Matthew Pines: Anti-Gravity Tech & Inter-Dimensional Aliens

Remove your personal information from the web at https://joindeleteme.com/JESSE20 and use code JESSE20 for 20% off. DeleteMe international Plans: https://international.joindeleteme.com In today's episode of American Alchemy, Jesse Michels sits down with Matthew Pines, a national security expert and Fellow at the Bitcoin Policy Institute, to explore the intersections of secret physics programs, elite networks, and UAP disclosure. From the CIA's founding to mid-century breakthroughs in theoretical physics, and the role of gatekeepers in modern UFO revelations, this conversation dives into alternate histories and the future of humanity. Support American Alchemy by Becoming a YouTube Member: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuG2KzrIMe3qoNcuDVpwnXw/join SPOTIFY ➤ https://tinyurl.com/jessemichelsspotify DISCORD ➤ https://discord.gg/jessemichels INSTAGRAM (Personal) ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichels INSTAGRAM (Show) ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichelsofficial TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [email protected] Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 01:27 - Current Affairs 12:20 - Trump’s Next 4 Years 23:16 - UFOs 40:02 - Alternate US History 55:19 - Secret Physics Program 01:04:32 - Modern Theoretical Physics 01:33:10 - Theories of Consciousness 02:01:10 - Ascension / Timelines / Simulation 02:32:15 - Next Phase of Humanity / Big Tech 02:44:40 - UFO Gatekeepers / Modern Disclosure 02:58:01 - China / UFO Disclosure / UAP Task Force 03:10:50 - Alien Hierarchy / Space Programs 03:19:41 - Mormonism / Elon Musk 03:28:31 - Mid Century Physics Breakthroughs 03:39:50 - Secrets Physics Program (Continued) 03:47:01 - AI & UFOs 03:59:12 - Next Steps in UFO Disclosure Original music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LlLRudDi60Uy4jcmOSEs1 *** AMERICAN ALCHEMY is an original series hosted by Jesse Michels that explores the frontier of science and tech. Each week, we bring you exclusive interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our time. #physics #theoreticalphysics #uap #americanalchemy #jessemichels #aliens #space #elonmusk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Just the other day, some people inside DOD intel and I was told one of the things came out of the water and zapped, hit somebody. They think, how could they get here? It's like, well, are they coming here from the planet over there or are they coming from branch of space not that far away?

• 0:15Jesse Michels?

  Who's in charge? Who's like the ultimate gatekeeper? It feels like there is. It's this like disjointed cargo cult.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  Any imperial system, when it runs into trouble, first thing it does is it cannibalizes the periphery.

• 0:26Jesse Michels?

  Things seem to be kind of unraveling quickly.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  Someone basically has, you know, virtually matrix dust.

• 0:32Jesse Michels?

  Yes. I think the brain itself is probably, you know, maybe a room temperature quantum system.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  It was communication with some NHI. It was like, what's going on? Like, why are you here or something? It was like CIA wizards are messing with the timeline.

• 0:43Jesse Michels?

  He became convinced that there is kind of this secret branch of physics.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  I don't know how conspiratorial it is if you just look at all of human history. We have classified entire areas of fundamental physics before.

• 0:53Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  Don't think we can do the same for AI. What is the nature of the interaction between human society, human institutions and non-human intelligence? And they said, it's a triangle. AI, quantum and the Grush stuff. What the hell is actually happening?

• 1:08Jesse Michels?

  Here with Matthew Pines, who's quickly become one of my favorite thinkers on the UFO topic and I think in general, as far as tracking what's going on in the US and the world today. And so I'm really excited to have you. You first came on my radar. You went on a show called Mr. Obnoxious and I recommend everybody listen to this because it's such a cogent synthesis of what's happening in UAP UFO world today from a legislative perspective, how you view kind of, you know, control systems over the topic and also, you know, public sentiment. But you also, you come from kind of an interest that you have a crypto background and you're Director of Intelligence at Sentinel One. And so I thought

• 1:49Jesse Michels?

  this was a very fitting week for us to talk. We've had a, you know, very conclusive election results and things are shifting in a particular direction with the election of Trump. And so how are you viewing the election?

