, he's the best. Yeah, but we'll get to it.

Starting point is 01:04:22 Yeah, of course. I'll defend him to the death. No, I don't know. I'm just kidding'll get to... Yeah, of course, of course. I'll defend him to the death, so... No, I don't know. I'm just kidding around. I'm kidding around. Okay, all good. But one of his favorite philosophers is René Girard. And Peter's a very deep thinker.

Starting point is 01:04:33 And René Girard is this French philosopher, and he talks about sort of people having these conversion experiences or hierophanies. And he has his own conversion experience, actually. And... Peter? No, Gerard does. And it's this really interesting thing where it's almost like once he realizes his own depravity, he was like, he grew up like in Avignon in France

Starting point is 01:05:00 and he would drive sports cars and he was into models and, you know, he was, he was as memetic as the, as the next person. And that, that becomes his theory that humans are very memetic, but he has this sort of conversion experience of sort of realizing his own depravity. And then that creates like newfound enlightenment. And so it's this bizarre paradox that's so like once you realize your own depravity then you then you reach upwards you're you're instead of your tether being horizontal to like in memetically pinging off other people's desires your your tether moves becomes transcendent and moves upwards and you you realize that you have all these animal instincts and urges that are sort of very finite and depraved. And then that allows space for what he would call the

Starting point is 01:05:53 kingdom of heaven or, you know, I don't know what the word, you know, some sort of transcendent tether. So would it be the case then that our culture with its emphasis on removing shame and removing sin is doing the opposite of what we should be doing? What we do is we look at ourselves and we're like, okay, what's something that I'm made to feel horrible for or that I just indeed feel guilty about? The difference between shame and guilt. And how do I remove those? Well, I say that there's nothing that's objectively moral. So we do that and we call that enlightenment. There is another route, which is, let me think not only about how am I sinful now, but how am I more sinful? Like in what other ways am I malicious? What other activities or frames

Starting point is 01:06:36 of mind I hold that are malignant and wicked and embittered? And if I'm honest with myself, I should stop. Totally, totally. If people did real audits on their motivations for things, it would usually tether to the seven deadly sins. Very few people act out of pure magnanimity, benevolence, selflessness. And often it's this sort of transactional symbiotic that, you know, it's not always like, you know, zero sum, but it often tethers down to some base primitive survival instinct. And that's okay. But it's also very important to admit. I like, I'm, I'm actually more okay with people who are a little more overtly, not evil, but like, they sort of admit that they're, they're like, they lean into like, okay, I'm a little controversial and I've got bad instincts and I'm flawed. You prefer the wanton self-awareness to the noble ignorance. Exactly. Like, like I'm not a fan of Trump. I don't like Trump. Caveat this caveat this with it, but in some ways, Trump is an overt gangster, where Clinton is an overt one,

Starting point is 01:07:52 or sorry, a covert one, where it's like you're sort of this like crazy kleptocrat, where the Gini coefficient, you know, the main measure of wealth inequality, you know, the, you know, the, the, the, the main measure of wealth inequality, you know, grows more under your administration than anybody. You have Larry Summers in there kind of, you know, doing a bunch of magic tricks or whatever. And you're, you're sort of, you know, you have NAFTA and you're sort of just completely outsourcing the American middle-class and manufacturing base. And you're flying with Epstein, you know, every, you know, 26 times or whatever. And you're flying with Epstein, you know, every, you know, 26 times or whatever. And, and then, but then you have all these like virtues and she goes, you've systematically avoided taxes and you haven't paid any of your taxes. And Trump goes, yeah, so have – I have. And so have you and all of your donors.

Starting point is 01:09:02 And there's something super refreshing. I didn't know that. Yeah. And Chappelle does an amazing, and Chappelle's also not a fan of Trump, but he does this amazing bit and he goes, in that moment, a star was born. And it's true.

Starting point is 01:09:14 He's just like telling it like it is. He's like, look, we live in this corrupt kleptocracy. Government bureaucrats are stealing all sorts of things. The rich is not treated like the middle class and the poor. And yet, you have one side that's sort of owning up to it or whatever, and then this other side. It's sort of this bait and switch. I'm going to try to buy off the votes of the poor and coastal elites by saying the right things.

Starting point is 01:09:41 But you're not doing anything to steer the ship in a different direction, in my opinion. Explain to people what you do at your job with Peter Thiel. What does your day-to-day look like? Yeah, for sure. A lot of it's talking to companies and investing in companies. I worked for Peter for four years at his family office. What does family office mean? Why is it called family office? It's family office because it's like personal wealth.

Starting point is 01:10:12 And so he figures out what to do with his personal wealth with the family office. So there are various investors who are there. I see. Is that a common term in the investing world? A family office? Because I imagine it would just be called, I work at Peter Thiel's office. Yeah, it's pretty common, the family office. Eric Weinstein, his former guest on your show, is a colleague of mine there. Peter's an amazing thinker. He's one of the few

Starting point is 01:10:41 people I know who is, he could have been an academic, I think if he felt like academia was making more progress or something, he probably would have done that. He's just absolutely brilliant in a theoretical sense. And then he also can make pretty hardcore decisions in the free market, whether it be incubating companies and recruiting really right-tail talent to create PayPal or Palantir or coach Mark Zuckerberg through the initial stages of Facebook. Then he can also make these macro bets based on this map of the world

Starting point is 01:11:17 he has in his head. I think actually Ryan Holiday makes an interesting analogy that I think for the average person makes him a little easier to understand. It's like if Elon Musk is Superman, Peter Thiel is Batman or something. He doesn't like to be camera facing or he doesn't love attention. He probably is not going to like that I'm saying this stuff about him. But he's really trying to do good behind the scenes. And I think he's often misunderstood

Starting point is 01:11:48 and that's sort of a frustration of mine. So, yeah. So what's misunderstood about Palantir? Explain to people who have a wrong conception of it and think that maybe, man, Jesse, he works for the devil or he gets the connections because somehow it's related to his boss and somehow this is going to the private sector slash government interaction.

Starting point is 01:12:14 Dispel that if you can. Yeah, that's important to dispel. And I guarantee you I'm not saying that. No, I know you're not. No, no, no, no. It's important to, you can voice it. I've seen one out of every thousand comments are to that effect or whatever.

Starting point is 01:12:31 And so I'm happy to address it. Palantir is really important sort of network analysis software. It's sort of middleware software for important analysis of various things. There are all sorts of applications that are kind of vertical agnostic. And some of the-

Starting point is 01:12:56 Meaning, sorry, vertical agnostic. Meaning they have their healthcare applications, but then there are let's find terrorist applications. There are various applications. I see. It's like Windows. You could use Windows for many purposes. Oh man, this person has Windows.

Starting point is 01:13:14 Yeah. You wouldn't hear that. Maybe some Mac user. They adhere to all of the proper data anonymity protocols. And, you know, yeah, this idea, it's like Peter was very involved in the founding of it. But this like insane idea, you'll see like some journalist, right, that it's like, like he's not acquiring anybody's data.

Starting point is 01:13:39 Like he doesn't have access to any of that. You know, that's an autonomous company. It's run by Alex Karp currently. And Peter's a founder. He's a large stakeholder. But it's not doing anything below board. And you could even, I guess the best way to sort of describe it is like, and Ryan Holiday actually talks about this in his book called Conspiracy, which is about the Gawker case with Hulk Hogan or whatever. That's a great book. Yeah, it's an awesome book. And Peter supports the Hulk Hogan's case, which we can now talk about. He's a public open source that's on record.

Starting point is 01:14:19 And there are all sorts of ways in which if he was positioned in the way that people thought he was, is this like, I'm a puppeteer and I know everybody, private and public sector, and I can query data or whatever. There are all sorts of other things he could have done there, but he went about it in this totally fair kind of free market way that was consistent with the constitution. And so, yeah, I mean, that's all I have to say is it's, it's frustrating for me to sort of read the headlines and then, and even, even on a personal level, I think he's a really good person. And, you know, it's like with, with Bill, you know, anybody who makes it to that level, right, you have to have some sort of aggressive business instinct. And I feel like

Starting point is 01:15:00 the, you know, with, with Peter, it's like, that seems to be the, it's like an iceberg, right? And it's like 20% of the icebergs above water and 80% below. And it's like, people only see the aggressive thing. And then with Bill Gates, until recently, until the pandemic with Bill Gates, it was like, I think it's like, Bill Gates is like 80% bad, like nefarious or something. And like, you only see this like virtue signaling, like PR window dressing thing, which is the 20%, which is, you know, very good at the PR and

Starting point is 01:15:30 managing optics, maybe again, prior to the pandemic. And so it's very frustrating for me to see. And I often say, you know, it's like, sometimes look at Ellen DeGeneres, right? Sometimes people's PR are the exact inverse to who they are as people and if you're you have to ask yourself the meta question why is somebody spending that much time on pr maybe it's because they're a shitty person and maybe peter's not spending that much time on pr because he actually cares about substance and he actually just wants to like invest in good people form good companies and so that's that's the i guess those are the main things I sort of want to say about that. And as far as my connections go,

Starting point is 01:16:09 I've met a lot of people in the context of working for him, of course. I knew a lot of people prior to that. I helped with, we had a Google speaker series, and so I brought a lot of people in through that. I've always sort of... What year was that, The Google speaker series? Did you start that?

Starting point is 01:16:28 I didn't start it. My friend ran it for a time. And he was really nice and was like, I was kind of sick of my day job. And he was like, you know, I'll give you carte blanche. If you get like cool people to come in and speak, you can interview them. And so I just would interview a bunch of people in that capacity. And that's actually how I originally met Peter is I reached out to him around possibly coming in to speak and he couldn't make it into speak, but we met around that and hit it off. And then, and that changed my life. You know, it was an incredible, I'm so happy I did. Yes. Yes. You were speaking on connections. Yeah. So, so, but I guess my, my point is, is like, yeah, I met a lot of people through that. Yes, you were, like I, I met a lot of people organically,

Starting point is 01:17:25 you know, by bringing them in and they have friends and these things sort of snowball as I'm sure you're familiar with, with your show. And so, yeah, there's, that's it. There's, that's, yeah. Unfortunately, I'm a reclusive hermit, an antisocial reclusive hermit. So it's a bit difficult. I'm a misanthrope at heart too in a weird way. So I identify with that. Here's something I should be doing that I'm not. I should be interviewing people in person. I should be investing in that. If I had the money to invest, I should use that to invest into that

Starting point is 01:18:01 because then you can build a rapport better. Like meeting you in person made this go way, way smoother. This is like butter. But it's because we met each other. And also then you exchange numbers and you can speak afterward. But unfortunately, I've hindered myself to just speaking about ideas and then mulling and getting upset over them. Yeah, but you know, your stuff is so much deeper than everybody else's it requires the like white

Starting point is 01:18:28 space it requires the intermittent thought period so i wouldn't get down on yourself for that and there's also a way in which it's it's more like my thing i do more in post-production your thing is more raw but that's really cool too like you get you get all this stuff like you got you got out of me like this crazy diatribe about guy hodl and condon and him getting his cute like i've never said that to anybody and i often come out of interviews being like damn i wish that had like made it in there but like i don't know if anybody could quite understand and like you you give people that space to to do that and that's really that's really cool. The rawness of it is pretty awesome as well. I think it's working for you as well.

Starting point is 01:19:08 I don't know. You're a great filmmaker. You have several talents. I wish I could list them. You have your history degree, which is a talent in and of itself. Also, the reading that comes along with that. Reading long documents is a skill.

Starting point is 01:19:24 It's hard. Then also retaining that information is not easy. You have the ability to speak with people and discern. So that's what you do for your living is you discern. Like, is this company worth it? Are these people BSing? And also I want to talk to you a bit more about that as well. Like, what is it that you're looking for

Starting point is 01:19:44 when you speak to people for the family office and I should add by the way as a snapshot now what I'm doing is I have my own outfit and I still invest on behalf of Peter I invest a lot of my own money as well obviously much smaller amounts. But yeah, I'm sort of doing things independently now, and I still have a great relationship,

Starting point is 01:20:12 working relationship with Peter, but I'm not full-time at the family office, I should say that. I see. Have you spoken to Peter about UFOs? What are his views? I, out of respect for him, I don't want to go too into it, but I'll just say this for any of the more conspiratorial people or whatever. I'm always pushing him on the topic when we do bring it up. He's very open-minded and goes back and forth but he's not this is the reason you're now part-time yeah maybe yeah yeah he's like dude that guy won't shut up about ufos who knows no we're um we i mean we joke about it like we have a great

Starting point is 01:20:59 relationship and he's he'll often be like you don't shut up about this. And so it is. But yeah, no, he's not like some, he doesn't like know everything about that. You know, it's like some of these, occasionally I'll get a comment being like, it's like he's trying to reverse engineer them. It's like, if only you knew how many things he has on his plate and how low on the priority list UFOs is. And sometimes the debates that we have to that effect where I'm obviously much more

Starting point is 01:21:27 gung-ho about the importance of the topic. He's very open-minded and I think hasn't pre-crystallized his thoughts. And that's all I'll say out of respect for him. I don't want to go too deep into it. But yeah, he's open for sure. What was your largest investment failure and what did it teach you? Oh, man. I have a few.

Starting point is 01:21:52 This is a good question. My biggest investment failure is, I can, I guess, say this because it's public. I invested in Sam Bankman Freed. Do you know who that is? The FTX? Yes. Yeah, I get the gist. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:22:11 Well, it's a really interesting story, actually, that's maybe worth telling to a prospective investor who's trying to get into venture investing. So I actually, I'm family friends with him. Like my dad and his dad worked at a law firm together a long time ago. And so I grew up occasionally like seeing him. And his dad hit me up when Sam started FTX and was like, you know, do you want to take a look at this? And I had just gotten my job with Peter at the time. And I meet up with them and it's like he has Alameda at the time, which is his hedge fund, and on the side he's starting this exchange and he's saying that, I think at the time it was like BitMEX, Wobie, and OKEx were really insufficient as far as their risk analysis.

