back to indexGarry Nolan: UFOs and Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #262
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How would you, as a higher intelligence,
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represent yourself to a lesser intelligence?
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Do you think they saw what they say they saw?
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It didn't just start showing up in 1947.
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How hard do you think it is for aliens
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to communicate with humans?
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What do we believe in?
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We believe in technology.
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So you show yourself as a form of technology, right?
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But the common thread is you're not alone.
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And there's something else here with you.
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And there's something that's, as you said, watching you.
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You are a professor at Stanford
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studying the biology of the human organism
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at the level of individual cells.
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So let me ask first the big,
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ridiculous philosophical question.
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What is the most beautiful or fascinating aspect
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of human biology at the level of the cell to you?
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The micromachines and the nanomachines
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that proteins make and become,
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that to me is the most interesting.
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The fact that you have this basically dynamic computer
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within every cell that's constantly processing
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its environment, and at the heart of it is DNA,
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which is a dynamic machine, a dynamic computation process.
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People think of the DNA as a linear code.
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It's codes within codes within codes.
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And it is actually the epigenetic state
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that's doing this amazing processing.
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I mean, if you ever wanted to believe in God,
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just look inside the cell.
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So DNA is both information and computer.
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How did that computer come about?
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A big continuing on the philosophical question.
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Is this both scientific and philosophical?
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How did life originate on Earth, do you think?
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How did this, at every level, so the very first step
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and the fascinating complex computer that is DNA,
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that is multicellular organism,
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and then maybe the fascinating complex computer
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that is the human mind?
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Well, I think you have to take just one more step back
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to the complex computer that is the universe, right?
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All of the so called particles or the waves
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that people think the universe is made of
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and appears, to me at least, to be a computational process.
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And embedded in that is biology, right?
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So all the atoms of a protein, et cetera,
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sit in that computational matrix.
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From my point of view, it's computing something.
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It's computing towards something.
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It was created, in some ways, if you want to believe in God,
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and I don't know that I do,
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but if you want to believe in something,
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the universe was created or at least enabled
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to allow for life to form.
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And so the DNA, if you ask, where does DNA come from?
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And you can go all the way back to Richard Dawkins
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and the selfish gene hypothesis.
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The way I look at DNA, though,
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is it is not a moment in time.
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It assumes the context of the body and the environment
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in which it's going to live.
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And so if you want to ask a question of where
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and how does information get stored,
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DNA, although it's only 3 billion base pairs long,
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contains more information than, I think,
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the entire computational memory resources
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of our current technology.
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Because who and what you are is both what you were as an egg
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all the way through to the day you die,
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and it embodies all the different cell types
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and organs in your body.
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And so it's a computational reservoir
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of information and expectation that you will become.
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So actually, I would sort of turn it around a different way
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and say, if you wanted to create
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the best memory storage system possible,
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you could reverse engineer what a human is
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and create a DNA memory system
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that is not just the linear version,
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but is also everything that it could become.
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When we're talking about DNA,
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we're talking about Earth and the environment creating DNA.
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So you're talking about trying to come up
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with an optimal computer for this particular environment.
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So if you were to reverse engineer that computer,
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what do you mean by considering
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all the possible things it could become?
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So who you are today, right?
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So 3 billion bits of information
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does not explain Lex Friedman, doesn't explain me, right?
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But the DNA embodies the expectation
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of the environment in which you will live and grow
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So all the information that is you, right,
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is actually not only embedded in the DNA,
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but it's embedded in the context
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of the world in which you grow into and develop, right?
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But so all that information though
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is packed in the expectation of what the DNA expects to see.
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So like some of the information,
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is that accurate to say is stored outside the body?
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The information is stored outside
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because there's a context of expectation.
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Isn't that interesting?
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Yeah, it's fascinating.
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I mean, to linger on this point,
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if we were to run Earth over again a million times,
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how many different versions
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of this type of computer would we get?
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I think it would be different each time.
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I mean, if you assume there's no such thing as fate, right,
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and it's not all pre programmed,
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and that there is some sort of, let's say,
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variation or randomness at the beginning,
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you would get as many different versions of life
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as you could imagine.
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And I don't think it would all be
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unless there's something built into the substrate
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It wouldn't always be left handed proteins, right?
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But I wonder what the flap of a butterfly wing,
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what effects it has,
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because it's possible that this system
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is really good at finding the efficient answer,
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and maybe the efficient answer is,
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there's only a small finite set of them
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for this particular environment.
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That's the kind of, in a way, the anthropomorphic universe
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of the multiverse expectations, right?
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That there's probably a zillion other kinds of universes
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out there if you believe in multiverse theory.
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We only live in the ones where the rules are such
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that lifelike hours can exist.
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So using that logic, how many alien civilizations
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do you think are out there?
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There's like trillions of environments, aka planets,
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or maybe you can think even bigger than planets.
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How many lifelike organisms do you think
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are out there thriving, and maybe how many
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do you think are long gone, but were once here?
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I think, well, innumerable, I think in terms
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of the present. Greater than zero.
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Much greater than zero.
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I mean, I would just be surprised.
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What a waste, right, of all that space just for us
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if we're never gonna get there.
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That would be my first way to think about it.
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But second, I mean, I remember when I was about
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seven or eight years old, and I would love
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if any of your listeners could find
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this National Geographic.
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I remember opening the page of the National Geographic.
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I was about, again, seven to 10 years old,
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and it was sort of a current picture of the universe.
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It was around probably 1968, 1969.
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I just remember looking at it and thinking,
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what kinds of empires have risen and fallen
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across that space that we'll never know about?
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And isn't that sad that we know nothing
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about something so grand?
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And so I've always been a reader of science fiction
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because I like the creative ideas
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of what people come up with.
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And I especially like science fiction writers
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that base it in good science,
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but base it also in evolution.
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That if you evolve a civilization from something
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lifelike, right, some sort of biology,
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its assumptions about the universe will come
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from the environment in which it grew up.
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So for instance, Larry Niven is a great writer,
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and he imagines different kinds of civilizations.
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In some cases, what happens if intelligence
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evolved from a herd animal, right?
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Would you lead from behind, right?
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Would you be, you know, in his case,
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one of them were the so called puppeteers.
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And to them, the moral imperative is cowardice.
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You put other people forward to run the risk for you, right?
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And so he writes entire books around that premise.
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There's another guy, Brin, David Brin is his name,
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and he writes the so called uplift universe books.
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And in those, he takes different intelligences,
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each from a different evolutionary background.
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And then he posits a civilization based around
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where and what they came from.
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And so to me, I mean, that's just fun.
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But I mean, back to your original question is
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how many are there?
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I think as many stars as we can see.
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Now, how many are currently there?
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I don't know, I mean, that's the whole question of,
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you know, how long can a civilization last
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before it runs out of steam?
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And you, for instance, does it just get bored
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or does it transcend to something else?
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Or does it say, I've seen enough and I'm done?
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What does running out of steam look like?
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It could be destroy itself or get bored.
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You know, or we've done everything we can
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and they just decide to stop.
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I don't know, I just don't know.
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It's that you all must worry that we stop reproducing
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or we slow down the reproduction rate
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to where the population can go to zero.
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We can go to zero and we can't and we collapse.
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I mean, so the only way to get around that
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is perhaps create enough machines with AI
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to take care of us.
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What could possibly go wrong?
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You've talked to people that told stories
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of UFO encounters.
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What is the most fascinating to you about the stories
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of these UFO encounters that you've heard
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that people have told you?
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The similarity of them, the uniformity of the stories.
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Now, I just wanna say upfront,
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a lot of people think that when I speculate,
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I believe something, that's not true, right?
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Speculation is just creativity.
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Speculation is the beginning of hypothesis.
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None of what I hear in terms of the anecdotes
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do I necessarily believe are they true?
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But I still find them fascinating to listen to
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because at some level they're still raw data
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and you have to listen.
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And once you start to hear the same story again and again,
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then you have to say, well, there might be something to it.
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I mean, maybe it's some kind of a Jungian background
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in the human mind and human consciousness
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that creates these stories again and again
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as coming out of the DNA,
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it's coming out of that pre programmed something.
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And Jung talked quite a bit about this kind of thing.
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The collective unconscious.
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But actually one of the most interesting ones I find
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is this constant message
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that you're not taking care of your world.
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And this came long before climate change.
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It came long before many kinds of,
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let's say current day memes around
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taking care of our planet, pollution, et cetera.
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And so, for instance, perhaps the best example of this,
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the one that I find the most fascinating
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is a story out of Zimbabwe, 50 or 60 children,
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one afternoon in Zimbabwe.
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It was a well educated group of white and black children
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who had lunchtime in the playground, saw a craft
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and they saw little men.
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And they all ran into the teachers
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and they told the same story and they drew the same pictures.
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And the message several of them got was
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you are not taking care of your planet.
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And it got, you know, there's actually a movie coming out
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on this episode and 30 years later now,
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the people who were there, the children
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who've now grown up say, it happened to us.
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Now, did it happen?
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Was it some sort of hallucination
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or was it an imposed hallucination by something?
