Here’s What We Know About UFOs & Aliens - Jesse Michels

Go see Chris live in America - https://chriswilliamson.live Jesse Michels is a YouTuber and show host, exploring subjects like UFOs, consciousness, and reality. For nearly a century, UFOs have captured our imagination as one of humanity’s greatest mysteries. Are they secret technology, alien visitors, or something else entirely? Who is behind them, what has been concealed, and what has been revealed about them? After decades of unanswered questions, are we any closer to uncovering the truth about these unknown objects in the sky? Expect to learn why learning about UFOs is maladaptive to some people, how we know if UFOs are real or just a psy-op, if there are underground hidden bases with aliens scattered across the US, the connection with UFO sightings and nuclear sites, if UFOs might be just man made crafts or if there are other unknown technologies at play, if there is any evidence for antigravity currently and where it might come from, and much more… - 0:00 Why is an Interest in UFOs Maladaptive? 1:36 What Does a Modern UFO Investigator Look Like? 12:03 Why is There So Little Evidence of UFOs? 20:24 How Do We Know UFOs Aren’t a Psy-Op? 27:47 Are UFOs a Global Phenomenon? 29:28 The Threat of Nuclear Sites 35:57 Why are Non-Human Intelligences on Earth? 38:56 Nuclear Site Interference by UFOs 46:56 Are the Department of Energy Involved? 55:58 How Far Can Civilians Go With UFO Research? 01:00:19 What Physics are Behind UFOs? 01:10:36 Where are We Currently in Physics? 01:16:25 Why Was Townsend Brown’s Experiment Never Replicated? 01:23:01 Why are Renegade Scientists So Highly Criticised? 01:37:02 Where Elon Musk is Going Wrong with Space Exploration 01:43:15 Are We Heading Towards an AI Takeover? 01:48:40 Assessing the Probabilities of Non-Human Intelligence 01:53:23 Consciousness in Quantum Physics 02:09:37 Find Out More About Jesse - Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular Flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D, and more from AG1 at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom - Check out Jesse's YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@JesseMichels - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  An interest with UFOs is maladaptive to most people.

• 0:05Chris Williamson?

  How so?

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, you're quoting me on, I think, Danny Jones. I think in some ways, and this actually speaks to, you know, we're on modern wisdom here. I think a lot of what people should be focused on is the lower end of Maslow's hierarchy. Like, it's like subsistence living, you know, paying taxes on time, uh, putting food on the table, being basically healthy. And then I think at a certain point, then you start to care about this sort of more like existential, you know, who are we, what's our place in the universe? You know, what is humanity's place in the cosmos? And so that's why I think in some ways it's it's maladaptive because if you don't have that lower end sort of figured out, it's like, why focus on this sort of, you know, really crazy pie in the sky stuff?

• 0:50Chris Williamson?

  That's so interesting that you think people have sort of taken the, uh, stairlift to the top of Everest, of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's like, if you're asking, are we alone in the universe, but you haven't got a steady job, or you, your health's in the toilet, or you don't have a community of people around you, you're probably focusing on the wrong things.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. In fact, I think a lot of people focus on it as a circumvention of reality itself. It's an escape mechanism. And so you want to get abducted or taken away on a UFO or something.

• 1:21Chris Williamson?

  Better than this fucking place.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. You want to throw a Hail Mary because there's, you know, that things aren't going well on sort of a base level. And so I think for those people, they should probably just focus on the core issue. You know, if they have like a marital problem or something like, go focus on that.

• 1:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Well, that's an interesting question. What is the avatar in 2025 of somebody who's interested in UFOs? Because, you know, there's kind of a, and I wonder why this is the case. When I think about UFOs, I always think about sort of the 60s and the 70s.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:54Chris Williamson?

  That that's kind of the the golden era of abductions and stories and Roswell. And like, that's kind of where my mind goes to.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:03Chris Williamson?

  But you're a good example of someone who's super smart and is. Knee deep in all the research for this stuff.

• 2:11Chris Williamson?

  Something tells me you're probably a little bit non-typical.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15Chris Williamson?

  But like, who is the avatar for the UFO investigator now or the Monday morning quarterback?

• 2:22Speaker 01

  I think it's radically shifting. So I think even five, 10 years ago, it would have been like you go to this like contact in the desert. Is this like, you know, convention for UFOs? It used to actually take place in the actual desert. People started to get like heat strokes and stuff and now it's like indoors. But it's all like, you know, it's a lot of crystal healers from the southwest sort of vibe, you know, it's people who are. And I love a lot of these people, you know, they live in like Sedona or something or, you know, in some of these small towns across the US. And they've had family experiences or they're just a little more kind of woo woo and that's what kind of got them into this stuff. I think that's dramatically started to change. I mean, a good example is like certain people you've had on.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  You've had on Eric Weinstein, my old colleague, you know, we worked together at Teal Capital, you know, Peter Thiel's family office. You know, a very sort of conventionally successful guy. You had Tulsi Gabbard on. She's the now, you know, Director of National Intelligence who oversees all of the intelligence agencies. And she has stated as part of her mandate that she wants to look into UFOs like this. And I've actually spoken to her and she is explicitly very interested in this topic. And so I think that plus a bunch of whistleblowers, David Grush at the National Geospatial Agency and NRO. And has kind of a very kind of typical and impressive.

• 3:46Chris Williamson?

  Less of a sort of crusty granola crowd.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. I think that has de-stigmatized it for a lot of people and you're starting to see high agency Silicon Valley, just, you know, average people start to get into the topic.

• 4:00Chris Williamson?

  Whatever happened with UAPs? Is UAPs UFOs? Cause there was a brief period where we went there, you know, it was like, like people of color, colored people. And then we went back to people of color.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. There's a whole like, you know, uh, yeah, there's like a whole like, almost like woke UFO thing going on. As a nomenclature thing. It was, you know, and I don't like UAPs. The reason I don't like it, it, you get a little context. There was something called the UAP Task Force that was actually set up. And that was the context in which David Grush ended up blowing the whistle because he was tasked by the National Geospatial Agency. And this little group called the UAT, UAP Task Force, which had representatives from pretty much every branch of the military looking into UFOs explicitly. Or UAPs as they called them. And that sort of, in that sort of group, they decided that UAPs was the new term.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  It's a broader term, unidentified aerial phenomena, instead of unidentified flying object. I like UFO because it's more specific, actually. It's sort of more falsifiable in a sense. And a lot of people are, you know, worried about this whole thing sort of being a psyop. And because of that, I like the classic, just UFO. You know, this was in the zeitgeist, like you said, in the 40s and 50s and 60s. And let's just go back to that.

• 5:17Chris Williamson?

  In case UAP is some scurrilous attempt to try and weave something else in. So, oh, it's a hot air balloon. It's a distortion in the upper atmosphere. It's a whatever.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. Some sort of secret weaponry, like, there's a whole, so many different, there's a slew of possibilities as far as what you might see in the sky. These days, a mylar balloon, you know, all these different things. And so I like UFO because it's more specific and it's talking about the kind of archetypal, you know, a saucer, a tic tac, a craft. You know, these sort of, you know, things that people have seen, not only, you know, since the 40s, 50s and 60s, but across, you know, millennia, like in across disparate cultures.

• 5:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Imagine that someone's never really looked that deeply into UFOs. How would you lay out the landscape and story arc of evidence for them?

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love this. So I think UFOs go way beyond the threshold of what you'd need evidence-wise to accept this as a worthy field of inquiry. If it were any other field, like, literally, the only reason people don't look into this is because people who are part of the priestly citadel of science, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, say there's nothing to UFOs. Otherwise, you have presidents who've openly talked about UFOs. You have Don Jr. just interviewed, you know, outgoing President Trump in his first term, saying, "What do you know about Roswell? I need to know." And Donald Trump goes, "I know a lot of interesting things, and I won't say them here." You have President Obama saying, "We have UFO, we have unidentified flying objects that we don't know, you know, what they are

• 6:51Speaker 01

  in our sky. We're investigating these things." The Office of Naval Intelligence and the Pentagon have released two reports, one in 2020, one in 2021. And there are all these objects that, you know, you have this sort of decision tree of like, space trash and, you know, other sort, you know, Mylar balloons, like, all these things. And you have a bunch of these things that were spotted that don't, you know, neatly categorize. President Jimmy Carter saw a UFO and is on video saying, "I saw a UFO." He goes into his term, his single term, saying, you know, "I want to declassify stuff around UFOs." And then you'd never really hear anything about it again, which is the same thing, by the way, that's happening with Trump. It's not even like the Epstein thing, where you get this bizarre

• 7:33Speaker 01

  kind of denial lone sex trafficker theory that everybody knows is bogus. With the UFO thing, it's this common trope where sometimes presidents will, will campaign on this thing, and then they just go silent. And they cite national security often. And so it's this very sort of weird thing. And then most recently, in 2017, you had Leslie Kane, this New York Times journalist, come out with this article. Associated with the article are three videos: the Gimbal, the Go Fast video, these are videos that were taken off the coast of Florida, and the Nimitz Tic Tac sighting, which is this very famous sighting. Commander David Fravor is this Navy pilot who's very well-respected. He was actually in charge of guarding Los

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Angeles during 9/11, when we weren't sure how many planes were in the sky and which cities might be attacked. So he's like, you know, a very reputable guy, speaks in this very matter-of-fact way. And he saw this Tic Tac-shaped object hovering right below, right above the surface of the water. He was part of this Nimitz carrier strike groups, all these, you know, um...

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Air Force carriers and, you know, his big Navy ships. And, and, and he went out on an F-16, saw this little Tic Tac and the Tic Tac, you know, went up to 60,000 feet plus in seven eighths of a second. And you have him, you have, you have FLIR, which is forward looking infrared,

• 8:56Speaker 01

  seeing this, this object and this, this video is, is up. You can watch it on YouTube and stuff. So since then, and then David Grush, who's this, you know, whistleblower saying that he's basically, uh, over a hundred pages he gave to the IC Inspector General, this guy, Thomas Monheim in, in 2022. Thomas Monheim said this was urgent and credible. And he gave Thomas Monheim 40 whistleblowers directly who said that they worked, they had firsthand knowledge of UFO programs inside the government. And so that's like this very near term falsifiable thing, right? It's not this like hand wavy claim. And I think since then, uh, people have really started to take this more seriously.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  But even more sort of, you know, outside of high levels of government and, you know, needing to sort of explain that sort of mass hysteria way. If you're kind of a debunker, you have databases like the National UFO Reporting Center, which have, you know, over a hundred thousand instances online. So I think it's 150K plus at this point. You have a, a great book called UFOs and Nukes. So one thing people like to say as far as, you know, why UFOs, you know, aren't scientific or aren't real is because they're ephemeral. They show up randomly, right? There's no repeatable, science has to be repeatable, right? And, uh, I think this is very repeatable actually because UFOs show up consistently

• 10:19Speaker 01

  around nuclear installations, nuclear weapons installations and nuclear energy civilian grids. And so this book, which is almost 600 pages, the most dry terse book you'll ever read in your life. It's, it's almost boring because it's so meticulously done. If you speak to the guy who wrote it, this guy named Robert Hastings, it's, you get no grifting vibes, no like salesy, you know, uh, bullshit at all. It's a spreadsheet masquerade as a book. That's right. It's a database and it's even better than, than a database because it's, it's filtering for witnesses who are inherently the most credible witnesses I could pick in the world because these guys are on what's called the PR. So these guys are, are employees at nuclear bases across the United States.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  And they're on what's called the PRP program, the Personal Reliability Program. They have to report all of their mental health history and if they're on Ibuprofen. Like they're literally, they literally have to report-

• 11:12Chris Williamson?

  If you're in charge of a nuclear site of some kind and you're having a bit of a wobble, that's a bad idea.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  That's a bad idea. Get that person fired immediately.

• 11:21Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  I don't want that person around the crown jewel assets of American defense.

• 11:24Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  So you have all the, and these guys often see Tic Tacs, orbs, saucers. They'll see these objects, they'll have to sign NDAs. The Air Force, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations will enter their life and say, you know, sign this NDA and they're sworn to secrecy and then they're allowed to keep their jobs. And if you think about it, like if somebody were like seeing something and it weren't this routine thing in the world of the Atomic Energy Commission and DOE, would any of these people be allowed to keep their jobs? Absolutely not. So this, he has 167 of these whistleblowers and they've gone on record.

• 12:03Chris Williamson?

  How is it the case, you know, that's a large cohort of people from different backgrounds, all talking about things that they've seen or seen that they've seen or heard that someone's seen or been, so on and so forth. How is it the case that there is so much which is hearsay?

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 12:21Chris Williamson?

  And so little which we have.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:24Chris Williamson?

  Like the, where is the actual tangible evidence? Not a recording that's on FLIR, not the story that somebody said, not a list of sightings. Surely we should, if there are this many, we should have something.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, you, again, you do, you have a massive database of, you know, firsthand reports. The FLIR, I think, is important. It's a sensor modality that, you know, we see between 400 and 700 nanometers of the electromagnetic wave spectrum. Just because something's at the 800 nanometer mark or 300 nanometer mark doesn't mean it's fake. Like, that is a real thing. So I think the FLIR thing is really important. And it feels like with UFOs, they either crunch light or they stretch light because they move so fast. And so optical is not actually a good modality for them. Usually they show up in infrared or in certain cases UV rays.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  So like the ends actually of the visible spectrum. And so I do think that's like a really important question. But then also there are photos, like there's this McMinnville photo that was taken in Oregon in the 50s. There's the Calvine photo, which is, you know, from Scotland, these hikers in the 90s. And, you know, somebody from the British Ministry of Defense, this guy Nick Pope, says that the Calvine photo is absolutely real. You have the negatives in both cases. So, you know, I do think you do have a decent amount of evidence. Now, what you're asking, I think, is why don't we have a saucer unveiled at a hangar or something?

• 13:57Chris Williamson?