Starting point is 01:23:13 And then they had some UI deficiencies on the front end. And so there's room for this new exchange. And none of it made sense to me. I didn't think that they really had too many issues. They were sort of dominant. They were printing money. He was doing it part-time while doing Alameda. He was super into effective altruism,

Starting point is 01:23:29 which didn't fully pattern match to me to a successful CEO. There was a lot of virtue signaling or whatever. And I was like, I don't know if this makes total sense. So anyways, I pass at the time. And I don't invest. Then I start to see how much momentum is sort of occurring with the platform.

Starting point is 01:23:50 I have friends use the platform. I'm like, okay, this UI is really cool. They're launching derivatives markets really, really quickly. Somebody will tweet at Sam, like, hey, we want a lumber derivatives market. It's up six hours later. He was just moving very, really quickly. Somebody will tweet at Sam, like, hey, we want a lumber derivatives market. It's up six hours later. He was just moving very, very fast. I'm like, okay, this is starting to work.

Starting point is 01:24:11 He has a lot of momentum. He's playing the Elon Twitter game in an interesting way, which I think the ex-post analysis is like, you can't actually do that early in a company's life cycle. I think that's probably pretty bad. It was a consumer company, so arguably it's helping the company.

Starting point is 01:24:29 If he gets somebody behind him to run the operations, he can be Adderall'd out and tweeting and doing maybe that somehow functional or whatever. Anyways, it comes back around and I'm doing diligence on it for the A or whatever and we lose the deal to Binance. And I'm like, damn, they have so much momentum. To Binance?

Starting point is 01:24:56 Yeah, so Binance is this other crypto exchange that was getting into derivatives. Originally, they were just kind of a retail spot buying crypto exchange. And they basically led FTX's Series A. There was arguably going to be this partnership where FTX would create these sort of levered tokens and they would end up on Binance.

Starting point is 01:25:24 And then FTX would have a take rate on those big trades. So sort of like a positive sum partnership where they would, you know. Anyways, we lose the deal to them again because it gets bid up like crazy. I think FTX was not doing a ton

Starting point is 01:25:40 in revenue and the price was just really, really high. It was some crazy high multiple. And so it just didn't make sense. And I was still early in my investing, and so it just, yeah, I wasn't doing high dollar amounts. And I was like, this doesn't make sense. So pass again.

Starting point is 01:25:55 Comes back around, and they seem to be just on top of the world. They're killing it. The thing has a lot of momentum. They send over numbers, and the numbers look out of the world. They're killing it. The thing has a lot of momentum. They send over numbers, and the numbers look out of this world. The annual profit is incredible. Margins are really good. And how do you assess that? You just have to trust them, or you do an audit, or what? So yeah, you're looking at, with the amount that I was sort of talking about in terms of investing, it wasn't a large amount. And so, yeah, you're not doing insane audits on the back.

Starting point is 01:26:33 You're not asking for a snapshot of bank account or things like that. I see. You're looking at the data that they give you. If you're putting in massive checks, you should be doing all kind of formal auditing. Your own due diligence. I just don't know how that works. No, you should be doing...

Starting point is 01:26:52 You should be doing due diligence, but for a very nominal check, the company wouldn't even let you give them a financial colonoscopy or whatever. So it's like, yeah look i don't the numbers they gave were not fake i think in retrospect maybe they were conflating you know um alameda's activity on the platform and fx i don't know but then i don't think the numbers were on the face

Starting point is 01:27:19 of it fake okay yeah and so any anyways um that's when we we put in a little a little bit and it was this weird thing where from 2018 2019 when FTX started to 2021 or two it was like the best investment of all time and it was this crazy thing where what I thought was my biggest, I'm in a hits driven business. It's driven by power laws. What I thought was my biggest miss, I'd always be like, Cam, I grew up knowing this kid and I didn't write a seed check into this company. Like I suck. What's wrong with me? And what was my biggest miss turned into my biggest, thank God, kind of relief? Because even though we invested, it was a very small amount. And then I think it was the same day we actually lost the Series A.

Starting point is 01:28:15 You know, it was like we got bid up and I was like, I don't think we should invest or whatever. We invested later. That same day, I met one of my favorite companies. And so it's this weird thing where things take place over long time horizons. And sometimes the best decisions can be the worst decisions. The worst decisions can be the best decisions. It's really important to maintain that kind of epistemic humility. And it was a really good lesson for me on the investing front, for anybody trying to get into this.

Starting point is 01:28:44 And I like Naval Ravikant has a good good he has this thing called beginner's curse where if you get really lucky on an investment early on it's like people win the lottery or people make it really big off crypto like initially like you're usually pretty screwed after that you think you have the touch and i think that actually peter has has a line about PayPal where it's like they won, but they didn't think that winning was too easy. It's like they won, but it was really hard for them to win. And so it's both, you don't get the learned helplessness from losing,

Starting point is 01:29:19 but you win and you're locally humbled a bunch of times. There's something really powerful about that that I think is really good for looking for that and a founder too. You want somebody who believes they can win and believes in themselves, but doesn't think it'll be this cakewalk. And so, yeah.

Starting point is 01:29:40 What else do you look for? I look for that. I look for having a chip on your shoulder. But then there's some efficient frontier, right? Where it's like you're not operating totally out of me against the world hate. It's like you want the chip on your shoulder, but you also want to be reasonable and not operate too much out of ego. And then you want humility, but you don't want too soft-spoken. You don't want, you know, it's kind of like, again, this is me kind of being a faint echo

Starting point is 01:30:12 of Peter's probably better thoughts, but it's like, he talks about a combination of opposites and like, you want, yeah, you want humility, but you don't want, you don't want like somebody who can't like brag about themselves and like, and like, you don't want somebody who can't brag about themselves. You don't want somebody who can't fundraise. Fundraising does de-risk a business. You can find somebody who's super substantive, but they just don't know how to sell. They just don't know how to fundraise.

Starting point is 01:30:37 That is a limiting factor. The zero to one thing would be, actually sales is way more important than product in some cases. Can you explain zero to one thing would be like, actually sales is way more important than product in some cases. Like just really good description. Can you explain zero to one? Yeah, zero to one's Peter's book with Blake Masters. And it is basically,

Starting point is 01:30:53 it's almost like an anti-how-to manual of how to build a startup in that it's like a bunch of reasons why a lot of the conventional wisdom is wrong. So it's like, actually, you shouldn't look for this massive, total addressable market. You should look for a very defensible, high moat ability to win a small market

Starting point is 01:31:19 and then be able to win small, adjacent markets, concentric circles over. So maybe the big guys aren't even paying attention because of some innovator's dilemma. They'll consistently say, that market's just too small or it doesn't make sense. And you win this little slice and then you can win this adjacent slice.

Starting point is 01:31:37 And then before you know it, you've crept up on the big guys. And it's like- Can you give an example of that? Sure, PayPal is a good example where it's like, why didn't the banks do it? And, um, you know, I don't, I don't think, I don't think there's like a really great answer as to why, as to why they, they didn't, you know? And, um, sometimes it's just, it's just how history goes and it's the ling, the little

Starting point is 01:32:02 dinghy can outmaneuver the big cruise ship. Yeah, there are loads of examples. And then sometimes the market goes in various ways where you build a thing and you don't quite know what it's going to turn into. Larry Page and Sergey, they were building, what was it called? It was like Backrub or something was like the initial algorithm they were building as PhDs at Stanford. I have to look this up, but I think that was the name. And who knew that organizing information online would be, I mean, it sort of makes,

Starting point is 01:32:36 it makes sense in retrospect, right? It's like, okay, you have this, this is akin to the printing press as far as like a stepwise leap in human technological innovation and just the internet and then the ability to organize information on the internet of course you're going to get a ton of eyeballs and then in retrospect it's like obviously a ton of ad revenue is going to come with that that's a killer business but at the time you just it's a weird science project that like kind of turned into that. And so I think, yeah, it's, it's important, you know, I think a lot of zero to one is, it's like a lot of these, these best companies are built on secrets.

Starting point is 01:33:14 And so like maybe they had an intuition for that before anybody else. And like maybe Mark Zuckerberg talks about how he'd be at the cafeteria at Harvard or whatever. And he's like, yeah, at some point in the future, we're going to be playing games with each other online. Everything is going to have a social overlay. And then he always just assumed Bill Gates would do it. And there's something about having that specific vision for the future

Starting point is 01:33:38 that don't take that for granted. If somebody else doesn't have that, even if they have the means to do the thing that you want to do, even if they have 10x the means that you have, sometimes you can just do it. And I think that's a really empowering thought. Well, I feel empowered. Well, I think what you're doing is super unique.

Starting point is 01:34:00 It's cool, man. Because you're kind of an insider outsider. Like you are speaking to like people really inside the beltway in academia who have like very prestigious titles. And then you're also entertaining out their ideas. And I think you have this desperation inside of academia around, um, progress, not being as fast as it, it should, people not having as much latitude as they should. And then I think on the outside, people are desperate for, there are outsiders as a result of that, that are probably more credible than ever before, because they don't feel like they fit into academia. But they want somebody like you, who also speaks to top academics to like engage with them and so i i

Starting point is 01:34:48 think what you're doing is like a perfect example and it's an expression of who you are as a person that you know some other random person who might have you know billions of dollars or whatever it isn't going to be able to recreate because it's would be inauthentic. It's not them. What you're doing is you. Someone said that Toa is like, there's the spiritual crowd, and it's too numinous and intangible. And there's so much BS. And they realize that. And then while on the other side, there's a hardcore scientific crowd that feels like there must be something more and it's like toe is in the middle that has both arms out and somehow can touch or allow them to touch or communicate i love that i love that respectfully and merging

Starting point is 01:35:36 merging the science and the in the spirit and if you yeah and maybe they maybe those two things converge and you know and if you look at a lot of scientists, it's funny, a lot of scientists later in life, everybody says they get kooky later in life. And that's when they start to speculate about crazy, it's like that's when Francis Crick starts to spend time on consciousness, right? Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:35:58 And that's when Heisenberg was super into Eastern philosophy. Schrodinger was named his, I think it was his dog or his cat, Otman or something. These guys, they get very mystical at the end of their life. And it could, the Occam's razor thing is like, they're grasping at straws. They do their best work early. Or maybe it's that they just converge on the same thing the spiritual people do.

Starting point is 01:36:25 And there's some convergence. There's some omega point convergence of the two things or something. John von Neumann became Christian. I didn't know that. A year before he died. That's amazing. There's a crazy interview with Edward Teller where he's like talking about, because he had blood cancer or something,

Starting point is 01:36:44 and von Neumann is like losing his mind. And Teller's like, I can tell him losing his mind. That's the worst thing for him because he's so goddamn smart. But that's crazy. I didn't know that he converted to Christianity. Was it sort of a Pascal's wager? Do you get the sense? Or was it a, it was. He said that the universe makes more sense if there was a God. Right. Just to him, it makes more sense. Right. See that?

Starting point is 01:37:08 And that's so wild, right? Like the highest IQ, smartest. I wonder, yeah, I wonder if there's a Dunning-Kruger about faith. So the stereotype, let me say that. Let me repeat that. I wonder if there's a, okay, I have to be careful because I don't want to give, I don't want to imply that I believe something that I don't. So the stereotype is that it's only low IQ people who have faith.

Starting point is 01:37:33 And then when you go to university, then you start to abandon it because you become more scientific and rational. Quote unquote rational and enlightened. But then there are people who, like Ed Witten, who's not, he's highly mystical if you listen to his interviews. And then there's von Neumann, one of the brightest people. Then there's Einstein. Then there's Gödel. People can say that they were, look, they're just, at the time, everyone believed in God. So, of course, they're just of their era. That's not the case for Einstein, nor for Gödel. Ale atheism was on the rise so it's not as if they didn't entertain them right so totally and you know einstein oh yeah what are you gonna say about einstein

Starting point is 01:38:13 well no i what i was gonna say is that einstein said nah we'll talk about that after okay because i'm not sure about it well there are guys are guys now, there's like Francis Collins, like super, super clearly really bright guy who also, you know, believes in God. And yeah, yeah, it's interesting. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know.

Starting point is 01:38:38 I mean, obviously there are all the kind of proverbial anthropic principle arguments as to this thing being kind of intentionally designed by some intelligence. And then... Yeah, recall how earlier you said that almost all of our actions and thoughts and desires come from the seven deadly sins. I was trying to tell Neil, I don't know if you saw that, but I was trying to tell Neil, like, look, you can claim that your skepticism comes from a rational place, but almost all of the data shows that we're social creatures and that what we say and do is heavily, almost entirely informed by where are we in the social hierarchy and what gets me higher

Starting point is 01:39:17 and what gets me lower. And so I don't think that the skepticism is motivated by this dispassionate assessment of the evidence. I think it's that they want to be worshipped by the savants that they look up to. I fully agree. I think ideas can often be fashion statements more than people realize just sort of carrying cards or accessories of social acceptance and not earnest. There's no earnest thinking behind them. And skepticism can be as dogmatic as dogmatism. You know, like you can read like the debates between Dawkins and Berlinski or something on, you know, creationism versus, you know, random universe or whatever. And Dawkins is very, he's emotional and he's shrill

Starting point is 01:40:07 and he's hurling ad hominems at Berlinski. And I don't know, man, that just doesn't seem like, it doesn't seem like you're more dispassionate than Berlinski. Like you're this super, you know, like you're just this like impartial observer. So I agree. You can act like you're not this like impartial observer. So I agree. You can act like you're not pre-leveraged by your own human tendencies, but everybody is. And I'm sure I am, and you are, and it's impossible to escape that.

