Kind: captions
Language: en
how would you as a higher intelligence
represent yourself
to a lesser intelligence do you think
they saw
what they say they saw it didn't just
start showing up in 1947. how hard do
you think it is for aliens to
communicate with humans what do we
believe in we believe in technology so
you show yourself as a form of
technology
right but the common thread is
you're not alone
and there's something else here with you
and there's something that's as you said
watching you
you are a professor stanford studying
the biology of the human organism at the
level of individual cells
so let me ask first
the
big ridiculous philosophical question
what is the most beautiful
or fascinating aspect of human biology
at the level of the cell to you
the
micro machines and the nano machines
that proteins make and become that to me
is the most interesting
the fact that you have this
basically dynamic computer within every
cell that's constantly processing its
environment
and at the heart of it is dna
which is a dynamic machine a dynamic
computation process people think of the
dna as a linear code
it's codes within codes within codes and
it is the actually the epigenetic state
that's doing this amazing processing i
mean if you ever wanted to believe in
god just look inside the cell
so dna is both information and computer
exactly
how did that computer come about
a big continuing the philosophical
question is this both scientific and
philosophical how did life originate on
earth do you think how did this
at every level so the very first step
and the fascinating complex computer
that is
dna that is multicellular organism and
then maybe the fascinating
uh complex computer that is the human
mind
well i think you have to take just one
more step back to the complex computer
that is the universe
right all of the the so-called particles
or the waves that people think the
universe is made of and uh appears to me
at least to be a computational process
and embedded in that is biology right so
all the atoms of a protein etc sit in
that computational matrix
from my point of view it's computing
something it's computing towards
something it was created in some ways if
you want to believe in god and i don't
know that i do but if you want to
believe in something
the universe was created or at least
enabled
to allow for life to form
and so
the dna
if you ask where does dna come from and
you can go all the way back to richard
dawkins and
uh the selfish gene hypotheses
the way i look at dna though is
it is not a moment in time it assumes
the context of the body and the
environment in which it's going to live
and so
if you if you want to ask a question of
where and how does information get
stored
dna although it's only three billion
base pairs long contains more
information
than i think the entire
computational
memory resources of our current
technology because who and what you are
is both what you were as an egg all the
way through to the day you die
and it embodies all the different cell
types and organs in your body
and so it's a computational
reservoir
of information and expectation
that
you will become so actually i would sort
of turn it around a different way and
say if you wanted to create the best
memory storage system possible
you could reverse engineer what a human
is and create a dna
memory system that is not just the
linear
version but is also
everything that it could become when
we're talking about dna we're talking
about earth and the environment creating
dna so this
you're talking about trying to come up
with a optimal computer for this
particular environment right
so if you reverse engineer that computer
what do you mean by considering all the
possible things it could become so who
you are today right so three billion
bits of information does not explain lex
friedman yeah doesn't explain me
right but
the dna embodies the expectation of the
environment in which you will
live
yes and grow and become so all the
information that is you
right is actually not only embedded in
the dna
but it's embedded in the context of the
world in which you
grow into
and develop
right but so all that information though
is is packed in the expectation of what
the dna expects to see
interesting so like
some of the information
is that accurate to say is stored
outside the body exactly yeah the
information is stored outside because
there's a context of expectation isn't
that interesting yeah it's fascinating i
mean
it to linger on this point
if we were to run earth over again a
million times how many different
versions of this type of computer would
we get i think it would be different
each time i mean if you assume there's
no such thing as fate
right and it's not all pre-programmed
you know and that there is some sort of
let's say
variation or randomness at the beginning
you would get as many different versions
of life as you could imagine and i don't
think it would all be
unless there's something built into the
you know into the substrate of the
universe it wouldn't always be
left-handed
proteins
right
but i wonder what the flap of a
butterfly wing what
effects it has because
it's possible that
this system is really good at finding
the efficient answer and maybe the
efficient answer
is uh
there's only a small finite set of them
for this particular environment exactly
exactly that's the kind of in a way the
anthropomorphic universe of the
multiverse expectations right that you
know there's probably a zillion other
kinds of universes out there if you
believe in multiverse
theory
we only live in the ones where the rules
are such
that
life like ours can exist
so using that logic how many alien
civilizations do you think are out there
there's there's
there's like trillions of environments
aka
planets or
maybe you can think even bigger than
planets
how many
life-like organisms do you think are
out there thriving and maybe how many do
you think are long gone but were once
here
i think well innumerable
uh
i think in terms of the rate of zero
much greater than zero i mean i would
just be surprised what a waste right of
all that space just for us if we're
never going to get there
that would be my first
uh way to think about it
but
second i mean
i remember when i was about seven or
eight years old and i would love if any
of your listeners could find this
national geographic i remember opening
uh the page of the national geographic i
was about again seven to ten years old
and it was sort of a current picture of
the universe it was around probably 1968
i remember looking at it and thinking
what kinds of
empires have risen and fallen across
that space
that we'll never know about and would
isn't that sad
that we know nothing about something so
grand
and so i've always been a reader of
science fiction because i like
the creative ideas of what people come
up with
and i especially like
science fiction writers that base it in
good science but base it also in
evolution
that if you evolve a civilization
from something
lifelike right some sort of biology
its assumptions about the universe will
come from
the environment
in which it grew up so for instance
larry niven is a great writer uh and he
imagines different kinds of
civilizations in some cases what happens
if
uh evolut what happens if intelligence
evolved from a herd animal
right would you lead from behind
right would you be
uh you know in his case one of them were
the so-called puppeteers
and to them the moral imperative is
cowardice
you put other people forward to run the
risk for you
right and so he writes entire books
around that premise
there's another guy
bryn david brin is his name and he
writes the so-called
uplift universe books
and in those he takes different
uh
intelligences
each from a different evolutionary
background
and then he posits
a civilization based around
where and what they came from and so i
to me i mean that's that's just fun but
i mean back to your original question
is
how many are there i think as as as many
stars as we can see
now how many are currently there i don't
know i mean that's the whole
that's the whole question of you know
how long can a civilization last before
it
runs out of steam and you
for instance does it just get bored or
does it transcend to something else or
does it say i've seen enough and i'm
done
what does running out of steam look like
it could be destroy itself or get bored
you know it said or we've we've done
everything we can and
they just decide to stop i don't know
i just don't know it's the elon musk
worry that we stop reproducing or we
slow down the reproduction rate to where
uh the population can go to zero can go
to zero and and we can't and we collapse
i mean so the only way to
get around that is uh perhaps
create enough machines with ai to take
care of us
what could possibly go wrong
you've talked to people that
told stories of ufo encounters
what is the most fascinating to you
about the stories of these ufo
encounters that uh that you've heard
that people have told you the similarity
of them uh
the uniformity of the of the stories now
i just want to say up front
a lot of people
think that when i speculate
i believe something that's not true
right speculation is just creativity
speculation is the beginning of
hypothesis
none of what i hear in terms of the
anecdotes do i necessarily believe are
they true
but i still find them fascinating to
listen to because at some level there's
still raw data
and you have to listen and once you
start to hear
the same story again and again
then you have to say well there might be
something to it i mean maybe it's some
kind of a jungian
background in the human mind and human
consciousness that creates these stories
again and again as coming out of the dna
it's coming out of that pre-programmed
something and young talked quite a bit
about this kind of thing the collective
unconscious but actually one of the most
interesting ones i find is this constant
uh message
that
you're not taking care of your world
and this
came long before
climate change it came long before
uh many kinds of you know let's say
current day memes
uh
around uh
you know taking care of our planet
pollution etc
and so you know for instance perhaps the
best example of this the one that i find
the most fascinating is a story out of
zimbabwe uh 50 or 60 children
one
afternoon in
zimbabwe it's a it was a well-educated
group of white and black children
uh who and lunchtime in the playground
saw a craft
and they saw little men
and they all ran into the teachers and
they told the same story and they drew