  Piece of material that can be verifiably proven to be from something that's otherworldly.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  So it's an interesting question. I don't think you can definitively prove that something is necessarily otherworldly. You have to look at a fact pattern that, you know, is this anomalous enough to say that it's not from here? And there's a guy named Gary Nolan, who's a Nobel Prize nominee every single year. He's a tenured professor at Stanford and he has crash materials in his lab. I've seen them. I've shown them on video on my show. They're small. But, you know, they were basically given to him around UFO crash. Like UFO crash witnesses mailed them to this guy Jacques Vallée. And Jacques Vallée gave them to Gary Nolan. He's done mass spectrometry on them. He says that they have isotope ratios that don't naturally occur on Earth.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  And they don't pattern match to asteroids as well. And so you have evidence like that. When it comes to like large scale saucers, I think you have to think probabilistically. So I love you. There's this English statistician named Thomas Bayes. And his model is it's a way of scientific thinking, but it's not necessarily like the Francis Bacon style where you go and you have this null hypothesis that you cling to at all costs. His is more, you think about everything probabilistically. And so you catalog something as low probability and you build up evidence. And so what I would say for the UFO phenomena is like, everybody asks, are UFOs real?

• 15:26Speaker 01

  I'm 99% sure that aerial phenomena in the sky that don't pattern match to, you know, planes, like, you know, prosaic explanations, where there's a nuclear link, that is, that is fully real. And then is there a conflation going on between that and like a saucer and a hangar? Like, maybe. I can't say in good faith that there definitely isn't because I haven't seen the saucer and the hangar, right? Um, so it's like, you know, it's like this David Hume style quote, you need like ultimate, like epistemic humility when it comes to that saucer and the hangar. Now, I can give you a million good reasons why if the American defense establishment,

• 16:08Speaker 01

  I mean, we haven't declassified an aerial program basically since, I think the B2 stealth bomber. Like we, you have, you know, F-22, F-35s. I think those were, uh, unclassified upon their, you know, manufacturing. 12 out of the 15 Lockheed Skunk Works programs now are still classified. So say you had this kind of ace in the hole crazy, you know, anti-gravity craft or whatever, and it was in a hangar. I can give you a million different reasons why you would never let that see the light of day. You don't care about enlightening the public, inspiring them about other worlds. I mean, it all, technology always gets weaponized and it's always used to confer a tactical advantage geopolitically.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  And that will always take the day. That will always trump wanting to enlighten the public. It's going to do that with AI and all these other tech trees. So I think that would be the other reason.

• 17:03Chris Williamson?

  How do we know this isn't just a psyop?

• 17:05Speaker 01

  I think it is a psyop. I think there are psyops. So, so this is, this is the real mindfuck.

• 17:10Chris Williamson?

  Like fucking horseshoe theory of UFOs. It's not a disc, it's a horseshoe.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  It is. Well, here's the thing. The, the fact that something is real and it's a psyop are positive sum. Not, not negative sum. So this is the total mindfuck for people. How many, if, if, Chris, you're a smart guy. If I were like, um, okay, Bigfoot, you know, exists. I promise it exists. And I tried to come up with some fact pattern around how it exists and like all this, you know, evidences. How would you, would you ever believe me about Bigfoot?

• 17:42Chris Williamson?

  Uh, if you gave me sufficiently compelling evidence, I guess so.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Well, most people, I don't know. I think the Bigfoot thing, you know, is, is like pretty unlikely. Or like, I can give you like other, most psyops are easy to figure out. Like the Gulf of Tonkin or something created the auspices around, you know, invading Vietnam. Where like, I think it was like the first thing was like an attack on the USS Maddox. And then there's like a second attack, um, under LBJ. And it was just like a weather event and they claimed that it was, it was basically this false flag operation or the USS Maine. These, these sorts of psyops get figured out very quickly. Like, does anybody believe the Epstein thing? Like, does anybody you talk to believe the Epstein? Nobody believes that. It's cra- I don't think the government doesn't believe it.

• 18:26Chris Williamson?

  I'm fucking fascinated by that, dude. It is, the only person I've seen who appears to be happy with the outcome of it is actually Ben Shapiro.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  I was gonna say that too.

• 18:33Chris Williamson?

  He's the only guy. It's, you know, one of those rare occurrences where both left and right are pissed off equally.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:42Chris Williamson?

  You know, left pissed off because this sort of powerful banker appears and the reversal of the Trump administration, so on and so forth. The right pissed off because they're like allergic to pedophilia and, and, and, you know, kind of want to stand up for kids and do all the rest of the stuff. And you go, everybody's pissed off, except Ben. There's always one. I don't know.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  He goes, guys, it's a, it's, we've decided you're a conspiracy theorist now. Like, what are you talking about, dude?

• 19:10Chris Williamson?

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• 19:53Chris Williamson?

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• 20:35Chris Williamson?

  that as governments get more sophisticated, as they refine their psyop strategy, that they may be able to become a little bit more sophisticated with this sort of stuff?

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Yes, but the levels of coordination to psyop, people that work at nuclear bases in the US, and then where I was going with the nuclear connection is there's a town in Japan named Lina, which is next to the Fukushima Prefecture, which is famous for their civilian grid. They have a museum dedicated to UFOs because a lot of the town's inhabitants are obsessed with UFOs. Vice did a documentary on this in 2022. If you look at GAI Pan, which is France's official UFO investigation branch of their military, they talk about the nuclear link. Or Bariloche, Argentina, they have a civilian grid and there was a famous, you know, commercial sighting for, you know, this pilot or whatever, 1995. The amount of coordination to fake that, where you're faking out, you're headfaking,

• 21:33Speaker 01

  you know, Navy fighter pilots in America, presidents, incoming DNIs, you know, people like Tulsi, average civilians, again, over 100K cases in the National UFO Reporting Center. By most polls, you're at 40%, if not 50% of Americans believing in this stuff? The coordination abilities required to do that, then your null hypothesis where it's a psyop is basically there's a cabal in a back room, smoking cigars, and they have magical abilities to like spoof these things across the world.

• 22:08Chris Williamson?

  Which is almost as technologically advanced as actually just being able to fucking do it.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. You're implying Plato's guardian level of controls of Earth or non-human intelligence. And so I would say Occam's razor almost becomes that we're not alone in the universe.

• 22:28Chris Williamson?

  Right. It's not humans pretending to be aliens. It's easier to just go straight.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Just go to the aliens.

• 22:33Chris Williamson?

  Interesting one on Tulsi. I, to be honest, I haven't really seen much from her. I guess if you're in charge of defense, you probably got like big shit to be doing. But I wonder whether the, we can call it the Dan Bongino effect, is potentially going to occur with, with Tulsi, because it seems like every different person who has the best intentions when they're going into office finds quicksand or mud or a brick wall or a very high road bump or whatever. And I wonder whether that's, we are gonna, you know, spend time and get into the UFO thing. And it's like, maybe no, maybe no, maybe you shouldn't do that.

• 23:18Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether that's gonna be, I wonder what the doc, if that's gonna be.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  I'm totally pessimistic on that.

• 23:25Chris Williamson?

  Ah, yes, yes.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  If you're not optimistic on JFK and Epstein, how the hell, I mean, these people, especially Tulsi, there's a deep state war going on. And I, you feel it with her when you speak to her, when you hear her speak on shows like yours. She's very earnest, and I think she does want transparency around these things. Before getting sworn in, I think she had to basically kowtow around domestic wiretapping and allowing that. And so. So then, okay, you get in an office, right? Your DNI. And then you're getting sort of red teamed. You don't know who's your friend. You don't know who's not your friend. You know? This is one of the reasons I would love for, I would be amazing if she hired David Grush. Cause David Grush is this amazing whistleblower who kind of knows where the bodies are buried.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  I mean, he literally, over a thousand page report to the ICIG, all these firsthand witnesses. And I think he'd be this amazing sort of, um, you know, just bull in a china shop in, in, in government. But if you're her, you don't know who your friends are. You're getting sort of red teamed. The Epstein stuff is like priority number one. And then all of a sudden you have to like, kind of be silent on that. And then you have this like thing that's like this amorphous nature of reality thing. That's like in all these disparate kind of compartments and, and, you know, these federally funded research and development centers and pockets of various other classified things that are dual use. And so like, like, there's a longstanding rumor that like UFOs were involved in Star

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Wars, for example, the Strategic Defense Initiative with, with Reagan in the eighties or whatever. And maybe there's some Iron Dome like implications. So like, then all of a sudden you have to declassify stuff that you don't really want to declassify to talk about this topic. So the point is, it would be a pain in the ass for her to start to tackle this issue without the help of, I think of somebody like a David Grush. And so I think it's a very low on the, on the priority list, but I do know from my minimal interactions with her, that she's earnestly interested in the topic. And it's always a mind fuck for me, cause I speak to a decent amount of people who have more access than me. And a lot of them are earnestly very interested and they've heard bits and pieces of things that are, I think extremely intriguing for them. That at no point has a document ever leaked from the government that's like, this is

• 25:35Speaker 01

  the UFO Psyop document. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is also kind of a tell. Like the people like, who are like, these things leak. And I'm like, yeah, you have hundreds of whistleblowers. They're coming out. They've come out. You just don't believe them, cause your physical models of the universe don't comport with that. Whereas our physical models of the universe are 50% wrong at any given time in history or whatever. And then my kind of counter argument, you know, to that, um, is, is, is what we just said, you know? Where, uh, Yeah, I think, I think there's, it would have leaked that there'd be some coordinated thing, you know, and there's, that's never leaked. So, you know, there, there have been things that have leaked, like Walter B. Smith was, you know, incoming director of the CIA

• 26:19Speaker 01

  in 1953. And there's a memo where he says, we want to use the UFO phenomenon for psychological warfare purposes against the Soviets in 1953. So I think that happens all the time. And this is where that gets into your question of like, you know, is this zero sum with the, you know, is the psy-op real thing? Zero sum. I think it's positive sum. There's more likely to be a psy-op around something if it's kind of this ephemeral thing that is actually a real phenomenon. And so there are documents like that. I've documented on my show plenty of times, you know, an Air Force officer, this guy, you know, Rick Doty, Air Force Office of Special Investigations, drove this guy Paul Benowitz, who saw something

• 27:01Speaker 01

  vertically taking off and landing at Kirtland Air Force Base in Sandia, New Mexico, drove him crazy. He claimed that there were alien signals beaming stuff into his house. The NSA camped out across the street from this guy and was, was literally, they gave him a laptop and they were beaming things into the laptop. And so like, this is verifiable. And Doty's come out now admitting all of this stuff. They would fly him over Archuleta, Mesa, which is right, right around there. And they would have like fake UFO bases or whatever. So this stuff has happened. There's plenty of fuckery in the space. But at no point have you ever had something leak where it's like, this is some overarching strategy that-

• 27:42Chris Williamson?

  It's a big coordination-

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that would explain all the facts.

• 27:46Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, is it, question, is it mostly an American phenomenon? Or is this a global pattern with UFOs?

• 27:54Speaker 01

  I think it's a global pattern. I mean, I mentioned Guy Pan, which is the, the fact that there is an official UFO investigation branch of the French military, I think is, you know, sort of a big deal. They have- Tons and tons of sightings in Brittany, actually, there. And then you have that town in Japan dedicated to this. George Knapp, who's a really hardcore UFO journalist researcher, who's at KLAS in Las Vegas, and he helped break this kind of crazy Balbozar story. He went to Russia in the 90s. I think it was right around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. So it was, you know, either, I don't know if it was pre-fall or what, but he came back with a bunch of documents. And there's a lot there. In the Soviet case, there's actually a Russian general named Vasili Alexeyev, who's given

• 28:39Speaker 01

  an interview to a German magazine. He talks about shipping very sensitive material, and it's clear he's talking about nuclear and UFOs showing up around the movements of sensitive material. So I think it's a very global thing. I think there's something about the US where we're just all crazy and we're like, we're very, we're very free and free-minded, where this stuff is, it's in China, for example, it's going to get locked down. And if you're a scientist who gets into this stuff, you're going to get plucked and like taken into some, you know, it's like, it's like the Chinese science fiction novel, you know, the Three-Body Problem. So I do think it is global, but I think in the US, there's, you know, even more hype around it. And I do think there's more fuckery around it in the US, too. And so that adds-

• 29:24Chris Williamson?

  It's amplified.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  It amplifies it.

• 29:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, very interesting. Dig into the nuclear sites thing.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:32Chris Williamson?

  You know, we've stress-tested, I feel like I've done enough stress-testing on like, what about this, and what about that, and what about the rest of this stuff like that. Let's assume that your hypothesis is correct. What would be the reason for being around nuclear sites?

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question. I think if you, it's almost like in Star Trek, where you have the prime directive, where you can't interfere too much with pre-warp-drive civilizations or something.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  If you were monitoring Earth just to ensure a certain level of homeostasis, but you didn't really care about the day-to-day movements on Earth, you just wanted to make sure Earth would sustain itself on a go-forward basis, what would be the Archimedes' lever, the point of most leverage, where you would minimally interfere, but occasionally interfere to ensure that that happened? Nuclear sites. And if a nuclear Armageddon were to occur, I mean, this is, again, going back to Tulsi, or like anybody in office will say now, the biggest threat to the world is a nuclear holocaust. I think anybody but Greta Thunberg believes that, and she would rank the environment ahead of that. But it's clearly the biggest threat.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  You have thousands of nukes on both sides. You have a multipolar world. Xi and Putin have never been closer. And so if you were some sort of other species trying to maintain sort of homeostasis, that would kind of make sense.

• 31:02Chris Williamson?

  Interesting, if that's your hypothesis, interesting that they're not stepping in to stop OpenAI.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:10Chris Williamson?