• 2:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I try not to, you know, read into what most people look at and who's of a Exit polls or demographic shifts, but trying to think like, what's the vibe? Like, how would we look at this sort of through the lens of American history? It seems like the closest analogy is sort of America's perestroika, which, as you know, perestroika in the Soviet system came with Glasnost, right? So reform and opening up. I think that is sort of maybe the closest template to look to, to kind of think through the shift that we're going through. And in terms of the canonical kind of political economy that we're witnessing evolve in real time, it's sort of this new anti-establishment, kind of this heterogeneous alignment of different

• 2:45Speaker 00

  political forces, you know, going after and essentially displacing, we're in the process of potentially displacing, kind of the old establishment. And in the Soviet system, this was sort of, you know, you had the old establishment, somewhat decaying institutional structures that were no longer able to kind of keep pace with the rate of change and external events and sort of an internal sense of sclerosis. And that was coming under twin pressures, both from within, a sense of like endogenous reform, we need to sort of get ahead of the curve, as well as external pressures, right? That wanted to break that system from the outside. And I think that's kind of the tension, the friction that we're seeing play out is, you know, external forces that want to essentially break or, you know, reset to a certain extent, these decaying institutional structures.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  And then maybe a competing mode, which is like the folks that are currently kind of that, the avatars of sort of that managerial technocracy that are, you know, trying to find a, trying to find a balance between tearing everything down versus sort of internal reform. And I think that was essentially the, like, the implicit fight. And it seems like the, you know, more structural perestroika argument won out, right?

• 3:52Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  And that's, I think, what we're going to head into, is this era of, I know how successful it will be, how controlled or orderly versus, you know, messy, it will be, it remains to be seen. But I think that is, you know, I think the current. The current phase shift that we're heading into.

• 4:08Jesse Michels?

  What do you think? Because this is an open question for me, you know, like last time around, Trump got elected, he promised to quote unquote, drain the swamp. And then he goes on to hire Milley and John Bolton and like a lot of usual suspects when it comes to, you know, Washington, what he would probably now call swampland or whatever. And Bolton even, I think is on air saying like, I tricked Trump into hiring me or something. And a lot of, you know, Trump, the end of Trump's campaign was sort of, you know, saying he's not going to hire these people. Does he just hire a lot of the same kind of managerial technocrats? Or is this truly a new coalition of your, you know, Tulsi's Vivek's, you know, RFK juniors that do kind of quote unquote, drain the swamp?

• 4:52Speaker 00

  It remains to be seen. I think that you're probably going to see a huge amount of churn over the transition as to see which of these different, you know, factional power bases, you know, come out on top in various administrative bureaucracies that get appointments and whatnot. And if you look back at the, you know, the Soviet version of this, you know, perestroika was, was a similar alliance of kind of, you know, internal technocrats, deep sort of quote, deep state, like security state figures from the KGB and, and sort of oligarchs, right? Now, our version of that is sort of, you know, this funhouse mirror where you have kind of this alliance of some maybe sort of ejected technocrats, folks that were technocrats at one point, but were sort of turned against the systems they were sort of forged in,

• 5:34Speaker 00

  aligned with, you know, our version of the, of the sort of these tech oligarchs, you know, Elon, Thiel, et cetera. And, you know, I think there is also a power base inside what we call our, our security state services that, that are definitely also on board, right? And so I think this is, you know, those are very loose, diverse coalitions. I don't know how stable they are. They weren't that stable in the Soviet system as it went through its, its pretty tumultuous transformation. And they're always, you know, the, the, Israel is high wire acts, right? In terms of how. Do they manage to do the kind of controlled reform and then, you know, essentially springboard, right, into, you know, to sort of reinvigorate, renovate these institutions, you know, kind

