What Bitcoin Did - UFOs, AI & the Future of Human Consciousness | Matthew Pines

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

Matthew Pines is a the Executive Director at Bitcoin Policy Institute and an advisor to Skywatcher. In this episode, we explore the evolving landscape of UAPs, why the U.S. government may be sitting on legacy programs involving non-human intelligence, and how the 2017 New York Times article triggered a wave of official investigations and whistleblower disclosures. We also get into the parallels between Bitcoin and UAPs as epistemic journeys, the UAP Disclosure Act, and why some believe we’re facing a constitutional crisis over secret government programs. Finally, we discuss Skywatcher's effort to gather empirical UAP data, why new physics might be locked behind closed doors, and how the next scientific paradigm shift could reshape our understanding of reality. THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN: https://www.iren.com/ RIVER: https://river.com/wbd ANCHORWATCH: https://www.anchorwatch.com/ BLOCKWARE: https://mining.blockwaresolutions.com/wbd LEDN: https://www.ledn.io/ Follow: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Matthew Pines: https://x.com/matthew_pines

Oh, it's a UFO sitting in a bunker that we have provided. The U.S. government has provided for research and development purposes. Provided to who? We were lying to you the whole time. We've hidden this core secret about who we are and who else is here and what's going on. And we have maybe like a fundamental human right to like no reality. Maybe this is the test. It's like you get access to certain knowledge and do you weaponize it?

or do you use it to uplift your civilization? Use it to allow your species to reach for the stars and to develop themselves as conscious beings in a much more fulsome manner. Are we going to pass the test? I don't know. I'm the guy that wherever we're in the same place, I know you.

I corner you for like three hours and just ask you all the maddest things I can possibly think of. And I'm so excited for this conversation. Well, let's go. So you were consulting for the government. You're now a very straight-laced job. You're now working in Bitcoin and consulting for Skywatcher. Is this a midlife crisis, man?

It's been a continuous midlife crisis since maybe I was 12, just rolling from one variation of existential crisis to another. Just finding partial resolution and then new vistas of uncertainty to explore. But I've become sort of resilient to my fate at this point, because this is just what I'm meant to do, apparently, and I'm just going to roll with it. Let's go. So, we've spoken about aliens loads in the past. I think it's one of the most interesting conversation you can possibly have. I listened to you on Jesse Michael's podcast. You've been on a couple of times. And then since then, I've been listening to that podcast quite a lot. I think it's great,

but there's a lot of assume knowledge in it. He talks about different people that I've never heard of, different events that I've never heard of, and it can be a bit of a kind of deep dive. And I want to try and get to the bottom of a load of the questions that I have around the whole UAP, UFO, non-human intelligence thing. But for me, like, the time that, the thing that really opened my eyes up to this

was probably the New York Times article in 2017. But maybe I'll let you kind of set it up and be like, where, if people are interested, in this. Like, what do they need to know today? Yes, and you're putting your finger on the problem, which is, it's just like with Bitcoin, um, uh, it's evolved to the point where there aren't that many like easy on-ramp podcasts or kind of, uh, clear, um, educational materials that are going to meet people where they are, uh, that already haven't gone down the rabbit hole and then aren't wanting to, you know,

you know, autistically obsessed about every little new development, uh, in either Bitcoin or in this case, UAPs. And so the podcasting kind of ecosystem is really speaking to the choir, right? And it's not really doing a whole lot to kind of provide an off ramp or a bridge to folks that are maybe curious, maybe skeptical, suspect something weird is happening. And they want to kind of find some anchor points that are high signal, high trust, that they can understand or at least approach and then sort of build their knowledge, build their level of familiarity and kind of, you know,

walk themselves at their own pace, right, into a territory that might seem unfamiliar, maybe jarring in various ways. It's sort of a similar epistemic journey with Bitcoin, right? It's this primafaci absurd thing to a lot of folks. It's this magic internet money, started by this anonymous, you know, cypropunk coder. It's like uses cryptography. And the people that are religious sort of adherence to it believe that it will change the world. And so it's just kind of a, you know, For the average person that's, like, presented with that. It's just this, well, no, like, that's crazy.

Like, that's not going to work. Like, they'll just immediately reject it, right? Most people will. Until they actually, until something happens, either they're a close confident of there, someone who they respect, you know, is like, no, I have a lot of Bitcoin. Or they, um, have a crisis in their life, which forces them to reappraise the value of money and the value of something like Bitcoin or they're technical and they kind of decide, oh, actually there's a design principle here that actually is really,

really smart and it actually works and solves a problem. But you have to kind of have that hook. You have to have this sort of reason or social proof. And so absent that, I think it's just like a, it's, it just bounces off of most people. And it's similar, I think, process and difficulty with the UAP subject, although I think it's layered in with a whole bunch of other frictions, which is it's inherent amorphousness. Like, well, what do you mean? What do you mean?

You're talking about aliens. And so the popular tree. that we have that have been sort of implanted in our collective imaginations are the stories in Hollywood and TV shows. And so we have decades and decades. It's not like this is a new subject. It's in fact, it's, you know, it's been being talked about for generations, right? And we can go back to the 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s. And, you know, similar sorts of questions and debates are happening about, is this a psychological operation? Is there a deception going on? Is it actually little green men from, you know, from Mars or whatever? And here we are.

you know, 2025 and it's, you know, maybe we haven't gone that much further in terms of, you know, broadening the social conversation and seriousness with which this should be taken. And, and so you do need to have like this kind of, okay, how do you step back and, and bring people into this subject? But I also think there's a sentence in which I'm not trying to, and I don't really think I can, like convince anybody of anything with words. It's ultimately going to require people having curiosity, just like with Bitcoin. Like, I can. you know, spent two hours just explaining Bitcoin and, you know, the technical, you know, elegance, the geopolitical rationale, the individual liberty, you know, sort of rights argument,

the ethical argument by human rights, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And for some people that'll stick, parts of it will stick, you know, but it's just words. Ultimately, people have to like care enough and want to question their assumptions about whatever it is, money, or in this case, you know, the received wisdom and social taboo and stigma around this, the subject to kind of at least open the door and then they have to be able to find like um you know that has to be an easy like gradient to sort of go down if it's like you're open the door and then you're immediately falling down this like steep cliff into like reptilian skin suit wearing human you know illuminati and you know time travel from future AI it's like that is not like a gradient that will bring people to you know any sort

of rational appraisal of this subject and so it is a gap right. right in the media environment. And I don't think I can, you know, one weird trick my way into it. So it's like a lot of throat clearing, right, of like why this is hard, but also kind of the sociological and epistemic analogies to something like Bitcoin, which I know this audience, you know, maybe have personal experience with like, rewinding the clock and imagining, you know, yourself five, ten, you know, two years ago where you dismiss Bitcoin or you thought it was a scam or it wasn't a serious thing.

And maybe some of you have, you know, an unhealthy or an uncomfortable amount of your net worth tied up in Bitcoin. And, you know, it's like, well, what was that journey like, right? You're now, you've made certain decisions. You've reassessed certain things. And now your view of a very important aspect of your model of the world is very different than it was two years ago. And everyone kind of goes on their own journey, right?

Their own process. And so I have had my own, right? And so it's very hard for me to kind of like replicate, right, how I've updated my own, you know, beliefs on this subject. which has been many, many years in the making and thousands of hours of conversation and reading and conversation and then also, you know, engagement with some, the contours of these of these bureaucratic structures that we call legacy program. And realizing that there's a there's a there there. Right. And that's once you like encounter, you know, a material constraint in reality, you know, you can, you can pretend that didn't happen.

You can, you can ignore it. But it's just like ignoring like the IRS. Like you can pretend, but like they're still there. Reality is going to ultimately creep up on you. And, you know, it just, it just happens that a small subset of people find, find, find themselves experiencing that structure of material constraint, the existence proof of these, of these programs and the related people that have access to this knowledge. And that's, that's ultimately like what is what is driving this, right?

So the conversation that started in 2017 was sort of individuals coming out from the government saying that, you know, they have collected data on these anomalous objects. And that was kind of this, whoa, like maybe it isn't just a total, you know, whiff of imagination or stories that were telling. There's serious people from the government. They got some, you know, ambiguous videos. You know, it's New York Times. So it must be serious, et cetera. And of course, there's always people that come out and be like, well, is this just a siop? And I was, I really don't really understand what that means because of course to sciop.

Like it's all siop's all the way down. And then the question is, well, is it a sciop to convince people it's not real or is a sciop to convince people it is real? And maybe both. And maybe both are being run by separate, you know, maybe some point in competing factions. Like social engineering at scale is a well-horned, well-honed practice of governments and has been, you know, finely tuned by elements. of the U.S. government for many decades. And so people have a rightful reason to be suspicious when the government's coming out with something or the government, meaning like some people from the government or there's some ambiguity about whether this is a formal activity of the government,

whether this is just true, righteous whistleblowers that are saying this is wrong and when you tell somebody or somewhere in between. And I think it is all the above, right? And so I think you should be extremely cautious, not just taking any particular whistleblower's claim, or YouTube channel or Twitter person's views as like gospel truth. But like I've, you know, my background was like assessing, you know, long range scenarios that could be extremely consequential, but low probability. And there you're sort of operating in an environment where you don't have a whole lot of hard data. You've got maybe certain elements, certain, a certain scatter plot, right, type things. And you have to kind of stitch it together.

You have to make sure that you're not introducing extra noise or bias, but the degree of importance of, at least trying, motivates, you know, a lot of effort to model out like the what if. What if it was true? What would be the implications? And then using that to acquire better data, right? And so this is not about reaching a final answer or a conclusion, but recognizing there's something really weird happening here, whether it's a complete, sigh up all the way down or whether this is essentially the the this is what you would expect when you have a legacy bureaucracy that is a decaying and then there's this um a new set of political forces uh that drive a very different type of conversation in the public imagination now on uap's

and this is this kind of awkward ambiguous like um transitional phase we're going through right now um But, you know, if you wanted to start, right, you have this 2017 stuff. I've always anchored people to the things that our elected officials are doing and writing in laws and passing in laws. It's not dispositive proof of anything, but it's the clearest sign of like with Bitcoin. Like, we get really excited when a US senator introduces a bill to buy Bitcoin. And it becomes a little focus of a lot of conversation. Like, whoa, why does she do that? Like, will it happen?