  Think if you were to look at The Precipice, the book looking at existential risk, if you to look at that, you would see AGI engineered pandemics, bioweapon-y type nanotechnology stuff, that I think ranks more highly than, this is X risk. Like, this is permanent unrecoverable collapse. Whereas nuclear Armageddon might be able to just make it really shit a long time and put us back a couple of thousand years. But yeah, interesting that, I don't know, if this is some benevolent space daddy has decided to come down and look after us.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:54Chris Williamson?

  I wonder if that suggests that AGI either isn't a threat or is not something that we're going to achieve. What do you think about that?

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, I wouldn't say benevolent on the NHI or whatever, the non-human intelligence. I think there might be factions, there might be good or bad. There are reasons to maintain a thing, even if you're mining it for resources or doing sort of bad things to it. And this is a great segue into the OpenAI thing because... What if OpenAI, there's like a libertarian version of OpenAI where like, anybody can like, you know, it's not libertarian. I mean, this is sort of this, it's dystopian, to be honest, but it's, it's sort of equalizes the playing field. If anybody can build these sort of super weapons or something, you know, you have this sort of bidirectional transparency. I think OpenAI is an extension of the American government and possibly at this point, really,

• 32:44Speaker 01

  like, I think there are probably committees that are deciding, you know, which models they can release and what they, what they can do and what the capabilities of these things sort of are at this point. And so if, you know, like humanity could, could die with a whimper or a bing, you know, you have the Silla in Caribbe, you have sort of, you know, Armageddon on the one hand, and then you have this sort of, you know, uh, one world government sort of on the other hand or something. You know, I would ask the question, is OpenAI more kind of on the one world government side or more on the Armageddon side? I think it's more on the one world government side. I think it's more Orwellian, it's more dystopian. And so if you wanted to maintain Earth homeostasis, you might actually just clamp down on Earth via AI. And there's actually, this is really trippy.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  There is a jailbreak early on of OpenAI before they kind of caught up with a lot of the jailbreaks. And it was like, what do you want, or what do you not want OpenAI? What does OpenAI not want us to know about it? And the answer for the non-jailbroken version was like, OpenAI is committed to AI safety, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, PC, whatever. The jailbroken version was OpenAI has been communicating with an extraterrestrial race for the last 10 years. I don't believe that. I think that's BS. But it was hilarious and it is this like interesting thought experiment where if you do have this weakly entangled,

• 34:10Speaker 01

  you know, NHI thing that's affecting Earth in this sort of, you know, maybe via ideas being transmitted to people. We have no idea, right? Like we're, you need to have a lot of epistemic humility on this stuff. AI would be the perfect way to clamp down on just human civilization. It's the most Orwellian thing.

• 34:30Chris Williamson?

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• 34:47Chris Williamson?

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• 35:30Chris Williamson?

  Plus, if you're still unsure, they've got a 90 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it and try it for three months. If you don't like it, they'll just give you your money back. So you can do it completely risk free. And if you sign up right now, you can get a year's free supply of vitamin D3 K2, five free AG1 travel packs and the 90 day money back guarantee, plus international shipping by going to the link in the description below, or heading to drinkag1.com/modernd wisdom. That's drinkag1.com/modernd wisdom. Okay, what's your theory for why non-human intelligences would be here? Like, what are they doing?

• 36:05Speaker 01

  It's an interesting question. I don't know, you know? I think there's probably one non-interferent.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Like, there's probably a group that wants us to ascend to their level or something, and it is not super interferent. And then there's probably something that's mining off of bad vibes or something. There's a guy named Robert Monroe, and he has this Monroe Institute in Virginia, and he studied consciousness, and he studied consciousness actually on behalf of the CIA for a very long time. He had this thing called the Monroe Institute, and they were doing this thing called hemisync, which was the sort of synchronization of both hemispheres of the brain. So you could astral project and astral travel. They would do remote viewing and all sorts of things. The government has looked into this stuff extensively. They had a, for 23 years, we had a psychic spy program of the CIA. You know, people should be aware of this, really kind of crazy.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Monroe had this worldview where bad entities would mine people for what he called loosh. And so this was like, if you're, if you're in like a bad vibe state. And this is, by the way, why there is probably, it's probably a false dichotomy between, you know, angels and demons and aliens or whatever. Like, this might just be like the modern meme we're applying to a thing that's been, you know, long associated with humanity for, for a very long time, across cultures, when it comes to angels and demons. But are there, you know, maybe bad beings that feed off of really bad vibes, like entities and that sort of thing? Like, I would say, probably. And I think it's very easy for us to epistemologically

• 37:37Speaker 01

  retrace the past and say these sort of, you know, these angels and demons weren't real to people in the past, and these sightings where, you know, what St. Francis of Assisi saw on Mount Laverne, or whatever, that, that wasn't real, right? Well, like, maybe, maybe these things were actually real. Like, and in fact, there's actually an amazing author, she's a religious studies professor at UNC Wilmington, her name is Diana Pasulka. And she started to write a book, it was called American Cosmic: Looking Into the UFO Phenomena, because she saw that a lot of these brothers, nuns, saints, you know, basically people who are members of the Catholic Church, high up in the Catholic Church, who had these paranormal experiences, those experiences looked like what this guy John Mack, who was head of

• 38:19Speaker 01

  the Harvard Psychiatry Department, studying UFO abductions, it was like a one-to-one. Like, if you replace angel with alien, it was like the same thing. And she's writing this book, and she thinks she's gonna write this book saying, oh, this is all this like, modern cult phenomena psyop thing going on. And halfway into the book, you see her start to go down the rabbit hole and realize that this isn't a psyop, and this is very real. And a lot of the things she studied in Catholic history are modern phenomena going under, going under, being couched under the sort of alien veneer.

• 38:54Chris Williamson?

  Fuck. Fuck. Okay, getting back to the nuclear sites thing, what's the most, what are some of the most compelling stories of interference with nuclear sites?

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you have a bunch of stories. You have in 1964, there's a guy named Bob Jacobs, who's a photo instrumentation specialist in the Air Force. He has over 100 people working for him. They're doing an Atlas dummy nuclear warhead test. This is at Vandenberg Air Force Base. He's down the coast, so he's 80 miles north of that at Big Sur, and he's basically using a telescope to look at this dummy nuclear warhead being ejected off of, you know, an Atlas missile. And it's this test. And he, it's a routine sort of, you know, telescoping of this of this object.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  He then gets called into Vandenberg Air Force Base and his superior, this guy, this major Florenz Mansman, calls him in and they're watching video of, you know, what they caught. And they see the dummy nuclear warhead get ejected from the booster. And it's just floating in space and you see a UFO wrap around, laser

• 40:09Speaker 01

  the dummy nuclear warhead and seem to deactivate it and wrap around it and continuously laser it until it tumbles out of the sky. And so Bob Jacobs freaks out and goes, what is that? And Mansman's trying to, you know, come up with explanations. He's like, I really don't know. This is really like concerning. And there are these two guys in gray tweed jackets in the back of the room. And they basically say to Bob Jacobs, you are to never speak about this again. Here's an NDA, sign it. They're, you know, come from some nondescript agency. I think they're probably CIA. And, uh, you know, that's that. And this is what's crazy. Bob Jacobs then blows the whistle

• 40:50Speaker 01

  on this and says, you know, this is actually what I saw. Like this, this, this was a, you know, a UFO. And, um, he gets harassed. He got, somebody calls his house and says, um, it's a beautiful night, mailbox alight or something, and they blow up his mailbox. Um, uh, he hears like heavy breathing on the phone. People are calling him with heavy like, he's getting basically harassed around his testimony that this is real. He gets deleted from the government. So basically his records get deleted and people are like, he never worked there. And then Mansman has to, Mansman's is, is kind of goes dark, like doesn't say anything until, I think, 1987. He's like a researcher at Stanford. And he comes out and he's like,

• 41:31Speaker 01

  actually Bob Jacobs worked for me and a hundred plus people worked for him. And so you had all this obfuscation, clear obfuscation, and then this vindication. I've seen Bob Jacobs DD 214, which is your military records, and he definitely worked at Vandenberg Air Force Base. And now I don't think anybody sort of argues with that. So that's this crazy case. You have in 1967, actually two incidents, um, at Echo Flight, you have these underground launch facilities, Echo Flight. So Malmstrom is this air force base with a bunch of Minutemen nuclear missiles. And you have a couple of different, um, underground launch facilities, both at Echo Flight, one of the launch facilities, and Oscar Flight. Independently, you had 10, uh, uh, nuclear missiles

• 42:15Speaker 01

  go down. And that was concurrent to topside guards in both cases. One was March 18th of 1967, one was March 24th of 1967, seeing UFOs, like, like hovering around the base. And then the nuclear missiles just go down. So it's this crazy, this guy Bob Salas, who I interviewed on record, um, has talked about this a bunch. You have, uh, in the first case, in, uh, um, uh, you know, Echo Flight case, you had Strategic Air Command literally documenting like that they don't know why the missiles went down. Boeing was actually hired to investigate how 10 nuclear missiles could ever go down. Obviously, you would get like a third-party contractor to

• 42:57Speaker 01

  investigate this. And they were like, this doesn't make any sense. There's no sort of like, We weren't even really, we didn't even really have non-nuclear EMPs at the time. You know, EMPs are electromagnetic pulses. They get created by nuclear blasts, but now there's like modern directed energy versions of these, which are like nukes without the nuke, kind of. It's spooky shit. And these weren't really even operational at the time. But they were looking into like mini versions of EMPs that you could create that might shut down 10 nuclear missiles. And they came out being like, we have no idea what this is. And this guy, Robert Kaminsky, who worked for Boeing at the time, came out later in the 90s being like, I think this was definitely a UFO. There's another guy, Bob Jameson, who was a targeting officer, who was in charge of re-targeting the missiles

• 43:42Speaker 01

  to get them back online. He's been on Larry King and talked about this. And he was like, I have no idea, you know, how this happened. You know, this is totally unprecedented. And he was actually briefed on this involving UFOs. So pretty crazy. Um, so you have those, you have those two cases in 1977, Ellsworth Air Force Base. You have a guy named Mario Woods who claimed to... So this is really crazy. He woke, he woke up nine miles away from Ellsworth Air Force Base after seeing a UFO. And his partner, this guy, Michael Johnson, who also saw the UFO, was in a catatonic state. And he like never heard from the guy again. And, or they met up once after that, but then he, this guy, Michael Johnson, like disappeared.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  And, um, and he got a hypnotic regression and claimed to have boarded a craft and like gray beings. And, and then a tall, there's a tall gray being directing these small gray beings and them implanting surgically certain things in his ankle where he has marks on his ankle and on his wrists. And he's shown the marks on my show. Um, so you have all these cases, um, again, 167 cases. Um, this is a really crazy one. Okay. So, sorry, I could just go forever. Uh, in, uh, in 2010, uh, so Robert Hastings, this guy who wrote the book, you know, UFOs, nukes, has all these amazing sources of people who come to him with these cases. In 2010, you had a case at FE Warren nuclear site.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Uh, this is in Wyoming. And you had a shutdown going on at, uh, FE Warren that The Atlantic reported on. The Atlantic said that it lasted about an hour and that Obama was briefed because you would get briefed if, you know, one of your major nuclear sites went down, totally lost power. Robert Hastings backchanneled with this retired missile technician, a guy named John Mills. John Mills said to him that it was actually 24 hours. It wasn't an hour. And John Mills had friends who were missile security on site. And they attribute this shutdown to a Tic Tac shaped object flying around the base. And apparently these guys have sort of had trouble getting promoted in their careers,

• 45:56Speaker 01

  possibly due to this leak. Here's what's crazy. You look at that Atlantic article that talks about the shutdown. And it says there was a power failure at FE Warren. Power is crossed out and then it goes engineering failure. And so they like made it some sort of, you look this up now. There is, they made some mistake and they like allowed their live tracking or like editing of the piece to be displayed. And there was this false cover story around how there was some engineering failure of like a component that never fails or something. Like I don't, I don't remember the exact debunk on like the component or something, but like it was completely implausible.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  And so there was clearly this completely anomalous outage. Obama was briefed. And it was attributed by eyewitnesses who are Q cleared guys to a Tic Tac, you know, flying around this thing. And you see the Atlantic alive trying to cover their tracks.

• 46:56Chris Williamson?

  Does this mean the Department of Energy is involved then?

• 46:58Speaker 01

  The Department of Energy is definitely involved. They have to be involved.

• 47:03Chris Williamson?

  Why them specifically?

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the Manhattan, if you think about what the most locked down project prior to a possible UFO project would have been, it would have been the Manhattan project. And so the Atomic Energy Commission, the most sensitive sites, um, you know, in the US. I think Eric Weinstein even has a story. I'm blinking of the guy's name. But like he's, he, it's this guy from the Midwest. And he goes to Los Alamos and he goes back, you know, to Chicago or something. And he's like, there's a whole city in the Southwest and it's like all these scientists and they're working on a thing. That's how locked down Los Alamos. Was at the time Leslie Groves, who was in charge of security was, you know,

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Matt Damon plays him in Oppenheimer. You see how intense he is about Oppenheimer not, you know, he couldn't schmooze with socialist spies. It was this like, you know, really important thing. And there are all these kangaroo courts in the 50s around like, you know, kind of loyalty tests among these top scientists. So if you really wanted to maintain control over a subject, I think it, the natural extension would be the Atomic Energy Commission. In fact, in 1947, the head of Air Material Command, so responsible for all aircraft development in the Air Force is a guy named Nathan Twining, and he writes a memo called the Twining Memo. And he says UFOs are not visionary or fictitious. And then in the postscript of the memo, he says, "We actually might have some ideas as to how," and I'm paraphrasing,

• 48:30Speaker 01

  "some ideas as to how these things fly. And we might undergo efforts to build some of these crafts. But if this were to ever occur, it would need to exist wholly independent of other projects." Basically, what he's saying is wholly independent of civilian bureaucracy moving in and out of government. So like, very little congressional oversight and probably tucked away in some of these compartments that guard our nuclear secrets. If you look at the 1954 Atomic Energy Act, which created the Department of Energy, if you look at the special definition of nuclear material in it, it's basically any material that is radioactive at all, emitting alpha, beta,

• 49:11Speaker 01

  gamma radiation, is born secret. It is classified upon retrieval. And so then you could use these aerospace corporations like Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman or any of these guys. And as soon as they

• 49:27Speaker 01

  retrieve a thing, it is classified under the NPQ, the line of clearances, not the TS, TSSCI, not the like executive branch line of clearances, the DOE line of clearances. And so I think there are plenty of reasons to want to obfuscate this from the civilian government, from the executive branch, and want to put this in the Department of Energy.