Starting point is 01:40:37 Yeah. I also wonder if there was a study that came out, like a landmark study, a meta-analysis, that said for those individuals who have an IQ of 180 and above, it turns out that almost all of them have some supernal spiritual element to them. Right. Then I guarantee you the people who have IQ of 110 or 120 or 130, who are trying their best to seem intellectual, will then be like, no, no, no, I believe in God. What are you talking about? Totally. Totally. Exactly. And there was a time where I think it was like the four horsemen. It was Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens. And these guys were in the early 2000s at the apex of their war against religion.

Starting point is 01:41:25 And I fell prey to this a little bit. I was a huge fan of all those guys. And I think now. Same, same. They're awesome. And their contributions individually to their respective fields are inarguable. But I was an obstinate and uncompromising atheist.

Starting point is 01:41:42 That's interesting. I mean, at some points I probably was too. Yeah, no, it's totally, I think I went through kind of a phase. I just, I always thought they were so smart and, you know, and now I think about like some of Sam Harris's stuff, for example, I don't want to use him too much as a, you know, punching bag, he's super smart guy, obviously, but punching value super smart guy obviously but this idea that we can somehow rationally reconstruct principle the principles of you know the virtuous principles of society and make it all work in an instant i think has been laid bare as a failure by modernity and by a lot of western civilization where you have this crazy loneliness epidemic.

Starting point is 01:42:30 A lot of the religious stuff seemed really arbitrary, and yet it was hyper-adaptive, even on just a pure sociological level. You can get rid of the ontological truth of the Bible, which if you believe in the alien stuff, that's a whole rabbit hole of maybe it makes you a biblical literalist. that's a whole rabbit hole of maybe it makes you a biblical literalist. But even without that, a lot of the religious rituals and sort of the belief structure is super adaptive for just keeping society going. There's the sentiment that it's not the government that has the majority of the information about UFOs. It's the private sector. Please explain that.

Starting point is 01:43:22 Even think about how AATIP was set up, right? It was Bigelow Aerospace. And part of that was probably to defend against FOIA requests. If things are kept in the private sector, these companies have, they don't have to give up anything. That's totally within their right. Like if Lockheed like finds something that might be a meteorite, it might be a UFO crash, and they just retrieve it and it's like on their grounds.

Starting point is 01:43:43 I think there's something around meteorite law. I think Ross Coulthard might have even mentioned it on your show. What Jesse is talking about is Ross Coulthard's episode on Theories of Everything, which is linked in the description and shown here, where we talk about recovered UFOs and David Grush. Earlier when mentioning Neil, I was referencing Neil deGrasse Tyson, and here's the episode, again, in the description. And much earlier, I was referencing Neil deGrasse Tyson. And here's the episode, again, in the description.

Starting point is 01:44:10 And much earlier, Jesse was mentioning the connections in the 1950s with quantum gravity research and anti-gravity or UFOs. And I've made a documentary on this very subject. It's a short 30-minute, hopefully fun ride. Link in the description as well. I think there's something around meteorite law. I think Ross Coulter might have even mentioned it on your show. I should follow up on this, so I don't want to say this for sure. But I don't know what grounds we have to say, no, that's ours. That's not yours. I don't know. So I do think you end up in really murky territory if it's in the private sector.

Starting point is 01:44:40 And that, to me, is the only solid explanation for this to have continued, if it's real, for as long as it has. Because otherwise, it's going to be super hard to conceal. And then there's all the connections we made in the Grush documentary with Townsend Brown getting unceremoniously fired despite very great records in the Navy, and then ending up in Burbank working at Lockheed a year before Skunk Works gets formed. And it's sort of this bizarre question of, okay, what happened there? And then his Santa Monica outfit, Townsend Brown Santa Monica Company Guidance Technologies is funded by a guy named Floyd Odlum in 67.

Starting point is 01:45:24 Floyd Odlum owns a majority stake in Northrop, pre-Northrop Grumman merger. And the nominal story is that Brown's experiments fail, which we learn from this amazing biography called The Man Who Mastered Gravity by a guy named Paul Shotskin, was a constant trope where he was trying to create disinfo around his own work to marginalize it. And so the nominal story is that his work fails, even though he's meeting with Edward Teller and Curtis LeMay and really top guys at the time. And then in 1992, the Aviation Week publishes a story that the B-2 stealth bomber, which is built by the merged Northrop Grumman, uses the Byfield-Brown effect and uses an electrostatic effect to reduce drag, which is Townsend-Brown's work.

Starting point is 01:46:15 And so was there like covert IP transfer going on there? And so, you know, I don't know. I mean, even if you look at, I think Close Encounters of the Third Kind was sort of, I think Spielberg might have known more than he let on. And he obviously consulted with Jacques Vallée at the very least, who was depicted in it. And there's a snapshot in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where you see two crates. And the two crates, one says TRW, which is former Northrop program. The other says Skunk Works, which is a Lockheed program. It's wild.

Starting point is 01:46:48 It's in the movie. And so these two companies tend to come up a ton. And then, yeah, I don't know. There are a handful of other companies that come up that I don't know. But that would be my guess, right? If you really wanted to keep this stuff concealed, you'd keep it in the private sector. How is it that you prep for interviews that you're not an expert in? How do you go about preparing?

Starting point is 01:47:13 Man, I'm weird in that I think I obsessively research on my own time, and then I try to be as extemporaneous as possible in the actual interview and it probably gets me into trouble and I probably am not as prepared as I should be in certain cases and then the added element is I think you go in with good energy I always find in everyday conversation if I know what I'm going to say before I say it I always fuck it up

Starting point is 01:47:42 it never comes out as good as I said it in my head but if I have no idea what I'm going to say before I say it, I always fuck it up. It never comes out as good as I said it in my head. But if I have no idea what I'm going to say before I say it, it's always like kind of good. And there, I think there's this article that came out two years ago. That's like less, you know, 10% of people don't have an inner monologue or whatever. And this article came up in a conversation I was having at a restaurant with some friends. And I remember being shocked, being like, people do have an inner monologue. Like what? Like people have like a voice in their head that like uses words. Yeah. And I was like, what? What are you talking about? So I've never had that. And so I think it's sort of reduces the latency or something where it's just like, whoop. And like, I don't know if that's good maybe it's maybe it's bad but

Starting point is 01:48:25 does that affect meditation like making it easier for you no we I would still say I'm frenetic and can be distracted and type a and I just think in sort of gestalt concepts or imagery uh and so I I need meditation as meditation as much as the next person, and I'm probably as bad at it as anybody else. And it really helps me, actually. I'm very sort of grateful to it. So take us through the editing of the Grush episode. So you get all this footage, and then, okay, now what does the timeline look like?

Starting point is 01:49:01 How are you directing it in your head? What are you choosing to include versus exclude and why? Yeah. Yeah. So it was like a mad dash. We made it in a month and with not that much money. It was like me and my, if only people knew, it was like me and a ragtag team. It was like my editor and we had my assistant editors right here now.

Starting point is 01:49:23 and we had my assistant editors right here now and we had a few cameramen and we kind of double used resources with us in Yes Theory. And so we get footage in the hearing and then we get footage back at his home in Colorado. And then we go back to LA and all of a sudden we're just like, okay, let's hit the ground running.

Starting point is 01:49:43 And I'm writing like a madman. I write like i want to say 30 40 pages have to cut it to like 15 pages or so which is all already feels too long in terms of like the monologue and then ah i'm thinking of like a narrative spine right because i feel like it goes back to our earlier conversation of like what is lacking in the ufo thing it's not what's lacking is not there's so many facts out there it's not a lack of of data or open source research and we should talk about this thing avi lobe said in the washington post as well but it's not a lack of data it's it's a it's an inability to piece the data together in a way that there where there's any sort of cohesive story it's just a jumble it's a clusterfuck of data interesting and

Starting point is 01:50:33 so the goal with the documentary was to create a narrative spine for okay what are the recurring themes nuclear recurring theme right patterson and and and um government officials wanting to get access to it and getting denied recurring theme where there's like a lot there um uh nuclear atomic secrecy and the personnel involved in nuclear recurring theme um and then and then we get and then and then and then we sort of demarcated. I'd say the part two of the documentary was almost like just theory because I feel like we're really under-indexed on theory. And that's, again, why I love your show is because you get into some of the theory.

Starting point is 01:51:15 But it's like, are these ETs? Are they co-located? Are they time travelers? What's actually going on here? And so those were the two parts like from just a human history perspective part one was like can you weave together a coherent narrative of like what's going on yeah and i think we did a decent job of that and then part two was just like oh yeah let's speculate like what what the hell's going on uh-huh so again i i recommend anyone

Starting point is 01:51:43 watch it and the link will be in the description Maybe some of it will be on screen right now so that you can see. The channel is Jesse Michaels. That means a lot. Spelled without an A. Yes. But just like Michaels. Yeah. Okay. Thank you.

Starting point is 01:51:57 Jesse, what part of the Grush interview was cut that was interesting that is off air, but people maybe should know about it. Yeah, the one thing I think I can talk about is we talked about Roger Penrose and his theory of orchestrated objective reduction. And you're, I'm sure, intimately familiar with this theory. I find it really fascinating that maybe microtubules in the brain are sort of undergoing, they basically, like wave function collapse takes place there. And there's some sort of weird discordance with what we're viewing in the form of classical reality, macroscopic, discrete reality, and then what you might think of as subatomic reality, which feels fundamentally probabilistic if you just look at Schrodinger's equation. And so that's an interesting sort of answer to that question. And we were getting into very speculative territory, which he can hang with.

Starting point is 01:53:05 He can speculate. And we were talking about how maybe people see the UFOs when they're in very heightened states of consciousness, which seems to be a recurring trope, right? If you have the five observables of how UFOs perform, but then you also have the two repeatable things as far as them showing up for people are you're around a nuclear site, and then maybe if you're

Starting point is 01:53:33 in some sort of heightened state of consciousness. And the second thing you could write off is the person's tripping or whatever, but often it's people with zero mental health history. So what is that? And maybe it has something to do with the Penrose thing, where maybe that collapsing function of the wave equation isn't going on quite in the right way via the microtubules. And so you're glitching into the more ontologically true probabilistic reality and you're viewing these UFOs as a result.

Starting point is 01:54:08 And there are different ways to, the ontological kind of fundamentals behind that could be different. It could be like you're viewing another multiverse branch or something. So that would be like many worlds or something. And so the brain is sort of collapsing it something. So that would be like, you know, ever many worlds or something. And you're, you know, and so the brain, the brain is sort of collapsing it into, into this, into this world. And you're,

Starting point is 01:54:30 you're viewing kind of another, another branch or like, I tend to think that, you know, Einstein had these debates with the Copenhagen school and it was around, you know, whether, whether he, Einstein was like, God doesn't play dice, very famously, and Niels Bohr in the Copenhagen School, they were like, no, quantum stuff's super spooky. If you think you understand it, you don't understand it. It's really a set of mathematical formalisms that are useful, and I guess the way I think,

Starting point is 01:55:04 and this is, again, me totally speculating, this is way above my pay grade, but I think both are right in a sense. I think God actually doesn't maybe play dice with position and momentum, and the wave equation does say something about reality that kind of relativity or the Newtonian paradigm does not. But maybe God plays dice with time. And so maybe the brain is sort of a snap-to-grid time sensor. And so maybe Schrodinger's equation, which takes time for granted, And so maybe Schrodinger's equation, which takes time for granted, over time, the kinetic energy and potential energy of a system is the total energy. all sorts of stuff, but it's couched within some larger theory that we don't know where time is actually creating the superpositionality of position and momentum. And so it sounds really

Starting point is 01:56:13 nuts, but this would go to like Gary Nolan's thing around the caudate nucleus and potamen where like me, I'm really interested in parts of the brain where like if somebody makes a decision that doesn't make any sense from like an inductive perspective, like it makes no sense on like a go forward basis, but it makes sense only in the context of the future. And so like it's a totally irrational thing that you're doing, but it makes sense in the context of the future. And so they set up fMRIs to people's brain and the caudate and the potamen of the basal ganglia lights up when people make these super counterintuitive moves in the game Go, which is a super complex game. And that to me is super interesting. Like maybe that explains the remote viewing connection with UFOs where you are glitching into, maybe

Starting point is 01:57:06 you're seeing the probability function, maybe you're glitching into like another part of the probability function, or maybe you're literally seeing into the future and you're sending the information back in time with some sort of temporal non-locality. You know, it's been speculated by people way smarter than me that you can reverse temporal sequences in quantum computations. You can reverse qubit states. And so maybe on the application layer, you can send information back in time as well. And so Grush and I, we went really deep on speculating around that stuff. And I didn't put it in there because I'm like, maybe I'm too stupid to be speculating on this. And he only has a bachelor's in physics.