Like, how could it be? done and we have podcasts about it. And even though it's only got, you know, five or six co-sponsors, it's a thing that we pay close attention to, right? Well, there was another bill that was introduced and was passed actually out of the Senate.

It was unanimously passed out of the Senate select me on intelligence. It had eight co-sponsors, including the majority leader of the Senate, bipartisan basis, the ranking member of Senator Rounds, Gillibrand.

So it was Schumer, Rubio, Rounds, Todd Young, Martin Heinrich, Jillibran. Maybe I'm forgetting one more. And it's called the UAP Disclosure Act. And it's 64 pages of well-constructed, dense legislative text.

And when did this first appear? Was this before or after David Grush's... This was after David Grush. So, yeah, so we had the New York Times videos, 2017, in 2020, 2021. And this is when I started picking up that's very seriously is when I started noticing amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act, which is sort of the annual big defense bill. And there were these amendments pretty tight,

well constructed, but pretty small, that were all about mandating the reporting of any unreported UAP related programs in the government and restricting funding to anything that was related to a special access program that hadn't been reported properly. So somebody in the Congress was being told, there's a bunch of unreported special access programs related to UAPs that you're not being told about, and you should write and pass a law that they did pass, that became law, that forces the government, the entire executive branch, to disclose any information on these alleged legacy unreported UAP programs. And that started 2020, 2021. They had this U.S. task force that was stood up inside the Defense Department and the U.S. intelligence community,

and they staffed it like a bureaucracy. They had senior people running it, like the equivalent of like one-star admirals. And people from the CIA and the National Conference office and Department of Defense. And there was like, you know, we know the people running it. Jay Stratton was running it. Like he's now talked about it. He's written a book about it. The guy running that task force has now unambiguously claimed he has physically seen non-human craft and non-human biologics.

So the same kind of thing that Grush said. Yes. So the guy running that task force that Grush was on has now. validated exactly what David Brush said. And his book's going to be coming out soon. Okay. Interesting. And in David Grish's testimony, he basically said that he knows his craft in hangars somewhere. He can almost point you to where they are.

He did. And he also said that they had recovered biologics. But I don't think he said he had seen them. Did he? When he was asked that question in public hearings, he said he would have to answer that question in a closed session. Okay. So we don't know the truth behind that. I cannot describe what he might have said in a closed session.

Yeah. But his boss has now said he personally saw craft, like not like on a video, not like on some sort of blurry gun camera footage, like walked into a hangar and there it is. So I want to ask you about the craft because there's lots of different types. But should we carry on this thread first before we get to them? Yeah, so just like the people, you can read lots of books, you can read lots of podcasts, and that's all going to be like an interpretation, narrative. There's some good books out there.

If folks want to read it, it's just like getting different perspectives. Nobody I think has, you know, the one, this is the encyclopedia, source of truth that everyone should anchor on. There's some good journalism by Ross Colthar. In plain sight was sort of a book that was sort of very ahead of its time in 2021, I think, to kind of do the traditional investigative journalism and develop sources and like take a skeptical eye at some of these things and tell a narrative. That's a great book. But these these pieces of legislation that started to accrete over time got more and more like there was a pattern. If you actually just read the different series of bills from 2020 to 2024, there's a vector

of like seriousness, intent, more nuance and complexity that there's like an indication that whoever is paying close attention to the subject, staffers on SSCI are learning new things, and then they're adapting their next set of legislative language to try to get their arms around something. And they're clearly not letting it go. It's not like, oh, they did this sort of one-off, you know, reporting requirement.

And then somebody comes in and goes to him and go, yeah, there's nothing here. Don't worry about this is all just a made-up slap. Like, you know, there's nothing here. That didn't happen. It was the exact opposite. They were like, oh, shit, there's something here. And then we got to like double down and double down.

And then talk about it publicly. But behind the scenes, there were dozens of whistleblowers coming to these committees and these staffers. I know one of them. He's now public, Jake Barber, who, you know, was on one of these retrieval programs and physically retrieved, you know, exotic craft. You know, and he went to, you know, the Senate. And he was explaining, you know, what he knows. And so that all culminated in. okay, well, they have to do something about this because there's two critical problems that now

elected officials in and out of the executive and the legislative branch are aware of, which is that these activities have been going on for a long period of time, and elected officials have not been properly briefed on it per our constitution. So there's an accountability question, is a constitutional crisis. In fact, the lead Senate investigator on this subject, that's how he's described it in public is as a constitutional crisis. Like how can you have activities on such a sensitive and strategic subject be conducted that are using large amounts of taxpayer funds and maybe doing other things to finance themselves, maybe not so legally, that are not being reported to the elected representatives of a democracy? How else could they be funding themselves? Oh, well,

that's a whole separate side. We can come back to that. You know, that's a, that is a very important question. But, but yeah, so he is saying, like, this is a constitutional crisis of accountability. So we need to reestablish, you know, mechanisms of accountability and transparency, at least to the elected officials we have. Because this is probably the biggest question in the world. Are we here on our own? And I don't feel like the government should be withholding that information from the people. I would tend to agree with you. Yes. And that's a moral sort of stain, right, that is difficult to, you know, wash out, right? But the government, I think, is some parts of the government. I think is some parts of the government realize this is a this is potentially a crisis of political

de-legitimization right if it comes out and it realizes oh we were lying to you the whole time we've hidden this core secret about you know who we are and who else is here and what's going on and you know we have maybe like a fundamental human right to like no reality right like the existence of the moon can't be classified and and so there's this push for just disclosure on the basis that we need to reestablish institutional authority over some of these activities and maintain, you know, the integrity of our democracy. And that's procedural. That's like standing up new committees. For example, the UAP Disclosure Act explicitly defines a new UAP kind of review group that would be comprised of nine very

senior officials that can't have any connection with legacy programs, national security official, foreign affairs, economists, folks from civil society, et cetera. And their official mandate, if this bill would be to take possession and review all UAP related records and materials in the possession, not only of the federal government, of like, any entity in the United States jurisdiction. And so the private entity is doing this as well. Well, I mean, this is, this is the rub, right? Like, this is why when we say it's the government program, well, it's think it's a very complicated archipelago, right?

And in normal government, you know, weapons development and intelligence activities, there is a kind of a sliding scale of things that are done by official government employees or military personnel and what are done by contractors. And sometimes it's sort of a gray area, right? And there's a huge, you know, ecosystem and contracting economy to support government activities, right? And so, like, I was a government contractor for 10 years. This is just like the structure of the whole machine. And so, yes, it's, it's very clear to me that there are aspects of these programs that are being done and managed and maybe even controlled by private aerospace, right? Entirely, like, there's maybe a dotted line from some of those activities to somebody in the government, maybe some, you know, mid-level guy in the agency or, or the Air Force. but exactly like what's the structure of authority.

You know, is there a government program that says, this is our UAP reverse engineering line item? No, right? Because that's the whole point. And so there's a series of these unacknowledged way special access programs or formal programs in the government. And then there's just completely off the books programs. They're not official government programs.

They're just, you know, being run by private aerospace. And that was, I think, the mechanism that was transitioned to in the 70s. They started off being very, you know, well-maintained, well-managed government-controlled bureaucracies under the Atomic Energy Commission, post-Manhattan project kind of apparatus, which is what you would have because you have all the best and brightest. You already have the apparatus of secrecy. And you just create a new compartment under that.

And then you can classify all your activities under the Atomic Energy Act, which gives you a lot more blanket, you know, kind of a much heavier blanket of secrecy. Because if it relates to nuclear weapons design information or transclassified foreign nuclear information, it's a very, you know, that's an extra difficult step for anyone to try to you know, get, you know, get into. So, yeah, so the UPU Disclosure Act is a critical thing.

And it lays out these procedural mechanisms. It uses the term non-human intelligence like 20 plus times. It references biological materials. It even gives a definition of technologies of unknown origin and explicitly separates that from like prosaic, temporarily unattributed objects. Which would be maybe some. Balloon. That China have made that we don't understand. Exactly.

Yes. That are of, you know, that are literally is like beyond the known means of human manufacture. So these are things like breaking physics, essentially? Well, there are definitions, which I would, you know, people writing laws have to be pretty precise. Yeah. So I would look at those definitions and they use very specific language like, you know, no means of human, like beyond no means of human manufacture and exhibiting performance characteristics that are beyond, you know, our current capability set, you know, non-urnertial movement,

lift without an apparent like aerodynamics sort of surface control system. pointing at like the apparent observables that we have on UAP objects and then trying to specify that and making a clear delineation between temporary non-attributed objects, right, that are just, oh, this looks weird, but actually it's a drone or it's a balloon or a flock of birds or glinting of Starlink or or or a conventional capability of a known adversary, right? From these technologies of unknown origin, right? They're unknown origin, but they are technologies. They are craft. We know that they are material objects that exhibit performance characteristics and means and material composition that are beyond known means of human manufacture. So that is like people have attention spans that are pretty limited. But like you can just read things on piece of paper and form an opinion about it.

Right. They'll just take my words for it. But just like, okay, well, why is the U.S. Senate passing this bill? Like, okay, they've got lots of things going on. Why is Senator Schumer and Senator Rounds byprivile? partisan, very senior senators with a lot of responsibility and public reputation line. Why do they go to the Senate floor and give like an eight-minute colloquy, like, you know, strongly, uh, strongly endorsing the need for UAP transparency and disclosure?

I mean, yeah, all it's a tie-up. I'm like, okay, like at a certain point, you start to, well, then what's the sci-up, right? Like, what's this going? Like, that's an even more jarring thing to me if it's like there's none of this and they're just building all this sort of infrastructure of bullshit it's not clearly get much out of it, right?

I was like, oh, they're going to pump the defense budget. It's like, well, they're doing that already. They don't have to use UAPs to like, you know, justify another hundred billion dollars in defense budget. It's just Iran, China. Like, UAPs is like not an, not like the easiest way to try to argue for another hundred to $100 billion of defense appropriation.