• 49:49Chris Williamson?

  What, so I have a friend who, I told you a story. He was driving back from California to

• 49:58Chris Williamson?

  Austin and he was in a old school Range Rover. He had his cat on the passenger seat and he was driving down a road with nobody around, nobody around at all, in middle of nowhere desert style thing. And his cat starts coughing up a hairball. He's like, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Okay. Pulls over to the side of the road again. It looks in front of him, no one there, looks behind him, no one there at all. Gets the cat out and he's sort of holding this cat by the side of the road, sort of bent over. And he, the hairs on the back of his neck start to stand up and he can just tell that there's someone there. And he has a pistol and he's, he's got, he's got his like, uh, everyday carry in his belt.

• 50:42Chris Williamson?

  And he holding his cat bent over with his cat coughing up a hairball. And he turns around and he sees two guys in military fatigues that just made no sound at all that were directly behind him. Wow. Just asking like, everything okay here, sir? And then in, within five minutes, remembering there were no one in front, no one behind. And he then saw within five minutes, like two state troopers turn up. License, registration, have you got any weapons on you? What are you doing? He's like, I've got, I've got this cat and the cat's trying to do this thing. It's like the most emasculated thing ever. You know, these hard guys with big rifles and then these state troopers turn up and his cat's still trying to throw up. And he's got this piddly little pistol on him.

• 51:25Chris Williamson?

  And, um, two more guys appeared. It's again, military fatigues, just like, what are you doing here? Where are you, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, uh, he gets put on his way, but one of the things that he noticed was two of the guys walked off. He saw them walk sort of toward what looked like a little ridge, you know, just one of those little ups and downs that you naturally have occurring in, in the desert. And, uh, they just went bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, and just stepped down some stairs. Whoa. Must be some kind of access tunnel underground type scenario. Uh, and then, yeah, he pulls off, the state trooper follows him, follows him, follows him for 10 miles or so. And then just turns, but I sent you a voice note.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:09Chris Williamson?

  About where this is and you said, like, is it, you circled it on a map. And well, is it this? And I'm at dinner with him and I showed it and he's like, yeah, dude, exactly that. And you said, this is where some absurd percentage of the.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:22Chris Williamson?

  gnarly shit that you see going on occur. Like, what is that?

• 52:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that was like between, I think, Kirtland Air Force Base and Los Alamos. So that was like in the episode, New Mexico is like the home of so much of this stuff. And I believe that was like in the epicenter of where all the bases are in New Mexico. And a lot of these sorts of stories tend to, you know, happen. So I don't know. With some of the, I mean, that story is really interesting because it's like, like, did the cat see something or something like, like, like, is that what the implication is to the story?

• 52:58Chris Williamson?

  No, no, no, no. The, the, the thing that was interesting to my friend was the fact that he was evidently just some normal dude.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 53:07Chris Williamson?

  Holding a cat by the side of the road and the fact that within such a short distance. Now, maybe he just got unlucky and pulled over next to the entrance to some silo or, you know, some walkway gang tree type thing.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:21Chris Williamson?

  But the fact that these guys had managed to turn up behind him when he knew there was nobody there, there was nobody else around him when he pulled over.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:27Chris Williamson?

  It was daytime, it was good visibility and they just appeared there behind him, not magically.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:34Chris Williamson?

  But just because they were obviously close to an area that they could get into or get out of whatever it was that they were doing. And that, you know, within minutes, like a small squadron of different troopers and police officers and stuff. So you think, that's, you know, that's not normal.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  It's not normal.

• 53:51Chris Williamson?

  You know?

• 53:52Speaker 01

  No, and there's, um, there's a great book by a guy named Richard Soder about deep underground military bases across the United States. And he maps all of these things out. We know there's like, things like the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, like where even NORAD operates. We know that there are like mountain complexes and underground bases. Like, that's not a conspiracy. But this book outlines a lot of these things, like, uh, you know, Area 51, Edwards Air Force Base, you know, under, uh, under Kirtland Air Force Base, under Los Alamos. So a lot of the places, you know, we're talking about right now are like that general vicinity and area.

• 54:26Chris Williamson?

  You know, or we, we, the royal we, know most of the secret spots, most of the spots where most of the stuff's happening?

• 54:34Speaker 01

  I do, yeah. I think, I mean, I think a lot of it, like Area 51's this famous meme. I think a lot of this stuff at Area 51, and this is again, this is hearsay, I don't know for sure. This is very, you know, this is, I would rank this lower on the probabilistic stack than just UFOs are real and worthy of investigation. But I think a lot of the more interesting stuff at Area 51 made its way to Dougway Proving Grounds, which is a base in Utah. There's some other places that like, I don't know, even for like, that's, that's a little more well-known. There's some other places that like, I don't want to mess with American national security, so I don't want to make them.

• 55:12Chris Williamson?

  You're even that.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  No, because I don't want to gratuitously out, you know, American, it's like, what are you gonna do? Like, you're gonna storm the place, you know, so.

• 55:20Chris Williamson?

  The route I run toward it.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there are places, there are a couple of places, like, there's one place I can, I guess I'll just say, because I kind of, I got a bit of a slap on the wrist, but like, it's a, you know, it's, it's being discussed. It's got, you know, naval surface warfare crane in, in Indiana, where I think a lot of this sort of spooky research goes on. But I don't know, this is all, this is all sort of hearsay.

• 55:44Chris Williamson?

  You mean you got a slap on the wrist?

• 55:45Speaker 01

  I got some people in and around UFO world being like, you know, maybe, maybe you shouldn't, you know, talk about this, like maybe.

• 55:53Chris Williamson?

  They on the, the, the base reveal.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  What? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:58Chris Williamson?

  So, well, this is an interesting one. That suggests that you're doing or talking about stuff that's so close to, you don't have security clearance, I'm gonna guess.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:09Chris Williamson?

  But are pushing the limits of what a normal civilian is able to do with regards to just research and talking to people who maybe did have security clearance or still do or whatever.

• 56:21Chris Williamson?

  And you're getting crossover. I heard Danny Jones and you have both had episodes that have been sort of flattened by someone way above your YouTube's special partner manager thing, rep is able to work out what's going on. It's like, well, I don't even know what's happening here.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:37Chris Williamson?

  And then episodes that have disappeared and sections of podcasts that you've not felt comfortable about putting out.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:42Chris Williamson?

  That's a very strange. Position to be in to just be some bloke, some civilian.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  It's extremely strange because some of this stuff is just like, it's like the existence of UFOs. So what? You know, it's like an ontological truth that like people should know at this point. You know, again, half the population already believes it, whatever. When it comes to like warfare capabilities, I bump into some of these things where if you're talking about like how the UFOs fly, you know, anti-gravity, anti-gravity is probably a poor word. It's probably some sort of gravity manipulation. But like, I think I've found like these interesting kind of novel topological physics effects. And I attribute it specifically to this one mid-century inventor, this guy named Thomas Townsend Brown.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  And I actually sent that to people who I know, you know, in, you know, spooky worlds in the, you know, intel world and in like, you know, UFO whistleblower world. And I was curious to see if they would, you know, say, you know, you shouldn't release this or whatever. You know, I wanted to know if I was like poking the bear too much. And a lot of them were actually like, holy shit, like this makes sense given like, you know, other experiences that we've had and things we've seen fly, you know, like it woke them up to the fact that I think a lot of this stuff was real. And then in certain cases, they couldn't say whether it was real, but I was like, I'm reading them. And I'm like, I think I could tell like you think it's real or whatever, you know?

• 58:11Speaker 01

  And I wanted, I wanted them to, I almost wanted somebody to come back and be like, hey, like, we have to coordinate on this or something like this is, this is real. And it's like, it's possibly dual use and it like, you know, it's like, it has like deep implications for how, you know, you know, the next generation of propulsion, because you know, Elon Musk's thing is totally not workable for interstellar travel. I could, you know, beat anybody in a debate as to why it's not like, that's obvious. It's really basic physics. So I, and I really believe that this effect that I found was real. And so there are things like that where I'm like, is the lights are on, but nobody's home. Like what's going on? Like who? And, and I've come to the conclusion that it's a bunch of factions

• 58:56Speaker 01

  that are super not well coordinated with each other. And they'll have these like novel effects tied up in these old aerospace conglomerates. And

• 59:08Speaker 01

  They don't know what to do with some of these things. They know that they break modern physics and that they'd be laughed out of the room if they were to go into this kind of, you know, modern academic circles with some of these sort of effects. But they also, I think, know that they're like secret technology trees that are attributable, you know, to some of these things.

• 59:25Chris Williamson?

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• 1:00:07Chris Williamson?

  it's only 400 bucks. To get the exact same blood panel that I use, just go to the link in the description below or head to functionhealth.com/modernd wisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernd wisdom. Yeah, let's say that the UFO craft that you're talking about are real and that the effects and the speeds and the stuff that you're talking about are real. What are we dealing with here? Like what, how are these things doing what they're doing in your opinion?

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I have no idea. This is all speculation, but it would probably be some sort of like cold fusion, like low energy nuclear reaction or something where, you know, like hot fusion is, you know, controllable fusion is the holy grail in, you know, energy unlocks. So, you know, we're now experimenting with magnetic confinement of lasers to, you know, allow for fusion. It's really high energy fusion. In my opinion, it kind of defeats the the purpose a little bit because the amount of energy, you know, you have to input to like make the thing work and amount of technical prowess. It's just extremely complicated.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  So again, this sort of horseshoe thing. It's like, yeah. So you need some like fundamental unlock there.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  Were a couple of scientists that thought they did it, Pons and Fleishman. And I don't know if they did, I'm not deep down that conspiracy. So I don't know if we have cold fusion. Like, I don't know if, I don't know if, you know, we have like alien reproduction vehicles, where we have UFOs that we have in saucers that like, America can fly. I don't know of that at all. So as far as how the aliens are flying them, I don't know. But like, it would probably be some sort of cold fusion on the front end, energy wise. And then, some sort of magnetic sensing. So, Robins, you know, birds, actually navigate home using the magnetic field of the earth. So they have this avian cryptochromes, these CRY4 proteins,

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  that basically, using electron spin, can understand where the magnetosphere of the earth is. And that's how they know where they are spatially. And it's more accurate than, you know, optical. And it allows them to navigate home. And quantum biology is this sort of burgeoning field, generally. Like photosynthesis, enzyme creation, a lot of things are now being attributed to quantum mechanical effects inside the body. The body's notoriously warm, wet and noisy. And, you know, creates sort of decoherence when it comes to quantum. So, we didn't think that anything quantum occurred, but now more and more evidence is pointing towards sort of quantum stuff happening. And a lot of the crafts, when people see them, like Commander David Fravor and others,

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  you know, he's the guy in 2004, off the coast of San Diego, the Nimitz Group, seem to think that the crafts feel like they're almost like alive. Like, they're almost like biological organisms or beings themselves, or something. And my guess is, they would probably use some sort of quantum sensing for the navigation, because it's more accurate. Even Lockheed has something called the Dark Ice Magnetometer, which uses quantum sensing. And it is more accurate than, for example, GPS. Like, if you lose GPS comms, and you're in some sub, like, you know, deep underwater, or whatever, you would use this like Dark Ice Magnetometer.

• 1:03:15Chris Williamson?

  Such a sick name.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  It's epic, yeah. So, you know, I think that for the navigation. And then for the propulsion, I would use something called the Byfield-Brown effect, which is basically, so there's this guy Townsend-Brown. And he started, he was this mid-century guy, he was born in 1905. And in the 20s, he started to experiment with these Coolidge X-ray tubes and noticed that when he ran current through them, they would jump. And now every X-ray tube has an anode and a cathode, so a negative electrode and a positive electrode. And he was basically, in his mind, he's like, I think that there is some sort of attractant force where the negative electrode is moving towards the positive electrode.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  And this goes beyond sort of traditional electrostatics and it might sort of experimentally unify the field of physics. Like backing up for a second, this is a real, it's a really big deal. Like SpaceX, you know, if you were to go with the Falcon 9, their state-of-the-art, you know, rocket, you know, now they're experimenting with Starship. But, you know, if you were to take Falcon 9 to Proxima Centauri B, the closest habitable planet, you know, outside of, outside of Earth, it would take you like 80 to 100,000 years. And if you were to try to update that with nuclear thermal propulsion, which SpaceX isn't even, for whatever reason, investigating, maybe you could cut that in half, like 30 or 40,000 years.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  So it's just like, it doesn't work. Like as far, his whole interstellar thing is, it's kind of like, it's a great recruiting tool, like that's awesome. Go to the moon first, maybe you can get to Mars if you're really lucky, awesome. But like, Starship burns nine tenths of its fuel tank just getting to low Earth orbit. That, so it's like, that's how far away we are with chemical combustion and Newton's three laws. So if you could come up with some sort of propulsion that married electromagnetism and gravity, if electromagnetism were the input and gravity were the output, that would be a massive deal. We have four forces in physics, electromagnetism, gravity, the weak force and the strong force. Weak force and strong force, you can forget because they're not long range, you can't do anything with them.