Starting point is 01:57:46 And all these people are going to come down on me. And I just want to prove that this stuff is real because I really believe that it's real. And so I sort of cut it. But it was a really interesting conversation. And I'd love to, see, this is where I would love to tell this to you and this have a ripple effect. Because you probably noticed like three glaring errors and what i just said or like you you like i'm sure know all these people who can like take this way further than me and you yourself can um but you know it's just sort of

Starting point is 01:58:15 an intuition and and even if you read like sean carroll's something deeply hidden he says look i don't think like you know it, it's like, how can we derive space-time from the quantum? It's a big question. And, you know, he's like, I think we're going to, you know, time will be, we're going to find out that time is not emergent. It's fundamental. That's what he says. that Wheeler and DeWitt in the 50s do have this interesting model and they play into the whole UFO in physics conspiracy stuff that you do by the way a great documentary on um they they the Wheeler DeWitt equation does does discuss time being an emergent phenomena and so you have time

Starting point is 01:59:00 is emergent a lot of this stuff makes a lot more sense, I think, than people realize. And that goes to this not being just classic extraterrestrials from Proxima Centauri B and more some weird, you know, trans-tempor giving some experimental ideas, and then he just said, yeah, maybe, or no, or I don't know. And then you're like, okay, well, that's mainly me speaking for 95% of it, him saying yes or no, and you don't want people to criticize him for no reason or criticize you for no reason. It doesn't add to the documentary, so let's just remove that. My own critique of the documentary is I felt like i i spoke a little too much um he's just really constrained in what he can and can't say and and he uh-huh he can say obviously he can say like these mind blowing things and you combine the credentials versus the the you know in the claims and it's it's worthy of any mainstream news outlet covering to no end.

Starting point is 02:00:06 It's really important stuff. And then there's a weird way in which he can do that, and then he can speculate on very out there, way outside the Overton window, crazy stuff. And then the meat in the middle of what happened in XYZ crash, like Roswell or whatever, it's like if he knows anything classified about the topic, he just can't talk about it.

Starting point is 02:00:27 And so it's this weird thing where he's the best person to speak to on the topic. And then in some ways, as an interview subject, it's hard, too. Is that why there were so many cuts? Or is that just because that's the nature of your film? It was a lot of it. Yeah, and I even feel like I spoke too much in the final thing but i we in post i tried to make myself speak as little as

Starting point is 02:00:51 possible and so i mean it's it's i think it's why you're such a great interviewer is like even now like you're just you have this clear like you let you let the people speak and it's that's amazing and i i try to generally be like that and I don't think I was like that in this thing but I felt like I was almost forced to not be like that because I didn't want to do a repeat of the News Nation thing which was great and it was awesome that it got out but it was just this fundamental layer. Apparently there's a three hour version.

Starting point is 02:01:20 I want to see it. Because I know Ross can speak about all this stuff and, you know, go really deep on it. And it was probably important for the first thing to be this more serious news story about, you know, just what are the facts or whatever. But I really did want to go into more speculative territory with him. And so, yeah, it was kind of all I could do is sometimes fill the room with my own

Starting point is 02:01:49 sort of theories. Yes. So a couple of times I asked you a question about Grush. I don't recall what they were specifically, but your answer was, let me see if I can talk about that. And then you think, which implies to me that grush had told you what you can't speak about now is that the case no i i don't i don't think so i don't think he's i think he's always like incredibly tactical and good about not doing i mean it's his job you know like he literally is like a trained professional at that And I think he's very good about doing that with me. But I also, and I'll be transparent about this, I feel like a filial connection with him.

Starting point is 02:02:32 I really like the guy. I feel friendship with him. And so if there are any sort of gray areas where maybe he shouldn't have speculated on XYZ or whatever, I really don't want to get a guy who I think is doing a very good thing into trouble. No, I can't say, I definitely can't say like kind of smoking gun

Starting point is 02:02:52 and he would be self-identifying if he was like saying, you know, by the way, don't say that to the public or whatever, then I would know that the thing was classified or whatever. I literally have no idea. He's never said anything kind of not in my mind above board to me. And most of my stuff, if you watch the documentary,

Starting point is 02:03:13 it's all open source stuff. And I cite all the books and all the, you know, and so that's why sometimes it's a little frustrating when people are like, why do you trust this guy so much? And I'm like, look, I trust him. He's a friend of mine. Yeah, of course I trust him. I wouldn't be putting the thing out if I didn't trust him. But you're relying on him more than I am. You're saying that if you find one thing with him as a person, that will rattle your entire

Starting point is 02:03:40 confidence about the space. If Dave turned on me tomorrow, I'd be like, that sucks. Like, that was my buddy. And he was like an important, he was an important data point for me, but he's one data point. There's so much open source stuff. And so these, these media people that, you know, have all these like little, they nitpick and they have all these semantics sort of like, you know, Dave's a liar because of X, Y, XYZ or, you know, he's in with these people or whatever. It's like, okay, but, and then that flips your entire worldview into thinking that there's

Starting point is 02:04:11 nothing worthy of investigation here. So like, was he in a back room with Robert Hastings writing UFOs and nukes and when they met with twining or the twining family and it's like, there's, there's so much here. And if, if, if it takes that little for you to flip, then I don't think you're doing good research or good work. And maybe, maybe you deserve to flip, you know, like it's fine. You don't, you shouldn't be researching the topic. I don't know what to say. I'm laughing because usually in the toe podcasts, there's a beginning snippet of about 10 seconds of a of a tantalizing clip yeah and you're using

Starting point is 02:04:46 the word you but the audience without the context would think you're just accusing me oh no no i could just put that at the beginning yeah you don't know what you're talking about you don't it'll be like the start of the neil degrasse tyson episode so okay so speaking of the evidence for ufos I'm sure you get this frequently, maybe from Peter Thiel. It's like, okay, what is the best evidence? Jesse, you keep saying there's evidence. Is it like increscent evidence or it's just a snippet here, like a grain of sand that

Starting point is 02:05:15 makes a heap? Or is there, well, I know you'll say there is no smoking gun. Yeah. What's the closest? Yeah. What's the best evidence for ufos you're someone is on the fence there are many people who are watching who are convinced yeah and there are many people who are watching who are skeptical and many people who just find this interesting

Starting point is 02:05:33 so for those latter two yeah what evidence i think it's hard to force rank and it depends on the person and how they think about things as far as how you would force rank them. So if you're like into credentials, the DOD has over a hundred cases, you know, the Office of Naval Intelligence, you know, two reports, over a hundred cases, unidentified stuff. You know, if you're a visual person, you have, you know, Nimitz FLIR data where you can like see the stuff and then you have what you would have to call reliable witness as far as Commander David Fravor, a guy who was literally tasked with, on 9-11, when we didn't know how many of these hijacked planes were in the sky, with defending LA. He was a commander in the Navy. No mental health history. That guy's a reliable witness, corroborated by FLIR data. That's pretty

Starting point is 02:06:20 interesting. You have a Stanford microbiologist who claims to have UFO crash parts with isotope ratios corroborated by real mass spectrometry that he's done that don't naturally occur on Earth and would be hard for a person to reverse engineer. And what would the motive be is sort of the question. And they come from Jacques Vallée, who is a longtime researcher, well-respected, worked on the first version of the internet with Doug Engelbart. And from people mailing them or him flying out to these places and retrieving the crash materials, where people saw Kraft blow up or whatever. Again, in many cases, these people had no mental health history. So there's all of that.

Starting point is 02:07:04 There's John Mack, who's the head of the Harvard Psychiatry Department, who, you know, in his own private clinical, you know, practice started to see a lot of people who, again, no mental health history, had all these sort of weird claims of close encounters of the third kind. If I were to force rank, I would force rank that lower than everything I just said, because that could be just psychological. All of what you said up until the therapist could be classified as there's strangeness in the sky, and then there's some objects that are associated with it. Yep. Okay, so that could be either some unknown astronomical effect, or it could be China.

Starting point is 02:07:44 It could be... But I'm just saying, okay. Yeah. Could be tech in the sky or some natural phenomenon. Totally. And then the therapist one. And then therapist one. And then how do you connect them?

Starting point is 02:07:52 And the way you would connect them and the rebuttal to just space trash, which is a possible explanation for some of this stuff, is you have hundreds of accounts, whether it's Kenneth Arnold or whether it's this nuclear missile radar operators and UFOs and nukes, or whether it's Foo Fighters with these Allied fighter pilots in 1944 in Germany, or Swedish Ghost Rockets, which was these UFO sightings in Sweden, considered a high enough priority for Eisenhower to send General James Doolittle to go investigate. A lot of people, like almost all of the accounts are like, these things seem to be intelligently propulsed. They are moving in intelligent ways. So it's not, at least visibly, it looks like they are moving in observably controlled, deliberately controlled ways. So that to me wouldn't pattern match to kind of meteor or space trash. And there are just a lot of those accounts.

Starting point is 02:08:50 You have the Phoenix Lights. You just have a ton of historical accounts. Steven Spielberg has a good documentary on all this stuff called Encounters. And usually that's the case. I have a speculation. I want to hear it. Let's hear your speculation. No, it's the case. I have a speculation. I want to hear it. Let's hear your speculation. No, it's not huge.

Starting point is 02:09:06 But I was wondering, why is it that these objects follow cars sometimes or they follow a plane? And we often think it's to intimidate or it's going to take us or it's collecting data on us. But it could be maybe that's just in the same way that if you want to run, you have to open your eyes. You need some sense data around you to orient yourself. It could be that in order for them to move, to make some sort of turn, they need to lock onto an object. And so they're just like, okay, that's the largest large object. Let me just lock onto that. Great. Now I can go away. Oh, that's fantastic. It has nothing to do with you. You're a side effect and you think it's following me. No,

Starting point is 02:09:42 it doesn't care about you. That's really fascinating. Well, going off this, there's a famous article that came out in Jane's Defense Weekly in 1956, of which actually Nick Cook, who wrote this great book called The Hunt for Zero Point, was an editor. I highly recommend it. It's a super hard-headed nuts and bolts book he was just a normal aviation journalist not at all into ufos and it's called the the title is goes here come the g engines and it's it's bill lear is quoted and he's the inventor of the learjet and then this guy named george trimble who runs research advanced institute for advanced study at martin corporation And it's this anti-gravity research outfit. Lewis Witten works there.

Starting point is 02:10:27 And so there's this whole wild kind of counter history we can get into. But one possible theory on, so that's an interesting theory on the navigation you just mentioned. One interesting theory on the propulsion is they talk about how we can use nuclear propulsion to figure out anti-gravity. And this seems to be a constant trope. We need to figure out nuclear propulsion. And Townsend Brown, his gravitator works

Starting point is 02:10:52 with these sort of crazy amounts of electrical charge over short distances using like megavolt charges over short distances to create kind of an anti-gravity effect. And the only limiter there is the energy. And he spent a lot of his career trying to find something called the quote-unquote flame jet generator. And that was sort of basically like a localized nuclear reaction that would provide enough energy to get those megavolt outputs

Starting point is 02:11:27 that would allow for you know this kind of constant anti-gravity to occur over a longer period of time and so anyways this is all a super long-winded way but another theory as to why they show up around nuclear sites is maybe it's the propulsion maybe Maybe it's somehow like refueling station or something. And in the Albert Salas case in Malmstrom in 67, they take down the nuclear sites. Maybe they need to take down the nuclear sites so they could refuel or something. I have no idea.

Starting point is 02:11:59 But going along with your interesting sort of car navigation theory, maybe there's something there. Have you heard of Edward Leedskalin? No, who's that? Maybe the name sounds slightly familiar. He's the guy who created Coral Park, Coral Stone Park. I know, but then the weird, yes, where he can use ancient technology to move the stones, the megalithic stones or whatever.

Starting point is 02:12:24 Yeah. can use ancient technology to move the stones the megalithic stones or whatever yeah yeah so i have a reddit account and i think my number one ranked post is me posting like 10 years ago this today i learned that so-and-so the edward leeds colin was this five foot four man or five foot five man skinny man who built this huge park and said he knew single-handedly, by the way, or at least it seems like it was single-handed. And he said he knew how the pyramids worked and he wouldn't let anyone watch how he moved these stones. And they were with such precision, like millimeter, sub-millimeter precision that even today with machines that we have, we couldn't put some stone back on his hinge in order to make it not squeak or turn as smoothly.

Starting point is 02:13:07 stone back on its hinge in order to make it not squeak or turn as smoothly okay so that's the story behind this guy and this was 50 years ago or so or i don't know but it was decades ago yeah what have you heard about this and in connection with ufos or in connection with tesla which is in connection with ufos or right and by the, just to make this all clear to you, but also to the audience, I don't believe in UFOs, but I don't believe in not UFOs. So when I'm putting this out there, I'm just having fun in the same way that when the lights are out and you hear a noise,

Starting point is 02:13:39 your mind conjures a multitude of images and you're wondering, okay okay what is it that produced that it's just fun for me i like ideas and i like playing with them i'm i'm right there with you man and i that's a refreshing take to hear and i believe in ufos insofar as they're unidentified so that's where i agree with neil degrasse tyson and then where i the only place i disagree with him is i think that's when you start investigating. That's not when you stop investigating. Right.

Starting point is 02:14:08 And also the scorn, like you disagree with that. Yeah, and I agree. There's no need. There's no need and the ego and all that. But yeah, totally. Yeah, on the Coral Gables front, I don't know. That's where we get into crazy territory with like, you know, Stephen Greer talking about the government's

Starting point is 02:14:24 not only hiding craft, reverse engineered craft, they're hiding zero point energy. And that would have calamitous economic effects if we were to let this out. So we shouldn't let it out or, you know, that's, that's their reasoning for not to, you know, not letting it out. And I just don't know. And then there's the whole Tesla thing and John Trump thing. And Donald Trump's uncle, who was at the Rad Lab, who was very close with Vannevar Bush and all these kind of top science guys in the 40s and 50s, was actually tasked with looking into Tesla's vault. Tesla's stuff, a lot of it is classified. And John Trump was actually tasked with investigating it on behalf of the

Starting point is 02:15:06 government, which is a really interesting, weird, weird fact. And so, you know, did he figure out anything on Long Island? I think he's being funded by JP Morgan at the end of his career. And he was also experimenting with like, you know, high electricity, you know, short distances or whatever. I have no idea. Where the overlap exists is there tends to be a correlation in terms of people interested in crazy things or whatever. I see.