So I just, the whole thing doesn't make sense. Like, the story. of a sciop is like, okay, well, this is the worst sciop, right? It's like the most long-running, most expensive, you know, and it's not clear it's gotten them anything, right? And so, but there clearly are attempts to try to shape public opinion here, right, and try to frame the narrative in a way that's conducive to certain, you know, interests, right? We have factions. We have, you know, competing structures of power. And the subject is, you know, among the most, you know, information, it gives the most information asymmetry to a subset of folks,

that could exploit that information in symmetry, right? And so it's like a self-keeping secret in that way, right? Like most people would tell somebody, but then what are you going to do with it? It's okay, well, are you in position to actually leverage that information? There's a very small number of people that would be. It's going to be intelligent systems. It's going to be, you know, large pools of capital.

It's going to be, you know, the structure that we know dominates the evolution of our political system. And those people know this exists. So I don't know what to tell you. I mean, this is a thing. I mean, I was talking to, you know, large Western sovereign wealth funds about China, AI, Bitcoin, and UAE piece. And I know that other sovereign wealth funds and large pools of capital are paying close to answer this. I know that the, you know, household names and AI very much closely tracking this subject.

You know, the White House is closely tracking this subject. as a subject of international discussion. So it's like there's a massive mismatch between, I say, the salience and seriousness of this subject among the average person who watches mainstream media or scrolls Twitter. And then like what's actually happening? It's like with Bitcoin.

It's like we're at this point now. We're all of a sudden Bitcoin has actually a geopolitically relevant asset. Yep. So central banks are asking questions. Heads of central banks are asking questions. Presidents and vice presidents are taking this very seriously. Secretaries and.

deputy secretaries of Treasury, of departments of defense, like those are conversations happening and those aren't public conversations, but they're a sign that the power structure is reassessing something, right? That's subject of a lot of our, you know, work at BPI. And then you talk to the normal person on the street and it's the man, that's crazy. Do you catch the game last night? Yeah. And it's like, well, I don't know what to tell you. Like, I mean, I have maybe the psychological compulsion to be prepared for change. Yeah. And so that has, you know, motivated me to be, you very autistic and looking at what are these parts of the distribution that are outside, like on the tail, but are exhibiting some direction of travel, even if it's barely perceptible.

But it's a sign that a strategic sort of shift or phase transition could be underway. Yeah. And it looks, it doesn't look like that when it's just starting. It looks, it's easily, easy to dismiss. It's sort of, the signal of noise is not great. And so you could wait for the signals of noise to be, obvious, buy Bitcoin a million dollars. You get at the price you deserve, right? It's like with UAPs, like you can sort of wait for, you know, it to become an object of massive political salience and then decide, oh, okay, now I'll treat it as real or serious and then I'll enter the public conversation or then I'll start my reading and analysis and cogitation on it. And that's fine. You'll get, you'll get that truth at the price you deserve, right? And so everyone

will make their own decisions about whether they care enough, whether it, strikes their priors sufficiently. And like personally, like I have no objective to like convince anyone. Like, you know, I really don't like talking about like I will I will talk because I'll talk, but like, you know, I'm not asking Danny to get me on a podcast to talk about UAPs to. No, I'm asking you. Yeah. And I go to these events and then people ask me these questions and I'll answer them because it's like it seems disingenuous for me to withhold or to kind of be like, you know, KG or whatever. It's like, well, I will answer questions asked. of me. And I'll try to be as clear and cogent about why I think what I think and how I got there.

But I have no, I really don't care. I mean, individually, like what people do with that information. I do think as a society, though, like if I just sort of step back and I go, well, we need to be, you know, broading our aperture, right, in terms of what we quite consider to be possible. And there's going to be political implications of this, just like there's political implications of Bitcoin. And I want to make sure that we are holding our, you know, government to account for certain things. So I sort of have like at least nascent political objective in general, but I'm not an activist on this subject. I think there's nuance, there's complexity. I do think, though, that there are certain communities of practice in academia, professional circles that, you know, are responsible for national security and sort of thinking around, around corners, folks in capital markets that are making allocations. even of, you know, public funds, like pension funds on a certain assumption about the future.

And so they're taking collective risks on our behalf. And if they are not making those decisions with a full view of the possibility set, then there's a blind spot right there. And it's not just like a blind spot of like, oh, there's something about reality that I miss. It's like, oh, there could be a strategic shock, a technological surprise, social disruption, cultural disruption, economic disruption, financial markets disruption, depending on how and when this information diffuses. And what exactly comes with that and how it's how it's internalized and digested. And I live in a society and I don't want our public funds to be, you know, vaporized because we misallocated capital. We didn't think about the possibility set here.

And so I do think there's like a public good to like talk about this and generally speaking and like foam the runway. And so that's a process that's been playing out. I want that to continue. But yeah, so start with the UAPD disclosure Act and form your own opinions of what you think that implies. Take the statements of senior government officials that have been in positions to know. Don't take them at face value, but, like, know that they said them.

Right? You need to, like, collect at least a certain degree of surface information about the political side of this. And then there's the, like, well, if it's real, we should just try to get better data on it. And so then ultimately, you know, you have two main options here. You could just ask nicely or force the government to disclose information that you suspect it has. And that's a process that's, you know, been difficult, but it's moving, right?

Throughop your disclosure act is an example of that, whistleblowers, et cetera. And then there's just, well, go and collect your own data. And so that's why, you know, I've been excited to advise Skywatcher, which is a group that's trying to do that. It's just like, let's go out and try to get some. some data and try to analyze it. And that's really hard. It's really expensive. It's time consuming.

It's ambiguous. But it's like, this is the necessary step to turn it from speculation to science. Okay. So I definitely want to talk about Skywatch here. But just quickly, before we do, I asked you before how these programs may fund themselves outside of taxpayer dollars. I'm just curious how that can actually happen. Do you remember Elon went on Rogan not too long ago talking about Doge?

And he said, you know, he can only go so far or else they'll kill me. right? I think he was joking about that. So, but how? Like what? Yeah. Because there's obviously, there's like the stories that have now come out about like drug trafficking from Central South America.

Like funding CIA programs way back in the day. Like, is it things like that? So there's a few interesting examples, right? So we did a prisoner swap with Russia late last year. And there was a gentleman that, we had arrested and imprisoned who was engaged in a stock manipulation insider trading. And his normal job was as a fund. It wasn't like a big guy.

He was like a $100 million, you know, we're talking scale. But he was basically charged with collaborating with Russian intelligence officers as part of this insider trading scheme where they would hack, get insider information, give that to him. He would trade on it. And then he would share the majority of the profits. back with the intelligence officers. I see.

Right. So you can see like, that's a basic prototype of if you're an intelligence service and you want to fund something, you have two main options. You go to your government and your public budget and even a secret public budget. But it's still taxpayer money or borrowed or borrowed money that's in the public balance sheet. And you go, we want to do some secret shit. Like give us, this is our budget for it. You know, give it to our operational accounts and we go and we spend it.

That's one option. The other option is off the books money. It's not public money. It's money you have made by conducting some other activity in the private sector, right? And you'd have obscured that being a thing that you're engaged in. It's some other nominally, you know, private entity hedge fund that is, you know, engaging in very profitable trades or investments. And a subset of those profits are redirected to support these activities.

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Okay. Let's talk about the disclosure process. So this stuff is going through like traditional government rails. But at Skywatcher, you're kind of going outside the band of that and doing it as a private company. You're trying to go out and see what's there and then what happens next. Do you then disclose that, disclose that to the public? How does that work? I'm an advisor, so I'm not like making management decisions at Skywatcher and I don't, I'm not like defining what I think they should or will do. Maybe it's worth explaining what they are doing right now. Yeah, so I'm like a

sounding board for them because, you know, I don't know, I have ideas and I, you know, I'll give them my ideas, but I'll have operational control over over the entity. But I, I really, I really, reason why I associate with them is because I met the individuals involved. I think they're operating with high integrity and good faith and they're willing to like do the work, right? And not just talk. And doing work is hard. It's expensive. It comes at an enormous risk, right? It might not work. Right. So like, it's an early stage venture, right? You could say. But it's a, it's objective is to achieve something so ambitious that it's worth it's worth given to the old college try. Right. And, and so they've assemble the team of folks, Jake Barber, James Fallows, I'm sorry, James Fallor, and a number of other,

you know, really, really high-skilled, great, great, great folks that want to try to get good data on this, right? And go out into the field and try to capture, you know, multispectral imagery, radar, multiple bands of infrared, multiple human observations to try to identify and classify different apparent anomalous objects in the sky. And so they're developing a technological suite and then an analytics capability to try to do that, right? Which is, you know, hard. But if we can kind of keep iterative development here, I think it's going to be quite successful. And yeah, so that's a basic process, right?

It's just going out into the field every once in a while and trying to capture, you know, as much data as you can and then analyzing it and then bringing it to to the public, right? And this is the process of, okay, trying to, you know, filter out what, what is, what's the highest signal information. It's a lot to do the sort of multi-sensor confusion to try to paint a picture of an anomalous object and try to, you know, give a, a coherent account of, you know, what is doing, right? Like, in three-dimensional space, is it an anomalous trajectory? Is it displaying anomalous performance characteristics? What is its surface characteristics in terms of its reflectivity of optical, light, infrared, radar? What's the pattern that we've seen for a similar class of object over many periods of time?

It's purely what you might call like phenomenological, right? There's no at this stage reaching for an underlying explanation. Is it a structured craft? Is it engineered by China or some alien civilization? It's not, those are not the hypotheses that we're testing right now. It's just, are there different apparent morphologies? Some look like orbs. Some look like balls of plasma light.