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I don't know, but these kids were seven to 10 years old.
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You see them on video.
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Seven to 10 year olds can't lie like that.
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And so, you know, whether it's real or not, I don't know,
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but I find that fascinating data.
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And again, it's these unconnected stories
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of individuals with the same story.
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That is worthy of further inquiry.
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Yeah, so here we are humans with limited cognitive capacities
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trying to make sense of the world,
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trying to understand what is real and not.
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We have this DNA that somehow in complex ways
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is interacting with the environment.
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And then we get these novel ideas
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that come from the populace.
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And then they make us wonder about what it all means.
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And so how to interpret it.
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If you think from an alien perspective,
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how would you communicate with other lifelike organisms?
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You perhaps have to find in points
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on this interaction between the DNA and its manifestations
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in terms of the human mind
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and how it interacts with the environment.
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So it gets some kind of, all right, what is this DNA?
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What does this environment have to get in somehow
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to like interact with it, to perturb the system
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to where these little ants, human like ants
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get like excited and figures and see stuff out.
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Yeah, it has, and then somehow steer them.
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First of all, for investigative purposes,
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understand like oftentimes to understand a system,
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you have to perturb it.
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It's like poke at it to get excited or not.
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And then the other ways you want to,
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if you worry about them,
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you can steer in one direction or another.
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And this kind of idea that we're not taking care
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of our world, that's interesting.
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I mean, that's comforting, that's hopeful
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because that means the greater intelligence,
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which is what I would hope would want to take care of us.
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Like we want to take care of the gorillas
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in the national parks in Africa.
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Yeah, but we don't want to take care of cockroaches.
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So there's a line we draw.
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So you have to hope that.
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Right now we're a bunch of angry monkeys
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and maybe whatever these intelligences are,
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are also keeping an eye on us.
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That you don't want a bunch of,
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you don't want the angry monkey troop
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stomping around the local galactic arm.
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Do you think these folks are telling the truth?
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Do you think they saw what they say they saw?
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I think they saw what they said they saw,
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but I also think they saw what they were shown.
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I mean, if you go back to the whole notion of,
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okay, how long has this been around?
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It didn't just start showing up in 1947, right?
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There are stories going back into the 1800s
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of people who saw things in their farming,
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in their farm fields in the US.
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It's in local newspapers from the 1800s, it's fascinating.
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But if you can go even further back,
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so to your point of how would you as a higher intelligence
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represent yourself to a lesser intelligence?
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So let's go back to pre civilization.
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Maybe you show yourself as the spirits in the forest
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and you give messages through that.
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Once you get a little bit more civilized,
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then you show yourself as the gods and then you're God.
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Well, we don't believe in God anymore necessarily,
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not everybody does.
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So what do we believe in?
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We believe in technology.
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So you show yourself as a form of technology, right?
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But the common thread is you're not alone
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and there's something else here with you.
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And there's something that's, as you said, watching you
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and at least watching over your shoulder.
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But I think that like any good parent,
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you don't tell your student everything, you make them learn
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and learning requires mistakes
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because if you tell them everything, then they get lazy.
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You've looked at the brains of, or information coming
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from the brain of some of the people
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that have had UFO encounters.
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What's common about the brain of people
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who encounter UFOs?
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So the study started with a group of,
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let's say a cohort of individuals that were brought to me
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and their MRIs to ask about the damage
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that had been seen in these individuals.
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It turns out that the majority of those patients
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ended up being, as far as we can tell, Havana syndrome.
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And so for me at least, that part of the story ends
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in terms of the injury,
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it's likely almost all Havana syndrome.
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That's somebody else's problem now, that's not my problem.
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But when we were looking at the brains of these individuals,
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we noticed something right in the center
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of the basal ganglia in many of these individuals
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that at first we thought was damage.
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It was basically an enriched patch of MRI dense neurons
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that we thought was damage,
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but then it was showing up in everybody.
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And then we looked and we said, oh, it's actually not.
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The other readings on these MRIs showed
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that actually that's living tissue.
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That's actually the head of the caudate in the pitamen.
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And at the time, and I remember even asking
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a good friend of mine at Stanford, who was a psychiatrist,
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what does the basal ganglia do?
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He said, oh, the basal ganglia is just about movement
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and nerve and motor control.
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I said, well, that's odd because these other papers
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that we were reading at the time started to suggest
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that it was involved with higher intelligence
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and is actually downstream of the executive function
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and involved with intuition and planning.
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And then if you think about it,
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if you're gonna have motor control,
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which is centralized in one place,
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motor control requires knowledge of the environment.
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You don't wanna move something and hit the table.
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Or if you're walking across a room,
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you want to be aware and cognizant
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of what you might bump into.
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So obviously all of that planning
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requires access to all the senses.
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It requires access to your desires, memory,
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knowledge of where and what you want
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and desire to walk nearby.
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Like I used the example of if you're at a party,
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you wanna avoid that person, you like that person,
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the waiter is about to drop something.
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All without thinking, you maneuver.
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So that actually, all that planning is done
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in the basal ganglia.
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And it's actually now called the brain within the brain.
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It's a goal processing system.
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Subservient to executive function.
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So what we think we found there was not something
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which allows people to talk to UFOs.
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I mean, I think the UFO community took it a step too far.
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What I think we found was a form of higher
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functioning and processing.
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So what we then looked at,
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and this was the most fascinating part of it,
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we looked then at individuals in the families
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or those, let's say the index case individuals.
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And we found that it was actually in families.
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And more so, this is the most fascinating part.
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We've probably looked now at about 200 just random cases
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that you can download off of databases online.
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You don't see this higher connectivity.
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You only find it in what Kit Green would have called
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or has called higher functioning individuals.
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People who are, I mean, he called them savants.
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I don't have the means to, we haven't done the testing.
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But it turns out my family has it, right?
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We found it in me, my brother, my sister, my mother.
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We found it as well in other individuals,
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husband and wife pairs.
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So statistically, if you had a group of 20 individuals
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and you found two husband wife pairs, both of whom had it,
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and yet it's only found at about, we think,
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one in 200, one in 300 individuals.
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The fact that two individuals came together,
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two sets of individuals came together,
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both of whom had it, implied either
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a restricted breeding group or attraction.
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The reason why it seems to be in, let's say,
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so called experiencers or people who claim,
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if intuition is the ability to see something
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that other people don't,
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and I don't mean that in a paranormal sense,
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but being able to see something just in front of you
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that other people might just dismiss,
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well, maybe that's a function of a higher kind
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of intelligence to say, well, I'm not looking at an artifact.
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I'm not looking at something that I should just ignore.
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I'm seeing something and I recognize it for,
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not what it is, but that it is something
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different than what is normally found in my environment.
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Yeah, you know, I have a little bit of that.
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I seem to see the magic in a lot of moments.
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I have a deep, it's obviously, not obviously,
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but it seems to be chemical in nature
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that I just am excited about life.
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I love stupid things.
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It feels like I'm high a lot,
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on mushrooms or something like that,
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where you'd really appreciate that.
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So I'm able to detect something about the environment
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that maybe others don't, I don't know,
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but I seem to be over the top grateful to be alive
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for a lot of stupid reasons, and that's in there somewhere.
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I mean, it's kind of interesting
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because it really is true that our brains,
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the way we're brought up, but also the genetics
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enables us to see certain slices of the world,
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and some people are probably more receptive
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to anomalous information.
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They see the magic, the possibility in the novel thing
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as opposed to kind of finding the pattern
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of the common, of the regular.
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Some people are more, wait a minute, this is kind of weird.
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I mean, a lot of those people would probably
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become scientists too.
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Like, huh, there's this pattern happening
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over and over and over, and then something weird
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just happened, and then you get excited by that weirdness
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and start to pull the string and discover
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what is at the core of that weirdness.
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Perhaps, is that, maybe by way of question,
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how does the human perception system deal
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with anomalous information, do you think?
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Well, it first tries to classify it
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and get it out of the way.
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If it's not food, if it's not sex, right?
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If it's not in the way of my desires,
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or if it is in the way of my desires,
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then you focus on it.
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And so I think the question is
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how much spare processing power,
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how much CPU cycles do we spend
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on things that are not those core desires?
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What is the most kind of memorable, powerful
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UFO encounter report you ever heard?
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Just to you, on a personal level,
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like something that was really powerful.
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Well, I mentioned the Zimbabwe one.
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That's particularly interesting.
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And one that actually most people don't know about,
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but family driving down the highway,
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two little girls in the back, open glass topped car,
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and the little girls see a craft right over their car.
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This is in the middle of the day on a busy highway.
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The mother sees it.
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Nobody can, they look around, nobody else seems to see it.
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So the girls take out their camera, take a picture of it,
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and then they get home.
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They look at the picture.
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There's no craft, but there's a little object
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about 30 feet above their car or so,
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probably about three feet across, kind of star shaped.
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It's not the craft, but it's something else.
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Obviously there was something there.
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And so what were they seeing?
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Were they seeing a projection?
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Were they seeing, and why were only they seeing it?
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And the photograph was capturing something very different
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than what we're seeing, but they're still an object.