• 6:16Speaker 00

  of strip out, you know, the, the, the, sort of the rotten floorboards, but the overall infrastructure of the house remains intact. And then they renovate it and it's a beautiful new house. You know, we start tearing through walls, sometimes you hit something that's load bearing, right? And so in any process like this, there's inherent risk. There's inherent risk that you could just, you could hit something that's load bearing in the system. And then you're dealing, then you're dealing with a crisis. And that's why they're trying to figure out, okay, what's the right balance between the folks that want to like, burn it all down versus kind of the traditional technocrats that come in to fill it out, right? And I think Trump has the sense that in his first administration, it was, it was imbalanced, right? In a sense, it was, he was kind of cocooned. A lot of his, his initiatives were kind of smothered. And I think he's now gonna swing in the other direction. I think

• 6:58Speaker 00

  his default is gonna be much more to sort of let loose the Viveks and the RFKs and the Elons. But we'll see. I mean, I also look at these as like, these are very big personalities, right? So I'm, the one observation I hadn't seen too many people make, that was always curious to me about Trump's, like, especially the, the, you know, the more recent part of the campaign was just how many big personalities he brought on board?

• 7:20Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  Like, he's a big personality. Like, he has a huge ego.

• 7:22Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  He's, he needs to be in the spotlight.

• 7:24Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  Right? And yet he was somehow comfortable.

• 7:27Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 7:27Speaker 00

  Sharing the spotlight with these huge personalities that command a lot of attention. Elon, these guys, you know, they have their own platform, they have their own, almost like, somewhat equivalent power base to a certain extent. And that's, that's a different mode. When, you know, first, you know, Trump 1.0 would brook nobody like that, right? At, you know, he had to be the center of the, of, of the attention.

• 7:47Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, you could easily see a world where Elon and Trump have some major public falling out. And like, what, what happens in that world? I don't quite know.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah, that's the thing. It's like, everything now is copacetic. You know, they got the energy of the wind, they're all aligned, et cetera. Yeah, fast forward six months, and you're, you're actually governing, right? You actually have to make hard trade offs. There's got to be, you know, certain priorities that don't get, that don't get everyone, that don't check off everyone's boxes. And that's where you'll see the friction potentially emerge.

• 8:18Jesse Michels?

  Is there change you're more bullish on and change you're more bearish on? So it's like the Make America Healthy Again movement, reforming, you know, the FDA vis a vis both food and drugs? Getting us out of wars, crypto reform, you know, UFOs and JFK, like, uh, how would you slap probabilities on, you know, all of these things? That's probably a very hard question.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, well, cause it's almost like looking at the Soviet system, it was not, it was chaotic, right? And, and I think it was very much, um, I think, I think we should expect a certain element of chaos. Um, not necessarily like complete disaster, but just the, the idea of being able to predict what's going to happen the next day, the next week, the next month, like that will not be feasible, right? I think when you're going through this era where those two, you know, major structural impulses are now being, um, pushed in terms of perestroika, kind of a structural reform, it's kind of coming in like a hostile force and, you know, purging essentially elements of the bureaucracies. Like there's going to be just, it's going to get really messy. This would be my baseline expectation. At the same time that you have, you know, and I think Trump just gave like

• 9:25Speaker 00

  a three minute speech where it was just like, it was basically him announcing Glasnost, right? We're going to have truth and reconciliation commissions. We're going to have, you know, we're going to, we're going to unseal all these records. We're going to like, you know, peel back the, the curtain on all this stuff. I mean, that's basically him announcing Glasnost, right? Um, now, once you do that, right? There's a reason why I think those things haven't been made public for various reasons, but it's like, because they would create, you know, a lot of uncertainty and a lot of, um, uncomfortable questions, uh, to go back. And there's going to be just a lot for us all to have to kind of deal with and process all at the same time. So it might just be overwhelming, right? Levels of just sort of information flow, disclosures of various information, as well as just the, the normal

• 10:07Speaker 00

  pillars of the institutional bureaucracies being, being, uh, sort of, you know, facing a pretty severe test.

• 10:14Jesse Michels?

  Do you think like snapshot three months from today, we all know who killed JFK?