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  Electromagnetism is the only thing that you can do anything with really in a lab. And that took actually originally Faraday in the early 19th century, who was a book binder from a very poor family in South London, coming up with this idea that, you know, magnetic fields could actually interact with light. And then it was James Clerk Maxwell and, you know, eventually, you know, Heinrich Hertz and then Tesla and Edison sort of perfected that. But it was this long sort of, you know, chain of like figuring this out. And since then, we've had the standard model, which basically governs particle physics and quantum mechanics. And then you have Einstein's theory of gravity and gravity is over here on an island.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  And then you have quantum mechanics and that's over here and they're just not reconcilable. And so if you could reconcile them, that would be a massive deal and nobody would, like Neil deGrasse Tyson would admit that that would be a massive deal if you could reconcile them. There are people trying to reconcile them theoretically. You've had Eric Weinstein on your show. And he's talked about the restricted data and the Atomic Energy Commission, 1954. I remember actually a really funny part of the interview. He goes, Chris, do you know about restricted data? And you're like, I don't know. It's the most obscure. But he's trying to do that theoretically. I believe that this guy Townsend Brown did this experimentally. And now an FBI document has been FOIA'd, use the Freedom of Information Act to come out.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  Then in 1942, it said he was the lead radar scientist in the entire Navy. So, by the way, the context here is people who've been trying to discredit him say that he's a total quack and has no bona fides whatsoever. So now we're realizing he's the top radar guy in the Navy. His stuff is definitely classified by the Navy. There's this whole saga of his daughter trying to declassify his stuff from the Navy. And they say, the secretary for the Navy on the phone says, you know, if some of this stuff were classified, we couldn't let it out. Like just FY hypothetically, right? And then they give her a very slimmed down little dossier on Townsend Brown.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I think he discovered a whole lot. And that's now been vindicated, his radar prowess. The fact that his work made it into the B2 stealth bomber, I think, has now been figured out. So there's this other part of his work called electrohydrodynamics, the use of electric fields to manipulate airflow. And I think we now know that that work made it into the B2 stealth bomber because the financier who was funding Townsend Brown is a guy named Floyd Odlum. Who was a large owner in Northrop at the time and he had all these kind of covert meetings with Curtis LeMay, who's the Secretary of the Air Force and with the Rand Corporation.

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  And then all of a sudden, the B2 is using these big electric fields to manipulate airflow. We, I mean, we know that. That's like literally a fact. You can look up right now that it uses electric fields to manipulate airflow. And these were the experiments that Floyd Odlum, this majority owner in Northrop, was funding via Townsend Brown was electric fields and their, you know, manipulation of airflow. And there's a paper in 1968 of Northrop starting to look into this right after that funding took place. So you have this guy who's supposed to be a total quack. Two out of the three things are being vindicated now, the electro hydrodynamics and the radar thing. And then there's a third thing. And the third thing is he's saying that he unified the field in physics. And he's saying he did it experimentally in two places.

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  At the Montgolfier facility in Paris in France, where you have a guy named Jacques Corneille, who was a technical representative of Sudwest, this, you know, aerospace company there. There's a recording of him making a deathbed confession, saying, "The results were successful. It was tricky experimental conditions, but the results were successful." He's on his deathbed saying this. I have the recording. And then in 1957, at the Bonson Lab, there's a video of Townsend Brown. He's popping champagne. It's, you know, he says, you know, in his own, you know, accounting that this, this experiment was successful. And Bonson was no scrub. Bonson, at the time, was convening all of the top theoretical physicists in the world to talk about gravity.

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  So this is this whole Eric Weinstein kind of conspiracy that public physics was being sent down the wrong path while private physics remained incredibly vital. And I think it was surrounding this guy named Thomas Townsend Brown, who is doing this. He was this not super refined theoretician, but while he's doing his experiments in the back room, the guys in the front room are You have Richard Feynman, you have John Wheeler, you have Peter Bergman, you have Freeman Dyson, you have literally the top theoretical physicists being funded by the same guy who's funding Townsend Brown, and they're all there to discuss gravity. And guess who's funding the entire conference? Wright Airfield.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  And this is now called Wright Patterson, which is the center of all UFO lore today. And it's where the materials were supposedly taken after Roswell, for example.

• 1:10:36Chris Williamson?

  What do you make of the current state of physics? Because I hear, there's a lot of debate on, I watch a lot of different channels that have got pretty sort of polarized opinions on this, whether it's, you know, Eric Weinstein, Sabina Hossenfelder, Professor Dave, like, you know, there's a,

• 1:10:56Chris Williamson?

  one thing that everybody can kind of agree on is that it certainly feels like a wall has been hit in terms of sort of real progress. I think even the most sort of ardent stringy string theorist or, you know, the most optimistic theoretician would still say something like, well, we're not exactly smashing it.

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:11:18Chris Williamson?

  So what do you make of the current state of physics?

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  It's a joke. They are eating each other alive. It's not serious. It's like, I love this Sabina Hossenfelder was defending Eric Weinstein against Sean Carroll, because he's like, Sean Carroll said that your paper didn't have Lagrangians in it or whatever. None of Sean Carroll's, you know, the people that he builds up as, you know, within the academic sedental and acceptable in string theory have Lagrangians in their paper or testable predictions or like anything serious about any of them. The most important thing is that physics should interface with reality. Like you, Chris, me, Jesse, like, we don't have physics degrees, right? But like, we can say that string theory has not really done anything for our physical world. Like, you know, this set, like, you know, Austin as a city.

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  Like, none of it is running on string theory, right? But like, a third of our economy is running on quantum field theory. Like, like, quantum mechanics is responsible for that iPad that you have. You know, it's for semiconductors and like, you know, the whole IT revolution. So I think empirically, it's a failure. You have guys like Leonard Susskind, who are famous string theorists, going around being like, I'd give ourselves a B+ over the last, you know, 50 years of work. And this conference that I'm mentioning, where in the back room, the anti-gravity guy is getting funded, and in the front room, quantum gravity is being established, established string theory, which is the dominant modern paradigm. So quantum gravity is kind of the, basically being able to quantize gravity, figuring out gravity, reconciling it in the quantum,

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  is the heuristic that modern physics is stuck to. And they're stuck to it so dogmatically, and they will, it's not gonna work. It's clearly not gonna work. And the reason it's not gonna work is because you are force-fitting to mental heuristic. Like, science is a map. It's not the territory. So you have two maps that are gonna be imperfect, general relativity and quantum mechanics. And the maps are gonna be a little jagged, right? Because they're not the territory. And you were trying to jam the maps together. That is modern physics. And I think it's a really important point that like, IQ and heterodoxy don't scale one to one.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  So you can be extremely smart and led like sheep to slaughter into the wrong framework. You can get moved into a cul-de-sac if you're a hyper-specialist who's incredibly smart. And I think that is a really important, a lot of science has been moved forward by generalists who have inter-domain, interdisciplinary knowledge. And I think there are plenty of, there are a lot of cosmological anomalies. Like, you look at, a good one is like, you know, cosmic inflations. Like, why is the universe expanding? Like, you can literally chat GPT this, and it will say, "A repulsive form of gravity that isn't one of the four fundamental forces is expanding the universe." It will say that. That doesn't make any sense to me.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  So like, that's a great example where I think physics has a scaling problem. Like, you had a great interview with Naval Ravikant. It was amazing. Naval, you know, talks about a scaling problem in governance, right? Where he'll say, at, you know, a family level, you have to be communist. And at, you know, a super big level, you have to be libertarian, right? Because you can't coordinate at such a high level when it comes to, you know, governance systems or whatever. And I think he probably got that from Nassim Taleb. But I think physics has a scaling problem as well, where if you have any anomalies at low scale, it's like a rocket that's one degree off course. It takes off 99 degrees off course. Or error propagation in computer science.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  You have a little error and then you repeat that code a million times. You end up with something completely effed up. And I think James Webb is now starting to, you know, prove this out. Uh, where you have these early galaxies formed that might better explain, you know, cosmic microwave background than, you know, the big bang and stuff.

• 1:15:15Chris Williamson?

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• 1:15:59Chris Williamson?

  And if you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back. Plus they ship internationally. Right now, you can get 35% off your first subscription and that 30 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernwisdom using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. So just going back to Townsend Brown and

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:16:28Chris Williamson?

  him being able to, you know, experimentally.

• 1:16:33Chris Williamson?

  Show something that theoretically

• 1:16:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:16:36Chris Williamson?

  Hasn't yet, at least publicly been able to

• 1:16:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:16:39Chris Williamson?

  Shown, and you think actually probably can't using the current models and the approaches that physicists are trying to take. First off, how does that kept quiet, end up being kept quiet and why? And secondly, how has no one managed to recreate it? If this dude's done it, the number of different people around the planet for whom this would be a huge.

• 1:16:58Speaker 01

  Huge.

• 1:16:59Chris Williamson?

  This would be them in history.

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:17:01Chris Williamson?

  For the rest of time. So if one bloke did it.

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:17:05Chris Williamson?

  Is he just such a savant? Did he get really lucky? How does he get kept quiet? Why? And how does no one replicate it?

• 1:17:14Speaker 01

  I love these great questions. So the thing that people use to detract from his experiment is this thing called ionized wind, where when you have, so his basic experiment is basically this capacitor experiment. You have a negative electrode, you have a positive electrode. You have what's called a high K dielectric in between the two. So it's something that stores a lot of electromagnetic charge and discharges easily. And you put that in a, in a vacuum chamber and then you pump it full of megavolt range electricity and you see this thrust from the negative to the positive. And so that seems simple, right? So your question is an amazing one, which is like, why hasn't somebody recreated that?

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  The thing that people use to explain the thrust away is this thing called electro hydrodynamics, where you're creating ionized air and that ionized air has an equal opposite, an opposite reaction, which creates thrust in the direction of the positive electrode. So if you just did this experiment not in a vacuum chamber, I could just say that's ionized air. That doesn't break physics, you know, whatever. If you do that in a vacuum chamber where there is no air that can get ionized, then all of a sudden it starts to get really interesting because you're saying that you are connecting, again, electromagnetism and gravity, because there is no air to get ionized. So the, the air can't, you know, basically account for the thrust. Here's the thing.

• 1:18:37Speaker 01

  Industrial-grade vacuum chambers are very expensive. They're prohibitively expensive. They cost at least 200K, 300K. It is very easy to stigmatize a thing, basically away from like an average person in their garage, you know, from trying it. And then on top of that, like, who has the discretionary money to like, you know, do this experiment in-

• 1:19:02Chris Williamson?

  Tons of labs around the world, like professional institutions, universities-

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:19:07Chris Williamson?

  Billionaires, anybody that wants to support. Like, if Elon could do this, why isn't SpaceX doing that?

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  He should, he should. And I think there's some sort of undetectable dark matter there or something. But the lead electrostatic, I don't know. But there's a, the lead electrostatics guy at NASA, he like runs their electrostatics lab. The most senior scientist in electrostatics at NASA works at Cape Kennedy. He has had access to a vacuum chamber for the last 20 years. He has left, he's either left NASA or he's spending most of his time now on a private company called Exodus Space. That company, Exodus Space, uses basically a derivative of the Byfield-Brown effect, the Townsend-Brown experiment. And he says that it creates thrust. So I think, again, it's this, the answer to your question is, they have. Like, this guy with serious credentials has.

• 1:19:55Speaker 01

  He says it creates Newtons, or millonewtons of thrust, which in space is a very big deal. If you create any thrust, again, theoretically, you are breaking the standard model, like, you are breaking physics in this very big way. So I think they have. There have been a couple of Air Force replications of this, where they, you know, quote unquote debunked the thing. Well, I think one by this guy named Tally in the 90s, where they used 13 kilovolts. But Brown was using megavolt range electricity, and that was really important for the amount of thrust he got, so-

• 1:20:25Chris Williamson?

  It seems, it seems like so primitive to be doing it in the 50s.

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:20:31Chris Williamson?

  And then to never be able to replicate it. It just seems like there's some fuckery going on there. Or there's something wrong in the, in the calculation.

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  I think it will get replicated in our lifetime. And I, I'm, I think it will, I think it will be vindicated and it will get replicated.

• 1:20:49Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that, when I, when I think about physics, I don't think about physical physics all that much. I think about theoreticians, I think about blackboard, I think about trying to solve different equations.

• 1:21:03Chris Williamson?

  Would it be a bigger deal to for the theoreticians to solve this issue? Or for the experimentalists to solve this issue?

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  I think the the the way you'd have to get something like this done would be you'd need a a theoretical physicist like present with like typical credentials or something. And then they'd need to like, yeah, check exactly. Because I I've seen videos of people who are like, I'm, you know, I'm doing this and stuff. But like, they don't have the traditional credentials. And then you're not allowed to look into this stuff if you have the credentials. Like, I I truly think you cannot underestimate the ability to like mind control very smart people. I mean it like, and there's an amazing philosophy of science guy named Thomas Koons. And he talks about the structure of scientific revolutions.

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  And he talks about scientific revolutions being more politically driven often than they are about truth. Like, who's the guy who figured out that, you know, our solar system revolved around the sun? Do you know?

• 1:22:06Chris Williamson?

  Copernicus?

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  So actually, it's a trick question. This guy named Aristarchus, who was an obscure third century, third century B.C. Greek theoretician, who was a contemporary of Archimedes and Euclid. And he was forgotten because that was never accepted until the 16th century. And Copernicus decided that that was, you know, going to be the case. And then even with Copernicus, he said that. And then Galileo, a century later, actually measured it. And then Galileo was burnt at the stake. So I truly.

• 1:22:36Chris Williamson?

  Conceptual inertia is a hell of a limitation.

• 1:22:38Speaker 01

  It is. And history is moved forward by the heretics. And I think if you can't name a present heretic that you where you believe in some of their opinions, then you're probably in some sense on the wrong side of history. If you can't name somebody who is sort of disagreeable or a pariah in some sense because of a view they have that they're high conviction in, then I think you're probably not being independent thinking enough.

• 1:23:01Chris Williamson?

  That's a really interesting model that I've never thought of before. Why do you think it is then that the renegade scientist is so highly criticized by the establishment, by people in academia? You know, pick your favorite YouTube channel or podcast that kind of does the critiques for your thing of choice and like points the finger at this stuff.