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Can you give a little bit of context?
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Is this from modern day?
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Oh yeah, they had a camera.
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I mean, they had a cell phone camera.
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And this is like a report provided.
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By the way, where is a central place to provide a report?
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Oh, there's a move on, but this isn't public.
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I've seen the picture.
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Oh, this is something you've directly interacted with.
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Yeah, yeah, I've seen the picture.
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So those moments like that, they captivate your mind.
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It's so different,
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and it doesn't fall into the standard story at all.
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But it also, but in another way, it's kind of a,
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it's a clear enunciation of this notion
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that when people see events,
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they don't all see the same thing.
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Now, we've heard this about traffic accidents.
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Different people will see the color of the car differently
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or the chain of events differently.
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And this tells you that memory isn't anywhere near
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what we think it is.
link |
But the issue around these so called UFO reports
link |
is that the same people will see a very different thing,
link |
almost as if whatever it is is projecting a,
link |
is projecting something into the mind
link |
rather than it being real, right?
link |
Rather than it being a real manifestation,
link |
material in front of you,
link |
it's actually almost some sort of an altered virtual reality
link |
that is imposed on you.
link |
I mean, I think the company Meta
link |
and all the virtual reality companies
link |
would love to have something like that, right?
link |
Where you don't have to actually wear something
link |
on your face to experience a virtual reality.
link |
What happens if you could just project it?
link |
Well, that's the fundamental question
link |
from an alien perspective.
link |
When you look at it, or as we humans look at ants,
link |
how does its perception system operate?
link |
So not only how does this thing's mind operate,
link |
how does the human mind operate,
link |
but how does their perception system operate
link |
so that we can stimulate the perception system properly
link |
to get them to think certain things.
link |
And so, that's a really important question.
link |
Humans think that the only way to communicate
link |
is in 3D or 4D space time, there's physical objects,
link |
or maybe you write things into some kind of language.
link |
But there could be just so much more richness
link |
in how you can communicate.
link |
And so, from an alien perspective,
link |
where somebody has much greater technological capabilities,
link |
you have to figure out how do I use the skills I have
link |
to stimulate the limited humans.
link |
Right, well, I mean, let's take the ants exam
link |
again as an example.
link |
Let's say that you wanted to make ants practical.
link |
You wanted to use them for something, right?
link |
You wanted to use them as a form of biological robot.
link |
Now, DARPA and other people have been trying
link |
to use insects for, turn them into biological robots.
link |
But if you wanted to, you would have to interact
link |
with their sense of smell, right?
link |
Their pheromone system that they use to interact
link |
So you would either create those molecules
link |
to talk to them, to make them do,
link |
I'm not saying talk to them as if they're intelligent,
link |
but talk to them to manipulate them in ways that you want.
link |
Or if you were advanced enough,
link |
you would use some sort of electromagnetic or other means
link |
to stimulate their neurons in ways
link |
that would accomplish the same goal as the pheromones,
link |
but by doing it in a sort of a telefactoring way.
link |
So let's say you wanted to telefactor with humans.
link |
You would interact with them.
link |
And this is, again, this is a technology
link |
which you could imagine possible.
link |
You could telefactor information
link |
into the sensory system of a human, right?
link |
But then each human is a little bit different.
link |
So either you know enough about them to tailor it
link |
to that individual, or you just basically take advantage
link |
of whatever the sensory net is that that individual has.
link |
So if you happen to be good at sound,
link |
or you happen to be a very visually inclined individual,
link |
then maybe the sensory information that you get
link |
that's most effective in terms of transmitting information
link |
would come through that portal.
link |
I think the aliens would need to figure out
link |
that humans value physical consistency.
link |
So we've discovered physics.
link |
So we want our perception to make sense.
link |
Maybe they don't, you know,
link |
that's not an obvious fact of perception,
link |
that you have to figure out what kind of things
link |
are humans used to observing
link |
in this particular environment of Earth,
link |
and how do we stimulate the perception system
link |
in a way that's not anomalous,
link |
or not too, it doesn't cross that threshold
link |
of just like, well, that's way too weird.
link |
So they have to, I mean, that's not obvious
link |
that that should be important.
link |
Maybe you wanna err on the side of anomaly,
link |
like lean into the weirdness.
link |
So communication is complicated.
link |
Well, that's why I always find this issue
link |
of people talking about the so called grays as interesting,
link |
because it is related to what you're saying.
link |
They're different enough,
link |
but they're not so different as to be scary, right?
link |
They're not venom dripping fangs, right?
link |
They're different enough,
link |
but it's also like they're what you could imagine
link |
us becoming in some distant future.
link |
So is that a purposeful representation?
link |
I mean, I don't believe in the grays, for instance,
link |
but I believe that people think that they see it.
link |
So if we're talking about a communication strategy
link |
that says, you know, we're like you,
link |
but not the same as you,
link |
this might be a manifestation that you represent
link |
in terms of a communication strategy.
link |
What do you make of David's favorite sighting
link |
of the Tic Tac UFO,
link |
and other pilots who have seen these objects
link |
that seem to defy the laws of physics?
link |
Well, I think you have to take them at their word.
link |
Are they fascinating to you?
link |
No, I know a lot of these people, right?
link |
So I know Lou Elizondo, Chris Mellon,
link |
the whole crowd I've been,
link |
I saw the videos about three weeks or so
link |
before they went public.
link |
I was at a bar with Lou overlooking the Pentagon
link |
in Crystal City, and they showed them to me,
link |
and my hair stood on end.
link |
And he said, this is coming out soon.
link |
And I know one of the guys on the inside
link |
who was the Naval Intelligence
link |
who had interviewed all of these pilots again
link |
before this came out.
link |
And it was hair raising to hear this,
link |
but also exciting that here's not just people's testimony,
link |
these are credible individuals.
link |
And if you've seen the 60 minute episode
link |
with some of the pilots,
link |
they have no monetary gain.
link |
If anything, they've got negative gain from coming out.
link |
But then you also have all of those simultaneous
link |
ship analysis from the USS Princeton
link |
and the radar analysis, et cetera.
link |
So at the end of the day, it's just data.
link |
It's not a conclusion.
link |
I'd be perfectly happy, honestly, perfectly happy
link |
if somebody showed that it was all a hoax.
link |
I can go back to my day job, right?
link |
That could be a hoax, but other things might not be.
link |
This is the point.
link |
This is why it's nice to remove some of the stigma
link |
about this topic because it's all just data
link |
and anomalous events are such that they're going to be rare
link |
in terms of how much data they represent.
link |
But we have to consider the full range of data
link |
to discover the things that actually represent something
link |
that's, if we pull at it, we'll discover something
link |
that's extraterrestrial or something deep
link |
about the phenomena on Earth that we don't yet understand.
link |
Well, if it only stimulates people, for instance,
link |
to think, okay, well, what happens if we could move
link |
like that with momentumless movement?
link |
And it stimulates young individuals to go into the sciences
link |
to ask those questions.
link |
That to me is fascinating.
link |
I mean, after I've been openly talking about this
link |
in the last year, especially, I've had a number
link |
of students from top schools who aren't my students
link |
come to me and say, if I can help, let me.
link |
I never had thought about this before,
link |
but you opened, you and others, not just you and others,
link |
have opened my mind to thinking about this matter.
link |
Yeah, that's why it's actually funny
link |
that Elon Musk doesn't think too much about this,
link |
these kinds of propulsion systems that could defy
link |
the laws of physics as we currently understand them.
link |
To me, it's a powerful way to think what is possible.
link |
It's inspiring, even if some of the data
link |
doesn't represent extraterrestrial vehicles.
link |
I think the observation itself,
link |
it's like something you mentioned,
link |
which is hypothesizing, imagining these things,
link |
considering the possibility of these things,
link |
I think opens up your mind in a way
link |
that ultimately can create the technology.
link |
First, you have to believe the technology is possible
link |
before you can create it.
link |
In my own lab, we always look for,
link |
as I've said before, what is inevitable,
link |
and saying inevitably this is the kind of data we need,
link |
but if we need that kind of data,
link |
the instrument we want doesn't exist.
link |
Okay, so I imagine the perfect instrument, I can't make it,
link |
and you back into something which is practical,
link |
and then you, in a sense, reverse engineer the future
link |
of what it is that you wanna make.
link |
And I've started and sold at least half a dozen
link |
or more companies using that basic premise.
link |
And so it was always something that didn't exist today,
link |
but we imagined what we wanted.
link |
And at the time, many people said it couldn't be done.
link |
I mean, for instance, all the gene therapy
link |
that's done today with retroviruses
link |
came from a group meeting in David Baltimore's lab.
link |
I was a postdoc with him, and one of the other postdocs
link |
wasn't able to make retroviruses in a way
link |
that he wanted to, and I realized I had a cell line
link |
that would allow us to make retroviruses
link |
in two days rather than two months.
link |
And so he and I then worked together to make that system,
link |
and now all gene therapy with retroviruses
link |
is done using this basic approach around the whole world,
link |
because something couldn't be done,
link |
and we wanted to do it better, and we imagined the future.