Some are, you know, metallic kind of manta ray type shapes. Some look like sort of jellyfish, you know, kind of semi-organic structures. Some are like crystalline, you know, geometric patterns. So just a lot of weird things, right? Okay. It's like Darwin. going off into the island and just like cataloging the different weird species and being just writing them down and you need to kind of do that first before you come up with the theory of evolution

that accounts for all this variety and diversity and somewhat confusing phenomena and so that's kind of what the process is now but how do they actually do that because i'm i know this won't be as simple as go to a field in montana and point a camera at the sky like what how do you know where these things are going to be well so that's the other you know kind of trick that they have that they're testing out, which is this kind of electromechanical signaling, right, that is apparently successful at attracting some UAP to the site of that ignition. And exactly why it works or how it works beyond me. But it's like, we've done this a few times, a number of times. And it seems to generate like a phenomenon that doesn't, that

that's not there when it's not on. And so let's just, let's see, let's keep doing that, right? And see, see what, like, what shows up. And so that's basically, like the basic heuristic, right? You sort of turn on the electromechanical, uh, signaling, uh, apparatus and you, you know, put, put that energy and that signal out into the, into the environment, then you wait. And where do they come from? Do they just appear?

Do they come from the sky, the ocean? Like, where are they coming from? Well, I'll also, I'll refer to a James Fowler's interview with Jesse Michaels where he describes in much more kind of technical detail because he's the technical expert and he's the technical operations lead and he's setting all this. He's developing the technology, running these operations in the field. So he's the guy like, you know, the subject matter expert. And so he can go, you know, go chapter and a verse. But, you know, we're limited by where we set up, right? We're not near the ocean. And so, you know, they might be coming out of the ocean at some point. But where we are, we can't discern that. And so, you know, we're limited. We're limited by where we set up. And so. And so. And so, you know, they might be coming out of the ocean at some point. But where we are, we can't discern that. And so. And so You know, we're in large open air ranges where you've got clear line of sight over the horizon, and you can, you know, you've got a certain area where your radar can extend. And so you pick up objects that come into your bubble. You don't know where they came from outside that bubble, but all of a sudden, they're in, they're doing your bubble now.

But they're not just materializing. That's interesting question. it's materializing is like a it's a word that implies certain things like they're kind of coming in from you know looking at the dimension right yeah whereas you could just see oh well that you have a certain bubble right a certain volume that you're monitoring and you have you know it's a complex you know set set up so you have a radar that has

you know a certain field of view right and then you've got cameras that are pointed right and you're trying to do this cue and slew where so you pick something up on the radar and then you're trying to direct, you know, you're much more targeted. You want to get as many pixels on that object as possible. So you want to get your high, high zoom, you know, really advanced optics, multiple bands of infrared to then go to the location that the radar ping has directed you to and try to then capture as much information about it. And if it's there, if it lingers for a while, maybe you deploy a helicopter out there to go see

if they can see it. Right. So you're just, this is the basic operational tempo. And so it's hard to then answer the question, well, where did it come from? because it could have just, when it could be a, it could be more stealthy, or your radar,

it might have just been a blind spot in your radar, or the radar just, you know, for whatever reason, like didn't fully discern it as a track until it got a certain distance into its bubble.

This is why it gets very technical, right? And so you can't really answer the question to the pop into existence, where did it come from, but you're trying to track these objects at different altitudes and speeds. And that's the data that we're kind of collating now,

right? Which types of objects are coming in? How often are they coming in? Are they coming in in in sort of singletons? Are they coming in in sort of flocks or fleets? And have they managed to actually pick anything up on radar so far? Oh, yes. Yes, yes.

In fact, we've released kind of our high-level taxonomy of kind of the different classes of UAP that we've discerned nine classes and kind of give sort of canonical imagery of each of them. And, yeah, the radar is an important piece of data, but it's extremely difficult to analyze radar image, like like radio. data, right? You've got, when it's, it's just an enormous amount of data, right? So it's not like a picture you can dice. It's like, you've got a whole track, a track file, and it's got a lot of data in it. And there's often noise in the environment you've got to clean out. So it's a, it's a complex data like data analytics question. Right. So the US government has spent billions of dollars on advanced radars. And we've got, they've got entire teams of people sitting in, you know, special facilities. And this is their sole expertise is just doing radar

analysis. And we've got like, you know, two guys in a truck. Right. So this is like a prototype to build the capability to then refine the technical collection methodologies and then just rinse and repeat. But this is like empirical data that anyone who's there sees. It's not something that you can have multiple people in a field and some will see this thing and some won't. Well, it's interesting. This is something that the team has observed. They've talked about, which is there's been cases where they get it on radar, they pull the camera up, they get it on camera, then they deploy the helicopter,

and they sort of vector the helicopter into that location. And, you know, this kind of merge plot, right, where it's like the helicopter's coming in, the object is here, yep, go, you know, 500 meters to the right, northeast, you know, da-da-da-da, it should be right in front of you. And the guys, the helicopter go, there's nothing here. And they're like, well, we see it.

So on the ground, they can see a helicopter. and whatever this craft is, but the helicopter can't see the craft. Yes. So there's something we are going on there. Hard to explain, right? That's, I think, happened maybe at least once. It might have happened more than that, but I know once. So is that just a weird one-off optical effect or who knows, right?

But what it shows is that you're running kind of this field experiment and you're trying to conduct a scientific activity, but where the, you know, you're trying to control as many of the, independent variables is possible, make them dependent variables, right? And so you're trying to tighten as much of the environment as possible, and they're trying to isolate this anomalous phenomenon and then try to collect as much, you know,

high fidelity data on it. But we're in this weird environment. We're like, well, by stipulation, if you think this is advanced non-human intelligence of some kind, or even just an advanced craft operating from, you know, say, some subset of human society, right, China, US, whatever, well, there's like an intentionality.

There's an intelligence, and it might be reacting to your activity. It might be trying to hide from you. It might be trying to collect information on you. It might be trying to disrupt your activity. It's like you're doing an experiment and you've got the creature on the dish and it's just like smacks your, smacks your, you know, microscope away, right? It's like, well, that's going to make it hard to like, you know, get the, get the cell on the, on the, on the, on the, on the tray. And it's not hard to think, like, if these craft are so advanced that they would be able to have. some kind of cloaking mechanism that mean you can't see them.

But the question is like, why would you be able to see them on the ground, but not in the helicopter? It's a good question. I mean, this is what we're at the point of just trying to identify these types of anomalies, not jump to conclusions, not jump to explanations. This is the process of science. You just need to accumulate anomalous information. This is the process of, I did physics and philosophy as undergrad, so lots of philosophy of science. And some people don't really understand the scientific method and how kind of fraught, like kind of the, what we think of as science

and kind of how we accumulate knowledge and what we mean when we say that something's a fact, right? And how do we interpret, you know, facts in the light of our models of reality? And the way human beings have done this in the last few hundred years, we construct systems of knowledge,

explanations, and then we, you know, design experiments where we have predictions from the theory and then they go out, we try to isolate, you know, the world and try to lock it down as many parts and pieces of it in order to test a particular implication

of our theory. And we, collect data and, you know, we get generally more confident if the experiments go the way we predicted. But often that means you're constructing theories that tell a consistent story about reality. And then reality, though, is, as we've seen, a lot more complicated than the theories that we've been able to develop thus far. We had Newtonian mechanics. It was great. It worked really well. It explained lots of things. Then we started noticing anomalies, right? And those anomalies start to pile up. And then ultimately, you get to a

crisis where the paradigm that you have, this is, you know, Thomas Kuhn, structure, scientific revolutions, and there's a variation on that, a slightly different take, Paul Fierreiber, it's a bit more anarchistic method of science. Carl Popper has his version more like a falsifiability and kind of, you know, leading to kind of a process of, of, of, kind of like elimination, essentially. But ultimately, you have this dominant paradigm and then anomalies start to accumulate. and you realize that your paradigm can't easily accommodate those anomalies. And so then a great genius comes out and says,

well, actually, I have a fundamentally different paradigm, a different view of reality, say Einstein. It's like, space time isn't this background fixed structure that has mechanical objects in it that obey these dynamical laws like Newton. It is a dynamical fabric that is itself, you know, the substrate for matter. and it you know stress energy tensor is is the critical object right that you know mediates between you know the matter stuff of the world and then the space like stuff of the world and the you know space time is a dynamical um uh entity uh in our models and that was a radically new thing like a funnily new way of conceiving of existence then we had to mathematically define it and then it turned out oh well it could protect you know the uh the perihelion of of of of

of Mercury and these anomalies in astronomical, you know, observation. And we go, oh, actually, now we know, okay, Einsteinian pictures is a better one. So this is all about like accumulating, accumulating those anomalies, right? And it's not just on the, you know, okay, there's anomalies in potentially in the air that we're detecting. There's also anomalies, say, in aspects of human capacities and human cognition, right? And there's anomalies in, you know, maybe what we think of as the frontiers of theoretical physics, right? We know there's got to be some, you know, next, next framework that we have to

move towards. It goes beyond quantum mechanics and relativity. Because these craft move in a way that we can't understand. Well, apparently, yes. So let me ask you about that, because this is one of the really hard things is like what, and I know you can't answer this, but like, what are aliens? Like, are these little green men from another planet or another solar system? Are they kind of interdimensional beings? Are they time travelers? Like, there's so much to it that I don't think anyone has a very good understanding of. And then in this, you said there's nine different types of craft. And are they different types of craft by one species, for lack of a better word, of alien? Or are these all different things? I have no idea. It's the honest answer. So maybe I can

maybe reprimatize the question, which is there's how you might go from characterizing observed phenomena, like these nine classes, which could ultimately be variations of, of a much more limited set of actual craft that you're just manifesting to us visually in different ways. Or there could be dozens, hundreds of different variations and we're just sort of having to pick up these nine. I'm saying like there are nine.

And that means there's nine species where like those, that's a false inference. But then you have to, when you're operating the frontiers of science, you have to operate both like from an empirical dimension, you know, direction and a theoretical direction. You want to ultimately kind of, it's a game of kind of a dance between theory and experiment, you know, observation and then hypothesis generation.