the same pictures
and the message several of them got was
you are not taking care of your planet
and they've got you know there's
actually a movie coming out uh on this
uh episode and
30 years later now
the people who were there the children
who've now grown up
say it it happened to us now did it
happen
was it some sort of hallucination or was
it a an imposed hallucination by
something was it material i i don't know
but
these kids were seven to ten years old
you see them on video
seven to 10 year olds can't lie like
that
and so
you know whether it's real or not i
don't know but i find that fascinating
data and again it's the it's these
unconnected stories
of individuals with the same
with the same story
that is
worthy of
further inquiry
yeah so here we are humans with limited
cognitive capacities trying to make
sense of the world trying to understand
what is real and not
we have this dna that somehow in complex
ways is interacting with the environment
and then we get these uh
novel
ideas
that come from
the populace
and then
they make us wonder about what it all
means
and so how to interpret it if you think
from an alien perspective how would you
communicate
with other life-like organisms
you perhaps have to
find
endpoints on this interaction between
the the dna and its
manifestations in terms of the the the
human mind and the
how it interacts with the environment so
get some kind of all right what is this
dna what is this environment i have to
get in somehow right to like interact
with it to get to perturb the system to
where these little ants human like
ants get like excited and figure and see
stuff out yeah yes and then and then
somehow steer them
uh first of all for investigative
purposes understand like
oftentimes to understand a system you
have to perturb it exactly it's like
poke at it you get they get excited or
not and then the the the other ways you
want to
if you worry about them you can steer in
one direction or another and this kind
of idea of that we're not taking care of
our world
um
that's interesting i mean that's
comforting that's hopeful because that
means
the greater intelligence which is what i
would hope would want to take care of us
look we want to take care of the
gorillas in the national parks in africa
yeah but we don't want to take care of
cockroaches so there's a line we draw so
you have to hope that
right now we're a bunch of angry monkeys
and you know maybe whatever these
intelligences are
are also keeping an eye on us
you know that you don't want a bunch of
you know you don't want the angry monkey
troop
stomping around the local galactic arm
do you think these folks are telling the
truth
do you think they saw
what they say they saw
i think they
saw what they said they saw but i also
think they saw what they were shown i
mean if you go back to the
whole notion of
okay how long has this
been around it didn't just start showing
up in 1947
right there are stories going back
uh you know into the 1800s of people who
saw things in their farming in their
farm fields in the u.s it's it's in
it's in
local newspapers from the 1800s it's
fascinating
but if you can go even further back
you know so to your point of how are how
would you as a higher intelligence
represent yourself
to a lesser intelligence
well let's go back to pre-civilization
maybe you show yourself as the spirits
in the forest
and you give messages
through that
once you get a little bit more civilized
civilized then you show yourself as the
gods
and then you're god well we don't
believe in god anymore necessarily not
everybody does so what do we believe in
we believe in technology so you show
yourself as a form of technology
right but the common thread is
you're not alone
and there's something else here with you
and there's something that's as you said
watching you and at least
watching over your shoulder
but i i think that like any good parent
you don't
tell
your student everything
you make them learn
and learning requires mistakes because
if you tell them everything
then they get lazy
you've uh looked at the brains of um
or information coming from the brain of
some of the people that have had ufo
encounters what's common about the brain
of people who encounter ufos
so the the study started with a group of
let's say a cohort of individuals that
were brought to me
and their mris
to ask about the damage that had been
seen in these individuals it turns out
that the majority of those patients
ended up being as far as we can tell
havana syndrome and so
for me at least this you know that part
of the story
ends in terms of the injury it's likely
almost all havana syndrome that's
somebody else's problem now that's not
my problem
um
but
when we were looking at the brains of
these individuals we noticed something
right in the center of the basal ganglia
in many of these individuals that at
first we thought was damage it was
basically an enriched patch
of mri dense
neurons that we thought was damage and
but then it was showing up in everybody
and then we looked and said oh it's
actually not
the other readings on these mris show
that actually that's living tissue
um that's actually the head of the
caudate in the potamin um and at the
time and i remember even asking a good
friend of mine uh at stanford who is a
psychiatrist what does the basal ganglia
do he said oh the basal ganglia is just
about uh movement and nerve and motor
control i said well that's odd because
uh you know these other papers that we
were reading at the time started to
suggest that it was involved
with
uh higher intelligence and is actually
downstream of the executive function
and involved with intuition
and planning
and if you think about it
if you're going to have motor control
which is centralized in one place
motor control requires knowledge of the
environment you know you you don't want
to move something in and hit the table
or if you're walking across a room you
want to
be
aware and cognizant of what you might
bump into
so
obviously
all of that planning
is
requires access to all the senses
it requires access to your desires
memory knowledge of where and what you
want and desire to walk near or by like
i use the example of you're at a party
you want to avoid that person you like
that person the waiter is about to drop
something
all without thinking
you maneuver
so that actually all that planning is
done in the basal ganglia
and it's actually now called the brain
within the brain
it's a
it's a goal processing system
subservient to executive function
so
what we think we found there was
not something which allows people to
talk to ufos i mean i think the ufo
community
uh took it a step too far
what i think we found was a form of
higher
functioning and processing
so what we then looked at and this was
the most fascinating part of it we
looked then at individuals in the
families of those
let's say the index case individuals
and we found that it was actually in
families
and more so
this is the most fascinating part we've
probably looked now at about 200
just random cases that you can download
off of databases online
you don't see this
higher connectivity
you only find it in what kit green would
have called or has called higher
functioning individuals people who are
uh
i mean he he called them savants i i
don't have the means to
uh we haven't done the testing but it
turns out my family has it right we we
found it in
and me my brother my sister my mother we
found it as well in other individuals
husband and wife pairs
so statistically
if you had a group of 20 individuals and
you found two husband wife pairs both of
whom had it and yet
it's only founded about we think one in
200 1 or 300 individuals the fact that
two individuals came together
two sets of individuals came together
both whom had it implied either
a restricted breeding group
or
attraction
the reason why
it seems to be
in let's say so-called
experiencers or people who claim
if if intuition is the ability to see
something that other people don't and i
don't mean that in a paranormal sense
but being able to see something just in
front of you that other people might
just dismiss
well maybe that's a function of a higher
kind of intelligence to say well
i i'm not looking at
an artifact
i'm not looking at something that i
should just ignore
i'm seeing something and i recognize it
for not what it is but that it is
something different than is normally
found in my environment
yeah you know i have a little bit of
that
i i seem to uh
see the magic in a lot of moments like
have a deep it's obviously not obviously
but it seems to be
chemical in nature
that
i just
i'm excited about life i i love
life i love like stupid things it feels
like i'm high a lot
unlike mushrooms or something like that
where you'd really appreciate that so
you're able i'm able to detect something
about the environment
that uh maybe others don't i don't know
but like i seem to be over the top
grateful to be alive on a lot of first a
lot of stupid reasons and that's in
there somewhere i mean it's kind of
interesting because um
it really is true that
our brains the way we're brought up but
also the genetics
enables us to see certain slices of the
world and
some people are probably more receptive
to
anomalous information
they see the
they see the magic the possibility in
the novel thing right as opposed to kind
of
uh finding the pattern of the common of
the regular some people are more wait a
minute this is kind of weird i mean a
lot of those people probably become
scientists too like
huh
like
there's this pattern happening over and
over and over and then something weird
just happened and then you get
excited by that weirdness and start to
pull the string
and discover what is at the core of that
weirdness and perhaps
is that
you know maybe by way of question
how does the human perception system
deal with anomalous information do you
think well it first tries to classify it
and get it out of the way if it's not
food if it's not sex
right if it's not
uh in the way of my desires
or if it is in the way of my desires
then
you focus on it
and so the i think the question is how
much spare processing power how much cpu
cycles do we spend on things that are
not those core
desires what uh
is the most
kind of um
memorable powerful ufo encounter report
you've ever heard
just to you pers on a personal level
like this something that was really
powerful
well i mentioned the zimbabwe one that's
particularly interesting and one that
actually most people don't know about
but family
driving down the highway two little
girls in the back