link |
And so that's, I think, what the whole UFO phenomenon
link |
is doing for people.
link |
It's like, well, let's imagine a future
link |
where these kinds of technologies are,
link |
but also let's imagine a future
link |
where we don't blow ourselves up, right?
link |
So if these things are there,
link |
they manage to not blow themselves up.
link |
So it means that at least one other civilization
link |
got past the inflection point.
link |
So if some of the encounters are actually representing
link |
alien civilizations visiting us,
link |
why do you think they're doing so?
link |
You suggested that perhaps it's the study
link |
understand their own past, right?
link |
What are some of the motivations, do you think?
link |
And again, from our perspective, us as humans,
link |
what motivations would we have
link |
when we approach other civilizations
link |
we might discover in the future?
link |
Well, I think one motivation might be
link |
to steer us away from the precipice, right?
link |
Or on the assumption that,
link |
even if we make it past the precipice,
link |
at least we're not a bunch of psychopaths running around.
link |
So maybe there's a little bit of motivation there
link |
to make sure that the neighbor that's growing up next to you
link |
But I mean, maybe it's sort of a moral imperative,
link |
like what we have with creating national parks
link |
where animals can continue to live out their lives
link |
I mean, that would be, I mean, the problem is
link |
we're imagining from a anthropomorphic viewpoint
link |
what an alien might think.
link |
And as I've said before, alien means alien, right?
link |
I mean, not Hollywood aliens,
link |
but a whole different way of thinking
link |
and a whole different level of experience
link |
and let's say wisdom, hopefully,
link |
that we could only hope to understand.
link |
Now, but if we ever get out there,
link |
if we ever make it past our current problems,
link |
and even if we don't have faster than light travel,
link |
and even if we're only using ram scoops
link |
or light sails to get where we wanna go,
link |
and it takes us 10,000 years to get somewhere
link |
or to spread out, we might encounter such things.
link |
And are we just gonna stomp all over it
link |
like we did in colonial South America or Africa
link |
or all the rest on our current path, likely?
link |
And so what are we gonna learn?
link |
Well, we're getting better and better
link |
at understanding what is life.
link |
And I think we're getting better and better
link |
at being careful, not to step on it when we see it.
link |
And this is one of the nice things
link |
about talking about UFOs is it expands the Overton window.
link |
It expands our understanding of what possibly could be life.
link |
It gets us to think.
link |
It gets the scientific community to think.
link |
When we go to Mars, when we go to these different moons
link |
that possibly have life,
link |
we're not looking at legged organisms.
link |
We're looking at some kind of complexity
link |
that arises in resistance to the natural world.
link |
And there's a lot of interesting.
link |
I like that, resistance to the natural world, yeah.
link |
So somehow there's a rebellious process,
link |
complex system going on here.
link |
And I don't know the many ways it could take form.
link |
There's a sense for aliens that as the technology develops,
link |
they take form more and more as information,
link |
as something that can influence the space of ideas,
link |
of the processing of data itself.
link |
So I just, this idea of embodiment that we humans so admire,
link |
physically visible, perceivable embodiment
link |
may be a very inefficient thing, right?
link |
If you think just about your area, AI,
link |
we're trying to make smaller and smaller and smaller
link |
circuitry that is basically closer and closer
link |
to the physics of how the universe operates, right?
link |
Right down at the level of, I mean, quantum computers
link |
are basically right down about quantum information storage.
link |
So fast forward 10,000, 100,000 years,
link |
maybe somebody found a way to embody AI directly
link |
into the physics of the universe, right?
link |
And it doesn't require a physical manifestation.
link |
It just sits in space time.
link |
It's just a locally ordered space.
link |
We're just locally ordered space time, right?
link |
You know, I mean, but maybe they just,
link |
they found a way to embody it there.
link |
They probably have to get really good
link |
at not, you know, trampling on the ants.
link |
The better your technology gets,
link |
the easier it is to accidentally like, oops,
link |
just destroy these simpleton biological systems.
link |
We constantly think about whatever these things might be.
link |
We think that they are some sort of a unified force.
link |
Well, maybe they're not unified.
link |
Maybe they are as disparate as you and I are.
link |
And maybe what keeps them from stomping all over the ants
link |
is each other, right?
link |
That they are in a self tension
link |
to prevent one or more of them from running amok.
link |
I mean, that's kind of the anarchy of nations
link |
that we have on earth.
link |
So there's always going to be this.
link |
There's a hierarchy.
link |
This hierarchy that's formed
link |
of greater and greater intelligences.
link |
And they're all probably also wondering,
link |
wait, what's bigger than me?
link |
That's what I always wonder is that maybe that they're,
link |
what keeps them in line is something that is beyond them.
link |
Like what created the universe.
link |
I mean, that's probably a question that bothers them too.
link |
What about the communication task itself?
link |
How hard do you think it is for aliens
link |
to communicate with humans?
link |
So is this something you think about
link |
about this barrier of communication
link |
between biological systems and something else?
link |
How difficult is it to find a common language?
link |
Well, I think if you're smart enough
link |
or technologically enabled enough,
link |
it's relatively straightforward.
link |
Now, whether your concepts
link |
can ever be dumbed down to us,
link |
that might be hard.
link |
Again, talking to the ants.
link |
Talking to the ants.
link |
I mean, they don't.
link |
You want to look good in this picture.
link |
Let me explain to you.
link |
Let me explain to you why.
link |
So that's the essential problem of,
link |
you know, perhaps they realize
link |
who it is that they're talking to.
link |
And they say, rather than muddy the picture,
link |
we're only going to give them limited information.
link |
And yeah, maybe we could sit down,
link |
like you and I, and have a conversation.
link |
But then they would make assumptions.
link |
The humans would then make assumptions about us
link |
Because we're not humans, right?
link |
So let's stay at arm's length.
link |
Let's just let them know that we're here, right?
link |
And here's the limited amount of communication.
link |
Again, this notion that
link |
if you give somebody everything, they'll get lazy.
link |
And, you know, if they've been around as long as they have,
link |
they've seen every kind of thing that can go wrong.
link |
And so they know as much as they might want to step in,
link |
that that would be a wrong thing.
link |
Yeah, you have to also understand
link |
the amount of wisdom they carry.
link |
You know, and so it's very easy as well for religions to,
link |
I don't want to get into a whole religious conversation,
link |
but it's very easy for,
link |
you could see how religions could call them angels
link |
or devils or what have you.
link |
Because, again, if you're trying to fit it
link |
into a framework of cultural understanding,
link |
the first thing you reach for is God.
link |
And so when you look at what these things are,
link |
and again, with the angels and the devils,
link |
in a similar sort of way, their communication is limited.
link |
They just kind of give little, what's the oracle of Delphi?
link |
They kind of give these Delphic pronouncements,
link |
and then it's up to you to figure out
link |
what it is that they really mean.
link |
Steven Greer claimed that a skeleton discovered
link |
in Atacama region of Chile might be an alien.
link |
You reached out to him and took on the task
link |
of proving or disproving that with the rigor of science.
link |
The result is a paper titled
link |
Whole Genome Sequencing of Atacama Skeleton
link |
Shows Novel Mutations Linked with Dysplasia.
link |
Can you tell this full story?
link |
Well, the story was, as you put it right there, correct.
link |
Reached out, got a sample of the body,
link |
did the DNA sequencing, then worked with a team
link |
of two other Stanford scientists
link |
and Roche sequencing group, Roche Diagnostics,
link |
and probably a total team of about 11 or so people.
link |
And as is standard in these kinds of things,
link |
the professors actually don't do the work.
link |
The students do the work and figured out the answer.
link |
And then we helped them put together the story.
link |
And the story was simply that it was human, 100%.
link |
I went into it thinking it was originally a monkey
link |
I got kind of excited a few months into the process,
link |
thinking, well, what happens if it is an alien, right?
link |
Can you describe some of the characteristics
link |
of the skeleton that makes it unique and interesting?
link |
Primarily, it had dysmorphias of the brain.
link |
And so the first thing I did actually,
link |
when I got pictures of it,
link |
I took it to a local expert at Stanford
link |
and he was on the paper.
link |
And he was the world expert in pediatric bone dysmorphias.
link |
He literally wrote the book on this,
link |
because that's what you do.
link |
You go to an expert when it's outside
link |
of your field of interest.
link |
And he said, well, I haven't seen this particular collection
link |
of mutations before or this physiology before,
link |
but here's what I think it might be.
link |
And he said, but based on the size of the thing
link |
and the bone density, it would appear to be like six
link |
or seven years old.
link |
Now, again, that's the thing where I think the lay public
link |
doesn't understand or takes a speculation like that
link |
and turns it into a fact.
link |
No one ever said that it was that age.
link |
We only said that the bones made it look like it was
link |
that age, but then we went back and looked for,
link |
we went back and looked for genetic explanations
link |
of why things might look the way they did.
link |
And if you, again, read the paper is very carefully
link |
caveated to say that these mutations might result in this.
link |
But what we did find was an unexpectedly large number
link |
of mutations associated with bone growth in this individual.
link |
And it was just a bad roll of the dice, right?