Starting point is 02:15:35 And look, I do think if these things, the propulsion they're using, they're definitely exotic at least. They're exotic and deep black and people do know how to use them. Humans know how to use them. Or they're really exotic in that they tap into, whether it's quantum vacuum space extraction,

Starting point is 02:15:58 or you'd have to revive the ether or something. I don't know. Do you think another country like China or Russia is responsible for it? That's a really interesting question that never gets asked. And, okay, you want to go to a really trippy place? So Agnew Bainson, who creates the Institute of Field Physics in the 50s with Bryce DeWitt, the whole purpose of this thing is to study gravity. And the Chapel Hill Conference in 57,

Starting point is 02:16:29 you have Freeman Dyson and John Wheeler and all these top guys, and they're talking about gravity. And it popularizes quantum gravity and sort of establishes quantum gravity, of which you could say string theory is like the stepchild or whatever. And so Bainson is clearly funding pretty important stuff in physics. And he writes a fiction novel called The Stars Are Too High.

Starting point is 02:17:14 And it is about the creation of this exotic craft by a rogue German faction that the high-ranking Nazi officials weren't even aware of. And I think some of the tech goes to the U.S. and some of the tech goes to Russia. And here's where it just gets really weird. It's like maybe that whole thing is fiction. But if you read The Hunt for Zero Point, you know, the Nick Cook book, which is very, very fact-based and hard-headed, and he shakes out saying, I don't know if the government ever figured out, you know, zero point energy. He talks about, you know, rumored UFO reverse engineering programs in Germany, where all the first Foo Fighters were seen in 1944 and where Townsend Brown parachutes into under William Donovan and William Stevenson, Bill Donovan, William Stevenson, who create the CIA out of the OSS. They send him to go investigate these sort of anti-gravity programs that the Germans were rumored to have had.

Starting point is 02:18:06 And Nick Cook actually even has a really cool documentary on YouTube where he, like, goes and visits the sites where these anti-gravity projects were supposedly rumored to have taken place. There was one with a scientist named Mita and another named Shriver. And I think one was in northern Germany and the other was in Bavaria. And I think Mita was in Bavaria, if I'm not getting this wrong. And then there's this crazy scavenging from both the Americans and the Russians to get this tech as fast as possible. And the nominal mission on the American side was called TICOM. And they were trying to get this Nazi Enigma machine that was, I think, even more complex than the traditional Enigma machine. And they didn't want the Russians to decipher it first.

Starting point is 02:18:50 But there was a whole laundry list of kind of weirder esoteric tech underneath that. And that's what Townsend Brown was presumably, that's why he was parachuting in. Robert Sarbacher was supposedly there as well. And he was, Grush has talked about him being reportedly in the standup of, you know, UFO secrecy. So, um, it's, it's really interesting question. Like did, did, um, did the Russians figure this out too? And, and then, and then do we, do we have sort of this competing program that, you know, maybe it's, we both took it from, from the Germans or something. Maybe paperclip was all the more pressing of a need for paperclip because of that history. Herman Oberth, who was the original father of German rocketry,

Starting point is 02:19:35 he was Wernher von Braun's mentor. There are tons of clips of him talking about UFOs and flying saucers in the sky and ETs. Wernher von Braun was obviously a very trippy guy who talked about entities guiding him to space and was actually very instrumental in the creation of Stargate, which was the CIA psychic spy program, and wanted to do parapsychology experiments in space, was very into all that stuff. So it's a weird history. And maybe the Bainson thing is total fiction.

Starting point is 02:20:08 Maybe he's hiding truth in fiction. I don't know. Another exclusive interview that, Jesse, you have that no one else has is an interview with Hal Puthoff. At least one of this depth on video. And you were able to pair him with eric weinstein so that also was edited please tell us what was left out and also how that connection came about yeah um so the the initial connection was actually i think 2018 2019 i just like cold reached out to him i i was just really interested in his stuff. And man,

Starting point is 02:20:48 you'd be really surprised. Like now these people are like pseudo celebrities or whatever. But like back in the day, if you were just earnestly into the UFO topic, it was a very small world and it was pretty easy to access these people. And if you had any good ideas about the topic that you could, you know, instrumentally add. And again, he probably, I think he knew the context of where I worked. And so it was like, I'm interested in this very out, out there ideas, but I can also, you know, possibly fund them. And I've never, I should say, I should say this definitively.

Starting point is 02:21:18 I have never funded anything with UFO reverse engineering. I don't have any plans to, I don't care about that. I I'm into this because of the nature of reality and just pure intellectual genuine curiosity and if there were opportunities to sort of work on this stuff and through patronage or directly fuck yeah i'd say yeah like i think it'd be awesome to work on but i'm i'm i'm with you except for that so i am interested in this from an intellectual side and what this has to do with reality yeah but i would not work on it that's fair and i don't want to be told any secrets so sometimes people will say like have has this guest talked to you off air i always tell people don't share with me anything that you

Starting point is 02:22:06 wouldn't be willing to publicly say yeah yeah because i don't i just don't want to be i don't want that knowledge totally i don't want to ever have to say i can't tell you uh or like look look i can't i i i feel like it i i just i guess it comes from the academic world where it has to be open. Yeah, no, I. It has to be open. There's no, there's like never, never in the academic world do you say, yeah, can you tell me the data on this? And then they're like, I wish I could, but I can't.

Starting point is 02:22:35 It's, and I feel the 100% the same way. I think the only time I would ever not say something in an interview is if I feel like I'm screwing somebody else over. That's, that's the only, like, and I'll be totally, like, I just told you in this interview that I made a really shitty investment and it's like, and it's, it's already public information. So it's like, fine. You know, it's like, but, but I, I, I'm, I'm with you in that.

Starting point is 02:23:00 Otherwise I want to be completely transparent. And I don't think, I don't think you should trust me if I'm not, you know. Or, or if it's something personal. I have no qualms with someone saying to me that their cousin has been diagnosed with so-and-so, please keep this under wraps. And then, okay, that's fine. I'm not going to talk about that.

Starting point is 02:23:18 That's completely different than a government secret, for instance. Totally. But anyway, continue. Yeah, so your interest in this is cerebral and metaphysical. than a government secret, for instance. But anyway, continue. So your interest in this is cerebral and metaphysical, and if you were given the opportunity, you would. Maybe. Maybe. Making it clear that you have not invested.

Starting point is 02:23:38 Never. In the phenomenon. Never, and don't even know. Other than making your own YouTube channel. Yeah, yeah, sure't count doesn't count but um yeah i'm interested in it i think for the same reasons you are it's like i think anomalies can point to new scientific paradigms it's like black body radiation with quantum mechanics or yes great great great great points or or you know the orbit of mercury with with relativity the Newtonian paradigm couldn't explain it.

Starting point is 02:24:07 Where it's like you get these weird observables that break the current theory. And again, that's why your show is so cool. It's like you're exploring the anomalies with an open mind because you can construct new theories as a result. And so, yeah, anyway, going back to the put-off thing, maybe Gary Nolan or somebody like that might have intro'd me or I think I might have just cold reached out and been like, hey man, I'm super into your stuff. I wrote an earnest email about showing I had sort of deeply researched it, and he was open to meeting.

Starting point is 02:24:37 And then, what was the other, there was another part of that question with put-off? Yeah, okay, so that explains, you met him in about 2018 via cold email. You interviewed him. What was left out? I think a lot of what was left out, and I know some of the comments are like, you left out the craziest stuff or whatever, and it's like, we left out some of the kookiest. This is, I think it was awesome.

Starting point is 02:25:06 What's the difference between crazy and kooky? Well, some of the craziest. Craziest, yeah, totally. No, good point. I mean crazy in terms of the implication, definitely true and really important and with profound implications. We definitely didn't do that.

Starting point is 02:25:24 So more secretive versus speculative. Right, exactly. I think the stuff we cut was hyper-speculative, going really into quacky places on the parapsychology. I think it took a lot for Eric to do that interview, especially at the time. This was earlier in the UFO curve, where now it's somehow become super acceptable for everybody

Starting point is 02:25:47 to talk about. But it was kind of relegated to more kooky people at the time. And Eric has, as you know, a theory of everything. And I think in the process of having that gain greater acceptance, you have to be sensitive to other stuff you sort of entertain. And so I think, yeah, if we cut anything, it was my own decision sort of out of conscientiousness to him because he was nice enough to do the interview with me where I didn't want to fully implicate himself with stuff that I'm willing to explore personally, but I think maybe he needs to not be

Starting point is 02:26:28 swimming in that sort of stuff. Okay. At first, when you said that there were more conjectural ideas that it would be coming from Hal Puthoff, am I to... I'm surmising that they came from Eric Weinstein as well. No, no. It wasn't like he said anything. I think it was like, you know, the association or whatever. A tacit agreement by not... Yeah, by being there.

Starting point is 02:26:50 Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no, he didn't say... Ah, so by not putting up enough of an objection, it could be seen as being tacitly in accord with them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like maybe we talked about Ingo Swann's book Penetration and Space Side and Earth Side.

Starting point is 02:27:04 You know, it's like stuff that's just like, it's impossible to falsify or corroborate. we talked about Ingo Swann's book Penetration and Space Side and Earth Side. It's stuff that's just impossible to falsify or corroborate. It's not even true. It's not even wrong, the Feynman thing. If you can't falsify it, why are we bringing it up? Yeah, that sort of stuff. I also just wanted to keep the flow good and make sure it was comprehensible for the average person as well,

Starting point is 02:27:29 which hopefully it was. So yeah, I don't know. It's funny to be- Can you say what some of them are now? I don't even remember. Like, it's really like, that's how like, I mean, I think maybe the thing about Ingo Swann, like where it was like that,

Starting point is 02:27:44 or maybe like, maybe getting into Bob Lazar, like where it was like that, or maybe like, maybe getting into Bob was like a little deeper into Bob Lazar or things like that, where it's like, I don't think Hal's presence there. Fantastic. You should have. Yeah, it could,

Starting point is 02:27:53 it could, it could have been good, but I don't like, it was like, I knew it's like, how was he going to say anything? You know, he couldn't talk about it.

Starting point is 02:28:00 If he didn't know anything about it, he probably wouldn't have said, he definitely didn't say it. I could, If he did know anything about it, he probably wouldn't have said. He definitely didn't say anything. I swear on my mother's life that I'm not sitting on some bombshell revelation from hell put off from that interview. There's not element 115 behind you? No, the stable version of Muscovian is not sitting on my couch. this, you know, on my couch. Yeah. You know, when you said, when I visited and then I was leaving, I saw this woman outside your place, this old woman. And then I asked you about that initially. And then you said, no, there shouldn't be anyone. And then 20 minutes prior to that, you said,

Starting point is 02:28:40 yeah, there are some crazy happenings here and then i walked away i'm like what what was that woman that i saw that was right up and then you told me later was your landlady or your or your gardener oh i don't know i don't know uh who that was but i will i hope so i will look like some necromancer that's creepy that's weird yeah like if a hom if if if such such a creature took a hominid form at least at nighttime i'm not trying to insult her but i remember feeling uneasy looking at her i i don't yeah i don't i don't remember this outside for a gardener it could have been i hope she doesn't look like a necromancer but to me at nighttime because I was like a throng.

Starting point is 02:29:26 Well, what I was talking about was not old ladies appearing, random apparitions. But Laurel Canyon is a trippy place. It's a weird place. There's definitely interesting energy. I think it's some sort of energy portal. You get all this crazy music history in the 60s and 70s. I don't think that's a coincidence. Townsend Brown lived here for a time when he worked at Martin Vega, which I find fascinating. There's a decommissioned Air Force base around here that I think Jared Litto now lives on that's really trippy and weird.

Starting point is 02:30:02 There's a book called weird scenes inside the canyon that documents a lot of the conspiracies from back in the day around laurel canyon it's just a strange sort of place and uh i've loved it while living here but um i'm kind of down to get out it's it's run its course it's been really fun but uh it's yeah i have them go for it before we talk about alvi loeb yeah david grush said in your documentary which again i'm going to link and the link is in the description or it may be on screen as well right now your documentary that for that is on jesse michaels channel called what is it called? It's called American Alchemy,

Starting point is 02:30:47 but you'd search in Jesse Michaels because that's the handle of the channel. Yeah. Okay. I mean the YouTube title, the video title. Oh, Dave Gresh Tells Me Everything, which is an annoyingly hyperbolic YouTube title. How are you choosing the thumbnail?

Starting point is 02:31:02 So that thumbnail was tough because I got criticized for it, which was probably right. How are you seeing the thumbnail for the first time that i was with him because that was so important i wasn't making some other you know some new like commentary video which is they're all over youtube and so it's like okay i need to find one where i'm with him we couldn't find anything from the hike and then the wide shot had like amar from Theory. His back was like in it for half the time or whatever. So the one shot we could find was kind of a jarring face that he was making. But in a weird way, it was like, you know, it was like clear that I was with him and he was like making a point and he was animated. And so we just ran with it and I changed it.

Starting point is 02:32:00 So now the evergreen version is like a much more you know I think kind of respectable looking version of him or whatever um and it was kind of I look I didn't think I didn't think it looked that terrible criticism but I don't know that look the most important thing to me was a get people to watch the thing and the average view duration is still 26 and a half minutes which is crazy. And the click-through rate's bonkers, too. So empirically, whatever we did worked, and it's now, he has a more normal-looking face or whatever. And yeah, I feel shitty we couldn't get a better picture.

Starting point is 02:32:40 I don't care. I mean, from one content creator to another. How is it that you choose the thumbs? Oh, just generally? I try to be as hard-headed as possible. How do we get the highest click-through rate? Do you generate several concepts and then test out a few? Or do you just settle on one and then you're like, this one feels right?