open glass
topped car
and
the little girls see
a craft right over their
car this is the middle of the day
on a busy
highway the mother sees it
nobody can
they look around nobody else seems to
see it so the girls take out their
camera take a picture of it
and then they get home
uh they look at the picture there's no
craft
but there's a little object
about 30 feet above their
car or so
probably about
three feet across kind of star-shaped
it's not the craft but it's something
else there's obviously there was
something there
and so what were they seeing were they
seeing a projection were they seeing
and why were only they seeing it
and the photograph
was capturing
something very different than we're
seeing there's still an object what can
you
give a little bit of context is this
from modern day it's modern day oh yeah
they had a camera i mean okay they had a
cell phone camera and this was like a
five years ago report provided by the
way where's like a central place to
provide a report is this oh there's a
mufon but this isn't public i've seen
the picture oh this is something you've
directly interacted with yeah yeah i've
seen the picture so those moments like
that
they captivate your uh
well
it's so different it doesn't fall into
the standard story at all but it also
but in another way it's kind of a
it's a clear enunciation of this notion
that when people see events they don't
all see the same thing now we've heard
this about like traffic accidents
different people will see the color of
the car differently or the chain of
events differently and just tells you
that memory isn't anywhere near what we
think it is but
the issue around these so-called ufo
reports is that
the same people will see a very
different thing almost as if whatever it
is is projecting
a
is projecting something into the mind
rather than it being real right rather
than being a real manifestation
you know material in front of you it's
actually almost some sort of an altered
virtual reality that is imposed on you i
mean
you know i think
the company meta
and all the virtual reality companies
would love to have something like that
right well you don't have to actually
wear something on your face
yes to experience a virtual reality what
happens if you could just project it
well that's the fundamental question
from an alien perspective
when you look at or as we humans look at
ants
how does this perception system operate
so not only how does this thing's mind
operate how does the human mind operate
but how does it their perception system
operate so that we can like
stimulate the perception system
properly to get them to think certain
things and so uh you know
that's a really important question
humans think that
you know the only way to communicate is
in like 3d or 4d
space time there's physical objects or
maybe you write things into some kind of
language but there could be just uh
so much
more um richness in how you can
communicate and so from an alien
perspective where somebody has much
greater technological capabilities you
have to figure out how do i use the
skills i have to stimulate
uh the human the limited humans right
well i mean let's take the ants exam
again as an example let's say that you
wanted to
make ants practical you wanted to use
them for something right you wanted to
use them as a form of biological robot
now darpa and other uh people have been
trying to
use insects for
you know and to turn them into
biological robots but if you wanted to
you would have to interact with their
sense of smell
right their pheromone system that they
use to
interact with each other
so you would either create those
molecules to talk to them to make them
do not say talk to them as if they're
intelligent but talk to them to
manipulate them in ways that you want
or if you were
advanced enough you would
use some sort of electromagnetic or
other
means to stimulate their neurons in ways
that would accomplish the same goal
as the pheromones but by doing it in a
sort of a telefactoring way
so let's say you wanted to tell a factor
with humans
you would
interact with them and this is again
this is a technology which you could
imagine possible
you could telefactor information into
the sensory system of a human right but
then
each human is a little bit different so
either you know enough about them to
tailor it to that individual or you just
basically take advantage of whatever the
sensory net is that that individual has
so if you happen to be
good at sound or you happen to be a very
visually inclined individual
then maybe the sensory information that
you get
that's most effective
in terms of transmitting information
would come through that portal
i think the aliens would need to figure
out that humans value physical
consistency so we've discovered physics
so we want our perception to make sense
maybe they don't they haven't you know
that's not an obvious fact of perception
that
you have to figure out what kind of
things are humans used to observing in
this particular environment of earth
and how do we stimulate the perception
system
in a way that's uh not anomalous or not
too doesn't cross the threshold of just
like well that's way too weird right so
they have to i mean that's not obvious
that that should be important
you know maybe you want to err on the
side of uh
anomaly like lean into the weirdness so
communication is complicated yeah well
that's why i always i always find this
issue of people talking about the
so-called grays
as interesting because
it it is related to what you're saying
they're different enough
but they're not so different as to be
scary right they're not venom dripping
fangs
right they're different enough
but they they all it's also like they're
they're what you could imagine us
becoming in some distant future so is
that a purposeful representation
i i don't know i mean i don't believe in
the grays for instance but i believe
that people think that they see it
so if we're talking about a
communication strategy that says
you know we're we're like you but not
the same as you
this might be a manifestation that you
that you represent
in terms of a communication strategy
what do you
make of david's favorite sighting of the
tic tac
ufo and other pilots who have
seen these objects that seem to defy the
laws of physics
well i think
you have to take them at their word
um are they fascinating to you
absolutely no i know i know a lot of
these people right so i
i know lou elizanto chris mellon
the whole crowd i've been i i saw the
videos
about three weeks or so before
they went public
i was um at a bar with lou
overlooking the pentagon um in crystal
city and they showed them to me and my
hair stood on end and he said they said
this is he said this is coming out soon
and i
i know
one of the guys on the inside who was
the naval intelligence who had
interviewed all of these pilots again
before this came out
and it was hair-raising
to hear this uh but also
exciting
that you know here's not just people's
testimony these are credible individuals
and if you've seen the 60-minute episode
with uh some of the pilots
uh you know they have no monetary gain
of anything they've got negative gain uh
from coming out but then you also have
all of those
simultaneous uh
ship analysis from the uss princeton and
the radar analysis etc
so um
you know at the end of the day
it's
just data
it's not a conclusion um i'm i'd be
perfectly happy
honestly perfectly happy if somebody
showed that it was all a hoax
i go back to my day job
right that could be a hoax but other
things might not be i mean right this is
the point i mean what this is why it's
nice to remove
some of the stigma about this topic
because it's all just data and
uh and
anomalous events
are such that there's going to be
they're going to be rare in terms of how
much data they represent but we have to
consider the full range of data to
discover the things that actually
represent something that's um
if we pull at it we'll discover
something that's extraterrestrial or
something
deep about the phenomena on earth that
we don't yet understand right well if it
only stimulates people for instance to
think okay well what happens if we could
move like that with momentum-less
movement
and
and it stimulates
young individuals to go into the
sciences
to
ask those questions that to me is
fascinating i mean after i've been
openly talking about this in the last
year especially
i've had a number of
students from top schools who aren't my
students come to me and say
if i can help
let me how can i help i never had
thought about this before but you opened
you and others not just you and others
have opened my mind to thinking about
this matter yeah that's why it's
actually funny that uh
elon musk doesn't think too much about
this
these kinds of propulsion systems that
could defy the laws of physics as we
currently understand them
to me
it's a powerful way to think what is
possible
it's uh it's inspiring even if somebody
doesn't represent uh
uh extraterrestrial vehicles i think the
the observation itself it's like uh
something you mentioned
which is uh you know hypothesizing
imagining
these things
considering the possibility of these
things
i think opens up your mind
in a way that uh
ultimately can create the technology
first you have to believe the
technologies possible before you can
create it right
in my own lab you know we always look
for
as i've said before what is inevitable
and you know saying inevitably this is
the kind of data we need but if we need
that kind of data the instrument we want
isn't
doesn't exist
okay so i imagine the perfect instrument
i can't make it
and you back
into something which is practical
and then you in a sense reverse engineer
the future
of what it is that you want to make
and i've started and sold like
at least half a dozen or more companies
using that basic premise
and so
it was always something that didn't
exist today but we imagined what we
wanted
and at the time many people said it
couldn't be done i mean for instance all
the gene therapy that's done today with
retroviruses
came from
a group meeting in david baltimore's lab
i was a postdoc with him
and one of the other postdocs
wasn't able to you make retroviruses in
a way that he wanted to and i realized i
had a cell line that would allow us to
make retroviruses in two days rather
than two months
and so he and i then worked together to
make that system and now all gene
therapy with retroviruses is done using
this basic approach around the whole
world because something couldn't be done
and we wanted to do it better