link |
You roll the dice enough times
link |
with enough people born every year
link |
and someone will roll the wrong dice all at once.
link |
So the sad part about it was individuals
link |
in the UFO community who wanted to think
link |
that there was some sort of conspiracy around it, right?
link |
That somebody had somehow convinced all of my students to lie.
link |
I mean, come on, you know, I would lose my job,
link |
first of all, and they would all be in trouble forever.
link |
Yeah, but also it's just projecting malevolence
link |
onto people that doesn't, I don't think exists
link |
in normal populace and especially doesn't exist
link |
in the scientific community.
link |
The kind of people that go into science,
link |
I mean, this is what bothers me
link |
with the current distrust of science,
link |
is they might be naive, they might not,
link |
especially in modern science, look at the big picture,
link |
philosophical, ethical questions, all that kind of stuff,
link |
but ultimately they're people with integrity
link |
and just a deep curiosity
link |
for the discovery of cool little things.
link |
And there's no malevolence, broadly speaking,
link |
in the scientific community.
link |
So, I mean, there's a bigger story here,
link |
which is, you know, there's a hunger in the populace
link |
to discover something anomalous, something new.
link |
And, you know, science has to be both open to the anomalous,
link |
but also to reject the anomalous
link |
when the data doesn't support it.
link |
What do you make of that, you know,
link |
walking that line for you?
link |
Because you're dealing with UFO encounters,
link |
you're dealing with the anomalous.
link |
Well, people have said, let's go back to the Atacama case
link |
that I was debunking it.
link |
Well, debunking is a loaded term.
link |
Sort of assumes that you were going in purposefully
link |
to prove something is wrong.
link |
I wasn't, I was just going in to collect the data.
link |
And, you know, I showed that this one was human.
link |
There was another skull that somebody had at one point.
link |
It was called the star child.
link |
They called it the star child skull.
link |
I said, you know, I looked at it.
link |
I looked at the DNA sequencing that they had done.
link |
I said, this is human.
link |
The people who owned the thing at the time disagreed with me,
link |
and then eventually another group came in
link |
and proved that I was right.
link |
And it's not about debunking.
link |
It's about getting the more spectacular and hyped cases
link |
I mean, the reason I got interested in it
link |
is because somebody was hyping it.
link |
And not because I wanted to disprove it,
link |
but because I just wanted to know.
link |
And thus, get it off the table, because it's usually
link |
the most extravagant things that are most likely to be wrong.
link |
Somewhere in the rubble will be something interesting.
link |
And so that's what you do.
link |
You get the dross off the table.
link |
And then somewhere in the data will
link |
be something worth real inquiry.
link |
And that, if you inquire deeply enough,
link |
will be extravagant as well.
link |
And that's what actually excites scientists is to, I mean,
link |
you want, with the rigor of science,
link |
to actually reveal the extravagant.
link |
And so look at CRISPR as probably the most perfect
link |
These weird sequences in bacterial genomes,
link |
all arrayed one after the other with these strange sequences
link |
around them, but when you looked at the sequences,
link |
they looked like viruses.
link |
And so how did they get there?
link |
And lo and behold, after a lot of effort and work,
link |
well, a couple of Nobel Prizes went out the door.
link |
But these strange things ended up
link |
having extraordinarily extravagant possibilities.
link |
You've also looked at UFO materials.
link |
You are in possession of UFO materials yourself.
link |
Claimed UFO materials, alleged.
link |
Alleged UFO materials, that's right.
link |
So what's another term?
link |
Weird materials that don't seem to have a story.
link |
They have a story that doesn't seem to be of natural origins,
link |
but it's not, you know, there's a process to proving that.
link |
And that process may take decades, if not centuries,
link |
because you have to keep pulling at the string
link |
and discover where they could possibly come from.
link |
But anyway, you're in a possession
link |
of some materials of this kind.
link |
Can you describe some of them and maybe also
link |
talk to the process of how you investigate them,
link |
how do you analyze them?
link |
Right, so let's say that there's two classes of materials
link |
that I've been given by people.
link |
And they're not given by the government or anything,
link |
just given people who've collected them,
link |
and there's a reasonable chain of evidence associated
link |
with them that you believe is not just a pebble somebody
link |
picked up off a road.
link |
There are almost always things that people have claimed
link |
have either been dropped off as like some sort
link |
of a leftover material, molten metals,
link |
or they are from an object that was released from this
link |
or that kind of exploded.
link |
They're almost always metals.
link |
I have some couple of things that
link |
might be biological that are interesting that I haven't
link |
really spent a lot of time on yet.
link |
When you look at a metal, you basically, well, OK,
link |
what are the elements in it?
link |
And what's it made of?
link |
And so there's pretty standard approaches to doing that.
link |
Most of them involve a technology
link |
called mass spectrometry, and there's probably
link |
about five or six different kinds of mass spectrometry
link |
that you could bring to bear on answering it.
link |
And they either tell you, depending
link |
upon the limit of the resolution of the instrument,
link |
they either tell you the elements that are there,
link |
or they tell you the isotopes that are there.
link |
And you're interested not just in knowing whether something
link |
is there or not, you're interested in knowing
link |
whether there are the amounts of it,
link |
and in the case of elements, how many different isotopes
link |
And that's kind of where, in some of these cases,
link |
it gets interesting.
link |
Because in at least one of the materials,
link |
as we first studied it, the isotope ratios of, in this case,
link |
it was magnesium, are way off normal.
link |
And I just don't know why.
link |
It doesn't prove anything.
link |
All it proves is that it was probably accomplished
link |
by some kind of an industrial process.
link |
Whether it's the result of a process,
link |
and this is sort of the leftover,
link |
or whether it was made that way for a particular purpose,
link |
All I know is that it was engineered.
link |
But then the question is, sort of you go one step deeper,
link |
why would you engineer it?
link |
Why engineer it, and what does engineered means?
link |
There's all kinds of, it could be a byproduct,
link |
it could be the main result of an engineering process,
link |
it would be a small part of the engineering process that
link |
Well, so the ratios of isotopes for any given element
link |
are basically the result of stellar processes.
link |
Supernova blew up sometime several billion years ago.
link |
That became a cloud.
link |
Those atoms coalesced gravitationally
link |
to form another sun, and a ring that became a rocky planet.
link |
And the ratios of the isotopes were determined
link |
at the time of that explosion.
link |
And so everything in the local solar system
link |
is more or less of that ratio, depending
link |
upon certain gravitational difference.
link |
But by fragments of a percent, not whole tens of percent
link |
So what do humans use isotopes for?
link |
Mostly to blow stuff up.
link |
I mean, the vast majority of the isotopes
link |
that have been made in the per pound or ton
link |
are things like certain ratios of plutonium and uranium
link |
We don't make or engineer isotopes, which today
link |
is relatively easy to do, but it's still expensive.
link |
For any other reason, apart from, let's say, anti cancer,
link |
we use stable isotopes and money these days
link |
as a counterfeiting tool.
link |
You basically embed certain ratios of isotopes
link |
in to make it harder for counterfeiters to accomplish.
link |
But other than that, we don't do anything with that.
link |
So why would you make grams of such material in this one case
link |
and drop it around on a beach in Brazil?
link |
So which case are we talking about?
link |
Describe that, because this is the Ubatuba case.
link |
Can you describe this case a little bit further,
link |
like what material we're talking about, just the full story
link |
It's an interesting one.
link |
It's an interesting one.
link |
So a fisherman saw an object that released something,
link |
And it was this relatively, I've got some big chunks of it,
link |
relatively pure magnesium with obviously something else in it
link |
because magnesium burns.
link |
So it had something in it that would, other metals,
link |
simple alloy that would prevent it from basically burning up.
link |
And so the question is, and so then we
link |
had two pieces that came from two different chains of custody,
link |
both claimed to be from the same object.
link |
At least physically, when you look at the two things,
link |
they look the same.
link |
So we took small fragments of each of them.
link |
We put them in an instrument called a secondary ion mass
link |
spec, which is an extremely sensitive instrument.
link |
And it can see down to 0.0001 mass units,
link |
which is important for, let's say, more arcane reasons.
link |
But it's a sensitive instrument.
link |
And so one of the chains of custody,
link |
we had two pieces from the same chain of custody,
link |
and then two pieces from the other chain of custody.
link |
One of them had completely normal magnesium isotope
link |
ratios, magnesium 24, 25, 26.
link |
And the other was off, not just slightly off, way off.
link |
And they were both off to the same extent.
link |
I mean, it was sort of like you had an internal control
link |
of what was normal.
link |
And you had this other one, which was wrong.
link |
And so you're left with kind of an open question.
link |
Were these two chains of custody, one of them a hoax,
link |
that somebody purposefully introduced those things?
link |
Because you could do it.
link |
It would cost a lot.
link |
I mean, at the time that this was found,
link |
I guess the 1970s or so, it might have been earlier,
link |
I forget, the amount that I had would
link |
have cost several tens of thousands of dollars to make.
link |
And again, it's not something you would just throw around.
link |
And why would you do it in the hope that some guy 30 years
link |
from then would pick it up and study it?