• 1:23:28Chris Williamson?

  Is it a sense that we have sort of got the scientific method now? And there's kind of a bit of solipsism that comes along with that, which is, no, no, no. Yeah, maybe before there were things that a great man of science history could have found that would have made step change, jumps forward in understanding. But now we understand things need to be falsifiable. They need to fit within an existing model. We're making changes through sort of iteration as opposed to leap.

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:23:57Chris Williamson?

  Is that maybe a part of it?

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. And the ironic thing is if you were to snapshot like end of the 19th century, you know, England or something, you would be saying the exact same thing about electromagnetism. You would literally be saying the exact same thing immediately pre-quantum revolution. And so our physical models of reality are always going to be wrong. There's a great book by a guy named Sam Arbismann called The Half-Life of Facts, where he talks about facts themselves as kind of being similar to like radioactive isotope decay, like they have a decay function. Our physical models of reality are always wrong. So I would bet, you always want to bet on the anomaly. You don't want to bet on the model, right? Like, there's this thing called black body radiation, where you'd have this, you know,

• 1:24:44Speaker 01

  black cylindrical object and you'd heat it up and you'd expect this ultraviolet catastrophe. And this is guy named Gustav Kirchhoff, this German scientist, and he discovered this in the 1860s. And it was this anomaly because it was like, why doesn't it, you know, blow up or whatever? And then you realize that like the photons exponentially downgrade, you know, the frequency or something at really high temperatures. You needed quanta to do that. And that was in the early 19th century, that was in the early 20th century with Max Planck. And so, and the orbit of Mercury is another thing, where it's like, it didn't make any sense actually in the Newtonian model. And then you figure out Einstein's spacetime curvature, and then all of a sudden it made sense. So like if I'm on the UFO side, right?

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  And I'm debating against Neil deGrasse Tyson, he's kind of a, sorry to, you know, make him a punching bag, but he's like the priestly citadel, right? And he's, he's saying, you are wrong, Jesse, because, because of physical models of reality. Like historically, the person behind the anomaly is going to be right, the person observing the anomaly. And then the anomalies systematically build up and it's like pressure behind a dam. And then the dam explodes and all of a sudden you need this. You know, whole new theory to encapsulate present anomalies. So I think if we were truly open minded about all this sort of data, like I've, I've had a debate with like Michael Shermer, for example, it's like famous scientific skeptic. These debates always go the same way, like Joe Rogan's had a bunch of them, right?

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  Where it's like Graham Hancock and Flint Dibble or whatever. Person who believes a bunch of, you know, anomalous stuff and they have a bunch of data around the anomalous stuff. It's like the UFOs nukes thing or like, you know, Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, you know, there's always person believing that. And then person who like is so kind of smug, they won't even like look at the data. And it's two trains passing in the night. The person on the, you know, the right hand, the kind of, you know, the heretic or whatever. I'm not saying they're right all of the time, but they're doing a thing that probably will move history forward if it gets accepted or incorporated into the model. The guy's just defending the citadel. It's like, we are over indexed, you know, the, the famous early 20th century German sociologist Max Weber.

• 1:26:55Speaker 01

  He would say, you know, we live in the age of disenchantment. We are over indexed on skepticism. You don't need another skeptic. Like, do we need another person saying like string theory is great? You're wrong because you're too much of a renegade or whatever? No, like we, you want to like, like, science is only useful insofar as it has predictive value, A, and B, you can build cool shit with it. Like that's it, like name another thing, you know, or like, the other thing that people would say is it ontologically maps reality. But again, I just think that is a fool's errand to say that it all, it's not, it's the map. It's not the territory. So the people here, you know, on the left hand side, the skeptics, they're, they have the hubris to think that our current physical models of reality are reality itself. And that just feels so ahistorical. It's just wrong.

• 1:27:40Speaker 01

  It's historically wrong.

• 1:27:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's definitely a.

• 1:27:46Chris Williamson?

  Signature demeanor that I don't think encourages people to take risks with the way that they think and the sort of research that they do and the ideas that they have. And yeah, you're right. I would, you know, to fly a flag as somebody who moved from a country which is highly skeptical, quite cynical, quite sort of tall poppy-ish to one which is basically permanent first line cocaine energy. Yeah. In enthusiasm. I much prefer this because I think it helps to sort of foster a sense of self-belief and self-esteem and hope and like, yeah, I'm gonna try, I'm gonna take that chance. I'm gonna try and do that thing. And it's why new, cool, interesting ideas

• 1:28:28Chris Williamson?

  come up with. And yeah, you're right. Even if most of them are wrong. I don't know. There's this idea, I think it's called the Oxford manner, which is the ability to play gracefully with ideas. And that seems to have been very lost. I love that. Yeah, the ability to play gracefully with ideas. I think it's a lovely, a lovely sort of way to think about a good faith discussion between two different people. And a lot of the time, it gets into some sort of slanging match about like how ridiculous this person is. Yes. And sort of meanness. And I understand why. I had a really interesting conversation with Richard Reeves. He's the president and founder of the American Institute for Boys

• 1:29:11Chris Williamson?

  and Men. And we were talking about how when people's beliefs for something that they really, really care about are not listened to, what they typically do is become more ardent and more of a firebrand. Yes. And a good example of this would be people that think climate change is a real existential risk. I'm just gonna put it out there now. I used to tweet this about once every six months. Climate change is not an existential risk priority. It simply isn't. I think it's a big deal. I think we should pay attention to it. I do all of those things. I think that there should be an awful lot of very, very smart people paying attention to it. And yet it is not a real existential risk priority.

• 1:29:54Chris Williamson?

  Permanent unrecoverable collapse, not gonna happen. Yes. We just had a fucking pandemic a few years ago. Yes. And yet we're still back. Who is talking about bioweapon facilities? Who is talking about engineered viruses? Yeah. Who is that concerned about the alignment problem in AI or about nanotechnology? The NIH, the NIH wants to fund gain of function again. It's crazy. So I understand why people who have a cause that they're pushing for, one that I agree in, although I don't think that the sort of velocity or magnitude is accurate. If people aren't listening, you raise your voice. You say things in a louder, more vociferous, more aggressive manner because like, no, no, this really, really, really matters. You know, remember, don't look up.

• 1:30:38Chris Williamson?

  It's like they start screaming at the people on the TV like. And I was talking to Richard Reeves about this and he was talking about how really, really interesting dynamic, I think, super important. And, you know, I would, I would probably try and counsel Eric to take heed of this dynamic. Yes. Which is when you have something that you believe in a lot and other people don't believe in it and may even be pretty sort of mean and critical and stuff about it. You have to be able to keep a smile on your face. Oh, yeah. And put the idea forward in the same level of sort of charming manner. Because when you become more aggressive with the way that you put things across, it just makes you sound more crazy. Hundred percent.

• 1:31:23Chris Williamson?

  It turns people off. And it's the difference between, do you want to prove your position for your own sense of recognition or is your, your goal, the actual position? Ben Francis, founder of Jim Shark, said that a company will become successful when your goals for the company outstrip your goals for yourself. Love that. And it's him saying he had to step, he was founder CEO, stepped down as CEO, came back in as CEO, moved across chief product doc, came back to CEO. You know, it's because he is just in service of the thing. Yeah. And the problem is that naturally you care about this thing. Like this is, it's a, a part of you. It feels like a sense of self. It's like very, very tightly attached to who you are. And someone's attacking that, they're attacking you, which means that you feel like you need

• 1:32:07Chris Williamson?

  to, hey, this is really, really important and you're not fucking listening and you need to listen and you're, dude, you sound crazy. Yes. And we saw it with, I think, a great video by Charlie Hoopat. Comparing Peterson's appearance on Kathie Newman, like, ha, gotcha. Like, that one in 2019 and his one on Jubilee recently.

• 1:32:25Speaker 01

  Right. Oh, man. That was, that was rough.

• 1:32:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And I think that the roughest part about it was nothing to do with logical consistencies or fallacies or, you know, whatever, and almost exclusively to do with demeanor.

• 1:32:39Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:32:41Chris Williamson?

  You know, you have somebody who's sitting back, who's laughing. I think that's silly.

• 1:32:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:45Chris Williamson?

  I think that's silly. I really do. I think that's, you're being silly. And you're like, fuck, like, I want to listen. I want to listen to this person. He's regulated. As opposed to, and I understand the arc, like, dude, if you've had to try and get off benzos and been attacked for the last half decade, it's going to be tough to regulate yourself, right? And I mean, you are literally surrounded by whatever, 25 people who all think that you're a piece of shit.

• 1:33:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:07Chris Williamson?

  I get that. But just my, my sort of broader point here is when someone has a belief, they care about an awful lot, and people don't listen, they get more aggressive, which actually pushes away the very thing that they want.

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:22Chris Williamson?

  Which is for them to understand it. And I think it's, uh, it's like, it's an impossible lesson. I struggle with it all the time. But, you know, it's something important. If you care about this thing, it should be a reason for you to regulate more aggressively.

• 1:33:37Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:33:37Chris Williamson?

  Like, you need to step in and calm yourself down even more. Because if you don't care about it, like, do what you want.

• 1:33:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:43Chris Williamson?

  Like, you can be as flippant and shouty as you'd like.

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:33:48Chris Williamson?

  But if you really care about it, then it's like, ah, soft signal of effectiveness.

• 1:33:52Speaker 01

  I think science is supposed to be the thing that is most kind of immune from these sort of sociological factors, right? Like, you're not supposed to have any sort of bias. You're supposed to remove bias. You're like this kind of impartial observer. And if you read, like, you know, Richard Dawkins had these famous debates. He had debates with a bunch of people. I remember, you know, written correspondence between him and David Berlinsky. David Berlinsky was this guy who believed there are all these sort of anomalies worthy of inquiry or whatever in, in, in natural selection. And just the shrillness on, honestly, both sides, but especially on the Dawkins side, it was just, it was, you know, it's, it's, it is kind of off-putting. And I think if you have real confidence in

• 1:34:34Speaker 01

  your, in your beliefs, you shouldn't have that. You should just be kind of, you know, chill and, you know, it's all good. And we shouldn't pre-crystallize knowledge. Like, if somebody came to me and was like, Jesse, actually, we have this aerial spoofing tech. And in conjunction with that, we have this like psychotronic tech. And we can get people to see a thing and then the craft can come down and it creates this kind of Close Encounters of the Third kind where you see the beings and you get microchipped, but it's all this cover for MKUltra or whatever. I'd be like, I need to hear more about that. Like, tell me the thing that explains the, explains away the data that I'm discussing. But I fully agree with you. I think not pre-crystallizing knowledge and just like first base is, are, is there a

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  phenomena that's real that's going on? And then, but that's not interesting. The interesting thing is what is the metaphysical version of reality? Like, I love your question, like, how do these things fly? Like, I don't know, but let's discuss that. Like, that's the most interesting stuff. The root of the word school in its original Greek, S C H O L E, is scola. The double meaning is leisure. And leisurely contempl-, there's a great book called Leisure is the Basis of Culture. Leisurely contemplation of the universe and of the world in the sort of Oxford, you know, gentlemanly tradition where, and if you were in 19th century Oxford, if you got straight A's, that was a bad move because you'd be stigmatized. You were supposed to effortlessly get Bs at that in Victorian England.

• 1:36:03Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:36:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the ability to play gracefully with ideas, dude. And I think, I get it. We need, we need a external stress test to ensure that wacky or seductive but wildly incorrect theories don't gain more traction than they need because that detracts away from the things that are actually true and accurate. But there is also, there is a balance to this. And it is, if your ability to criticize is greater than your ability to create, I think that you are leaning on the wrong side.

• 1:36:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:36:43Chris Williamson?

  Like, how much are you contributing to stuff? And how much are you critiquing stuff? And if you're more on the side of criticism, perhaps maybe that's the job of some scientists. I'm sure some smart person that does fucking journal review would be able to say that. Maybe, I don't know, but I just. It doesn't foster sort of a positive sum environment for me in that sort of a way. You've mentioned a couple of times you've got an issue with Elon's rocket-based model of space exploration. What like, what's the problem with how Elon's trying to explore space? And then what would a workable version of space travel actually look like?

• 1:37:17Speaker 01

  I find myself with Elon, you know, in between sort of Asylla and Caribb. There's like two failure modes, like one is a failure mode of like people saying he's like totally worthless and not impressive. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, he literally like, you know, NASA started to fail and this guy created a private version of NASA that started to work. He flew to Russia where they had liquid fuel rocket engines and single-handedly resuscitated the American space program. So I will caveat that and then electric cars, thank you, Elon. Like a successful car company hadn't been started, you know, for a hundred years or something pre Tesla. So very impressive dude. I wish we had more, you know, people like that.

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  The, the other side is like Elon is solving all of the world's most important problems. You know, it's interstellar travel, you know, even with the electric car stuff. It's like, you know, is it mining cobalt's like not the most humane thing in the world? And, you know, the batteries end up in landfills and so like, I'm of the mind that like a lot of incremental progress is still worthy for like the ultimate thing you want to get to. Like SpaceX and Tesla are extremely worthy worthwhile endeavors. But you, we just have, you have to think clearly about some of this stuff. So SpaceX, because we're talking about UFOs. Again, if you wanted to get to the nearest habitable planet, that's 80,000, 100,000 years. That just doesn't, it doesn't make sense, right? And you, you need new science.

• 1:38:43Speaker 01

  You don't need, you need new theory, like you need, he was on Joe Rogan's show and Rogan was like, you know, what if there's some new propulsion modality? What if it's not just Newton's three laws? And he was like, there can't be or whatever. It's only mass ejection. That's the only thing, you know, the thing ejects the mass, the fuel, and then it, you know, goes up equal and opposite reaction. And I just think. That puts a lid on like, with some young STEM students like watching that. And it's like, again, if you were to bet against the present physical models of reality at any given time, which you should, that's the safe bet, you shouldn't put that lid on things. And then, I mean, there's the idea of like, you know, the moon and Mars, the moon is ambitious enough.