• 10:22Speaker 00

  I mean, I think that RFK will be rooting to dig that out, right? I think, you know, this is, I think, I would say 50/50. I never want to say 100% because you never know. But I'd say, you know, this, there's going to be a lot that's going to come out. The question is, though, like, how much it's going to come with context? Like, usually, these sorts of historical questions, this is almost like a mirror image, or it's a sort of isomorphic to the UAP question in the sense of how much of this is catastrophic, right? Disclosure, which is, all comes out all at once. There's no storyline necessarily attached to it. There's no phased sort of narrative management that allows sort of, you know, people that

• 11:04Speaker 00

  don't pay attention to these things to kind of understand it in a phased way that incorporates it into their mental models, to understand that the sky isn't falling, versus, you know, there is a, you know, here it is. There you go. Deal with it. And I think there's going to be twin impulses and different power structures inside the Trump administration that will be pushing in those two different directions. Right now, it seems like the just let it all out impulse is, has the upper hand. And that seems to be, you know, what I would expect from the sort of surprise magnitude of the win. I think they were relatively confident they would win the presidency, but I don't think they expected or were banking on having unified government. And so now that they do, the sort of aperture of possibility spaces have now sort of shifted. And now that's sort of, that has a momentum to it.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  And that momentum will likely play out until it, you know, until it triggers, you know, other, other, other problems potentially, and then they might try to dial it back. But right now, we seem to be in that momentum towards open up everything.

• 12:02Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. And what do you think happens on the kind of geopolitical or foreign policy front? You know, I feel like Trump, maybe the more armchair thing that like I would always kind of disagree with, with Trump on in his last campaign, was that he would, he would always say things like, you know, Russia, Ukraine wouldn't have happened if I were president. Like, you know, Israel, you know, wouldn't be sort of blowing up if, you know, if, if I were president. And I think on the Israel... You know, Casey, the Abraham Accords, which he engaged in, were actually really positive. And then, you know, maybe he did, you know, Putin did respect him more or something. So directionally, maybe I agree with him, but like, when it comes to the details and disentangling from these sort of conflicts, I think it's just way more complicated.

• 12:46Jesse Michels?

  You know, vis a vis US interests in Ukraine, um, you know, our relationship with Israel historically and the sort of leverage there. It just, it doesn't feel like whose president really might even matter all that much. And so what do you think happens there? Things are heating up with China, obviously.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  I mean, I think it's not settled which direction his foreign policy will take across these different theaters. I think it's pretty clear Ukraine will be a negotiated settlement. Probably on unfavorable terms, you know, relative to, you know, a counterfactual for Ukraine. But I think that's pretty much a clear signal that I've seen is just, yeah, they're gonna reach some sort of settlement and then it's gonna be about, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars of reconstruction contracts. I think he's also sent a signal to Bibi that, um, you know, he can go gloves off until he gets elected and then he wants him to wrap up the conflict. So I'd expect a surge in Lebanon over the next, you know, month or two. And then that will, that will wind down.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  And then we'll see what sorts of quote maximum pressure campaign gets restarted against Iran. Again, you know, unclear how that would, whether reach a, another negotiation settlement or whether, you know, he would do kind of his traditional Trump, Trumpian sort of brinkmanship, right? Sort of like with North Korea, threaten nuclear war, fire and fury, take us to the pretty, pretty close and then essentially become best buddies, right? Probably walk across the DMZ.

• 14:09Jesse Michels?

  Art of the deal.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  You know, it's like, you know, I think it's brinkmanship and, and, you know, kind of uncertainty. He'd be even said like he would bring Bolton into the room because his, his, his interlocutor, head of state would know Bolton is like a warhawk maniac who was just ready to pull the trigger at a second's notice.

• 14:25Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 14:26Speaker 00

  And so the fact that Bolton is in the room is sort of like a negotiating tactic, right? Like, don't let, I got this guy pushing for war. Like, I would rather not fight you, but like, he's, he's ready to go.

• 14:34Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  Right? You got your, got your buddy of those, well, he's a little bit of a loose cannon.

• 14:37Jesse Michels?