link |
Yeah, it's a very subtle, subtle troll.
link |
It's a long term plan.
link |
So I just don't know what to make of it,
link |
except it's interesting.
link |
So a different kind of question that you're asking
link |
is, what constitutes evidence?
link |
So is this sufficient evidence? Absolutely not.
link |
But somebody's put it forward.
link |
And my objective is to sort of take
link |
those that I think are credible enough
link |
and do a reasonable analysis, put it out there.
link |
And maybe somebody else will come up with an idea
link |
Now, what would be better is some sort of true technology,
link |
something that is obviously.
link |
And people like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Seth Shostak
link |
have come out rightfully and have said,
link |
when you show up with something really obviously technology
link |
that we don't understand, then we'll pay attention.
link |
Not just material.
link |
Not just material.
link |
A piece of metal is interesting.
link |
And several of the things that I've looked at
link |
and other things that people have come to me with,
link |
we've found to be completely banal
link |
or were actually pieces of aircraft
link |
that were invented back in the 1940s.
link |
And so take them off the table.
link |
But I think, again, I think showing up
link |
with technology that we humans would find completely novel
link |
is actually a really difficult task for aliens
link |
because it obviously can't be so novel
link |
that we don't recognize it for what it is.
link |
And I would say most of the technology aliens likely have
link |
would be something we don't recognize.
link |
So it's actually a hard problem how to convince ants.
link |
You first have to understand what ants are tweeting about.
link |
What they care about in order to inject into their culture.
link |
Because that's why I think it would be the technology
link |
that you could present is in the space of ideas,
link |
is try to influence individual humans with the encounters
link |
and try to, with this kind of thing that you mentioned
link |
about us not taking messages, about us not taking care of the world.
link |
It's difficult. I mean, for them to understand,
link |
you have to come up with trinkets that impress us.
link |
I mean, maybe the very technology,
link |
the fascination with the development of technology
link |
and the development of technology,
link |
the actual act of innovation itself
link |
is the thing that they're communicating.
link |
I mean, this is kind of what Jacques Vallée thinks about, is the role of...
link |
The control system, he calls it.
link |
The control system. Well, let me ask about Jacques.
link |
Who is he? You know him. Who is Jacques Vallée?
link |
What have you learned from him about life, about UFOs,
link |
about technology, about our role in the universe?
link |
Well, I met Jacques actually soon after the whole Atacama thing happened.
link |
I was visited by those people associated with the government
link |
and whatever around the Havana...
link |
What ended up mostly being Havana syndrome patients,
link |
but also Jacques at the same time.
link |
And they were actually working behind the scenes with each other,
link |
that, oh, here's this Stanford professor
link |
who is willing to talk about this stuff and investigate things.
link |
Maybe we should go talk to him.
link |
And he reached out through a colleague
link |
and he and I had lunch actually at the Rosewood Inn up on near Sandhill.
link |
So Jacques is one of the first openly active scientists,
link |
and he's really a scientist, in this area going back to the 1960s.
link |
And he's put forward a number of ideas,
link |
speculations about what it might be that people are interacting with.
link |
And the first thing that I learned from him
link |
is this notion of what he called Kabuki theater,
link |
that many of the things that people have seen are...
link |
I remember reading his books and thinking,
link |
he uses this word absurd a lot.
link |
He said, the things that people claim they see are absurd, right?
link |
A ship doesn't land in a farmer's field
link |
and then come up and knock on the door and say,
link |
can I have a glass of water?
link |
And these are stories literally out of newspapers from the 1930s.
link |
And the other thing that people say, ships don't crash.
link |
If you're so technologically advanced, you don't crash.
link |
It's absurd that they crash.
link |
So he says, this is put on as a show.
link |
It's an influence campaign, right?
link |
It's not meant to influence individuals.
link |
It's meant to influence a culture as a whole.
link |
Maybe they don't look at us as individuals.
link |
Maybe they look at us as an organism that lives on a planet, right?
link |
And perhaps rightly so.
link |
And so that's how you interact with them.
link |
That's how you influence them.
link |
So that was one of the first things that kind of took me back
link |
and realized, wow, there's actually...
link |
maybe there's a puppet master behind the scenes that's doing this influencing
link |
and that all this stuff about aliens is just not true, per se.
link |
They're just a representation of something that is meant to influence.
link |
So that was probably the most interesting.
link |
I mean, the man is brilliant.
link |
He's also, and I'm sorry, Jacques, he can also be incredibly annoying
link |
to have a conversation with because he will pick apart your arguments
link |
or anything that you think you know
link |
and show you why you don't know what you think you know.
link |
And he used the example that, for me, that is all you need
link |
is one counter example to any conclusion and you're wrong.
link |
And so I learned from him...
link |
I mean, I'm supposed to be a good scientist, but I learned from him,
link |
don't talk about conclusions, just talk about the data
link |
because data is not wrong.
link |
I mean, convince yourself that the data is not wrong or not an artifact,
link |
but be careful about your conclusions because whatever is going on,
link |
it's much more complicated than we imagine.
link |
Wow, that's powerful.
link |
Being able to always step back because we humans get excited.
link |
We start to jump to conclusions from the data, but always step back.
link |
Powerful, being able to always step back because we humans get excited.
link |
We start to jump to conclusions from the data, but always step back.
link |
Well, in some of my Twitter feeds, when I dare to go on Twitter,
link |
are full of, well, when are you going to give us the answer?
link |
Science is not immediate.
link |
You're going to have to be patient.
link |
And even some of my science colleagues have said, well, where's the data?
link |
My answer to them has been, where's been your work to try to produce any?
link |
I'm not here to give you everything on a silver platter.
link |
We talked offline how much I love data and machine learning and so on.
link |
And it's been really disheartening to see the U.S.
link |
government not invest as much as they possibly could into this whole process.
link |
So let's jump to the most recent thing, which is what do you make of the report
link |
titled Preliminary Assessment, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena that was released by the
link |
Office of the Director of National Intelligence in June 2021.
link |
So this is what's like, okay, we're going to step back and we're going to like,
link |
where do we stand and where do we hope the future is?
link |
What do you make of that report?
link |
I see it as very hopeful, very hopeful.
link |
I think the adults are finally stepping up and being in charge, right?
link |
In the good sense of adult.
link |
In the good sense of adult.
link |
This childlike curiosity is a pretty powerful thing.
link |
That's true, yeah.
link |
But it's also, I think, the people who were worried that the populace at large might run
link |
screaming into the streets and riot, you know, have, you know, they basically,
link |
the empiric evidence is they're wrong.
link |
You know, these videos and all these things have been out for now, what, five years?
link |
Most people don't even know about it, right?
link |
So as hyped as it's been and all over the newspapers that it's been and et cetera,
link |
you know, even Tucker Carlson has talked about it many times on his news program.
link |
A lot of people don't know about it.
link |
So I think people, if it's not affecting their day to day life,
link |
they're going on with their day to day life.
link |
So, but that said, I think it was an important sea change in the internal
link |
discussions going on in the government because, and the reason being,
link |
that I think this is actually partly true with the maturation of human social technology.
link |
It was becoming so obvious that this stuff was showing up again and again and again around our ships.
link |
They just couldn't keep it quiet anymore, right?
link |
And so it's like, we need to do something about it.
link |
And Lou Elizondo and Chris and others, to their great credit, found the right angle to talk about this.
link |
It says, well, okay, let's say it's not out there.
link |
Maybe it's the Russians, the Chinese or somebody else.
link |
We should know about this because we damn sure know it's not us.
link |
So that to me is an important thing to finally be a little bit more open about the matter.
link |
But like I often say, I'm not looking for people to give me permission to do anything.
link |
I'm just going to do the analysis myself with what I have.
link |
Avi Loeb has taken the same approach.
link |
He said, I'm not going to wait for the government to give me telescopic information about technologies
link |
or things that might be even on our own solar system.
link |
I'm just going to collect it myself.
link |
And that's the right way to do it, right?
link |
Don't wait for somebody else to give it to you.
link |
It's also possible to inspire a large number of people to do a wider spread data collection.
link |
I mean, you yourself can't do a large enough data collection that would,
link |
if you're talking about anomalous events, you should be collecting high resolution data
link |
about everything that's happening on Earth in terms of like, in terms of the kind of things
link |
that would indicate to you a strong signal that something weird happened here.
link |
And this is why governments can be good at funding large scale efforts.
link |
I mean, you know, NASA and so on, working with SpaceX, with Blue Origin, you know,
link |
fund capitalistic sort of fund companies, fund company efforts to do huge moonshot projects.
link |
And in the same way, do huge moonshot data collection efforts in terms of UFOs.
link |
I mean, we're not, it needs to be like 10X, like one or two orders of magnitude more funding.
link |
To do this kind of thing.
link |
And I understand on the flip side of that, if you make it about what are the Russians,
link |
whether the Chinese doing, you know, make it a question of geopolitics, it gets touchy.
link |
Because now you're kind of taken away from the realm of science and...
link |
Making it military.
link |
Making it military.