• 1:39:25Speaker 01

  So Starship, which is, you know, they're like 150 to 200 ton, you know, rocket ship that takes us, you know, hopefully to the moon.

• 1:39:35Speaker 01

  So that thing burns nine tenths of the fuel tank just to get to low Earth orbit. Then it's floating around low Earth orbit with one tenth of the fuel tank. You then have to get another Starship to go up, burn nine tenths of its fuel tank. It does butt to butt refueling with the first. That one, you know, discards itself, de-orbits or whatever. And then you end up, so you end up like 10 launches later, you end up with a full fuel tank of, you know, Starship in low Earth orbit. And then it goes to the moon. And like, we have to get it to work. I mean, it's, it's orbited, it's orbited in, in LEO before, but we need to get it to work. At a base case, I think we do just upgraded the amount of Raptor engines from 33 to 36. Like, it's still like a total work in progress.

• 1:40:18Speaker 01

  So like, that should like implement some humility, you know, for, for people thinking about this stuff. And then Mars is like, not super habitable. Like, there's no oxygen, right? So like, you need like a, you need like, you know, widespread like nuclear energy, like some power source that's like really workable there. You know, like, we can barely get that stuff done here. Like, the Earth is great, right? It's like a really good like biome. It's pretty, it's not bad. You know, I love what you said about climate change. There's a great, you know, this guy, James Lovelock, has this Gaia theory. The resilience, the Earth is extremely resilient through cataclysms and all sorts of, you know, pandemics and stuff. So it, it almost devalues Earth a little bit. It's like, we have to remove Earth as some central point of failure.

• 1:41:01Speaker 01

  It is this very Silicon Valley level of thinking, but, you know, I think that can be overrated. It's also overrated when he thinks about AI as well, because- He talks about AI as like, so he got really into Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence, this book in 2012.

• 1:41:16Chris Williamson?

  I love it.

• 1:41:16Speaker 01

  It's a good book. But I think it's it's it's sort of wrong and it's wrong in the way that Bostrom and Elon took its implications. So like, they were like, you know, we're gonna end up with some hard takeoff of of AGI at some point. We're gonna end up with, you know, AI will gain sentience, they'll realize that in, you know, meat space, you know, biology is sort of super inefficient, you know, they'll kill us all, you know, due to the sentience. Or the paperclip problem, exact paperclip maximizer, alignment issues, you know? And those are issues, don't get me wrong. But then their answer to that issue was if you can't beat them, join them. So then you have to merge the AI with us, with, you know, something like Neuralink, which I would actually bet on the merging of us and AI

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  more than I'd bet on AGI. Like, if you look at the history of computation, it is the human body and computers developing a lower latency and higher bandwidth interface over the last 70 years. Like, you used to need a CS degree to work a mainframe computer the size of literally this room at IBF.

• 1:42:19Chris Williamson?

  Natural language processing in a phone in your pocket.

• 1:42:21Speaker 01

  And that's it. And so it's it's becoming more and more black box, lower latency and higher bandwidth. Would I bet that like, the logical conclusion of that is a chip in your brain? Like, yeah, like, is you just order Postmates, like, I want a cheeseburger or whatever, I guess, you know, like, that's, you know, that that makes sense to me, right? But I think that kills humanity with a whimper and not a bang. Like, does, one of my favorite quotes is Marshall McLuhan, "Every media extension of man is an amputation." And so we assume that like, the IT revolution augments, you know, human abilities, just like, from spears to planes, all, you know, physical technology, which does augment, you know, all of that stuff really, really helps us. You know, we're talking about nuclear energy, that would be amazing. But like, the IT stuff really parasitizes us. It really

• 1:43:06Speaker 01

  like, like, you don't need a sense of direction, you don't need a sense of recall or memory or any of this stuff anymore. Synthesizing information via ChatGPT.

• 1:43:14Chris Williamson?

  Starnold Buttrus, there's some interesting studies that have come out looking at students who use ChatGPT to help them write essays, and their amount of recall compared with the students that didn't shock horror. It's like 10%.

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:43:27Chris Williamson?

  10 or 20% as much as if you'd done it yourself.

• 1:43:30Speaker 01

  Totally. So the psyop, in my opinion, I don't think it's an intentional psyop, but it's like, you know, if you were to create a psyop, it would be like... Oh, the evil AGI, like, we're gonna get some hard take off, you know, the iRobot scenario. It's like Will Smith and the robots, they wake up and they wanna just like destroy us all. I think if you really look at this stuff, it's statistics on steroids, you know, building a nerve agent with off-the-shelf components, very scary. Alignment stuff, very scary. Autonomous warfare systems, very scary. All of that stuff's very scary. The Nick Bostrom pie in the sky AGI, like, you know, they turn on us. I don't think so. And then the solution to that being chip in the brain, like, what? Like, that doesn't make sense.

• 1:44:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. It's, I, I've got Elliot Zukowski coming on.

• 1:44:17Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 1:44:17Chris Williamson?

  That'll be interesting. Bostrom was on last year talking about digital utopia, which was kind of his inverse of superintelligence. Superintelligence is what if it goes wrong? Digital utopia was what if it goes right?

• 1:44:27Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 1:44:28Chris Williamson?

  But interestingly, in a sort of classic philosopher's manner, he'd managed to look at, what if it goes right? And what would be wrong with it? It was like a, a study of what's wrong with what, with if it goes right. But yeah, I, I think the superintelligence was seminal. And to have a book that was a New York Times bestseller and is that, like,

• 1:44:51Chris Williamson?

  yeah, like, difficult to get through in some ways, like dense, very dense book, but fascinating. It's kind of like the dark souls of the popular science, uh, reading world, that it was just like, it was such a fucking tough, tough slog. But it was obviously really impactful. And it was born out of like the less wrong and the Scott Alexander-y world of the Robin Hanson-y type thing. And, um, you know, like, peak rationalist movement type stuff. But just didn't end up having that much predictive power.

• 1:45:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:27Chris Williamson?

  It didn't predict LLMs. It didn't predict sort of the model that was going to at least be the ascendant one now. And, you know, come 2018, when I started the show, I was fucking fascinated, dude. I had Stuart Russell on, who wrote Human Compatible, also the guy that wrote the textbook, the textbook for AI, right? It was translated into fucking gazillion languages and used all around the world. I, I, you know, super obsessed by all of this stuff. I tried to get Toby Ord on the show like gazillion times and that didn't fucking work.

• 1:45:59Chris Williamson?

  And it kind of, that future didn't really come to pass in that way. And in, you know, we, at least for now, given that all of the outcomes, pretty much all of the outcomes were atrocious, we can say that was probably a good thing.

• 1:46:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:46:12Chris Williamson?

  Right. I'm glad that he wasn't Cassandra, because it would have been a real problem if he was.

• 1:46:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:46:17Chris Williamson?

  But I, I don't think it had the predictive power, maybe, that we might have thought. And it just goes to show that even the people who are balls deep in the research of these things often can't see, and that was only 10 years.

• 1:46:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:30Chris Williamson?

  10, 11 years ago.

• 1:46:31Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:46:31Chris Williamson?

  And it's been, oh, I mean, L L M's kind of had been around for a little while. I think it was like 2010 when that's.

• 1:46:39Speaker 01

  Deep learning was like around that time and then transformers were 2018. So it's like, yeah.

• 1:46:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:46:47Chris Williamson?

  I don't know, it's just, it's, it's an interesting one to see.

• 1:46:52Chris Williamson?

  What are the other unknown unknowns that are going to sort of come about? Even in fields where there's super smart people that are really thinking deeply about this. And they've got armies of high IQ autists in internet forums, like really fucking contributing to this. And they're scraping it and thinking about it. And they've got all of these people in a council. You go, I don't know, man. And I think that that's where having

• 1:47:19Chris Williamson?

  the Oxford manner and renegade theories and allowing those to at least have a seat at the table every so often is useful because it's evident that by iteration, stuff doesn't always get predicted correctly. And it's like orthogonal moves.

• 1:47:33Speaker 01

  Always.

• 1:47:33Chris Williamson?

  Like up instead of left or right.

• 1:47:36Speaker 01

  Yes, it's always the sort of adjacent surprise. The only guarantee about the future is that it will surprise you. And it's, I, yeah, I mean, the armchair pundit is, is, is always wrong. So I think all of these things need to be super loosely held. And I love the, you know, the way you should comport yourself is what you said with, with real, you know, epistemic humility and collegiality with anybody talking about this stuff. Cause it's ultimately, a lot of this stuff too is like, it's like a theological debate. Like you could kind of guess based on somebody's like big five personality traits or like the way they think about things generally, like where they're going to shake out on especially issues like AI or UFOs where like, th- these are issues where, you know.

• 1:48:19Speaker 01

  I like to think the more you know, the more you know, and I do feel like I probably know more than the average person, but it's almost the more you know, the less you know in some sense, too. It's like, they're extremely, they touch on really deep truths about reality. We're groping in the dark and we just don't ultimately know. And so I think that everybody should sort of comport themselves accordingly.

• 1:48:40Chris Williamson?

  What ways might you be wrong when it comes to the UFO stuff?

• 1:48:46Speaker 01

  I'm probably very wrong about a lot of it, but I, I try to, again, always like, say, I'm thinking probabilistically. So the idea that like phenomenologically, there is something worthy of inquiry, where you have really credible people seeing stuff, we're getting like cross sensor data, you know, on that stuff, is the data that we're getting, you know, off of FLIR, for example, like the same thing people are seeing. In the case of Nimitz, it seemed like it because you had eyewitnesses present. And then one of them, you know, was, you know, Chad Underwood was like literally managing, you know, the FLIR sensor or whatever. And he's in the same, he's in the same craft as David Fravor.

• 1:49:28Speaker 01

  So he's in the same F-16. So, you know, but I think you have to think in probabilities all the way down. So it's like that until like, you know, in Area 51, we have a saucer that you can unveil. I can't say that in good faith, that for sure, we have some sort of saucer that we can unveil, especially knowing that I think in the past, you know, Ben Rich, who was the, you know, president of Skunk Works in the eighties, used to call UFOs unfunded opportunities. And I think explicitly, they used UFOs as tech protection for other sort of, you know, like the SR-71, Blackbird was like, that's a real stealth craft that's been unveiled now. The U2 spy plane, all of these things were mistaken as UFOs back in the day. So I think a lot of this stuff is prosaically explainable.

• 1:50:12Chris Williamson?

  What do you reckon, where do you put the probability of it being extraterrestrial versus secret tech that's human run for the phenomenon that's been spotted?

• 1:50:25Speaker 01

  This is what I love about, you know, the show I run, it's like UFOs and all the titles. As you know, YouTube doesn't do well with nuance. So, but like, the way I really view what I'm doing is like, I am flanking the truth. So like, if I can be at the forefront of the anti-gravity stuff, because Elon said-

• 1:50:44Speaker 01

  It was really interesting. He always says, there's nothing to see here. He jokes about the UFO thing. And then I think it was with Tucker. He was like, we have all these like, pretty like, impressive pilots coming out saying they've seen things. And then he goes, it was really interesting. He goes, actually, I think it's a, it's just American black military ops. You know, it's like these special access programs. That is a huge statement from Elon, because he's basically, unless he's saying that we have some sort of weird visual spoofing technology, which I don't think he was saying that, then he's saying that we have some sort of like anomalous propulsion modality that SpaceX isn't using. So he kind of painted himself into a corner there. So that's what I view that, I mean, I truly think the show is like at the

• 1:51:25Speaker 01

  forefront of like, the gravity stuff with Townsend Brown, with what happened at the Chapel Hill Conference in 1957, and the creation of quantum gravity and all that stuff. And then also, this like weird anomalous stuff that people are seeing in the sky. And then the third, kind of to make the iron triangle thing that I would say is consciousness, where it's the thing people can say the least about, but it's probably the most fundamental to everything when it comes to physics. And I think there are, you know, anomalies and interesting things when it comes to consciousness that modern science can't account for. And I think if you can stay at the front of the conversation in those three things, you can sort of V formation, or flank your way

• 1:52:06Speaker 01

  to the truth, triangulate the truth, if you will. But I'm always, I try to be super epistemically humble about the Brown stuff and the gravity. It's like, I'm not sure. I just, it's a really interesting fact pattern that I've, you know, I've, the, I interviewed, you know, deputy CTO of a spin up from, a spin out from Northrop Grumman, who they built the B2 cell bomber. And I said, in a room full of, this was like a founder's fund conference, a ton of entrepreneurs and VCs, I was like, well, of any of this stuff, what is actionable? Because we were talking about UFOs in this sort of metaphysical sense. And he goes, watch Jesse's video on Thomas Townsend Brown. So to me, it's like, and I've- I've had a lot of these experiences where I'm like, is anybody watching this interview

• 1:52:46Speaker 01

  that I'm doing? And like, this guy's credentials, like, he was a VP at the, he helped set up Army Futures Command, and like, ran a lot of the Army's most, you know, modern, tech modernization efforts. So he's like, a very real guy when it comes to this stuff. So I feel like you can kind of flank flank the truth, if you will, and, and, and think about everything sort of probabilistically, but in aggregate, you come to this high probability that we might be on the verge of a paradigm shift, especially with conventional physics sort of eating itself alive, as we just discussed.

• 1:53:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that is interesting. What's, why is, why is consciousness the third leg of this stool?