So you do some observations and you try to generate some novel hypothesis and where we are in the OAPS subject or even just, you know, say, a novelist cognition subject. There's an enormous white space in between what limited experiments have been done, good science have been done, and what serious sort of model building and theoretical hypothesis generation have been done. Like there's been some good work, but it is not what you would call like a mature science, right? It's just front science, very speculative, lots of ideas, and, you know, because it's been subject to such taboo, like not a lot of actual effort going into it. And the institutions that we normally look to to kind of lead the frontiers of research have been either misdirected or because of social

stigma and professional incentives have not seriously directed attention at it. So the main objective is just to actually change that, like shift the academic and professional taboo so that you can actually dedicate serious scientific research to this. So you can actually, you know, be much more precise and much more productive in how you actually developed theories and test them. And then you can ultimately try to get at some of these answers. Like you can, you know, from a just apiary basis, be like, well, there's maybe four canonical classes of non-human intelligence that you could kind of stipulate at a very high level.

This is how I think about it. This is alternative ways of slicing, essentially, traditional extraterrestrial, extraterrestrial, meaning from a different time, wherever we think of as time in your model of physics. Crypto-terrestrial, which means they're from Earth, meaning the Earth is the home planet origin, so they're not extraterrestrial. They didn't come from a different planet. They're from Earth, maybe just like long-predated human civilization. Or ultra-dimensional, or, you know, essentially from a different degree of freedom, you know, another, another plane of existence,

another, you know, bubble universe. So, like, you can construct all sorts of different variations on that theme. And then you would have to specify, okay, well, what does that imply about the observed phenomenon? Like, if they were from another time, what could we then, we construct the model of what that, what would have to be true for that to be true? What sorts of characteristics would we expect to see in the observed UAP if they were time-traveling AIs, as an example?

Does that model fit some subset of the data that we can collect about these objects, right? And I think we are in a point where the data does not sort of pick out or falsify any of those hypotheses. There's some data that, you know, leads people to certain, certain of those hypotheses to some data that points in another direction, right? You know, there's some of these objects people have characteristic experience with that are almost just like balls of plasma light energy. And, you know, I might say, oh, well, where's that from? But it's not like a structured craft. And there's some, you know, high signal, you know, we have craft sitting places.

They're structured material. They're not just like balls of light energy, you know, some sort of interdimensional wobble. They're like, a thing. It's heavy. It sits there. You can knock on it, right? Somebody made it. And then we find biological occupants, right?

We don't know if those are the progenitor species that created the object or whether they themselves were creations of some other. Some drone-like thing. Yeah, they're like a synthetic robot, right? That's designed to perform a certain function. These sound like outlanders hypotheses, but like not to some of these people that when you have the stuff. Well, okay.

I didn't think this was true, but I guess what? Now I got a freaking, you know, little gray thing sitting on my table. Get over yourself. Like, figure it out. And so, yeah, we're in this mode now. we have to like radically expand the aperture of possibility for our explanation seeking and not jump to conclusions, right? That's the most important thing. Like we as human beings have constructed a whole tower of explanations.

Ever since we kind of got smart at the scientific method, you know, Descartes was the first person to kind of really help do the philosophical work to kind of separate out the world of mind, the world of matter. And it was very useful for enlightenment rationality to be like, oh, okay, we can kind of partition a lot of spiritual, and metaphysical conversation about the soul and the spirit and the mind and God, that can kind of keep developing in this track. And then we can look at the world of objects, material, you know, things. And we can try to model what are the patterns of reality. That's what that became physics. And that worked really well as a scientific sort of metaphysical paradigm. My sort of gut is like that's that's sort of running out of steam. And we're kind of having to sort of reconverge back to like, you know, is a book called DeKart's error,

which was basically pointing out, like, this separation was necessary for its time. But it kind of fundamentally diverged, you know, these critical aspects of reality, right? Like, what does it like to be a thing, like a being that has experiential subjectivity and awareness of consciousness from the world of material objects that we can mathematically describe? We've developed a whole system of knowledge and explanations. it's worked really well that gives us models of space time and causation and time itself. And we keep, you know, building on top of those systems and we develop new vocabularies, right,

that we can translate into those models. And by assumption, these advanced civilizations have been doing that just much longer than us. And there's no shortcut, I think, right? You have to actually, like, iteratively build a stack of knowledge. That's a stack of concepts. that we can encode in language in our minds and in our mathematical symbols. And you can't just, you know, it's like translation. It's like a future science 100 years from today will be utterly alien to us,

unrecognizable. You have to actually like build the translation layer from here to there. And it turns out like this is where AI is going to be very important. Because AI is like the one thing AI, LMs in particular are like, that's what they are. It's essentially maps between vector spaces. of like co-similar concepts. And if you're trying to translate between, you know, very divergent sort of webs of meaning,

AIs are really good at that. Like we're now, you know, pretty close to, say, translating whale song, right? It's because we can capture lots of data on whales and we can say, okay, well, what's the characteristic network of apparent relations between these different localizations? How does that, you know,

what's the sort of isomorphisms that we can go between whale song-like conceptual? web of meaning to human webs of meaning. Our webs of meaning are much more complicated, but can you do an encoding and a compression and a mapping? And that's, that's feasible, right? But that's the process you would need to be like, okay, well, there's aliens intelligences. They have their own webs of meaning that they've then used those webs of meaning to be able to engineer objects. They've created structures of understanding that allowed them to create structures in reality. That's what we do, right? We figured out a structure of

understanding about nucleus, and we developed a structure in reality called a nuclear bomb. And so these are not like ineffable abstractions. Like that is the work of human civilization. It's also the risk in human civilization as we can figure things out and then develop quite destructive capabilities. And that's what you would expect, you know, any arbitrary civilization to be doing the same thing. And so trying to understand who they are and what they're able to do and what they're building what these objects are requires that we kind of try to stretch our conceptual understanding to that level. And if I'm the U.S. government, maybe one of the reasons why it's so secret is that they

understand that rapid progression and conceptual understanding, which we call science, is also the basic predicate for radical transformation of weapons technology. And you would, you know, learn that lesson very acutely in 1945. And I would never forget it. And so physics would be the most important thing that a civilization does. And therefore, you would maybe not let real physics happen. This episode is brought to you by Anchor Watch. Now, one of the things that keeps us Bitcoiners up at night

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cutting-edge computing resources for AI, all backed by renewable energy. We've been working with the founders Dan and Will for a long time now and have been really impressed with their values, especially when it comes to their commitment to local communities and sustainable computing power. So whether you're interested in mining Bitcoin or harnessing AI compute power, Iran is setting the standard. Visit iran.com to learn more, which is iri-en.com. So that, again, like in this kind of UFO, UAP world is obviously a huge talking point of whether like physics has been purposefully stalled since the, basically after the Second World War. Do you think that's likely?

Well, I was going to do PhD in physics. And my like whole intellectual, you know, obsession from when I was a teenager was like trying to do, you know, quantum gravity, theoretical physics. And I went to undergrad at Hopkins and took, you know, quantum mechanics. I was talking to my professor. And quantum mechanics, of course, is core theory in modern physics. And it's also the subject of, like, extreme metaphysical angst. Like, what does it mean?

You have the superposition of states. And then you have a measurement and you get, you know, one, one eigenstate out of this superposition. Was that mean we have like a multi-bursts, like a many-world's interpretation? Is consciousness actually, like collapsing the way function? into a single output. This has been, you know, this has been the churn of metaphysics and philosophy for a long time. And I was asking the professor, like, you know, what's your, you know, preferred interpretation

of quantum mechanics? He was like, don't, don't trouble yourself with those things. Like, these are not going to be questions that will help you get jobs. Like, find a narrow, you know, just shut up, calculate, find a research project that you can engage in that will contribute to the literature and get tenure, basically. there was immense stigma around, you know,

exploring deeper questions. It was like, nope, this is the canonical paradigm. This is what you need to do to get a job. And that selects out, I think people that would want to like break the paradigm. I want to like, you know,

well, I'll take the right. And there's been some people that have been doing that, but they're few and far between to take immense personal cost. So the institution of physics as a whole has kind of been, you know, this is like Eric Weinstein's bit, right? And he's not wrong that we have kind of stalled in physics. Now, how much of that is like master plan manipulation behind the

scenes? How much of it's just like the sclerosis of a decaying institution and, you know, incentives of publication? I think it's both. But I also strongly suspect that, you know, we have an entire architecture of secret physics. We call it Department of Energy National Lab infrastructure. And that would be from reverse engineering these craft that the U.S. government likely have? Well, it exists, you know, we know, I mean, it's a real thing. Like you can go to Department of Energy and they look at the national labs and they do physics research. They got part of an accelerator. So that's not like the secret piece, right?

But that creates the infrastructure where if you wanted to have circuit physics, that's where you would do in a black box. And then you would, you know, maybe I've sort of, this is definitely not a factual allegation. It's just a speculative hypothesis. But I find it very interesting that Jim Simons is hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, which is the most successful hedge fund in human history as far as we're aware of. which is just a black box that prints money. Also, his private foundation is one of the largest funders of breakthrough research in physics,

computer science, math, synthetic biology. And he engineered a partnership between Stony Brook University, where he sort of does the recruitment of the best impritis physicist and mathematicians to his hedge fund, engineered a partnership between them and Brookhaven National Lab, which is Department of Energy National Lab that has a particle accelerator and, you know, it's a large piece of infrastructure. And they're all near each other in Long Island. And the head of the Simons Foundation, a gentleman named Dr. Spurgel, was the chair of the NASA UAP working group. And he's the go-to advisor to many mainstream media institutions that have questions about UAPs. They call him up and they go, what do you think is going on?

Is this real? And of course, his response is, oh, it's temperature inversions, it's balloons. You know, don't trouble yourself here. This is all just a mistake. an identity, you know, quite convenient, I would say. What would be the benefit of them holding back this information, though? Is this kind of ace in the whole technology in case the U.S. goes to war? Like, why would they not? Well, yes. So this is where it's quite complicated here.

And this is, I think, part of the conversation and the negotiations now are, you know, if we do have breakthroughs in physics that lead to breakthroughs in engineering and, say, capabilities for aerospace, propulsion or new materials. that provide really enhanced cloaking or single generation. There's all sorts of, you know, pretty important applications you can imagine for military intelligence advantage. And you would not want to compromise if I'm a U.S. senior U.S. senator or national security official.