link |
Some of the greatest, this is what makes me as an engineer, makes me truly sad that some
link |
of the greatest engineering work ever done is by Lockheed Martin, and we will never know about it.
link |
I wish we were, it was different, but it's the world we live in.
link |
You know, but related to that UIP task force announcement that you just said, you know,
link |
the bill was passed in the Department of Defense and now it formally establishes an office
link |
to collate that information and also to be transparent about it.
link |
Money is now set aside, right?
link |
What do you think of it, just in case people don't know, the DOD establishing new department
link |
to study UFOs called Airborne Naming Command.
link |
But yes, Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group.
link |
Do you know how to pronounce that?
link |
It's stupid and needs to be renamed, but...
link |
AO, all right, is directed by the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.
link |
What do you make of this office?
link |
Are you hopeful about this office?
link |
I think there's still a tug of war going on behind the scenes as to who's going to control
link |
But I do know, though, that money has been set aside that will be used to make things
link |
more public, right, to start to get others involved.
link |
And, you know, I'm involved with an effort to get other academics involved.
link |
So you think there might be some of that money could be directed towards funding maybe like
link |
groups like yours to do some research here.
link |
So they would be open to that, you think?
link |
I mean, nothing is set in stone yet.
link |
So, you know, and I'm not hiding anything because I just don't know anything, right.
link |
But I do think that there will be public efforts.
link |
Now, there are being set up other private efforts to bring monies involved and to use
link |
that to leverage and get access to some of the internal resources as well.
link |
So what you're seeing is kind of an ecosystem building up in a positive sense of people
link |
who are willing to do the research.
link |
So, you know, before it would be you couldn't even go to a scientist and ask them to help.
link |
Now, if there's money, as I said before, scientists are essentially capitalists.
link |
We go where the money is.
link |
I mean, the work that I've done, I did out of my own pocket.
link |
And probably about $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 of money went into the paper we published
link |
out of my own pocket.
link |
But the amount of money that needs to go in is in at least the few millions to do
link |
a proper analysis of these materials.
link |
The work I know that the Galileo project is involved with, it's probably in the, you
link |
know, 5 to 10 million range to get stuff done.
link |
But that's actually a relatively modest amount of money to accomplish something that
link |
has been in the zeitgeist for decades.
link |
I should also push back a little bit on something you probably will agree with.
link |
You said scientists are essentially capitalists.
link |
What I've noticed is there's certainly an influence of money, but oftentimes when you're
link |
talking about basic research and basic science, the money is a little bit ambiguous to what
link |
direction you're doing the research in.
link |
And the scientists get really good at telling a narrative of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're
link |
fulfilling the purpose of this funding, but we're actually, they end up doing really what
link |
they're curious about.
link |
And of course you cannot deviate like if you're getting funded to study penguins in Antarctica,
link |
you can't start building rockets, but probably you can because you will convince some kind,
link |
you'll concoct a narrative saying rockets are really important for studying penguins
link |
I think that's actually, this is one thing I think people don't generally understand
link |
about the scientific mind is I don't know how capitalistic it is because if it was,
link |
they would start an effing company.
link |
I mean, when I meant capitalist, I didn't mean in the, they'll start companies per se.
link |
I mean, we can only do the research where there's money.
link |
And so from, you know, maybe it's a bad use of the term capitalist.
link |
But we will only do the research where there's money.
link |
I mean, why do most people work, many biologists work in cancer?
link |
Uh, work in cancer research because there's a lot of money there.
link |
It's an important problem, but I might not have ever gotten involved in it if there wasn't
link |
I might've gone and I was going to be a botanist when I, when I was a kid.
link |
That's what I wanted to do.
link |
Um, so having money available will bring people to bear.
link |
Now, another mistake that's often actually made, I think by the lay public about science
link |
is that people think that we're paid to do things.
link |
Just as you said, I get a research grant and luckily from the NIH there, they give you
link |
a fair amount of latitude.
link |
I will go my own way and I'll find something.
link |
I might've proposed something, but I'll end up somewhere entirely different by the end
link |
And that's how good science is done.
link |
You follow the, you follow the data, you follow the results.
link |
Um, and so that's what I'm hoping can be done here.
link |
I think the worst kind of thing that could be done with this subject area is to put it
link |
inside another company where they have a set plan of what it is they're going to do and
link |
the scientists either tell, do what the executives tell them to do or not.
link |
That isn't how anything will really get discovered.
link |
Put it, get it out into the public, get open minds thinking about it and then publishing
link |
on it and doing the right kind of work.
link |
That's how real progress will be made with this.
link |
Let's again, put our sort of philosophical hats on.
link |
Do you think the US government or some other government is in possession of something of
link |
extraterrestrial origin that is far more impressive than anything we've seen in the public?
link |
If I, I've not seen anything personally, but if I believe the people who I don't think
link |
This is how does that make you feel in terms of the way government works, the way our human
link |
civilization works, that there might be things like that and we're not, they're not public.
link |
Is, is, is there a hopeful message for transparency that's possible?
link |
Like if you were, if you were, uh, in power and I'm not saying president because maybe
link |
the president is not the source of power here.
link |
Would you release this information in some way or form?
link |
Yes, if I were, I think it would, I think it's, I think it's something that can bring
link |
humanity together, right?
link |
I think that knowledge of this kind of thing to know that we are, you know, we are more
link |
alike than we are different in comparison to whatever this is, is, uh, is a positive
link |
Um, and to know, you know, I don't necessarily care that the government has been hiding it.
link |
And I think, you know, people who've been talking about what we should give government
link |
officials or whatever amnesty, I think that's probably the right, the right answer.
link |
We don't, this isn't a time to look back and say, you did something wrong.
link |
You did whatever you did because that was the data you had available to you at the time
link |
and those, you had good reasons for doing it.
link |
Now, if your reasons were selfish, if your reasons where you wanted to do it because
link |
you wanted to monetize it yourself, uh, to the, to your benefit, but against that of
link |
others, then I think maybe there's something else that could be said, but you know, an
link |
opportunity to get all this information out.
link |
If I were in charge, I would, I would try to do it.
link |
Now I might be shown something though that says, there's a reason why you don't want
link |
to let anybody know this.
link |
Maybe you don't want to let anybody know this and maybe you don't want everybody have having
link |
access to unlimited, uh, energy because maybe you might turn it into a bomb or something
link |
that gives you hints that something like unlimited energy is possible, but you haven't figured
link |
And if you make it public, maybe some of the other governments you have tensions with we'll
link |
figure it out first.
link |
I mean, it's kind of an arms race going on, I think in all forms and it's, it makes me
link |
truly sad because, uh, it's obvious that, um, for example, the origins of the COVID
link |
virus, it's obvious to me that the Chinese government, whatever the origins are, is interested
link |
in not releasing information about it because it can only be bad for the Chinese government.
link |
And every government thinks like this, like every, actually this has been disappointment
link |
to me talking to PR folks at companies, like they're always nervous.
link |
They're always like conservative in the sense like, well, if we release more stuff, it can
link |
And then an Elon Musk character comes along who tweets ridiculous memes and doesn't give
link |
And I've been encouraging CEOs, I've been encouraging people to be transparent.
link |
And of course, government is national security is really like another level as human lives
link |
But let's start at the lighter case of just releasing some of the awesome insides of the
link |
tech, how, how the sausages made the technology and being transparent about it because it
link |
It uh, like you said, it, it connects people and inspires them.
link |
It's a good for the brand.
link |
It's good for everybody.
link |
I, I honestly think this kind of idea that people will steal the information and we use
link |
it against you is, um, is an idea that's not true in his idea of the 20th century.
link |
Like you said, some of the benefits of the social media, uh, our, our social world is
link |
that transparency is beneficial and I hope governments will learn that lesson.
link |
Of course, they're the, usually the last to learn such lessons.
link |
What do you make of Bob Lazar's story in terms of possession of aircraft?
link |
Do you believe him?
link |
I don't believe in the Bob Lazar story to be quite honest.
link |
I mean, I, uh, Jeremy Corbell has done a great job interviewing him and, uh, has done some,
link |
you know, beautiful, uh, documentaries.
link |
Um, I just don't, I, I don't know how to interpret it.
link |
And um, you know, and again, there's some of the people who I fraternize with think
link |
Uh, yeah, but he, maybe he's right, but I don't know.
link |
I mean, the, the problem is, and um, this is a little bit different about how I approach
link |
the whole area than a lot of others.
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I'm less interested in going over old paperwork and all these old histories of who said what,
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you know, the whole, he said, she said of the history of, of UFOs, I'm a scientist.
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I worked on the brain area because it's something I can collect data on.
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I can go back to the same individual, collect their MRI again and redo it.
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I can hand that MRI to somebody else.
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They can analyze it.
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I can get materials, I can analyze them.
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I can get some of these skeletons.
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I won't touch any skeletons ever again, but I can analyze it and somebody else can reproduce
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I mean, that's what I'm good at.
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And so, you know, I'm, I, I, I'm not going to go into the whole, I'm not a historian.
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Yeah, that's true.
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But there's a human side to it.