and we imagined the future
and so that's i think
what the whole ufo phenomenon is doing
for people it's like well let's imagine
a future
where these kinds of technologies are
but also let's imagine a future where we
don't blow ourselves up right so if
these things are there they manage to
not blow themselves up
so it means that at least
one other civilization got past the
inflection point
so if some of the encounters are
actually representing
alien civilizations visiting us
why do you think
they're doing so
you suggested that perhaps it's this
study understand their own past
right right what what are some of the
motivations do you think and
again from from our perspective us as
humans what motivations would we have
when we approach other civilizations we
may discover in the future
well i think one motivation might be to
steer us away from the precipice
right or on the assumption that you know
even if we make it past the precipice at
least
uh we're not a bunch of psychopaths you
know running around so maybe there's a
little bit of motivation there to make
sure that your the neighbor that's
growing up next to you is not
you know unruly
um
you know but i mean maybe it's sort of a
moral imperative
like what we have with you know creating
uh
national parks where animals can
continue to live out their lives in a
natural way
i don't know i mean that would be
i mean the problem is we're imagining
from a
anthropomorphic
viewpoint what an alien might think and
as i've said before
alien means alien right i mean not
hollywood aliens
but
a whole different way of thinking
and a whole different level of
experience and let's say wisdom
hopefully
that we could only hope to understand
now but if we ever get out there if we
ever make it past our
current problems
uh and even if we don't have faster than
light travel and even if we're only
using
ram scoops or
light sails to get where we want to go
uh and it takes us
10 000 years to get somewhere or to
spread out um we might encounter such
things and are we just going to stomp
all over it
like we did in colonial south america or
africa or all the rest
on our current path likely
you know and so what are we going to
learn
well we're getting better and better at
understanding what is life
and i think we're getting better and
better being careful not to step on it
when we when we see it and i i this is
one of the nice things about talking
about ufos
is it expands the overton window it
expands our understanding of what
possibly could be life
it gets us to think it gets the
scientific community to think when we go
to mars go and we go to these different
moons that possibly have life
you know we're not looking at uh legged
organisms
we're looking at some kind of
complexity
that uh
arises in resistance to the natural
world
and um
there's a lot of instruments like that
resistance to the natural world yeah so
somehow
there's a rebellious process complex
system going on here
and i don't know you know the many ways
it could take form and there's a sense
you know for aliens that
as the technology develops they take
form more and more
in as information
as something that can influence the
space of
of ideas of the
processing of data itself so i just uh
this idea of embodiment that we humans
so admire
physically visible perceivable
embodiment
may be a very
uh inefficient thing
right if you think just about
you know your area ai you know we're
we're
trying to make smaller and smaller and
smaller
uh circuitry
that is uh
basically
closer and closer to the physics of how
the universe operates
right right down at the level of i mean
quantum computers are basically write
down about quantum information storage
so
fast forward ten thousand a hundred
thousand years
maybe somebody found a way to embody ai
directly into the physics of the
universe
right
and it doesn't require a physical
manifestation it just it just sits in
space-time
it's just a locally ordered space we're
just locally ordered space time
right
you know i mean people
but maybe they just they found a way to
embody it there
they probably have to get really good at
not you know trampling on the ants
the the better your technology gets the
easier it is to accidentally like oops
just destroy these simpleton biological
systems
we constantly think about whatever these
things might be we think
that they are some sort of a unified
force
well maybe they're not unified
maybe they are as disparate
as you and i are
and maybe what keeps them
from stomping all over the ants is each
other
right that they are in a self tension
to
prevent
one or more of them from running amok
oh yeah i mean that's kind of the
anarchy of nations that we have on earth
so
there's there's always
there's always going to be this um
there's a hierarchy this hierarchy
that's formed of greater and greater
intelligences right and they're all
probably also wondering
wait what's bigger than me exactly
that's what i always wonder is that
maybe that they're what keeps them in
line
is something that is beyond them like
what created the universe i mean that
and that's probably a question that
bothers them too
um what about the communication task
itself
how hard do you think it is for aliens
to communicate with humans so is this
something you um
think about about this barrier of
communication between biological systems
and something else
how difficult is it to find a common
language
well i think if you're smart enough
or technologically enabled enough it's
relatively straightforward
um now
whether your concepts
can ever be dumbed down to us
that might be hard
i mean again talking to the ants talking
to the ants i mean on instagram
so
[Laughter]
you want to look good in this picture
let me explain let me explain to you why
yeah
so
that's the essential problem of
you know
perhaps they realize
who it is that they're talking to
and they say we're
rather than muddy the picture we're only
going to give them limited information
yeah right and yeah maybe we could sit
down like you and i and have a
conversation but then they would make
assumptions
the humans would then make assumptions
about us that aren't true
because we're not humans
right so
let's stay at arm's length
let's just let them know that
we're here
right and here's the limited amount of
communication again this this notion
that
if you give somebody everything they'll
get lazy
and you know if if they've been around
as long as they have they've seen every
kind of thing that can go wrong
and so it's it's they know as much as
they might want to step in
that would be a wrong thing
yeah you have to also understand that
the the amount of wisdom they carry
yeah
you know and so it's it's very easy as
well for religions to i don't want i
don't want to get into a whole religious
conversation but you could very easy for
rel you could see how religions
could call them angels or devils or
what have you because
again if you're trying to fit it into a
framework of cultural understanding
um the first thing you reach for
is god
and so
it
when you when you look at what these
things are and again with the angels and
the devils in a similar sort of way
their communication is limited
they just kind of give little
what's the the oracle of delphi they
kind of give these delphic
pronouncements and then it's up to you
to figure out what it is that they
really mean
stephen greer
uh claimed that a skeleton discovered in
atacama region of chile
might be an alien
you reached out to him and uh took on
the task of proving or disproving that
with the rigor of science the result is
a paper titled
whole genome sequencing of atacama
skeleton shows novel mutations linked
with dysplasia can you tell this full
story
the story was as you put it
right there
correct
reached out
got a sample of the body
did the dna sequencing
then worked with a team
of uh two other stanford scientists and
uh
roche sequencing group
roche diagnostics and probably a total
team of about 11 or so people um and as
as is standard
in these kinds of things the professors
actually don't do the work
the students do the work and figured out
the answer
uh and then we help them put together
the story
uh
and the story was simply that uh it was
human a hundred percent
i went into it thinking it was
originally a monkey
of some sort
um
i got kind of excited a few months into
the process thinking well what happens
if it is an alien
right can you describe some of the
characteristics of the skeleton that
makes it unique and interesting
primarily it had dysmorphias of the of
the brain
um and so the first thing i did actually
when i got pictures of it i took it to a
local expert at stanford
uh and uh he was um on the paper
and uh
he was the world expert in pediatric
bone dysmorphias
though he literally wrote the book
and
on this because that's what you do you
go to an expert when it's outside of
your field of interest and he said well
i haven't seen this particular
collection of mutations before uh or
this uh this physiology before but
here's what i think it might be
um and he said but based on the size of
the of the
thing and the bone density
it would appear to be
like six or seven years old
now again that's the
that's the thing where i think the lay
public
doesn't understand or
takes a speculation like that and turns
it into a fact
no one ever said that it was that age
we only said that the bones made it look
like it was that age
but then we went back and looked for
uh
genetic explanations of why things might
look the way they did
and
if you again read the paper it's very
carefully caveated
to say that these mutations might
result in this but what we did find was
an unexpectedly
large number
of mutations associated with bone growth
in this individual and it was just
a bad roll of the dice right you roll
the dice enough times with enough
people born every year
and someone will
roll
the wrong dice
all at once so the sad part about it was
individuals in the ufo community who
wanted to think
that there was some sort of conspiracy
around it
right that
somebody had somehow convinced all of my
students
uh to lie
right i mean come on
you know i i would lose my i would lose
my job first of all
uh and they would all be
uh you know in trouble forever
yeah but also it's just projecting
malevolence onto people that
doesn't i don't think exist in normal
populous and especially doesn't exist in
the scientific community the kind of
people that go into science i mean this
is what bothers me with the current
distrust of science
is there they might be naive they might