And I realize there's a there there and there's an important, you know, existential question that needs to be resolved for the public. I would have this tension between disclosure and national security, between broadening the aperture and bringing some of this information into public view, but without revealing our most critical advanced capabilities or technical breakthroughs or giving China any hints that would allow them to potentially catch up or accelerate their own developments. And this is the all too human, you know, maybe this is the test is like you get access to certain knowledge and do you weaponize it for like terrestrial, you know, zero sum war? Or do you use it to uplift your civilization?

use it to allow your species to reach for the stars and to develop themselves as conscious beings in a much more fulsome manner. Like this is this might be like which way Western man. Well like which way this is the cheering test. This is our this is our test right. Like are we going to pass the test? I don't know. But this is, you know, this is a challenge for our bureaucracies because you know, the job of the Department of Defense isn't like human enlightenment job of the Department of Defense is making sure they maintain a tactical and strategic advantage over U.S. adversaries.

But you have to assume that if the U.S. do have these craft and have reversed engineered them, maybe had breakthroughs in physics, that probably China are doing the same thing. Yes, in Russia. Yeah, and like every large nation today. Everyone that knows this exists is like, oh shit, I need to get

up the curve as quickly as possible. Yeah. Do you have any kind of feeling on whether the U.S. are the furthest to head with this? I haven't been read into any of these programs. I have no, I've not signed any non-disclosure agreements. I have not privity any classified information on the subject. So it's all just, you know, informed speculation.

One piece of text that I always point to that I come back to is something that was written in one of those, you know, National Defense Authorization Act amendments, which basically said, in order to mitigate the population. possibility of foreign technology surprise, the federal government must broaden awareness of historic exotic technology antecedents previously provided by the federal government for research and development purposes. So, like, you can unpack that. Like, in order to mitigate the possibility of foreign technology surprise, you know, trying to getting the jump on us, the federal government was broad an awareness of historic, exotic, technology antecedents. Historic exotic technology antecedents. Historic exotic technology and deceit. Oh, it's a UFO sitting in a bunker that we have

provided, the U.S. government has provided for research and development purposes. Provided to who? The U.S. government has given, has provided those historic exotic technology antecedents to some group or company

to do research and development. And what it basically saying is that you're that F, that activity is too slow. And we're worried China's catching up. And so we need to broaden awareness. That's it. That's the whole like that's the, it's all in one sentence basically. Now you could say, well, that's just a bunch of words. It is. But words might have meaning. Somebody wrote them for a reason and passed it in a piece of legislation. So your question is, oh yeah, they're probably worried about China. I would be, right? China's like probably got 10 times amount of STEM talent as we do. Highly

operational effective military civil fusion system of research and development. They're developing youthful weapons like like this. They're dramatically expanding their space activities. They develop retrievals from the dark side of the moon,

established station keeping in the Lagrange points between like in the cis lunar competitive environment. They are rapidly advancing in quantum information systems, quantum computing, even in AI, they're caching up. There are developments in synthetic biology and genetic research is probably among the leading

in the world now. So you've looked at all these competitive domains in the frontiers of science and technology. They are peers in almost every single one, and you can make the case that in some they exceed US capabilities. Now, does that mean that we have certain exquisite special things that they don't have plausible, but things change pretty quickly and their industrial system is rapidly expanding. And I think this is a subject of competition between different power structures because it's not just US versus China, right, at this point. You have to imagine the US is a, when you say the US, you think about it, you have to model it is like, well, there's a political layer that is competitive, Democrats, Republicans, different factions within the Democrats and

Republican factions that point to elite factions, uh, in Wall Street, in financial capitals, folks in tech circles now that are climbing the ladder and into the military industrial complex. You've got that dynamic, the Palantirs, the Anderals, etc. There's a huge amounts of money on the lot, like Golden Dome is a $500 billion project. And China has their own internal ecosystem between the rocket forces, the strategic support force, the CCP apparatus, the Shanghai clique that wants to open up and be much more international and, you know, reform-minded and then the kind of hardliners

that want to, you know, potentially go to war, right? So this is why I think it's so important when I talk to these institutions, sub-world funds, et cetera, is this isn't like this esoteric subject to like park in the corner and be like, oh, I need to make sure

I'm smart on the UAP stuff. Like, it is in the backdrop of a lot of the geopolitical decision-making happening right now. And it's, depending on how it's leveraged as a tool of statecraft, just like all these it's like my sort of case is bitcoin is this like emerging you know tool of statecraft it's a it's a tool in our toolkit now that didn't exist before if we wield it properly we can um you know

maybe uh gain a strategic advantage or or provide strategic resilience to our economy and to our to our people and to our values i think is the same topic of like you could you know try to use the uap subject and maybe the knowledge you've gained for narrow you know military advantage um but also might be like a a a opportunity to, you know, I wouldn't say world peace, but to like help squash the beef, right? Like if it turns out that the exo politics is a thing. If there are nonhuman intelligence or nonhuman intelligences interacting with humanity and, you know, maybe with different degrees of intentions, um, that's worth fighting about becoming a little bit silly. Yeah. It's just something that, you know, I mean, Gorbachev and Reagan, like they kind of famously had this. Like, if you were

attacked by, you know, aliens, would you help us? And they're like, Yeah, of course, man. Yeah. You know, squat up, right? So, I mean, that's kind of a bit of a trope, but it's not entirely wrong. So, yeah, I think this is why it's like, I think in terms of scenarios and looking next two, three, four, five, ten years. And we're facing a series of these accelerations now where subjects that were, you know, dismissed as taboo are now increasingly of strategic importance. And the three, like, you know, major ones that I'm focused on are Bitcoin, AGI, and UAPs.

And they all have very similar characteristics in this respect. Like, you know, AGI as a subject was like on less wrong blog posts. Eliza Yikowsky and Nicholas Bostrom. And I wrote a fiction novel like 10 years ago about quantum superintelligence emerging from an NSA spooky lab. And, you know, I was, I don't know, I was just sort of spewing. But I was reading, you know, Boston superintelligence. And it was like a niche somewhat fringed subject.

Like one of these days, you know, we're going to create a computing system that can rewrite its own code. And now it's basically bootstrapping itself. And we can't control that process. And do you get runaway, you know, super intelligence and what's that mean for humanity? That went from being like a fringe blog post speculative sci-fi to now like driving our geopolitical deals. Riyadh, South, and the Riyadh series of tech deals. and with the Emirates and hundreds of billions of dollars of investment to try to get access to these frontier A models.

It's premised on the idea that we're probably going to get drop in white collar workers in two to three years, AGI, and whatever, it's an effable definition, but there's going to be something like, you know, a period where we reach almost every task that can be done on the computer will be done by an AI system within the next, within the political horizon of current of current leadership. Yep. Right. So, you know, if you're a vice president now, you might be running.

for president, 2027, 2020, this is no longer like a hypothetical question for you. So AGI went from like,

less wrong, tiny, like some people were perceiving it, like the curve was, it was an exponential curve, but it was a very early part of the exponential curve.

And now that's like, a strict issue of the policymakers. Bitcoiners, again, like a bunch of autistic nerds getting obsessed with an exponential process. And they just see that, that little like pick off off the,

off the slope very early. And some get very, very rich because of, that, right? Because then they saw that takeoff and we're just still on that takeoff moment. And now Bitcoin is maybe, you know, in that process of becoming like a geopolitically relevant asset as it, as I think it is. And I think UIPs are on the same sort of trajectory where like, I'm just autistic and I see this like slight deviation from the from the slope. And because it's dressed in a lot of taboo, like with Bitcoin, like you have to take a bit of risk to talk about it and analyze it seriously.

But I don't know, like that's the benefit of being a bit autistic because you don't give a shit. And, you know, I think it's important to then think about, okay, you have these three curves. Maybe they're going to lag, but they're all going to be in this sort of exponential phase, whether it's, you know, exponential in terms of capability on AI, exponential in terms of price and, you know, changes to the global system with Bitcoin. And, of course, even the more is, you know, all encompassing sort of exponential impact from UAP disclosure, which is going to touch everything, right? And I think I'm sort of increasingly of the view that I think all three of these, are going to start to converge, and the dynamics between them is going to be very important to

understand. And that's kind of what I'm focused on now, is like the practical implications of taking seriously a set of scenarios the next two to three to five, ten years where, you know, with the what if Bitcoin becomes global gold or more, what if we do go through, you know, post-AGI disruption to our economy? And we have a whole new set of economic actors, AI agents, and then what transformations that does for human productivity and society. And then you layer in these disclosure questions. You know, other breakthroughs in physics, knowledge about human capacities, human consciousness, and then the presence of non-human intelligences, you know,

where we're not the top of the hierarchy of being, right? And then what does that mean for human society? And what sources of new, how do we create new institutions, right, that will help us navigate this disruption, right? Because we're going to need a new institution. So I talk to folks at, you know, the Atlanta Council and Rand and, And, you know, these are systems we've created that are designed to help us think about the future and prepare for strategic surprises and to translate these into documents and formal bureaucratic procedures for the government. And they're totally cooked.