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I want, sometimes I think with these, because again, anomalous, rare events, some of the
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data is inextricably connected to humans, the observations, I mean, I hope in the future,
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you know, that, that, that sensory data will not be polluted by human subjectivity.
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But you know, that's still, that's still powerful data, even direct observations, like if you
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talk about pilots.
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And so it's an interesting question to me, whether Babasar is telling the truth, whether
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he believes he's telling the truth too, and what also, what impact his story and stories
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like his have on the willingness of governments to be transparent and so on.
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So you know, you have to credit his story for captivating the imagination of people
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and getting the conversation going.
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He's maintained his story for all these years with little to no change that I'm aware of.
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So but there's so many other people who are, let's say, experts in that story.
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Their gut, you know, you accumulate a set of sort of circumstantial evidence where your
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gut will say that somebody is not telling the truth.
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You mentioned Avi Loeb, I forgot to ask you about Oumuamua.
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You know, because you've analyzed specimens here on Earth, what do you make of that one?
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And what do you make broadly of our efforts to look, look at rocks, essentially, or look
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at objects flying around in our solar system?
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Is that a valuable pursuit or maybe most of the stories can be, most of the fascinating
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things could be discovered here on Earth or on other nearby planets?
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Just going to Oumuamua, you know, I think Avi's insight is an interesting speculation,
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Like I was saying before, people can sometimes look at something and not see it for what
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Somebody would just look at that and say, oh, it's an asteroid and dismiss it.
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There was something odd about the data that Avi picked up on and said, well, here's an
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alternative explanation that doesn't fit, that actually better fits the models than
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it just being a rock, you know.
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And to his credit, he just has ignored the critics because he believes the data is real
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and is using that then as a battering ram to go after other things.
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And I think that's, I think that's great.
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What, what is his main conclusion?
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Does he say it could be of alien extraterrestrial origin?
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Well, that's one of the things.
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I mean, he, you know, he's explained how it could be a light sale.
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And a light sale is certainly within near human capabilities to make such a thing.
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I think Yuri Milner, he's a Russian billionaire.
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He's involved, I think, in a project to make light sales with laser, you know, to, to launch
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them with laser power, essentially, towards Alpha Centauri, right?
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So it's something that humans could make.
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I think Avi's proposal is perfectly within the realm of possibility.
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I mean, sadly, the thing is, you know, now nearly out of our solar system.
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Yes, I mean, to me, that's inspiring to do greater levels of data collection in our solar
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system, but also here on Earth.
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And it just seems like we should be constantly collecting, collecting data because the tools
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of software that we're developing get better and better at dealing with huge amounts of
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It's changing the nature of science, I mean, collect all of the data, right?
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I mean, I, I, the Galileo project asked me over the weekend to join and I did.
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So you know, I'm not a specialist in any of the stuff that they're doing.
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But you know, in looking at the list of people who are on there, there are really no biologists
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So at, at some point, if my expertise is required for something.
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What's the goal and the vision of the Galileo project?
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Better talk to Avi, but my understanding and just actually looking at the, at the sort
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of the bylaws this morning, literally just got them, is number one, collect the data
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And number two, collect data on local, potentially local technological artifacts.
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I need to look into this.
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This is fascinating.
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And Avi is heading the Galileo project.
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Have you spoken to him?
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That was before, I believe it was before he was headed.
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Is this a new creation?
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The Galileo project was, I think it's about six or seven months old now.
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And he's getting a group of scientists together.
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Actually, I am, I was looking at some of their stuff over the weekend.
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I'm shocked at the level of organization that they've already got put together.
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It looks like a moonshot project.
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I mean, I've been involved with a lot of NIH, large NIH projects, which involve a lot of
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people in coordination and they're putting it together.
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So you're extremely well published in a lot of the fields we began this conversation with.
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So you're a legit scientist, but yet you're keeping an open mind to a lot of ideas that
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maybe require you to take a leap outside of the conventional.
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So what advice would you give to young people today that are in high school or in college
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that are dreaming of having impact in science or maybe in whatever career path that goes
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outside of the conventional that really does something new?
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If you believe in something, you believe that an idea is valuable or you haven't approached
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something, don't let others shame you into not doing it.
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As I've said, shame is a societal control device to get other people to do what they
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want you to do rather than what you want to do.
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So shame sometimes is good to stop you from doing something unethical or wrong, but shame
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also is something that is circumscribing your environment.
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I've never let people who've told me, you shouldn't do that line of science, you should
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be ashamed of yourself for even thinking that, give me a break.
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Why is it wrong to ask questions about this area?
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What's wrong with asking the question?
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Frankly, you're the person who's wrong for trying to stop these questions.
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You're the person who's almost acting like a cultist.
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You basically have closed your mind to what the possibilities are, and if I'm not hurting
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anybody, and if it could lead to an advance, and if it's my time, why does it bother you?
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I had a very well known scientist once tell me that I was going to hurt my career talking
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If anything, it's enhanced my career.
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I have a couple of questions on this.
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So first of all, just a small comment on that.
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I've realized that it feels like a lot of the progress in science is done by people
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pursuing an idea that another senior faculty would probably say, this is going to hurt
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I think it's actually a pretty good indicator that there's something interesting when a
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senior wise person tells you this is going to hurt your career.
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I think that's just the one, as a small, if I were to give advice to young people, if
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somebody senior tells you this is going to hurt your career, think twice about taking
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I mean, I think that's the primary thing.
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And the other, I tell my own students, I have a lab of about 20, 30 people and it's been
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that big since 1992.
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People come and go.
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It's not the data that falls in line that's so interesting.
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It's the spot off the graph that you want to understand.
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When something is way off the graph, that's the interesting thing because that's usually
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where discovery is.
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And the number of times that I've stopped people in my lab and said, wait a second,
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go back a few slides.
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And then it ended up being something interesting that made their careers, I could count on
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Get excited by the extraordinary that's outside of the thing that you've done in the past.
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Just on a personal psychological level, is there, I'm sure at Stanford, I'm sure in you
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exploring some of these ideas, there's pressure.
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How do you not give in to the pressure?
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How do you not give in to the people that push you away from these topics?
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What would you say is shame?
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I just point to my successes.
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I say, you're the ones who told me not to start companies all this time ago.
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And now you're the one coming to me for advice for how to start a company.
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But from the scientific area, it's you're wanting to take something off the table that
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might be an explanation.
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How is that the scientific method?
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I reverse shame them.
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So purely with reason through conversation, you're able to do that.
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So it doesn't feel, because to me it would just feel lonely.
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There's a community.
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There's a community of science, and when you're working on something that's outside a particular
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conventional way of thinking, it can be lonely.
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There's in the AI field, if you were working on neural networks in the 90s, it could be
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I have met some of the most fascinating people ever that had I stayed the conventional track,
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I would never have met.
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Truly brilliant people because of this.
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So it is for those worried about, well, should I step outside of my comfort zone?
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You're going to meet some really interesting people.
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And because I'm open about this area, I'll go and give a talk in Boston, Harvard or MIT.
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And at dinner, inevitably, this subject comes up.
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And inevitably somebody else at the table will admit both that they're interested or
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that they've seen something.
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And suddenly the whole tone of the conversation changes.
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It's kind of like there's safety in numbers and then, or I've had people come to me afterwards
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after dinner and say, Hey, I don't talk about this openly, but.
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So the number of scientists who know that there's something else going on is much larger
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than the scientific community would like to think.
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That's a really powerful one, which is, I don't talk about this openly, but here's what
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And you'd be surprised how many people speak like this and hold those beliefs.
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And I am optimistic about social media and a more connected world to reveal more and
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more, like us not to have these two personalities, we're like this public and private one.
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We've mentioned the big questions of the origins of the universe.
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What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing for us humans, our human existence here
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on earth, or just at the individual level of a human life?
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What Gary is the meaning of life.
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I think that what we're going through today with this realization, it's kind of like you've
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lived on an island your whole life and you've looked across the ocean and you've never imagined
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there was another island with anybody else on it.
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And then suddenly a ship with sails shows up.
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You don't understand it, but you realize that suddenly your world just got a lot bigger.
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I think we're in one of those moments right now that our world view, our galactic view
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is opening to something a little bit bigger.
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And not just that there might be somebody else, but that there's something else.
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And what it is, is yet to be understood.
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And the fact that it isn't understood to me is what's exciting because I can fill it with
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And this discovery our world might is about to get a lot more humbling and a lot more
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fascinating once we look out and realize we were on an island all along.
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It makes us both smaller but larger at the same time to me.
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You know, I can look outside at the stars and think and imagine what else might be out
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And although I know that I will never see it all, it excites me to know that it's there.
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Well Gary, both to respect your time and also because at 12 I turned into a princess, let
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me just say thank you for doing everything you're doing as a great scientist, as a person
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willing to reject the conventional, and thank you for spending your extremely valuable time
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Thanks for talking.
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It was great talking.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Gary Nolan.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now let me leave you with some words from Stanislav Lem in Solaris.
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How do you expect to communicate with the ocean when we can't even understand one another?
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Thanks for listening and hope to see you next time.