they might not especially modern science
look at the big picture philosophical
ethical questions all that kind of stuff
but ultimately they're
uh people with integrity and just a deep
curiosity for the discovery of cool
little things and there's no
um
there's no malevolence
broadly speaking in the scientific
community
so i mean there's a bigger story here
which is
you know there's a hunger in the
populace to discover something anomalous
something new
and um you know science has to
be
both open to the anomalous but also
to reject
the anomalous when the data doesn't
support it right
what do you make of that you know
walking that line for you because you're
dealing with your phone counters you're
dealing with
with the anomalous well people have said
let's go back to the atacama case that i
was debunking it
well debunking is a loaded term sort of
assumes that you are going in
purposefully to
prove something is wrong
i wasn't i was just going in to collect
the data
and
um you know i
i showed that this one was human there
was another
skull that somebody had at one point it
was called the star child they called it
the star child skull i said you know i
looked at it i looked at the dna
sequencing that they had done i said
this is human
end of story
um
the people who owned the thing at the
time
disagreed with me and then eventually
another group came in and proved that i
was right
and it's not about debunking it's about
getting the more spectacular and hyped
cases
off the table i mean the reason i got
interested in is because somebody was
hyping it
and not because i wanted to disprove it
but because i just wanted to know and
let's get it off the table because it's
usually the most
extravagant things that are most likely
to be wrong
somewhere
in the rubble will be something
interesting
and so that's what you do you get the
you get the
the dross off the table
and then somewhere
in the data will be something worth
real inquiry
and that
if you inquire deeply enough will be
extravagant yes exactly and that's what
actually excites scientists is to i mean
you want with the rigor of science to
actually reveal the extravagant and so
look at crispr as probably the most
perfect example of that these weird
sequences in bacterial genomes all
arrayed one after the other with these
strange sequences around them but when
you looked at the sequences they looked
like viruses
and so how did they get there and lo and
behold after you know a lot of effort
and work well a couple of nobel prizes
went out the door
but these strange
things ended up having extraordinarily
extravagant possibilities
you've also looked at ufo materials you
are in possession of ufo materials
yourself
claimed ufo materials
alleged geophone materials that's right
some
what's another term weird materials that
don't seem to uh
uh
have a story
they have a story that doesn't seem to
be of natural origins but
it's not
you know
there's a process to proving that and
that process may
uh take decades if not centuries because
you have to keep pulling it
at the string and discover where they
could possibly come from but anyway you
you're in possession of some
materials of this kind
can you um
describe some of them and maybe also
talk to the process of how you
investigate them how do you analyze them
right so let's say that there's two
classes of materials that i've
been given by people and they're not
given by like the government or anything
just given people who've collected them
and there's a
reasonable chain of evidence associated
with them that you believe it's not just
a pebble somebody picked up off a road
um
there are almost always things that
people have claimed have either been
dropped off as like some sort of a
leftover material molten metals
or um
they are
from
an object that was released from this so
that kind of
exploded
they're almost always metals
i have some couple of things that might
be biological that are interesting that
i haven't really spent a lot of time on
yet
when you look at a metal you basically
well okay what are the elements in it
and what's it made of and so there's
pretty standard approaches to doing that
most of them involve a technology called
mass spectrometry uh and there's
probably about five or six different
kinds of mass spectrometry that you
could bring to bear on answering it
and they either tell you depending upon
the limit of the resolution of the
instrument
they either tell you the elements that
are there
or they tell you the isotopes that are
there and you're interested not just in
knowing whether something is there or
not you're interested in knowing
whether they're uh
you know the
the amounts of it the the and in the
case of
elements
how many different isotopes are there
and and that's kind of where in some of
these cases it gets interesting
right because on in at least one of the
materials
as we first studied it the isotope
ratios of in this case it was magnesium
are way off normal
and
i just don't know why it doesn't it
doesn't prove anything it just all it
proves is
that
it was probably
accomplished by some kind of an
industrial process
whether it's the result
of a process or whether and and this is
sort of the leftover
or whether it was made that way for a
particular purpose
i don't know all i know is that
it it was
engineered
that's it
right but then it's
the question is
sort of you go one step deeper why would
you engineer it
right
why and what is the engineered means
there's all kinds of
it could be a byproduct it could be
um
the main result of an engineering
process
it would be a small part of the
engineering process that is the main
part
well so
the ratios of isotopes for any given
element are basically the result of
stellar processes
uh
a supernova blew up
sometime several tens you know several
billion years ago
uh
that became a cloud
those atoms coalesced gravitationally to
form another sun
and a ring that became a rocky planet
uh and the ratios of the isotopes were
determined at the time of that
explosion
and so everything in the local
solar system is more or less of that
ratio depending upon certain
gravitational diff but but
by
fragments of a percent not
whole tens of percent difference
so what do humans use isotopes for
mostly to blow stuff up i mean the vast
majority of the isotopes that have been
made in in the per pound or ton
are things like
certain ratios of plutonium and uranium
to blow stuff up we don't make
or engineer isotopes which it's it's
today is relatively easy to do but it's
still expensive
for any other reason apart from let's
say
uh as uh
anti-cancer we use stable isotopes in
money these days as a counterfeiting
tool you basically embed certain ratios
of isotopes in to make it harder for
counterfeiters to accomplish
um
and so but other than that we don't do
anything with that so why would you make
grams of such material in this one case
and drop it around on a beach in brazil
so which case we're talking about this
is this is the ubertuba case
can you describe this case a little bit
further like what material we're talking
about just the full story of the case so
it's an interesting one it's an
interesting one so a fisherman saw an
object
that uh released something or it it
exploded
and it was this
relative you know i've got some big
chunks of it
uh relatively pure magnesium
with obviously something else in it
because magnesium burns so it had
something in it that would other metals
simple alloy that would prevent it from
from uh basically burning up
um
and so the question is
and so then we had we had two pieces
that came from
um two different chains of custody both
claimed to be from the same object
at least
uh
physically when you look at the two
things they look
the same
right
so we took small fragments of each of
them we put them in an instrument called
a secondary ion mass spec
which is an extremely sensitive
instrument and it can see down to 0.0001
mass units
uh which is important for
let's say more
arcane reasons but
um it's a sensitive instrument and so
one of the chains of custody we had two
pieces from the same chain of custody
and then two pieces from the other chain
of custody
one of them had completely normal
uh magnesium isotope ratios magnesium 24
25 26 and the other was off
not just like slightly off way off and
they were both off to the same extent
so
uh
i mean it was sort of like you had an
internal control
of what was normal then you had this
other one which was which was wrong
and so you're left with
uh that's what kind of an open question
was this a hoax were these two chains of
custody one of them a hoax that somebody
purposefully introduced those things
because you could do it it would
cost a lot i mean at the time that this
was found i guess the 1970s or so
um might have been earlier i forget
uh the amount that i had would have cost
several tens of thousands of dollars to
make
um
and again it's not something you would
just throw around and why would you do
it in the hope that some guy 30 years
from then
would
would pick it up and study it that's a
very subtle
subtle
it's a long-term plan
um so so i i just don't know i just
don't know
what to make of it except it's
interesting but it's but so a different
kind of question that you're asking is
what constitutes evidence
right so is is this
sufficient evidence absolutely not
but somebody's put it forward i have the
time it's my time
i'll study it and i my objective is to
sort of take those that i think are
credible enough
and do a reasonable analysis put it out
there and maybe somebody else will come
up with an idea as to what it is
now what would be better
is some sort of
true
technology right something that is
obviously
we don't have it
you know and
people like
on neil degrasse tyson
and seth shostak have come out
rightfully
and have said
you know when you show up with
you know
something
really obviously technology that we
don't understand
you know then we'll pay attention
right not just material not just
material a piece of metal
is is interesting
uh but
and several of the things that i've
looked at and things that people other
things that people have come
to me with we found to be completely
banal or
were actually pieces of aircraft
that were invented back in the 1940s
yeah and so take them off the table see
but
i think um
again i think showing up with technology
that we humans would find completely
novel is actually a really difficult
task for aliens because it obviously
can't be so novel
that we don't recognize it for what it
is for what it is and so and i would say
most the technology aliens likely have