Starting point is 02:33:01 If the video's important important enough i'll often do that and sometimes i'll you know i like the mr beast you know he's i don't admire him as a thinker intellectual but i he's the best at youtube that guy's the best at youtube well as a businessman and you can admire him oh beyond insane what he's done yeah and he's at 24 and wild 25 now wild and he in what and i like his process which is he creates the thumbnail he has to be high conviction in a thumbnail and a title before he even makes the video and so i just not that's not something that would ever occur to me so i that would never occur to me me initially me too i was like i was like this is stupid i don't like that.

Starting point is 02:33:45 And then I started to fall into this groove of like, the stuff we make is a little higher production quality than like your average YouTube video. And like, we're investing a lot of resources. And I'm like, if we're going to invest resources, I can't have these things go into black holes. Like, I just can't have them. Like, if it's just like,. If it's just a raw conversation,

Starting point is 02:34:05 it's fine. One hits, one misses. It's all good. But if you're investing a decent amount of resources, you need them to hit. And so I just started to use that process where it's like, unless I'm high conviction on the thumbnail

Starting point is 02:34:19 and the title, rework the concept until you are high conviction in that. And yeah, that's basically what, what. Yeah. So there's a danger with putting too much production value into a video, but you struck a balance. So for, there's two sides, like go way overproduced, way, way overproduced, like 8k and beautiful light. And that, that can work. Like there are, that can work yeah like there are that can work you can do that tastefully and then there's the other side of just completely scrappy just put up the just put up the live stream and that's it from zoom right and not even process the audio

Starting point is 02:34:56 don't do any editing okay so so on the one side one feels more raw and authentic. So people like that, but new viewers aren't so attracted to it. But then on the other side, if you go too overboard, it feels inauthentic. It feels overproduced, like you were able to go out to dinner and have such a rapport with the guests that you're no longer unbiased. So how do you strike that balance? Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I try to keep it as raw as I can while keeping the flow and realizing that the value prop I'm providing, like you do great long form interviews. And so like, I have to like, and like Jeffrey Mishlove does like great long form interviews, like, and like, so it's like, I have to like up off my game, I have to like do something do something different you know and so that's kind of the way i'm thinking about it it's like how do i and and i do think um we know along with like remembering the facts and weaving together the narratives like i do think again i'm dumb on all sorts of vectors but the thing i'm really good at is like

Starting point is 02:36:01 putting like coherent narratives and like patterns together and so the narrativizing it both probably makes up for like me being like a shittier interviewer than you but it also like allows me to like have like a narrative spine that I'm like can high conviction in that the interview can actually um kind of embellish and illustrate, which I think is really important for this topic where there is just so much content. And yeah, I want to weave together something kind of cohesive, if that makes sense. So like if somebody doesn't really know what's going on, they're like, okay, okay, right, Pat, the atomic stuff's important.

Starting point is 02:36:42 Who's this guy, Townsend Brown? I'm going to read this book. You know, that's kind of the goal. write Pat, the atomic stuff's important. Who's this guy, Townsend Brown? I'm going to read this book. That's kind of the goal. David Grush said that in 2024, he said this on yours, it's just going to go down. It's going to be a crazy year.

Starting point is 02:36:55 Why? And do you have any indication as to when in 2024? Like first half is in March? Is it February? Yeah, I've heard John Ramirez talk about 2027 and Linda Moulton Howe, Roswell Alien interview, talk about some imminent, I think it was 2025 actually, event. And people say, Leslie Cain's talked about people who were in the know saying things are going to get

Starting point is 02:37:21 eminently worse. I don't know how anybody can predict. I think global history is not, history is being written as we speak, and it's just impossible to say how things go. Obviously, in some ways, I think what's happening in the Middle East feels weirdly analogous to World War I, not the players, but the powder keg dynamics where you have Iran and Saudi as these sort of, you know, like maybe Iran was sort of pushing Amos to do this. So Israel wouldn't ally with Saudi. And

Starting point is 02:37:51 then maybe, maybe China uses the whole thing as distraction to take Taiwan, which, you know, clearly is an intent of theirs in the next five to 10 years. Russia, Russia, Ukraine feels super unstable. I can't think of, you know, it's like kinetic energy versus potential energy I can't think of, and you know what happens when you're in a high potential energy state You move to a resting state I can't think of a higher potential energy You know, kind of powder keg Where it's like, this stuff can get gnarly quickly

Starting point is 02:38:20 And it kind of makes it all the more imminent It's like, okay, if there's some like framework, it's like, we're wrong in our current myopic framework, we should explore the better framework. And I think that's part of what your show is doing. And so yeah, around this specific events, you know, I just, I don't think anybody can predict them. But just if you look at what's happening in the world right now, it doesn't feel good. It doesn't, we have this multipolar world and, you know, it's, it's, it's scary. And it's, and just to keep the Ukraine situation at stable state, we need to, U.S. needs to keep investing more and more and more. And then on top of that, you have the aid

Starting point is 02:39:01 we're probably going to have to give to, to give to Israel and then, you know, possible interventions there. You know, I know past, you know, American presidencies have talked about regime change in Iran. And it's like, if you're even thinking about that, how are you going to deal with China, which is probably like the real, you know, the real competition. the real competition. It's scary. I don't envy people who have to think about this on a day-to-day basis. Nominally, it doesn't feel like at least the front-facing people in Washington, they don't feel like they know their ass from their forehead or are at all well-equipped to deal

Starting point is 02:39:44 with any of this stuff. it's it's scary avi lobe gave you some pushback yeah on your doc yeah please talk about that so i i i respect avi and i interviewed him on my show and I'm only speculating, but maybe he felt a little criticized by the fact that I said, you know, if you're trying to find a needle in a haystack, don't add to the haystack. And then Dave actually added, yeah, we're actually oversaturated with data. And the only thing you get from like increased sensor data is an understanding of more hotspots and activity. increased sensor data is an understanding of more hotspots and activity. But really, I think we're under-indexed on theory. It's like fertile grounds for theories of everything, where it's like, we have a lot of data.

Starting point is 02:40:39 The data's not well-organized, so maybe we can have more standard taxonomy. Maybe we can have multi-sensory, more corroborated data. It'd be awesome if the DoD opened up. What are the multisensory data? Can we see the database? We don't have the database. So it's like the Galileo project finding that is awesome. And that's really cool.

Starting point is 02:41:02 But I do think there's this outsourcing of our agency to machine learning that's been going on with the whole AI hype cycle where I think AI works well. It's almost like the Daft Punk song where it does what humans do at low sample size, harder, better, faster, stronger. But it doesn't do it stepwise better. You can't take fire, digitize it, turn it into a database, and get a light bulb. You can't take a horse, cut it up, digitizeain knowledge and polymathism. And there's something about the

Starting point is 02:41:46 I think kind of lazy data story of the Galileo project where it's like, we're just going to get more multi-sensory data where if you can't figure out, if the human brain can't figure out what's going on at low sample size, why would we understand

Starting point is 02:42:02 it at high sample size? You'd just be getting this bigger database and maybe there's something about some of the sensors where it's like more smoking gun that the thing exists or something i don't i don't i don't know you know there's probably some possibly good rebuttal that that he has but i took his dismissal of my stuff as you know a little bit of a you know like like uh like, uh, it's because I critiqued him maybe implicitly, which I didn't even mean, you know, I think it's great that anybody in academia is sort of studying this, but, um, yeah, that's, that's my read. That's

Starting point is 02:42:34 my read on that, I guess. How did you feel when you read it? Um, it's fine. Like I, I, if, if he wanted to talk, I'd hop on a zoom with him tomorrow and like, it's all good. You know, I've had a good relationship with him, you know, through the years. And I do look, if I were to critique him a little more, it's like, there's all this stuff out that lies outside of the traditional scientific framework like the parapsychology stuff that i found in my at least first interaction with him he wasn't even aware of like he and and then you know it's like the nuclear reaction the nuclear connection i think he started to become more aware of and so yeah you're gonna have a bunch of people pushing you towards the same historical stuff i dug up like eventually because i really do think this stuff is going to become more important as a part of the narrative. The things, the important facts around Condon and

Starting point is 02:43:30 Oppenheimer and Townsend Brown, where your whole project is predicated on there being a possibility that this is real. And if you're saying that the historical personnel analysis is just, we should just throw all of that out. It's just not good fact-finding. You can say only looking at data in a multidimensional database is science. Or you can say, no, it's investigatory, and you can investigate what certain people have found in the past who were really respected scientists who might have had to do with the UFO story. And then you can also do that. You can do both. And they're positive some.

Starting point is 02:44:10 They're not zero some. And so, yeah, I don't know. The critique felt, it's like we're all kind of on the same team insofar as we think this is worthy of investigation. I don't know why you're kind of coming after me. And then I think the, the Washington Post, so this is kind of inside baseball, but I think it's worth telling because it just shows how dumb the mainstream media is, man. They like, they kind of like, they didn't watch the videos. I'm convinced because they contended with none of the substance. Like, I love this interview, Kirk, because we're like

Starting point is 02:44:43 talking about the actual substance of like what we talked about in the doc. Like, I love this interview, Kirk, because we're like talking about the actual substance of like what we talked about in the doc. And he didn't, people don't care about facts. He didn't watch the interviews clearly. It was like, why are these frat bros from YouTube? Why did they have access or whatever? And like, first off, I ask myself the same question every time. You, Washington Post reporter, should be writing about this. And you had your chance, by the way, and you completely whiffed and fucked that up. And so like, that was really a thing. Like, the Washington Post and the New York Times screwed this up. And I even spoke to Leslie Kane, who is a New York Times journalist who published this stuff in the debrief because she had to, because they wouldn't publish a story.

Starting point is 02:45:23 because she had to because they wouldn't publish a story. And if you just combine Grush's credentials, you know, with the claims, you can say, caveat it with whatever you want. Say that this stuff is vague and that the jury's out. But to say that this is not worthy of investigation or a story is crazy. And it implies that you have a motive and it's very weird. And so the line that I thought was kind of funny from the Washington Post reporter is my friend Amar from Yes Theory, who was coordinating with the reporter, I think he was like, hey man, I don't think you did the best job with this. And the Washington Post reporter goes, you're lucky to be written about in the Washington Post

Starting point is 02:46:01 and to be in the same article as the greatest living scientist of our time. And he was referring to Avi Loeb as the greatest living scientist of our time. And it's like, you know, it's like, I think Avi Loeb's great, but it's like Roger Penrose is still alive, you know, Ed Witten's still alive. Like there's a lot, there are a lot of people you've interviewed who So it's like, there's no critical thinking in the reporting on this. And I was with my mom the other day, and she's like, you were in the Washington Post. I'm so proud of you.

Starting point is 02:46:37 And I'm like, I appreciate it, Mom, but watch the documentary because it's so much more substantive. You know, the Washington Post reporter was kind of an idiot and kind of smug. It is still an honor though. It is still an honor. Like, congratulations. Thank you. I don't know. I care. I know it's not under this. It's not in the way that you would have hoped or would have liked. Yeah. Well, I just care about substance. I care if you, if you earnestly engage with the stuff, I don care who you are but if you're if you're if you're smug and dismissive and you're resting on credentials to do it it's just like they go into the writing these articles where it's like they they have to keep some a priori distance and smugness and like at arm's length like i realize this is wacky i'm

Starting point is 02:47:22 writing about ufo this is unworthy of my liberal arts degree from williams or whatever and so you know and as a member of the intelligentsia i have to just say that this is all very wacky but and then and then they'll say like one or two kind of intriguing and then they go away and it's like you're doing bad report it's bad journalism it's just it's come on and i get it it's a it's hard to sift through it's hard to sift through the facts so i understand it but yeah let's switch to good journalism okay there's a documentary on your channel called why the soil in green creator went to goat farm something akin to that okay so again the link to that will be in the description. My question to you is, have you considered

Starting point is 02:48:08 any radical life change? That's so interesting you're asking me this question. It's so serendipitous. Yes. I think big cities are really in decline. I think the wage to cost of living ratio doesn't make sense for for people um i don't know as i as i get more interested in like the deeper ideas i feel like time and space is becoming increasingly important and there's something very frenetic about and like

Starting point is 02:48:41 it's very it's very conducive to networking you know being in la or new york or san francisco it's like you meet all these people and then and i'm so grateful for i've met all so many amazing people but but just being here and then it just gets tiring and um there's something about having time and space to like do deep thinking that i feel like is necessary for my next thing. And I think the next thing is more of the same. It's more content creation as the top of the funnel and more investing as the bottom of the funnel, but it's doing it in a more deep and like considerate and slow way where I kind of call, you know, call my shot or pick my shots more,

Starting point is 02:49:22 pick my battles more. And so yeah, I'm thinking a lot about do I move to a smaller city or to the woods somewhere or to Europe? And so I think I'm going to be nomadic actually for the next year, year and a half, call it. And travel to a bunch of cities and try it out, kind of learn by doing and see what I like best and interview a bunch of cities and try it out, kind of learn by doing and see what I like best and interview a bunch of cool people along the way, meet with cool startups and learn kind of peripatetically and see what happens.

Starting point is 02:49:55 So that's the biggest radical life shift kind of on the horizon. What about you, Kurt? Do you have any crazy life changes coming? Well, it's similar for wanting to do deep work. I need to, we rent, and I need to rent a place with a one bedroom with a closed door so I can do deep work. But it's not as large as backpacking across Europe.

Starting point is 02:50:16 It's maybe the next building over. For the work that I do, I need, I need to study. And it's unfair for me to tell my wife, who lives right in the same unit as me, obviously, to not walk around in the background, to be more quiet. I bark at her unfairly. And so I need a closed door.