They are talking about the subject, but it's like whispers and the internal taboo and preference falsification is extreme. And so they're not going to be the institutions we can rely on to, like, steer society and, like, you know, help hopefully take most advantage of these changes. changes. So like my sort of schizo view is like Bitcoiners, I think are the most psychologically open to like they inherently distrust authority. We've seen behind the veil already. Yeah. And they're cognitively, they've been willing to sort of take the slings and arrows, like to go out on a limb and be like almost somebody telling them it's a stupid, uh, scam, you're wasting your money is like, only makes them want to double down on that floor. right and so as a personality type they're kind of been hardened and they're i think more cognitively

open than most and so if i look at the next few years and okay well if bitcoin does what i think it's going to do there's going to be a new class of maybe more post-economic individuals that uh okay you you you you achieved success here like your bitcoin thesis paid off now what right what are you going to do right like probably most rich people right that became rich through this process of social cultural acculturation. You know, you went to Harvard, you know, went to business school. This is a whole different beef. Hedge fund, you know, senior director at Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs. And then you become a senior executive or your dad that gives you money. A certain set of rich people and they do

rich people things. They end out libraries at the university so their kids can go there. They buy yachts. They invest in prestige art. And they just sort of, you know, become donor class people, right? But Bitcoiners are investing in things like psychedelic research. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, okay, like, if, if time travel is possible, it's probably going to get invented by a Bitcoin. Right. It's like if, if human consciousness is a much more funnal variation of a core metaphysical theme in reality and we can expand it, maybe engineer it, use it to expand human flourishing in capacities, I think people that are willing to do that are going to be people that don't just accept received wisdom. Right. And I think Bitcoiners are like a canonical example of that. And so yeah, it's like it sounds like a real schizo story I was telling. It's like, okay, phase one, you know, get America to buy Bitcoin. And that provides seed capital for a whole new cohort of sort of aligned individuals that are orthogonal to the existing institutional framework of think tanks and venture funding and scientific research. And just like the process of institutional reform and decay, you have to kind of do both. both the renovation and sort of try to salvage the existing institutions so that they can still withstand these disruptions. But you also need to create new institutions that are sort of fit

for the purposes that we're going to require. And so yeah, my whole, I don't know, like, David Bailey is going to be the first time traveler. It's like if it would be like kind of a funny story to tell, like, okay, if we're on this timeline where Bitcoin becomes global money and then Bitcoiners are the ones that actually get alien-pilled. And then they fund breakthrough physics research and they invent these radical technologies. They're going to send them back in time to ensure like Trump narrowly avoids the bullet. And the Bailey bit pays off. And so he can invent the time traveling AI probes that keep us in this closed time like loop that we're in. Yeah, that's pretty skisoe. Yeah, it's pretty funny. But like what are the chances that we live in this like,

wildest, most interesting time. It's a simulation man. But I do want to talk about the consciousness piece, because this is something that, again, like the UFO people are really sort of honed in on. And it's really hard for me as someone who, like, I find this stuff fascinating, but I'm not like in this world to know what is nonsense and what's real. And there's people like, is it Stephen Greer who goes out and meditates and summons craft? Have I got his name right? Yeah, Stephen Greer, he's known for a certain sort of modality called CE5 that he's popularized. What I don't know is if that's just nonsense or if that's a real thing. And like what is the consciousness link to UAPs?

Yeah, so the first answer is it. There's been lots of versions of that in modern history, right? Some are more associated with government programs and remote viewing, the Monroe Institute. Sort of neuromeditative practices. Stephen Greer's version of it has, you know, been, I think, the most, penetrated some of the UFO culture a bit more. I've never been on one of those things. I'm not an expert in CE5 as like a particular methodology. I'm not an expert any of that. So I can't. I know people have accused him of certain poor practices and sort of fraudulent activities. So I, but I haven't

resolved. I don't know the details of that. So remain agnostic with respect to him personally. but there's been a number of these sorts of apparent consciousness techniques, which if you actually to zoom out for human culture are like not new, right? Like all the major faith religious traditions have something like aesthetic meditation practice, prayer, right? Certain ways of entering into a state of consciousness, a mental orientation that's like, you know, whether it's Buddhist meditation, you know, tantra,

in Catholic traditions. It's like everyone has a version of, you know, incantations or chants. There's lots of serious, like, actual, like, neuro-psychological research, putting people in MRIs. And, you know, the brain is, like, the most interesting object that, like, we know in the universe.

And it's, like, creates me. It's pretty crazy, man. That's a wild thing, right? I'm just this fucking stuff between my ears, right? Like, that's a wild, what's going on there, right? And, you know, there's a huge amount of complexity going on in the cortical structures and, you know, all the way down if you look inside a neuron, you've got microtubules and you've got the whole Stuart Hammeroff orc or maybe you can get these tubular dimers that can, you know, enter into like quantum superposition. So there's like a rich complexity and potentially deep physical structures that the brain is, is organized and evolutionary design to to leverage. And so you have that kind of serious scientific research where maybe, you know, we engage in meditation as a certain entrainment that occurs.

And if the brain is in a certain set of default mode states that you can shift, like you can imagine the brain is like this, a whole bunch of series of layered vibrations that you can sort of parameterize and kind of a phase space. And like normal waking consciousness is a certain state where it's vertical. it's filtering out some information. It's a design to help you navigate reality and engage in conversation and, you know, do sort of raciosination as like a higher higher order cognitive functions. But then you, okay, can you entrain a certain set of states that move the sort of whole system to a different part of the face space, where different filters are being applied. Different information is allowed to be synthesized and and aggregated. And what does that mean for different, you know, we sort of interpolate that as different states of consciousness. So meditative practices have different, you know, oh, these are the Janhas or whatever, right?

So this is like a real, you know, it's this mix of spirituality and science, right? Because we kind of are leveraging a lot of like historical traditions where we've layered in a lot of received wisdom. And then we're trying to do serious science on them. But it's become clear to me that it's like a, just like there are anomalies in the sky, there are anomalies in human cognition in our normal frame, meaning telepathy, meaning remote viewing. The telectly tapes were wild. Yes. So you should probably explain that for anyone who isn't aware, but this was basically nonverbal autistic kids who can essentially read their parents' mind.

Yes. Which I remember, I think I was listening to that. I was there listening to her before it was cool with Danny. Of course you were. It talks about it on Jesse's podcast. I was on the hype train when I was talking about it. And I was like, oh, this is weird. Like, this is interesting.

And it's something I had never encountered before. But I've, you know, come to know a lot more about that whole domain. And I think it's not convinced, you know, to a certain degree of scientific rigor that it's 100% real. But there's something very weird happening. Well, that was the criticism it got that it wasn't properly scientifically tested. Yes. And so you need to do the scientific analysis, right? And that's challenging when you have, you know, children, right?

You have to get the institutional review board approvals. And they're not like, it's not like, they're human beings, right? And you have to do the control test. But you can imagine an experimental setup where, you know, you isolate them. So you try to minimize as much as possible, the possibility of covert signaling, maybe even unintentional signaling between the mother and the daughter or vice versa. And then you want to basically randomize exposure of, say, a certain word. So you roll some dice.

You look up the word and just a, you know, like, almost like, you know, generating a seed phrase. Yeah. Right. And then the mother puts that word in her head and then you have the child or the teenager, whoever it is, like try to, you know, say that word, right? Well, what word is your mother thinking? Right.

And if they keep getting it right and you've got, and you've got videos and you're like, well, you know, unless there's something like crazy happening with like some subtle tapping or some like, you know, sub vocalization that nobody can hear, like, you can try to construct all sorts of, like, ways of getting rid of, but like, Prima facie, when you've seen that, you're like, yeah, the daughter just read the mother's mind. Okay, like, that's not a thing I thought was possible, but, okay, if it's anomaly, I got to explain it somehow. Um, and you just got to keep doing those controlled experiments and try to, you know, get the statistical significance to say, oh, yeah, we try to rule out any potential, um, you know, conventional

explanation. And now we have to just consider the possibility. This is, this is a real phenomenon. And then it's back back to the UAP side. It's like, you try to rule it out as a conventional balloon or whatever. And there's like a weird thing doing something weird. Okay. How do we explain it? And then you've got to broach this other much more difficult territory, which is we have to construct new models of reality, right? That are not just advances in our understanding of theoretical physics, but understandings of human consciousness. What is human consciousness? What is consciousness? What is consciousness? you know, in general as a function of, you know, the structure of reality. What's your answer to that?

Well, this is another three-hour podcast. I think I've talked about this a bit on number of podcasts and kind of my metaphysics and my physics. I mean, I'd say my top-level view of metaphysics is that causation is the most important thing to try to model metaphysically, meaning there's a structure of constraint in the world. It isn't just a bunch of random stuff that happens, right? There is like, like events constrain other events. So there's a structure of constraint that we call causation. And my top of view is that that structure of constraint is what we call from the outside physics

and what we experience that structure of constraint is what we call consciousness quality. So there's two sides of causation. There's the extrinsic aspect of causation that we model through physics. And there's the intrinsic aspect of causation is what, you know, qualitative first-person subjective experiences. And so that is essentially implies a form of panpsychism, right? but not like a panpsychism where there's like a substance dualism. You know, there's quality like stuff and physics like stuff.

And they sort of relate to each other in some, you know, weird way. There's nomological regularities that connect changes in the physical facts to changes in the qualitative facts. That's like David Chalmers view. My view is much more structural, right? There's a metaphysics of causation that requires that there are two essential aspects of reality that are inextricable, like inextricable. inextripably connected and you have to have both for you to have anything like causation to have a world that is anything like our world. And that requires an inner aspect and an outer aspect, right? Just like the rules of chess can be written down formally and can constrain, you know, how pieces move in a game of

chess. But the rules of chess are a substrate agnostic. Like they apply equally to glass pieces or wood pieces. The rules of chess you write down don't tell you what the pieces are made of or what they are. Right. So the rules of physics are like that. They tell us the constraints that the stuff of the world has to obey mathematically, right? And so we reify those when we write down these equations, then we put these pictures in textbooks with an electron. It's like a little ball, right? And we color it in and we go. And so then we form an image of our mind of an electron or a particle or a wave as like a thing.

But it's just a mathematical structure. That's all that physics really tells us, right? Everything else is just imagery and metaphor. So physics doesn't tell us stuff of reality. is something to say when electron is or what a way function is or what the stress energy tension is. It's just this is mathematical symbols. So the stuff of reality, there has to be a carrier for the structure. It has to be like a, you can call it an essence, right?

Inner aspect, outer aspect, like a door, like logically cannot have one side. Right. So it might be like causation cannot have a physics only side. Like that's like a logical contradiction. So causation requires consciousness. And so you have a problem of causation. You have a problem of consciousness. Those are two sort of separate metaphysical problems.

And I think by solving a problem of causation, in this way you solve the problem of consciousness. Because that puts consciousness sort of at the floor of reality. And then you build up, right, a whole structure, a whole series of structures. And we're not at the bottom. So, you know, we have to kind of build these abstractions to try to touch what we think is at the bottom.

So yeah, I think conscious is a fundamental future of reality. And I think it's deeply connected to the structure of physics because, again, they're like, there's two sides of the same underlying process that's playing out. So connecting that metaphysics, which is kind of a David Rosenberg slash Philip Gough slash Whitehead, slash Bertrand Russell kind of school of philosophy of consciousness and philosophy of physics. And then there's a fundamental science approach, which I like the Wolfram-Garad model. We've talked about before. I won't give the whole recapitulation of that. But essentially thinking of the universe, developing models of the universe is sort of multi-way computations. So there's a branching and merging process playing out.