would be something we don't recognize
so they it's actually a hard problem how
to convince ants
like you first have to understand what
ants are tweeting about
like what they care about
in order to like inject into their
culture
because uh
you know that's why i think
it would be the technology that you
could present is in the space of ideas
is in uh
it's tried to influence individual
humans and with the encounters right and
try to with this kind of thing
that you mentioned
about uh
us not taking messages about us not
taking care of the world
it's difficult
i mean i to for them to understand you
have to come up with trinkets that
impress us i mean maybe the very
technology
the fascination with the development of
technology and the development of
technology the actual act of innovation
itself
is the thing that they're communicating
right i mean this is kind of what you
know jacques valet thinks about
is the role of
the control system he calls it the
control system well let me uh ask about
jacques
who is he um you know him who's jacques
valet
what have you learned from him
about life about
about ufos about technology about our
role in the universe
well i met jacques actually soon after
the whole atacama thing happened
um
i was visited by those people associated
with the government and whatever around
the um
the havanas what ended up mostly being
havana syndrome patients but also
jacques at the same time and they were
actually working behind the scenes with
each other that oh here's this stanford
professor
who is willing to talk about this stuff
and investigate things
um maybe we should go talk to him and he
he reached out through a colleague and
you know i had lunch actually um at the
rosewood inn um up on
uh near sandhill so jacques is one of
the first openly
active scientists
uh and he's really a scientist in this
area
going back to the 1960s um
and uh
you know he's
put forward a number of ideas
speculations about what it might be that
people are interacting with and he the
first thing that i learned from him is
this notion of what he called kabuki
theater
that many of the things that people have
seen are i remember reading his books
and thinking he uses this word absurd a
lot
um he said the the things that people
claim they see are absurd
right
a a ship doesn't land
in a farmer's field
and then come up and knock on the door
and say can i have a glass of water and
these are stories literally out of
newspapers from the 1930s is it's absurd
you know and the other thing that people
say ships don't crash if you're so
technologically advanced you don't crash
it's absurd
that they crash
so
um
he says this is
put on as a show
it's meant to it's an influence
campaign
right it's it's not meant to influence
individuals it's meant to influence a
culture
as a whole maybe they don't look at us
as individuals maybe they look at us as
an organism
that lives on a planet
right and perhaps rightly so
and so that's how you interact with them
that's how you influence them so that
was one of the first things that kind of
took me back and realized
wow there's actually a maybe there's a
puppet
master behind the scenes
that's
you know doing this influencing that all
this stuff about aliens is just is not
true per se they're just a
representation of something
that is meant to influence so that was
probably the most interesting thing i
mean the man is brilliant
uh he's also it can be and i'm sorry
jacques he can also be incredibly
annoying
to have a conversation with
because he will pick apart your
arguments or anything that you think you
know and show you why you don't know
what you think you know
and he uses the he used the example that
for me that is
is is all you need is one
counter example to any conclusion
and you're wrong
and so i learned from him
i mean i'm supposed to be a good
scientist but i learned from him
don't talk about conclusions just talk
about the data
because data's not wrong i mean convince
yourself that the data is not wrong or
not an artifact but be careful about
your conclusions because whatever is
going on it's it's much more complicated
than we than we imagine
wow that's powerful being able to always
step back because we get we humans get
excited yeah we start to jump to
conclusions from the data but always
step back powerful being able to always
step back because we get we humans get
excited yeah we start to jump to
conclusions from the data but always
step back well in some of my twitter
feeds when i dare to go on twitter
are full of well when are you going to
give us the answer
well you know science is not immediate
you're going to have to be patient and
even some of my science colleagues have
said well where's the data my answer to
them has been
where's been your work to try to produce
any you know i'm not here to give you
everything on a silver platter
we talked offline how much i love data
and machine learning and so on
and uh it's been really disheartening to
see the the us government
not invest as much as they possibly
could into this whole process so let's
jump
to the most recent thing which is what
do you make of the report titled
preliminary assessment
unidentified aerial phenomena that was
released by the office of the director
of national intelligence in june 2021 so
this is what's like um
okay we're going to step back and we're
going to like what
where do we stand and where do we hope
the future is what do you make of that
report is it hopeful is it i see it as
very helpful
very hopeful i think the adults are
finally stepping up in and being in
charge
right in a good sense of adult
what's that in the good sense and the
good sense of adult
um because childlike curiosity is pretty
powerful thing that's true yeah i i it's
but it's also i think the people who
were worried that the populace at large
might run screaming into the streets and
riot
uh you know have
you know they basically the empiric
evidence is they're wrong
you know this
these videos and all these things have
been out for now what five years
most people don't even know about it
right so as as as hyped as it's been and
all over the newspapers that it's been
and etc you know even tucker carlson has
talked about it many times on his news
program
um joe rogan has a lot of people don't
know about it so i think people if it's
not affecting their day-to-day life
they're going on with their day-to-day
life
so but that said
i think it was an important
sea change
in the internal discussions going on in
the government because
and the reason being
that
i think this is actually partly true
with the the maturation of human social
technology
it was becoming
so obvious that this stuff was showing
up again and again and again around our
ships they just couldn't keep it quiet
anymore
right and so it's like we need to do
something about it and lou elizondo and
chris and others to their great credit
found the right angle
to talk about this it says well okay
let's say it's not
out there maybe it's the russians the
chinese or somebody else we should know
about this because we damn sure no it's
not us
so
that to me
is an important thing to to finally be a
little bit more open about
the matter
but
like i often say i'm not looking for
people to give me permission to do
anything i'm just going to do the
analysis myself with what i have avi
loeb has taken the same approach he said
i'm not going to wait for the government
to give me
telescopic information about
technologies or
things that might be even on our own
solar system i'm just going to collect
it myself
and and that's the right way to do it
right don't wait for somebody else to
give it to you
it's also possible to
inspire a large number of people to do a
wider spread data collection yes you
yourself can't
do a large enough data collection that
would if you're talking about anomalous
events right
right you you should be
collecting high resolution data
about everything that's happening on
earth in terms of like at
in terms of the kind of
things that would indicate to you a
strong signal that something weird
happened here and this is why
you know governments can be good at
funding large-scale efforts yes i mean
you know nasa and and so on working with
spacex uh with blue origin
uh
to you know fund
uh capitalistic sort of fun companies
fun company efforts to do huge moonshot
projects
and in the same way do huge moonshot
data collection efforts in terms of ufos
i mean we're not it needs to be like 10x
like one or two orders of magnitude more
funding exactly to do this kind of thing
and i i understand on the flip side of
that if you make it about
what are the russians whether the
chinese doing
you know make it a question of
geopolitics
it gets touchy because now you you're
kind of taken away from the realm of
science
and picking it military making it
military some of the greatest this is
what makes me as an engineer
makes me truly sad that some of the
greatest engineering work ever done
is by lockheed martin and we will never
know about it yeah i agree i agree i i
wish
we were it was different but um it's the
world we live in
um you know but related to that uap task
force
announcement that you just said you know
the bill was passed in the department of
defense and now it formally establishes
an office
to
collate that information and also to be
transparent about it
money is now set aside
right what do you think of just in case
people don't know the dod establishing
new department to study uh ufos
called airborne naming come on but yes
airborne object identification and
management synchronization group hey do
you know how to pronounce that no i do
not no aoi msg it's stupid and it's
renamed but ay msg
ao
all right it's directed by the under
secretary of defense for intelligence
and security what do you make of this
office do are you hopeful about this
office i think there's still a tug of
war going on behind the scenes as to
who's going to control this
uh but i do know though that money has
been set aside that will be
used to uh
make
things
more public
right to start to get uh others involved
and um
you know there's i'm involved with an
effort to get other academics involved
so you think there might be some of that
money could be directed towards funding
maybe like groups like yours
to do some research right so they would
be open to that you think i hope so i
mean it nothing is set in stone yet so
you know i and i'm not hiding anything
because i just don't know anything
right but i do um
i do think that
there will be
uh public efforts now they're going