Starting point is 02:50:43 It's like I'm spinning 10 plates. And then as soon as, even if she just goes to the fridge because she needs to eat because she's a person, then I just drop a few plates. Yeah, I hear you. How's your love life? Oh man, non-existent. non-existent it's um it's yeah i don't know i think la is not the best like i feel like a lot a lot of the i don't know people here implicitly value some some not some not not not always the best stuff and i've fallen prey to it in the past um but that's that's sort of, that's hard to kind of deal with that and kind of the superficiality. And, you know,

Starting point is 02:51:30 I'm also sort of busy with work and I'm probably not the easiest person to be with as well, so it's probably, you know, that element. Yeah, you have a haunting specter outside your head. Yeah, people don't want to deal with

Starting point is 02:51:44 the succubus wench that walks around my property. I understand that. At least she waters the flowers. Okay, so the last two questions are along the same lines. You're already young, but if you were to give yourself advice when you were younger with regard to investing and with regard to studying the phenomenon, what would they be? We'll start with investing first.

Starting point is 02:52:13 I think with investing, it would be really trust your – well, always do the work. You have to simultaneously trust and distrust your instincts. And what I mean by that is if you insecurity or something, usually that like, that thing is like right. And it will come, it will come to play out and not necessarily in an existentially bad way, but it will, it will play out. And so like, trust that. And then the way in which you should distrust your instincts is like, never, don't pre-crystallize knowledge. Don't, you can't want something to happen and bet on, you want to find reality, you want to find truth and you want to stress test your own belief over and over and over again and whack it over the head

Starting point is 02:53:15 and sort of have a ton of epistemic humility and like you'll shake out with this gestalt picture of like, okay, I think this is a good bet or I think this is a bad bet, but it should not be like, you'll shake out with this gestalt picture of like, okay, I think this is a good bet, or I think this is a bad bet, but it should, it should not be after, you know, the first, you know, few conversations. It should be when you, when you really, really go deep, that's, that's when you get the really, really high conviction, which obviously sounds sort of trite and obvious and, you know, conventional, but I mean, you'd be surprised how many people like don't, just don't do that.

Starting point is 02:53:45 I often think it's interesting in the venture world, people say, oh, it's just a gamble. It's always a power law. It's just a gamble. I always think this is kind of a rule of thumb and there are no ultimate rules of thumb. But it's like, if you're not over 80% sure that an investment in a company is going to go well, you should definitely not invest in it. And the reason I say that is because there are unknown unknowns. So you need to have the epistemic humility. You have to basically

Starting point is 02:54:16 discount all of your bets by 30% or something. And then would you play roulette for a living? If you're dipping below that 50%, would you play roulette for a living? If you're dipping below that 50%, would you play roulette for a living? No. So whenever I hear somebody make an individual bet that they call a gamble, they go, yeah, that's the game, you know, whatever. I always, you know, and they're obviously outliers, and there is probability and luck, of course, but I always tend to think when they say that, I'm like, you're going to lose a lot of money.

Starting point is 02:54:44 Because there's sort of error propagation where if everything is 51-49, things could be like a good local trade or whatever, but then the risk builds up, the risk compounds, and then in aggregate you're taking way too much risk. And then there's the epistemic humility of not understanding the unknown unknowns. So think that that would be for the investing and then for the for the what was the over for um studying the studying the phenomenon

Starting point is 02:55:13 i think this is going to sound really weird but like it's studying the phenomenon like things seem to present themselves at the right time. Like, like that Townsend Brown book, the man who mastered gravity was like, he was, that book was recommended to me by a, um,

Starting point is 02:55:37 university of Chicago anthropologist. He's super into UFOs named Hussein Aghram. And it like, and he, I also read read about it Townsend Brown was discussed in the hunt for zero point and I was thinking about ways to prep for the Grush documentary and I was like how do I how do I prep for this like I don't quite know what the right way is you know it's like we can't talk about all these things and some inner voice was like you need to like please like read the man who mastered gravity and then my my rap so you you have an inner voice it came yeah but not it didn't not in words it came not in words not in words not a dialogue but yes yeah an inner urge

Starting point is 02:56:15 and i kept and i kept and i kept it kept being like you know and again i'm i'm articulating this now but it kept like you have to read this thing and nominally that doesn't make sense like rationally that does not make sense why why would you read about an anti-gravity inventor when you're just you want to learn about ufos but something kept telling me like it's like no this is related this is related this is related and i read the book and and that became the entire midsection of the documentary and he he interacted with sarbacher and oppenheimer like i guess sarbacher not oppenheimer sarbacher and and lame and teller and all these guys who were included in the atomic secrets and then the basically part one of the gresh dock turned into atomic secrecy being this really important thread. And that's why I find the intuition stuff is so interesting. What are the decisions you make in

Starting point is 02:57:10 your life that are very irrational prima facie, but they only make sense in the context of a future endpoint that's like inspirational or awesome or cool. And so I think with both the UFO thing and the life in general, it would be like reduce the intensity and the anxiety and the neuroses around like just sheer productive output. Thinking, staying in your rational brain of like, I have to interview this person or I have to invest in this deal. Like, of course it's going to work out or whatever. Like, of course it's going to work out or whatever. And just having more faith and going with the flow more and understanding that things happen and come in their time. And life is so much weirder than we probably understand.

Starting point is 02:57:56 We're swimming in the soup of weirdness. And synchronicities come and go. And maybe they come more if you sort of notice them more. And things come together in this beautiful way. But this is the Steve Jobs thing, you can't connect the dots going forward. You can only connect them going backwards. Yeah, well that's beautiful. Thank you, man. Thank you, man.

Starting point is 02:58:19 That hits home for me, because I'm of the type that tries extremely hard almost all the time and focused on productivity like i relate so much to eminem i relate so much to to his thought process like firstly he's umbratic and in the shadows like me like just put on the yeah the baseball cap and stay away from people. I don't put on the baseball cap, but I have a pretty cool Panama hat. It's fit, but it looks fantastic. I get complimented on all the time. I feel so great. And also there's this urge in me, like a fire, like it has to be the best.

Starting point is 02:59:00 It has to be the best. And you see this in Eminem now. He's way more insecure when he's older because he's no longer longer in the scene and so he's still fighting for number one and he's caused that's all he talks about now is you you won't put me in top five you won't put me in top five totally I'm top one I'm not even top five I'm like number one how dare you not put me there so there's a part of me that's like I have to work hard work work work work, work, work, work, be. It's not good enough, not good enough, not good enough. And I need to, I also was struggling with the channel. I don't know if you know about that.

Starting point is 02:59:41 Struggling, still I'm struggling, but it seems to be dissipating financially because of a poor decision I made with respect to sponsors. I didn't know. It's not the sponsor's fault. It's like the broker of the sponsor, the people who bring you to sponsors. I didn't know. It's not the sponsor's fault. It's like the broker of the sponsor, the people who bring you the sponsors. And I was doing some sponsors for free. And it takes so much effort to do a sponsor spot and it devalues a video. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:59:56 And luckily now I have high value sponsors. In fact, this video is sponsored by Copilot. Sweet. And you've heard about them before. That's on brand. It's a workout app and I love it. Yes, it is. You by Copilot. Sweet. And you've heard about them before. That's on brand. It's a workout app, and I love it. Yes, it is. You know Copilot Fitness?

Starting point is 03:00:08 Oh, I thought you were talking about GitHub Copilot. I guess that wouldn't be sponsored feature. But no, it's Copilot Fitness. Copilot Fitness. Okay, they're not paying me for this. Yeah, it's organic. So maybe I'll take this out. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 03:00:20 It's completely organic. It's a fitness app, and it's an app that takes you. You first meet with your coach. They ask you, what are your goals completely, it's a fitness app and it's an app that takes you, you first meet with your coach. They ask you, what are your goals? And it's super cool. The guy texts me all the time, say like, Hey, are you going to go to your workout today? And then if I say, I don't like this one, he says, Oh, okay. I'll substitute it for another one next week. My wife loves it. I got to check it out. Maybe I'll use it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We have sponsors now that are, are great and anyway it's just struggling struggling

Starting point is 03:00:46 struggling so this whole aspect of hoping or wishing or having faith that it will be okay in the long run something i need to do i think it will man you're you're the at the center of so many interesting people and conversations and i mean it would be a shame if anything were to happen to that. And I don't think it's, I think I see, I see what you, I see you just thought that you're just getting started. I think I'm very long what you're, what you're doing that. And I'm not just saying that in a, I'm not kissing your ass. This is not obsequious. I'm very bullish on it.

Starting point is 03:01:23 And I'm bullish on myself for similar for similar reasons and um yeah i'm i'm excited to see where you where you take it and you're yeah go for it yeah i i like i'd like your opinion on this for me when i watch a ufo video or i make one myself like i interview someone on the topic like a Ross Coulthard or whatever it may be, I'm invariably disappointed because I have looming into me large expectations of a grand revelation. And then it doesn't come out. And then, so how do you deal with that? Probably not super well. I get fatigued. I get cynical around a lot of the same things that people who are cynical about some of my interviews get cynical about like i'm not like this like you know you know and uh it's hard and and i just want to know the answer and you know but and then i remind myself well i know way more about this stuff than i did three or four years ago and it's

Starting point is 03:02:24 like more coherent it's not like a bunch four years ago. And it's more coherent. It's not like a bunch of random disparate facts. It's things that are building on a possible real narrative. And I have all these books that I want to read in the future based on that real narrative. And just keep going. And then I also remind myself, if this stuff is true, so say we have 10 to 15, however many crafts

Starting point is 03:02:49 in U.S. government possession or whatever, would it be possible that it hasn't leaked and none of the material has leaked, no high-res photos have leaked? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely that's possible and would it be possible that you know most of the personnel on the program wouldn't say anything a hundred percent and then maybe there are people who have come out um and so i just remind myself like to the people

Starting point is 03:03:18 are like there's no evidence there's no data like no the government hasn't fully disclosed of course like therein lies what me and you are doing now kurt but like there's a lot there's a lot of stuff and yeah of course it's uh there i get super frustrated but in some ways i don't know maybe this is a rationalization but i think it's like a good it's like such it takes such mental gymnastics like the theorizing around it that um and the fact-finding, the pattern-matching, that it keeps you sharp, too. So I think that's interesting. And so rife with snake oil.

Starting point is 03:03:50 You have to really pan for gold and suss out and distill the fact from fiction. That, I think, is good for your—it's healthy for your sort of thought process. And then, yeah, I don't know. I guess those are the main points. How do you keep going? Because I'm sure, yeah, I'm sure, as you said, you feel disillusioned a lot of the time. Yeah, it's disheartening because there's a dearth of new information. And so you've seen on the Toe Channel that I've pulled back in the past six months or even a year on the content on interviewing people on this topic because it's just, I want

Starting point is 03:04:27 something new. Everyone wants something new and then you don't get it. You still learn and there's still something positive about asking the same question again because you can elicit a novel response. So for instance, this happens in the math world. There's something called a compact set. And I thought I knew what a compact set was until someone asked, another undergrad asked, what's a compact set to like the world's best mathematician named Terry Tao? And you'd think that's a waste of his time. Why would you ask such a rudimentary question? And then he gives this exposition on it.

Starting point is 03:05:02 And it's online. There's this PDF. He gives one on differential forms, like first and second year concepts that are illuminated because you just ask a sophomoric question. Well, anyhow, you're encouraging me to go venture a bit more into this topic, dip my toes into it. I think you should. We should do like a reading group or something.

Starting point is 03:05:21 my toes into it. I think you should. We should do like a reading group or something. Like, I often think the open source research on this is super stove piped. And it's like, you probably know some stuff I don't know. I know stuff you don't know.

Starting point is 03:05:34 Ross Coulthard knows stuff. Coulthard knows stuff that neither of us know. Korbel knows stuff. And it's like, I just want to get to the truth as fast as possible. I'm, you know, I make some ad revenue off my show or whatever but I'm not monetizing this in any big way

Starting point is 03:05:51 I just want to get to the truth and I would love to have some sort of study group or something join forces I don't need to be the disclosure guy for me in physics and consciousness, there seems to be plenty of uncharted territory. And that may prove inexorably bound with the phenomenon. But either way, it's interesting on its own.

Starting point is 03:06:15 So if you're a Toe fan and you're listening or watching and you are also similarly tired of being inundated with shopworn information, then watch one of the episodes of Toe that you don't think you would like, like one of the physics or the consciousness ones. I think you'd be surprised. Yeah, also something, podcasts like yours, even though yours is a documentary, but let's say content, content on YouTube in this domain, maybe something like a nurse crop. So the nurse crop is a concept of a necessary precondition

Starting point is 03:06:47 for something that you want to occur to occur. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, and that's how I see Grush, or that's how I see Lou, that's how I see many of these people. I see them as nurse crops. Totally. That's my goal. I just want to push the conversation forward,

Starting point is 03:07:03 and again, push it forward in a non-dogmatic way where if anybody can speak on the same layer and falsify any of this stuff there's a document that's been FOIA'd in 2006 it's dated November 12th 1963 from JFK to the CIA where he's asking for information about UFOs from the CIA 10 years before his death.

Starting point is 03:07:25 Can somebody, please, somebody, John Greenwald, can you focus on falsifying that or corroborating it or whatever? Let's get close to the truth on that. And it's weird how much information is just sort of sitting there in this gray area state. sort of sitting there in this like gray area state where, and it's like, it feels like I have to do like a vigilante job where it's like UFO reporting is the crime. And I'm sort of a bystander, not super well equipped to, you know, make sure the crime doesn't happen. But it's like, I feel, I feel duty. And then, and then I don't feel like I'm best equipped to do some of this stuff where some of these documents are just lying there in this sort of liminal space. And we should falsify or corroborate them.

Starting point is 03:08:16 Jesse, it was a pleasure. Like super, super fun. It was awesome. I didn't think it would go this long. It went double the length. This was so cool. And I'm super tired now. I love it, man.