And then you can provide an interpretation of that, branching and merging hypergraph structure in such a way that you can recover general relativity and quantum mechanics. And then gesture at kind of what would be the models that you would need to go beyond that. And then the critical sort of next phase for those things, but unfortunately because falling outs between Garad and Wolfram, a lot of that research is stalled. But it's like, what does it mean for the observer? The observer is slicing this multi-way system. you know, that's branching and emerging, and we're a certain, you know, type of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of observer. And so this question of NHI is like, okay, we're, we're navigating this, this, this, this,

uh, this, uh, higher dimensional space, but we have certain constraints, filters on, right? And so when we relax these filters, when we take psychedelics, for example, or we enter into a certain neuromeditative state, um, that sort of way of slicing this, you know, very complicated structure, um, changes. And the way of it's, you know, um, changes. And the way of we normally slice it as an observer because we're competition-bounded and we have a linear sense of time in history that's encoded in our present state. You know, we

see a world that looks like space-time, normal space-time, a three-plus-one manifold. And when we do experiments kind of at the smallest scales that we can kind of interrogate and do the course screening on, which is what all observations and measurement are, just coarse screening, right? We're sort of trying to course-creen

a certain subset of a system that's outside of our system, and we're trying to do essentially translation. and like represent that system in our in our internal model. And we do that at a certain set of course screenings. We see, you know, the laws of thermodynamics, the era of time, quantum mechanics. And then when we do the inverse of that cosmological large scale models, we get generativity, right? We get sort of a smooth manifold.

So the basement of the reality we can experience, we see a discrete algebra at the top. We see a continuous geometry. And those are just features of us. And so our physics is downstream of us as a, as a, as a. certain type of observer that is slicing this much more complicated structure. So if you were a different type of observer, would you see a different type of physics? And could you almost like not do spacetime engineering, but in sort of this verbiage would be branchial engineering?

I mean, if the universe is a sort of branching emerging structure, there's a higher level sort of representation of the causal graph that you can interpret as a branchial graph, which is how you recover quantum mechanics, essentially. what you think of as like the different paths in history. There aren't like, you know, separate threads, but they're kind of this constant branching and merging. And observers are sort of slicing one, one path through that branch. If you relax your boundary constraints as an observer,

can you sort of bias your future paths, right, systematically? It might be one of the branchal engineering, right? You call that time travel-ish. Maybe it's timeline engineering, right? So if you could do that, well, that would be a new kind of thing. We don't have a model for like what, we don't have a sci-fi for that really, right? Because it's based off of the sort of metaphysics and this physics that is a different view of what's going on than just like, oh, a wormhole through space time. I think that's not likely what we're going to figure out UAPs are doing.

I think we're going to find out UAPs are doing is they're able to traverse slash manipulate this much more higher level structure that we're kind of a worse looking at through a soda structure. draw. Right. And, and so they're able to kind of, so what, that's why they think they appear to us very mysteriously in various guises, right? They almost seem like interdimensional objects. They can kind of blink in and out of existence. But at the same time, they're, they're material structures, right? And so, you know, you can riff back and forth with, uh, Chachypte and come up with, like, all sorts of schizophrenic delusions that reinforce your priors here. I'm not saying I've done that. Um, but, uh, which is the danger mode. with these LMs is because they're so good at basically linking all these different potential

threads together. They can paint a very compelling picture and then you can believe your own bullshit. So constantly try to resist that. But you also have to, you know, leverage these tools. So it's important to kind of push the boundaries of understanding as much as you can. And so, yeah, this idea of branchal engineering and this is kind of be connecting how to, the frontiers of UAPs, the frontiers of consciousness, frontiers of physics. I don't know exactly where it's going to go, but I think this is the direction you have to go, right? Because if you're stuck on, you know, just, ah, it's a sci-app. Fine.

You're, guess what? You're going to get, you're going to get that at the price you deserve, right? You're going to push the frontiers of knowledge. You have to be like, we need to entertain these possibilities. So, I don't know, I think it's fun. I mean, you definitely lost me in part of that, but I enjoy, I'm sure it was genius. You know, you, you, you asked for it, you know? Do you think that psychedelics could play a really important role in this kind of, like,

consciousness revolution? I do. I do. And I've done it once. I'm no expert. But, so I did psilocybin once. It's great. And it was a very interesting experience, right? I think it was not like a recreational, like, oh, let's have fun. I viewed it as a scientific research, like phenomenological research, right, where you kind of are experiencing real time, kind of your generative world model flickering, right? Which is thinking it's a characteristic feature of, at least psilocybin. and I don't know the phenomenology of other hallucinogens. I think they're different. And as a gentleman named on Andrew Gallimore. He's a neuroscientist who's written two books on kind of the taking very seriously, kind of the metaphysics of different states of experience associated with, you know, hallucinogens.

I'm trying to map out, like, what does that mean? How do we interpret the structures of reality? There's a lot of, like, kind of pop culture, YouTube-y, of stuff. Like, you take DMT, you look at the laser and you can see the machine code. I don't know. I'm not going to rule anything out, right? But like we exist in this world where there's lots of fringe, frontier, experimental kind of speculation that's compelling and makes for good YouTube content, but there's not necessarily hard science. Not to like, you know, talk shit about those people. I think it's really encouraging to have people kind of put out,

put out interesting ideas and generate conversations that wouldn't otherwise happen, just like with the telepathy tapes. But then you need to build on that. to like turn it into formal science and professionalize it and make it like a real thing. If we want to advance human understanding and not just be this game of YouTube content and reply guys on Reddit or whatever. And so I do think that pharmaceuticals have been on neurochemicals, some are pharmaceuticals, some are natural compounds, have had like a co-evolution with human history that's been some books and research on just how, you know, maybe those was critical to human social

development. Just like the stone date theory. Yeah, that has been variations on that theme. And I do think, like, you know, you look at the effects of, say, DMT or SLS having on the default mode network, you know, cortical wild activation patterns, where you get just a very different structure of consciousness that has a neurobiological correlate. So it's obviously important to understand what's going on there, right? It's not just like, like, again, it's the whole taboo.

It's like it's fascinating to see how the parallels like all came at the same time, like in the 60s, you know, when you had this countercultural movement was basically driven by a bunch of people taking LSD and psilocybin. And they were, they were looking at reality now in a fully different way. And they're like, well, the structures of power, maybe aren't as legitimate as I've been told since I was a kid. And the government's like, mm, can't have that, right? So we need to make sure that we implant a taboo. NASA social stigma, you know, LSD, psilocybin. and these things will fry your brain, melt your, melt your brain. UFOs, total fiction, taboo, only weird schizzoes and tinfoil hat wearing people think UFOs are real.

Isn't quite a convenient social type. When all the taboos are designed to kind of reinforce a certain power structure to partition human knowledge, especially human knowledge that might otherwise be destabilizing for a structure of power and the social order, you know, suss. You should probably pay attention. You should be like, well, question, why do I think that's as a stigma, right? Like, why do I believe that? Like, oh, it was because of the process of culturation, the media I consume, the reinforcing

narratives that have been designed, you know, very consciously around these things. And I do think we're entering an error. All of those are kind of collapsing in real time. They're not fully collapsed. But, you know, like the elite consensus over psychedelics is like, you know, suburban moms or like microdosing, taking their kids to soccer practice. And like the tech elite are doing ketamine, like it's going out of style. And, you know, everyone is.

on something, you know, there's maybe pathologies associated with that. I'm not saying we're going through some sort of spiritual enlightenment. But there's a clear shift in the norms. They're filtering in from certain elite subsets of society. And it's also, you know, there's a, it's all this like cocktail of, say, knowing that lots of things are changing and preparing for massive disruptions. There's folks that are obsessed with the emergence of AGI and superintelligence. And that's almost like their spiritual religion now.

There's folks that in that subset, they're also clued into what's happening on the UAPSat. There's like the adjacency to Bitcoin. And there's the adjacency to psychedelics. And it's this, you know, dynamic, chaotic, you know, evolution of our society and our norms. I don't know where it's going to go, but it's, it, I see this. There's a direction of travel here, right? And there's, I think, a correlation between the types of people that would, you know, recognize, maybe participate in many or all of those sorts of trends. And then I think there's like the legacy, you know, it's like, the boomers versus the bitcoins.

It's like the boomers, you know, they just collected Ws decade after decade, right? Like the system was just like, you're just going to keep winning, right? And so they didn't, when you grew up in that world, like, everything worked for you. The system was engineered. You engineered the system, right? So that kind of works. Institutions, everything, you're kind of like, you know, I like this. Like, I grew up with this.

This made me rich and happy and powerful. privilege and on the top of the status and our societies, you know, those institutions worked. So the kind of forth-turning story is also the subset here is like a challenge to that infrastructure, to that institutional consensus is what's underlying all of this. It's like the disruptions from AGI are like, oh, a handful of like revantious tech elites are potentially going to upset the political economic order. A handful of Bitcoiners, right, with this megalomaniac, you know, eschatology that we're going to like turn Bitcoin to global money right now upsetting the political. economic order. You've got, you know, the UCAP thing. And there's activists and groups and now

investors that are like, you know, very serious about pushing the envelope here and trying to bring some of this information out into the public. And that's disrupting the legacy apparatus of secrecy and the government control and kind of the monopoly on this information. And so there's, there's like, these are not, I'm not saying this is going to be an easy, you know, transition here. But, you know, if you're going to try to prepare for the next few years, it's kind of going to be important to monitor and try to understand what's going on. Matt, you're amazing. I could literally talk to you all day, but I am going to miss my flight if we don't wrap it up there. There was so much stuff that I wanted to talk to you about that we didn't get to. So we'll have to do it again. But

I appreciate you, man. Thank you for this. I don't know if I helped or hurt or confused or enlightened, but it was fun. Well, we could do another three-hour skits-so podcast just on the stuff we didn't talk about. So, yeah, another time. Another time. Thanks for having me. Thank you, ma'am.