there there are being set up other
private efforts
to bring monies involved and to use that
to leverage
uh and get access to some of the
internal resources as well
so um what you're seeing is uh kind of
an ecosystem building up
uh in a positive sense uh of people who
are willing to do the research
so you know before it it would be you
couldn't even go to a scientist and ask
them to help
now
if there's money as i said before
scientists are essentially capitalist we
go where the money is you know
i mean the work that i've done i did out
of my own pocket
and probably about 50 60 70 000
of money went into
the paper we published yeah out of my
own pocket um
and you know but the amount of money
that needs to go in is in the in at
least the few millions to do a proper
analysis of these materials
the work i know that the galileo project
is involved with uh it's probably in the
in the you know five to ten million
range to get stuff done but that's
actually a relatively modest amount of
money
to accomplish
something that has been in the zeitgeist
for
decades
i should also push back a little bit on
something you probably will agree with
you said scientists are essentially
capitalists
what i've noticed is there's certainly
an influence of money but oftentimes
when you're talking about basic research
in basic science
the money
is a little bit a little bit ambiguous
to what direction you're doing the
research in and the scientists get
really good
at telling a narrative of like yeah yeah
we're fulfilling
the purpose of this funding but we're
actually they end up doing really what
they're curious about yes and of course
you cannot deviate like if you're
getting funded to study penguins in
antarctica you can't start building
rockets but probably you can because
you'll
convince some kind you'll concoct a
narrative saying
rockets are really important for
studying penguins in the entire right i
i think that's actually
this is one thing i think people don't
generally understand about the
scientific mind
is i don't know how capitalistic it is
because if it was they would start an
effing company no no no no i mean when i
met capitalist i didn't mean in the uh
they'll they'll start companies per se i
mean
we can only do the research where
there's money and so from from
you know maybe it's a a bad use of the
term capitalist so
but the
we will only do the research where
there's money i mean why do most people
work
uh many biologists uh work in cancer
research
because there's a lot of money there
it's an important problem
but
i might not have ever gotten involved in
it if there wasn't money i might have
gone and i was going to be a botanist
when i when i was a kid that's what i
wanted to do
um
so
having money available
will bring people to bear now another
mistake that's often actually made i
think by the lay public about science
is that people think that we're paid to
do things just as you said i get a
research grant and luckily from the nih
they give you a fair amount of latitude
uh i will go my own way and i'll find
something i might have proposed
something
but i'll end up somewhere entirely
different by the end of the project and
that's how good science is done you
follow the you follow the data you
follow the results
um
and so that's what i'm hoping can be
done here i think the worst kind of
thing that could be done with this
subject area is to put it inside another
company
where
they have a set plan of what it is
they're going to do and the scientists
either tell do what the executives tell
them to do or not
that isn't how anything will really get
discovered
put it get it out into the public
get open minds thinking about it and
then publishing on it and doing the
right kind of work that's how real
progress will be made with this
let's again put put our sort of
philosophical hats on do you think the
us government or some other government
is in possession
of
something
of extraterrestrial origin that is far
more impressive
than anything we've seen
in the public
if i i've not seen anything personally
but if i believe the people who i don't
think can lie
yes
this is how does that make you feel in
terms of the way government works the
way our human civilization works that
there might be things like that
and we're not they're not public is is
there a hopeful message for transparency
that's possible like if you were if you
were uh in power and i'm not saying
president because maybe the president is
not the source of power here
would you release this information in
some way or form yes
if i were
i i think it would i think it's
i think it's something that can bring
humanity together
right i think that
knowledge of this kind of thing to know
that we are
you know we are more alike than we are
different
in comparison to whatever this is
is uh
is a positive thing for us
um
and to know
you know i don't necessarily care that
the government has been hiding it and i
think you know people who've been
talking about what we should give
government officials or whatever amnesty
i think that's probably the right
the right answer we don't this isn't a
time to look back and say you did
something wrong you did whatever you did
because that was the data you had
available to you at the time and those
you had good reasons for doing it now if
your reasons were selfish
if your reasons were you wanted to do it
because you wanted to monetize it
yourself
uh
to the to your benefit but against that
of others then i think maybe there's
something else that could be said but
you know
an opportunity to get all this
information out if i were in charge
i would i would try to do it now
i might be shown something though that
says there's a reason why you don't want
to let anybody know this
maybe you don't want everybody have
having access to unlimited
uh energy because maybe you might turn
it into a bomb
or something that
gives you hints that something like
unlimited energy is possible but you
haven't figured it out yet and if you
make it public
maybe some of the other governments you
have tensions with will figure it out
first right i mean
it's kind of an arms race going on i
think in all forms and it's it makes me
truly sad because uh it's obvious
that um
for example the origins of the covid
virus
it's obvious to me that the chinese
government whatever the origins are
is interested in
not releasing information about it
because it can only be bad for the
chinese government
and every government thinks like this
like
every actually this has been
disappointment to me
talking to pr folks at companies
like they're always nervous
they're always like conservative right
right in the sense like well if we
release more stuff
it can only be bad and then an elon musk
character comes along who tweets
ridiculous memes
and doesn't give a fuck
and i've been encouraging ceos i've been
encouraging people to be transparent and
of course government national security
is really
like another level it's human lives at
stake
but
let's start at the lighter case of just
releasing some of the awesome insides of
the how
how the sausage is made the technology
and being transparent about it because
it excites people
it uh
like you said it it connects people and
it inspires them
it's good for the brand it's good for
everybody i i honestly think this kind
of idea that people will steal the
information and we use it against you is
is an idea that's not true in his idea
of the 20th century like you said some
of the benefits of the social media
uh
our our social world is that
transparency is beneficial and i hope
governments will learn that less and of
course they're the usually the last to
learn such lessons right
what do you make of bob lazar's story in
terms of possession of aircraft do you
believe him i don't believe in the bob
lazar
story to be quite honest i mean
jeremy corbell has done a great job
interviewing him and
uh has done some you know beautiful
uh documentaries
um
i just don't i
i don't know how to interpret it
and um
you know and again there's some of the
people who
i fraternize with
think it's all rubbish
uh yeah but maybe he's right but i don't
know i mean
the problem is
and um
this is a little bit different about how
i approach the whole area than a lot of
others
i'm less interested in going over
old paperwork
and all these old histories of who said
what you know the whole he said she said
of the history of of ufos
i'm a scientist
i worked on the brain
area because it's something i can
collect data on i can go back to the
same individual collect their mri again
and redo it i can hand that mri to
somebody else they can analyze it i can
get materials i can analyze them i can
get some of these skeletons i won't
touch any skeletons ever again but i can
analyze it and somebody else can
reproduce the data yeah i mean
that's what i'm good at and so
you know i'm i i i'm not going to go
into the whole i'm not a historian
yeah that's true but there's a human
side to it
i want
sometimes i think with these because
again anomalous rare events
some of the data is inextricably
connected to humans
the observations right
um i mean i hope in the future
you know
that that sensory data
will not be polluted by human
subjectivity but
you know that's still that's still
powerful data even uh direct
observations like if you talk about
about pilots
so it's an interesting question to me
whether brah bazaar is telling the truth
whether he believes he's telling the
truth too
and what also
what impact his story and stories like
his have on the willingness of
governments to be transparent
and so on so
you know you have to credit his story
for captivating the imagination of
people and that getting the conversation
going he's maintained his story for all
these years with little to no change
that i'm aware of so
um but there's so many other people who
are let's say experts in that story
um their gut you know you accumulate us
a set of sort of uh
circumstantial
evidence where your gut will say that
somebody is uh not telling the truth
yeah you mentioned uh avi loeb
i forgot to ask you about a moa
you know because you've analyzed
specimens from here on earth what do you
make of that one
and what do you make broadly of our
efforts to look
look at rocks essentially or look at
objects
flying around
in our solar system is that a valuable
pursuit or maybe most of the stories are
can be
most of the fascinating things can be
discovered here on earth or on other
nearby planets
just going to omomoa
uh
you know i think
avi's insight
is an interesting speculation right
like i was saying before people can