Starting point is 03:08:24 I always love talking. This is awesome. And I'm super tired now. I love it, man. I always love talking. This is awesome. And I'm pumped to put our thing out. And I'm honored to be on. I feel super unqualified to be on this show. So thank you for giving me the time. Well, you're honoring the channel. I appreciate you being on.

Starting point is 03:08:39 Thank you, man. As always, man. Yeah. Maybe I'll make it up to Toronto in my nomadic quest. Yeah, that'll be fun. Are you backpacking? No, I'm more like Airbnb-ing in a city for a month or something and going from place to place.

Starting point is 03:08:56 All right, man. Take care. The podcast is now pretty much concluded. I want to thank you all for being here. Thank you so much. One side note, quite a few people personally messaged me about the letter that I alluded to earlier in this podcast, and I'm including it one more time here,

Starting point is 03:09:12 updating you all on the status of the Theories of Everything channel in case you missed it. I've also started this tradition where on every episode or every other episode, I'll highlight a comment and read it because, hey, if you're like me, then you don't have many people to speak to about these subjects outside of conversing online and digitally. This is my way of not only highlighting a certain comment, but also encouraging the community that we've established. The last time it was Bijou's comment about there being no wave function of the universe,

Starting point is 03:09:37 at least from one point of view, but from another point of view, there does exist a wave function of the universe. This time I want to tell you about a comment not attached to a podcast, but attached to a post. And to explain that, I'm going to just read the post for you so that you have some context. Dear friends, as I sit down to write this, I want to express my deepest gratitude. Your support, engagement, and the passion for the Theories of Everything podcast

Starting point is 03:09:59 have been the driving force behind this endeavor. We've built a community that shares a fervor for science and philosophy. And for that, I'm eternally grateful. Truly. Despite our 240,000 subscribers and the vibrant community that we've built, the past 11 months have been challenging. Behind the scenes, our channel has been grappling with financial struggles.

Starting point is 03:10:20 Our content, deeply rooted in science and philosophy, unfortunately falls into a category that doesn't fetch the highest ad revenue on YouTube, to say the least. This isn't just our struggle. Even Sabine Hossenfelder recently mentioned a similar issue. During 2023, I've been working harder than ever, which I didn't think was possible, often at the expense of personal and family time. The effort that goes into each Toe episode is immense. I pour my heart and soul into researching and studying for each episode to ensure that we deliver the most in-depth

Starting point is 03:10:51 and high-quality content, forcing myself to watch myself even, which is extremely cringeworthy, as you can imagine, so that I can improve on each episode. Despite my love for studying for Toes and the joy I derive from interacting with our guests and community, the financial returns have been far from promising. This letter is a discussion or disclosure by me on what's been going on behind the scenes at Toe. Our struggles have been exacerbated by issues with sponsorships, which were once a significant part of our revenue. Despite the promise of good returns, the sponsorships recently turned out to be a financial setback. Unforeseen expenses such as poor deals that we weren't aware of until returns, the sponsorships recently turned out to be a financial setback. Unforeseen expenses such as poor deals that we weren't aware of until later, writing scripts, dealing with the sponsor

Starting point is 03:11:30 intermediaries, acquiring products for review that were sent across the border, and then paying our dedicated editor have strained our resources. There were even instances where we unknowingly did sponsored spots for free, believing that we were being paid. That's right, for free. This is unheard of. However, I take full responsibility for these mishaps, and I sincerely apologize for any disruption they may have caused to our content. I've had and still have no podcasting mentors nor connections. Zero. Everything's been built from the ground up. I've learned some hard lessons along the way. There were several times when we interviewed large names and they didn't so much

Starting point is 03:12:10 as tweet about Toh, despite them promoting other podcasters. I would be disingenuous if I were to pretend I'm not a tad bit hurt, but that's just how it goes. Luckily, the depth and breadth of our content have always been a point of pride at Theories of Everything. In fact, the guests themselves invariably remark on air and off air how this is the most thorough, the most in-depth of any conversation with them out there. Wonderfully, even the comment section seemed to echo this sentiment. Like, man, oh man, that's fantastic. I believe in quality over quantity, at least for Toh, and work to ensure that every single episode is not just informative with meticulous timestamps, but also thought-provoking and engaging. Hearing from you and the community about how Toh has ignited intellectual curiosity, changed lives, inspired

Starting point is 03:12:57 you, helped you through your own dark nights, and provided a platform for discussions that might otherwise be out of reach, fuels my commitment. It's an honor and a privilege. I too know what it feels like to be lonely in this space of physics, math, AI, consciousness, without anyone to talk to who doesn't look at you like a nerdy quantum quirkster, other than, say, virtually. To keep Toh alive and thriving, we're working on several projects. So for instance, number one, we're developing an artificial intelligence tool to recover old audio and improve the sound of episodes like the old Chomsky episodes. Number two, there's a lost lecture of Stephen Wolfram's from Mindfest that we're recovering the audio from by developing, again, an AI tool. And this tool should prove

Starting point is 03:13:40 helpful for future podcasts as well. Number three, we're working on translating our episode into different languages to reach a wider audience. You'll now see there are several accurately captioned languages. Number four, I would like to do more in-person interviews. Number five, I would like to do compilation episodes on specific topics from several guests. So usually you have one guest speaking on several topics. What about if we just said, hey, does quantum mechanics give rise to consciousness? Yes or no? And then we have every guest on that subject.

Starting point is 03:14:09 Or hey, what is the physics of free will? And we have every guest on that subject. Most channels of our size have teams, but Toe doesn't. It's just me and the editor. And we each work more than full time. I would be remiss if I didn't mention the darling angel that is my wife, of course. Without her, there would be no Toh. There may not even be a Kurt.

Starting point is 03:14:27 You'll see many other YouTubers interviewing the same people, and that's because it pays significantly more to go with what works. On Toh, I've purposefully chosen not to interview high-profile guests that I feel like are featured on the podcast circuit repeatedly. Now, the positive side of interviewing people repeatedly is that it opens you up to massive connections and influence. But on the deleterious side, I feel like it would sacrifice a modicum of character in my likely wrong opinion. Instead, I've opted to bring hidden

Starting point is 03:14:55 gems like Michael Levin, who has astounding theories and studies to the forefront and to delve extensively into them. Therefore, I'm reaching out to you, our loyal subscribers, for support. Your contribution would go a long way in helping us maintain and improve the quality of our content, ensuring the longevity of Toe. If you would like to contribute to Toe, there are two primary ways, both listed in the description. There's number one, Patreon at patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal. There's number two, PayPal at tinyurl slash paypal toe with a capital T-O-E, lowercase PayPal. In fact, PayPal gives more to the creator. Every dollar helps. It's difficult to underestimate how your support keeps Toe and myself and my wife

Starting point is 03:15:39 going, both financially in terms of the emotional support, knowing there are people who will voluntarily donate something that they could have spent in innumerable ways somewhere else for no other reason than they want to help out. If you already support Toh and want to increase your donation, then of course we would more than welcome that as well. Thank you again for being part of the Toh community. Your continued backing and engagement mean the world to us. Here's to exploring even more theories of everything together. Warm regards, Kurt Jaimungal. P.S. If you're ever curious about what future projects there are of Toh, you can always message me with specific questions.

Starting point is 03:16:15 Me and or my wife read every single comment and try to respond when we can. There's also a day in the life of a hectic time at Toh, and luckily it's no longer anywhere near as shambolic. Despite the turmoil of the past 11 months, they've simultaneously been the most rapturous of my life. It's a blessing. Thank you dearly. Man, thank you.

Starting point is 03:16:34 Thank you so much. After the posting of that letter, there's been a flurry of support, not only from you, from the audience, but also from other podcasters. Coincidentally enough, Theo Vaughn, a channel with over 2 million subscribers, just talked about this same issue happening to him on his channel with being cheated over sponsored deals and also waiting approximately a year before saying anything publicly because we're not allowed to. Here's a 65 second snippet from September 2023 on Theo Vaughn's channel. Link in the description. So yeah, you can keep that money, but you can't get me to shut up, man. You know how many other

Starting point is 03:17:09 podcasters wanted to say this shit right now, but can't say it? The way that people are able to cheat and lie and manipulate the system. Fuck. It's just fucking kind of sad, man. Yeah. But I just wanted to speak up for myself, man. I've waited a year to speak up for myself. They put us through so much bullshit. And I don't know if there's other people over there that did it too. And maybe we'll get more information. I don't know. Yeah, I wouldn't do that to somebody. And they did it, man. They did it to, I mean, some of these people's podcasts is all they had, man. And these motherfuckers did that, bro. So I'm sorry about that. And I'm sorry for them.

Starting point is 03:17:46 And yeah, I'm just happy to have a voice for myself. And that's one thing that we built here that he had nothing to do with. He had nothing to do with. In fact, he stole on our backs once. And I'm not letting these people do it to me two times. So for anybody that had to take that sucker deal over there, I'm speaking for all of us, man. Because I know that some of you guys have said to me that you wanted to say some of these same things.

Starting point is 03:18:10 Notes and the person he's speaking about has nothing to do with Toa. I just want to make that clear. Though we've gone through what's similar. Furthermore, the problem is not with the sponsors. The sponsors are great and visiting the sponsors helps support this channel. The problem is instead with some of the companies who represent you to the sponsors. One comment of the over 500, like man, this post alone has more comments on it than when I ask for questions for Josha Bach or for Noam Chomsky. Like holy moly, thank you, thank you, thank you so much. So now the following comes

Starting point is 03:18:40 from an email which was precipitated by the YouTube community post that I just shared. Actually, it was by my thank you email to this person. Hi, Kurt. The decision to donate was entirely motivated by gratitude for the great conversations and information your channel has brought me. In terms of feedback, maybe what I value most about Toe is the depth that you're willing to go to for the complex topics. It's clear that you genuinely want to understand the nuances of each and attempt to reconcile with similar and competing ideas. want to understand the nuances of each and attempt to reconcile with similar and competing ideas. I love that you're willing to bring up the competing theories and complementary views, even get people to foster many sharing ideas like Michael Levin and Josje Bak,

Starting point is 03:19:16 two people I'm a huge fan of. That said, sometimes I feel like you put a bit too much pressure on yourself in terms of preparation. I love that intent, but it struck me as a bit excessive, and I'm sure you're aware for the need for balance and probably agonize over it. Just know that I don't expect you to have an encyclopedic knowledge of decades of some person's work just to adequately interview them. I understand how tricky this balance must be though. I'm going to comment on that in one moment, but just here's one more that touched my heart. And this one is by James Mackey. Thank you for all your work. It's meant a great deal to me. In 2015, I was sleeping on sofas, listless and destructive. Now I have my PhD at the London College of Music coming up, and I'm lecturing this year at Durham College,

Starting point is 03:19:49 and I'm pleased with who I am today. Much of what I like about myself, I've modeled on the values I see in yourself and your interviewees. Serene, sincere, kind, and concerned. I found a tremendous consolation in discovering the academic community with you over the last five years or so.

Starting point is 03:20:05 You've been a role model and introduced me to several many other role models. The comments that I'm going to start reading at the end of the episodes aren't always just effusive thank you comments to me. They're generally going to be about other podcasts and ideas and theories, but because of the preceding YouTube community posts that I just mentioned, I thought it was apt to talk about this. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you so much. Also with regard to the pressure and the reason why I study so hard, it's not actually because I want to have

Starting point is 03:20:28 the best quote unquote interview. It's because the goal of the Theories of Everything podcast is in part, in large part, for me to understand every theory. And in order to do so, I study super hard because I'm speaking with the author of a theory and I don't want to waste this opportunity. In other words, the production of a podcast is the side effect of me just trying to understand

Starting point is 03:20:49 theories, particularly theories of everything, the largest theories. So that's not something I've made clear and I hope this helps demystify the reason for why am I putting on so much pressure to study for each guest. It's not just to have a great interview because maybe I could study half as much or even 20% as much. It's because I want to understand the theories. There's also playlists. So if you want, you can look in the YouTube description. There's several playlists for Toe. You can click on that so you can go through episodes one by one if you like.

Starting point is 03:21:14 Every episode on Toe is edited so there's no large spikes in the volume or loud jumps with music so that people can listen as they sleep. Because I know I used to listen to podcasts as I sleep and I would dislike when they would just quote someone and then the levels were obscene and it would wake me and then I couldn't fall back asleep because I'm worried it's not going to happen again. That won't happen for Toe. If you personally want to message me to get in contact for whatever reason, for sponsorships, for donations, for support, just telling me what Toe has meant to you, if that's what you want, then you can email me directly at Toe, so T-O-E, at IndieFilmTO.com. So that's I-N-D-I-E-F-I-L-M-T-O.com. Toe at

Starting point is 03:21:55 IndieFilmTO.com. Thank you so much for all your support. Thank you. Thank you. The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now would be a great time to do so, as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people. You should also know that there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for Theories of Everything, where people explicate toes, disagree respectfully about theories, and build, as a community, our own toes. Links to both are in the description. Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on

Starting point is 03:22:41 YouTube as well. Last but not least, you should know that this podcast is on iTunes. It's on Spotify. It's on every one of the audio platforms. Just type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Often I gain from re-watching lectures and podcasts, and I read that in the comments. Hey, total listeners also gain from replaying. So how about instead re-listening on those platforms?

Starting point is 03:23:03 iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whichever podcast catcher you use. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting patreon.com slash kurtjaimungal and donating with whatever you like. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on Toe full-time. You get early access to ad-free audio episodes there as well.

Starting point is 03:23:24 For instance, this episode was released a few days earlier. Every dollar helps far more than you think. Thank you.

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Jesse Michels: UFOs, David Grusch, Venture Capital

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