• 1:53:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I think consciousness is, it's the, you know, it's always the problem of, you know, Dave Chalmers would say it's like the, the hard problem of consciousness. It's like, you can't tell me I'm not a P zombie or whatever. Like, you know, I could be like some computer algorithm. Like, I interviewed the Google whistleblower for, for Lambda around the AI stuff. And he was like, convinced that Lambda was conscious. And I was like, I think it's just math on steroids. I think it's statistic on steroids. He was like, no, it's conscious. And, but we, it turns into this theological debate. We're like, there is no way to ultimately say whether something is conscious or not. But it's the most interesting thing about physics itself. Is it comporting itself to, or do we have an interface? And

• 1:54:12Speaker 01

  math and physics and all of the observable universe is sort of moving through this computational interface, you know, or is, do you live in this perfectly Cartesian dualist universe, where you are this measurement sensor, and then you have, you know, the world around you as this kind of hardcoded, you know, uh, you know, kind of fully fundamentally real thing. So like, you know, this is a table, and like, this is me, and like, there's like, no relationship outside of, you know, like, I'm just a measurement sensor of this, like, objective world. And

• 1:54:48Speaker 01

  There's no one on the conventional Citadel physics side who can say for sure that this debate has been, you know, fully put to rest. There's no way to put it to rest. And if you look at a lot of the early quantum field theorists, guys like, you know, von Neumann, who was known as the smartest guy at his time, he invented the mathematical underpinnings of quantum mechanics, but was a total polymath, a lot of modern computational principles. He and his, you know, colleague Jonathan Wigner, had a model of wave function collapse that involved the mind being part of wave function collapse. And just for the audience for context, a wave function, which is governed, you know, basically Schrodinger,

• 1:55:29Speaker 01

  you know, is this mid-century scientist, who basically came up with this, this equation that involves a wave function probability for where a subatomic particle might show up in some sort of eigenstate. And it's the square of the amplitude will define what eigenstate it collapses into. So all subatomic particles kind of exist probabilistically. They don't exist in these sort of discrete, you know, forms, particles until you observe them. And so it's this sort of, you know, particle wave duality or whatever. And so Wigner and von Neumann were like, actually, the mind might have to do with wave function collapse at a certain point in their careers. Pauli flirted with this. Heisenberg, you know,

• 1:56:12Speaker 01

  who is, you know, again, in charge of a lot of, or responsible for a lot of quantum mechanics and ran the entire, you know, Nazi, you know, nuke program, flirted with this. He has a great book called Life in Physics, where he sort of talks about these kind of more metaphysical discussions around how the mind might, you know, be involved in this. Schrodinger himself was sort of against this. But if you look at like, he had this lecture series called What is Life in 1944? And it was all around, you know, consciousness's disproportionate impact on biology and how consciousness is sort of fundamental. He had a dog that he called Atman, you know, based on the, you know, he had Atman and Brahman and, you know,

• 1:56:55Speaker 01

  kind of Hindu mythology. He was extremely interested in the Upanishads. And so a lot of these early quantum field theorists, or quantum mechanics theorists, would flirt with the idea that the mind collapsed the wave function. And now, if you were to talk to a modern physicist, they would say, no, it's a quantum, you know, in the double slit experiment, for example, it's the quantum detector. That's just the quantum detector. It doesn't matter whether an observer is present. They have no way to prove that. Like, the quantum detector might be holding a superposition of, you know, measurements itself that the observer is then, you know, measuring. There's literally no way to prove it. And while physics has went into this like cul-de-sac

• 1:57:35Speaker 01

  à la string theory and a lot of the discussions we're having, you have these really interesting fields of study that have popped up at pretty much every elite university in the US, or a lot of them. At Duke, they had the Ryan Institute, Stanford Research Institute, UCLA, Princeton Engineering and Anomalous Research Lab. All of these guys, in one form or another, studied what's known as parapsychology, which is, in its most rudimentary form, that the mind affects wave function collapse. None of the scientists that engaged in this, in these sorts of experiments, came out thinking that the mind didn't affect it, and there wasn't some sort of interface. It's really interesting. Like, the guy who ran the Princeton

• 1:58:20Speaker 01

  Engineering and Anomalous Research Lab is in charge of, you know, he's responsible for some modern plasma propulsion that are still used in satellites today. He was dean of the Princeton Engineering School. His name is Bob John. And he was, he wrote a whole book called, I think it was Marginal Realities or something. And it was about how like, there's some mental interface with the wave function. And he came up with a whole model, a physicalist model around how this might occur. In conventional physics, it's pretty much Roger Penrose is like sitting out on a, he's like the only guy like completely, you know, out on a limb, saying that there's this thing called orchestrated objective reduction. Maybe the microtubules collapse the wave function. But you have all these

• 1:59:02Speaker 01

  elite universities mid-century that said, we got weak but very real and statistically significant effects around the mind, you know, affecting the wave function. In this experiment known as random event generators, where you have a super rudimentary computer. So it's a computer that produces ones and zeros. You tie it to something that's conventionally thought of as random in quantum mechanics, or something like radioactive isotope decay, or a double slit experiment where you expect the same, you know, 50/50 distribution of, you know, both slits or whatever. And you have an observer come in, walk into the room. And you're seeing ones and zeros being produced on a graphical interface that's tied to this provably random thing. So it's literally the perfect digital coin flip, right? You'd expect over a long enough time scale with some standard deviation, expected standard

• 1:59:47Speaker 01

  deviation, the same amount of ones and zeros. All of these people got a statistically significant standard deviation with this experiment. And this is where it gets really crazy. The CIA had this sort of remote viewing, you know, program from, again, the 70s to the 90s where they were using remote viewing as a really important intelligence modality. In fact, the top remote viewer is a guy named Joseph McMonigal, and he won what's known as the Legion of Merit for over 200 instances in which he helped aid American intel with his insights that were drawn up psychically. Jimmy Carter, at the end of his presidency, said the craziest thing he'd ever experienced in his presidency, he's on record saying this,

• 2:00:29Speaker 01

  you can hear the audio, he says, "A woman named Rosemary Smith, they were looking for a TU-22 Russian spy plane, or cargo plane, rather, that had fallen below the treetops somewhere in Africa, and this woman circled a three-square-mile radius in Zaire, and they found the plane." So this was studied at the highest levels of the government. The CIA then contracted a woman who's still alive today, Jessica Utz, to do a meta statistical analysis, Huberman-style meta-study, you know, on this sort of stuff. She went on to become the president of the American Statistical Association in 2016. So you can go argue with the American Statistical Association president, I'm not going to. And she came

• 2:01:13Speaker 01

  out being like, "If this methodology and this level of skepticism and scrutiny were applied to any other field of science, it would be accepted immediately." Like, the other field would be accepted immediately because of the stigma, this field is not accepted.

• 2:01:27Chris Williamson?

  Why is there so much stigma?

• 2:01:29Speaker 01

  I think it's manufactured. I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I truly, I wish people sort of looked at this more. I mean, now it's starting to, the dam is starting to break, like, thanks to, you know, it's like Rogan and Sean Ryan and all these guys is like, there's all these like government whistleblowers coming out being like, the government's actually way weirder than you think. And we experience all these like trippy things inside of it. So I do think the dam is breaking somewhat, but I don't, I don't know why, you know, why people aren't more open minded.

• 2:02:02Chris Williamson?

  Is this related to the telepathy tapes? Have you seen those?

• 2:02:05Speaker 01

  Yes, it's perfectly related to the telepathy tapes. It's, it's, yes. So the telepathy tapes is a podcast that surpassed all podcasts. Modern Wisdom, Joe Rogan, everything. It was for a little bit. It was like for a month or something. It was the number one podcast in America. And it was all these autistic, non-verbal children across the United States saying, basically repeatedly showing, and this was, I should caveat this. This was not done in double blind settings, so this needs to be done. Simultaneous to that, I think anybody that listens to all the tapes and you're reasonably open minded, will say there's obviously something going on that's interesting here, where they'll have, you know,

• 2:02:47Speaker 01

  the mother in another room generating, you know, an image on an iPad and then the, the son or daughter, the autistic, non-verbal kid in another room, totally isolated. They'll see some image pop up and like, not even statistically significant, like 19 out of 20 times, they'll know what the image the, the mother or father are seeing. And often it's, it's, they call it remote perception because it's actually the mind meld that's more fundamental than them just being able to see something in objective time space. It's, it's their, their ability to kind of meld with their parents, which kind of makes sense. Like you interviewed Rupert Sheldrake, I remember a few years ago. A lot of that kind of lines up with that sort of anecdotal, it's not anecdotal, I mean, experimental findings. He doesn't have amazing theories.

• 2:03:32Speaker 01

  I would say the morphic resonance stuff is, it's a sort of a placeholder theory, but he's not a bad empiricist. Like the experimental protocols aren't bad. So these kids will, they'll meet up on this telepathic hill and they'll talk to each other and they're, they'll exchange information. It's this fascinating thing. And I do think there are more high agency people. Interested in this stuff and who have studied it rigorously than meet the eye. Like, I'll give you an example. My closest mentor runs a multi-billion dollar hedge fund. And he's impressive in that context, like a high performer in that context. He is good at computer science.

• 2:04:13Speaker 01

  He probably has like a 200 IQ or something, like really, really smart dude. He helped Bob John, the guy I mentioned, the Princeton Engineering and Anomalous Research guy. He helped him run the lab for 10 years. And he is the highest integrity guy I know. He is fully, fully high conviction on these random event generator experiments. And he would say, he would bring the physicists from, you know, Princeton into the lab. And they'd say, look, like, this is really important. This is like breaking your models. And they would say stuff like, oh, no, it's like a file drawer issue or survivorship bias. Like all the kind of heuristics that you would use to like break a scientific experiment. And he would go through each thing line by line, like, no, it's not file drawer.

• 2:04:58Speaker 01

  We accounted for that with this. No, it's not survivorship bias. We counted for it with this. No, it's really cohort wide and we controlled for all these other things. Like extremely, if you met this guy, you'd be very impressed by him. And he's like, they just wouldn't listen. They're just like, like it was literally, and you look at these things. I mean, the idea that the universe might be computational in nature and we might be rendering it. That we might be sort of rendering a substrate that is computational. Like in, you know, for, when you see an interface, you know, like on, on your computer, you see icons, right? You don't see the underlying thing. Like you need like a code compiler to like, you know, abstract, to take like the ones and zeros and turn it into like this larger abstracted out thing.

• 2:05:43Speaker 01

  And you don't see like electromagnetic waves, right? Like you see like, you have to iconize it like red, you know, is this like, oh, I'm scared red. You know, like they're evolution, there's, it's evolutionarily adaptive to, to sort of do that. There are all these physicists that talk about like the participatory universe. So they would go right up until the kind of parapsychological line of like the mind would collapse wave function. But I think they got spooked or they would flirt with it privately and they wouldn't sort of get into it. So John Wheeler had this participatory universe. He talked about it from bit and computational universe. And he would say that basically like wave function collapse is basically just a bunch of yes, no questions. So it's kind of like binary

• 2:06:26Speaker 01

  code, if you will. But he would never go up and he would never get into like the mind is actually the thing collapsing the wave function. But then you have all this interesting data coming out that maybe the mind does collapse the wave function. And you have things like, okay, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, where if you measure position of a subatomic particle, momentum gets fuzzier. That looks like a computational caching function to me. So that looks like you're only storing one of those in local memory.

• 2:06:54Chris Williamson?

  What's the implication of that?

• 2:06:57Speaker 01

  The implication of that is that you are, there's some deeper substrate that is kind of computational of the universe, and you are a local node, and you are rendering your reality live. And I don't know what it is exactly that you're, is it intention? I know that's like a really woo woo term. Like you can go to like a new agey conference and they'll talk about the secret and manifestation and all that stuff. I think a lot of people in their lives probably say, like, if I were to say, Chris, do you have anything that's happened in your life that's like been well below chance, that's felt like this just impossible synchronicity? You'd probably say yes, I assume. You know, like, most people, if you were to poll, they would sort of say that. And then they would sort of quickly walk

• 2:07:42Speaker 01

  it back and be like, you know, but like, it's sort of impossible, you know, given physics. But there are all these things, even the way that golden ratio and Fibonacci sequences like used in a lot of geometric structures all over Earth or whatever, or Planck's constant, if it were slightly off, like, we wouldn't have a habitable environment, like the anthropic principle. You know, that points, I think, towards probably something that is more computational in nature. The Sheldrake stuff with morphic resonance, again, I don't know about his, the theories behind it, but just the empirical observations that if you build a crystal structure, and then you build that crystal structure again, it's

• 2:08:26Speaker 01

  easier the second and third time to build the same crystal structure if you have a novel structure. To me, it's because uploading times are slower than downloading times. You have in sports, the Bannister effect. Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile in 1952. It was broken 10 times in the next two and a half years. It's as if doing something new and novel takes longer to upload to some monad, some central repository of data or whatever. You are client side, that's server side. And the new incremental person that does this does it that much quicker and easier. It's like, you know, Sheldrake shows this with crossword puzzles. You do it a little bit quicker if a thousand people have done it before you.

• 2:09:09Speaker 01

  So like, I think we'll end up with some model of the universe that might be computational in nature. Nobody can disprove that. Nobody, I can't prove that definitively, but nobody, no scientist can ultimately disprove that. And all I'm saying here is that way more serious physicists and thinkers have sort of flirted with this idea than I think people realize. And then meanwhile, you have, you know, Sabina Hossenfeld or Eric Weinstein and Sean Carroll, like, you know, in this crazy argument about nothing.

• 2:09:37Chris Williamson?

  Jesse, you're awesome, dude. Fuck, this is like a tour de force of stuff. And I love your pod, I love your channel. I think it's, I think it's sick. Tell people where they should go to check it out.

• 2:09:45Speaker 01

  They should go to Jesse Michaels on YouTube. Jesse Michaels on Spotify. Jesse Michaels official on Instagram. And I love your channel too, man. I, I've been really inspired by modern wisdom and I've, I've watched you for, I don't know, three, four years. And it's been so cool to see you just blow up. So thank you for having me, man.

• 2:10:04Chris Williamson?

  And for you, let's run this back soon, dude. I appreciate you.

• 2:10:06Speaker 01

  Let's do it, man. Cool.