sometimes look at something and not see
it for what it is
many would just look at that and say oh
it's an asteroid and dismiss it there
was something
odd about the data that avi picked up on
and said well here's an alternative
explanation that doesn't fit that
actually better fits the models than it
just being a rock
you know and to his credit
he just has
ignored the critics because he believes
the data is real and is using that then
as a battering ram
to go after other things so i think
that's i think that's great
you know yeah
what what is his main conclusion does he
say
it could be of uh alien extraterrestrial
origin is that well that's one of the
things i mean he you know he's explained
how it could be a light sail
um
and a light sail is certainly within
near human capabilities to make such a
thing i think
yuri milner is he's a russian
billionaire
he's involved i think in a project to
make light sales with laser you know to
to
launch them with laser power essentially
uh towards alpha centauri
right so it's something that
humans
could make
i think avi's proposal is perfectly
within the realm of possibility i mean
sadly the thing is you know now nearly
out of our solar system yes i mean to me
that's inspiring to
do greater levels of data collection
yeah in our solar system but also here
on earth it just seems like we should be
constantly collecting collecting data
because the tools of software that we're
developing get better and better at
dealing with huge amounts of data it's
changing the nature of science i mean
collect all of the data right collect
the data i mean i i um the galileo
project asked me over the weekend to
join and i did
so um you know i'm not a specialist in
any of the stuff that they're doing
uh but you know in looking at the list
of people who are on there there are
really no biologists on there so at some
point if my expertise is required for
something what's the goal in the vision
of the galileo project better talk to
avi but my understanding and just
actually looking at the uh
at the sort of the bylaws this morning
literally just got them
um is uh number one collect the data on
uap and number two collect data on uh
local
potentially
local technological artifacts i need to
look into this this is fascinating and
the is heading the galileo project yeah
have you spoken to him i've on this
podcast yes that was be i believe is
before he was headed it was a new
creation yeah the galileo project was i
think it's about six or seven months old
now okay you know amazing and he's
getting a group of scientists together
oh yeah about 100 oh it's it's that's
actually i am
i was looking at some of their stuff
over the weekend i'm i'm shocked at the
level of organization that they've
already got put together that's amazing
it looks like
a moonshot project i mean i've been
involved with a lot of nih uh large nih
projects
um which involve a lot of people in
coordination and uh
they're putting it together
so
you're
extremely well published
in a lot of
um the fields we began this conversation
with
so you're legit scientist
but yet you're keeping an open mind to a
lot of ideas that um
that
maybe require you to take a leap
outside of the conventional
so what advice would you give to young
people today that are
you know in high school or in college
that are
dreaming of having impact in science or
maybe in whatever career path that goes
outside of the conventional that really
does something new
if you believe in something you believe
that an idea is
valuable
or you haven't approached something
don't let others shame you into not
doing it
as i've said shame is a
societal control device to get other
people to do what they want you to do
rather than what you want to do
so shame sometimes is good to stop you
from doing something unethical or wrong
but shame also is something that is
circumscribing
your environment i've never let people
who've told me you know you shouldn't do
that line of science you should be
ashamed of yourself for even thinking
that give me a break
i'm you know why is it wrong to ask
questions about this area
what's wrong with asking the question
frankly you're the person who's wrong
for trying to stop these questions
you're the person who's
almost acting like a cultist
you basically have closed your mind
to what the possibilities are and if i'm
not hurting anybody
and if it could lead to an advance and
if it's my time
why does it bother you i mean i had a
very well-known
scientist once tell me that i was going
to hurt my career talking about this
if anything it's enhanced my career
i have a couple questions on this so
first of all just a small comment on
that
i've realized that
it feels like a lot of the progress in
science is done by people pursuing an
idea that another senior faculty would
probably say this is going to hurt your
career
i think it's actually a pretty good
indicator that there's something
interesting when
when a senior wise
uh person tells you this is going to
hurt your career i i think that's just
the one as a small if i were to give
advice to young people if somebody
senior tells you this is going to hurt
your career um think twice about taking
their advice yeah
i mean i think that's the primary thing
um and the other i tell my own students
you know i have a lab of about 20 30
people and has been that big since 1992
people come and go
is
it's not the data that falls in line
that's is it that's so interesting it's
the
it's the spot off the graph
that you want to understand yeah that's
that's it you wanna when something is
way off the graph
that's the interesting thing because
that's usually where discovery is
and the number of times that i've
stopped people in my lab and said wait a
second go back a few slides
what was that
and then it ended up being something
interesting that made their careers
i i could you know count on
a few hands
yeah get excited by the extraordinary
that's outside of the thing that you uh
that you've done in the past right um
just on a personal psychological level
is is there
you know i'm sure at stanford i'm sure
in you exploring some of these ideas
there's pressure
how do you um
how do you not give in to the pressure
how do you not give in to the people
that say uh
like uh that push you away from these
topics that um
what you said shame i just point to my
successes
i say what you know you're the ones who
told me not to start companies all this
time ago
uh you know and now you're the one
coming to me for advice for how to start
a company yeah
right um
but the
from the scientific area it's it's
you're wanting to take something off the
table that might be an explanation
how
how is that
the scientific method so you i reverse
shame them reversing them
so purely with reason through
conversation you're able to do that so
it doesn't feel because to me it would
just feel lonely there's there's a
community yeah there's a community of
science and you know when you're working
on something that's outside a particular
uh
conventional way of thinking it could be
lonely i mean there there's a you know
in the ai field
if you're working on neural networks in
the 90s it could be lonely
i have met some of the most fascinating
people ever that had i stayed the
conventional track i would never have
met
i mean truly yeah uh
brilliant people because of this
so you know it is
for those worried about
well should i step outside of my
comfort zone you're going to meet some
really interesting people and you know
because i'm open about this area
you know i'll go and give a talk you
know in boston harvard or mit
and at dinner
inevitably
this subject comes up
and inevitably somebody else at the
table will admit both that they're
interested or that they've seen
something
and suddenly the whole tone of the
conversation changes
it's kind of like there's safety in
numbers
and uh
and then or i've had people come to me
afterwards after
dinner and say hey
you know i i don't talk about this
openly but
so the number of scientists
who
who know that there's something
else going on is much larger
than the scientific community would like
to think
that's a really powerful one which is i
don't talk about this
you know openly
but here's what i believe and you'd be
surprised how many people speak like
this and hold those beliefs and i am
optimistic about
social media in a more connected world
to reveal more and more like us not to
have these two personalities where like
this public and private one
we've mentioned the big questions of the
origins of the universe
what do you think is the meaning of this
whole thing
for us humans
our human existence here on earth or
just at the individual level of a human
life
what
gary is the meaning of life
i think that what we're going
through today with this realization it's
uh
it's kind of like
you've lived on an island
your whole life
and
you've looked across the ocean and
you've never imagined there was another
island with anybody else on it and then
suddenly
a ship with sales shows up
uh you don't understand it but you
realize that suddenly your world just
got a lot bigger
i think we're in one of those moments
right now
that our world view our
galactic view is opening right to
something a little bit bigger and not
just that there might be
somebody else
but that there's something else
and what it is is yet to be understood
and the fact that it isn't understood to
me is what's exciting
because i can fill it with my dreams
and uh
this discovery our world might uh
is about to get
a lot more humbling
and a lot more fascinating once we look
out and realize we were on an island all
along it makes us both smaller but
larger at the same time to me
you know i i
can look outside at the stars and think
and imagine what else might be out there
and although i will i know that i will
never see it all
it excites me to know that it's there
well uh gary
uh both to respect your time and also
because at 12 i turned into a princess
uh
let me just say and uh thank you for
doing everything you're doing
as a great scientist as a person willing
to reject the conventional and thank you
for spending your extremely valuable
time with me today thanks for talking
thanks so much it was great talking
thanks for listening to this
conversation with gary nolan to support
this podcast please check out our
sponsors in the description
and now let me leave you with some words
from stanislav lem in solaris
how do you expect to communicate with
the ocean
when we can't even understand one
another
thanks for listening and hope to see you
next time
you