  Good cop, bad cop.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  Um, so we'll see, right? A lot of this is person, is driven by, by personnel. China, of course, is the elephant in the room. I think there is still a big debate. Even within the different Trump factions over like what should be the approach towards China. There are some like, you know, very China hawks that want to sort of pivot away from these other theaters, negotiate those settlements, sort of concentrate our resources to contain China, to deter China. And there's others who are just want to basically like this great power competition, this increasing sort of militancy and sort of tit for tat sanctions, export controls, et cetera. They're bad for business and we should just do a grand bargain with China. That might involve subtly selling Taiwan out, but you know, at the end of the day, it's a deal.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  And a deal resets, resolves tensions, et cetera. So I think there was, that is for me, the biggest geopolitical macro question is which of those different China opinions kind of plays out.

• 15:32Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, he had a real split in his cabinet the last time around between kind of, you know, Wilbur Ross type. You know, he's close with Schwartzman and stuff and like, oh yeah, Schwartzman wasn't in his cabinet. But like you had these guys who were like, it's very pro-China. And then you had all these hawks who were, you know, extremely, you know, the Josh Rogan book Chaos Under Heaven that describes this sort of split. And so, yeah, I'm curious to see what wins out.

• 16:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, and right now, I mean, I've, I've been asking these questions, other people that you would think would know are asking this. Like who's, who's going to be Trump's China team? And it's like, anybody, like Trump doesn't know who his China team is going to be, right? Like this is the, this is the moment where all these different factions, all the different people jockeying for, for cabinet positions and other senior appointments, the knives are out, right? They're just coming after each other, right?

• 16:21Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, like Peter Navarro and Matt Pottinger, all these guys who were super hawkish. And then, yeah, and so Michael Pillsbury. And then, and then, yeah, and then you have, and it seemed like it's sort of netted out that Trump was kind of hawkish on the trade stuff, but then he was kind of lulled to sleep on COVID. And he had all these assurances from Xi that he wouldn't, you know, invade Taiwan. And he was kind of tricked on the PPE question with COVID. And so, yeah, and it turned into this sort of schizophrenic foreign policy or something.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I also think on the part of this is going to be like geopolitics is often deeply connected to these economic monetary shifts. And.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  There is, I think, somewhat nascent, but I've seen memos written that sort of try to codify what would be like a dramatic geo-economic shift that would be triggered in 2025. And this isn't even the Bitcoin stuff. That'd be like icing on, that'd be like, you know, kerosene on the fire. But like a Nixon-style shock where that has essentially a larger strategic logic, which is essentially the US-dominated geopolitical and economic position is under challenge, right? We both have domestic endogenous instabilities in terms of our financial system, the increasing debt costs that we're going to be committed

• 17:40Speaker 00

  to the next few years, and a sense of increasing challenge from innovation and industrial ecosystem in Eurasia, principally centered in China, and this loose alliance of Eurasian countries, Russia, Iran, North Korea, China, that actually have significant industrial, technological, and sort of, and energy resources. And they want to challenge and sort of upset the legacy kind of international economic and political geopolitical order. So the logic is sort of, okay, how do you like, hold the line, right? Between kind of this legacy hegemonic system the US has built up, and these sort of rising, sort of revanchist

• 18:23Speaker 00

  challengers. And the play is essentially to sort of make more explicit the function of the US as a global empire, right? As an imperial dollar system. And where we essentially control the access to dollar credit, and increasingly, we can sort of gate access to our advanced technology ecosystems, or AI models and the associated infrastructure. And you can imagine him setting up essentially a tech and tariff and security umbrella, where there's a club. If you want to get into the club, you're gonna have to pay. Right? So if you want to get access to our AI and infrastructure models, if you want to get access to, you know, dollar system in a favorable fashion, swap lines, et cetera, if you want to, you know, have us reinforce and not abandon our security commitments to you, well, you're

• 19:06Speaker 00

  gonna have to pay. And that payment might take the form of essentially a coerced swap. Of either, either or, and their gold reserves, their FX reserves, which usually, you know, short-term bills for century bonds. So that would help us term out our debt, right? It would relieve some of this acute interest burden. It would, you know, there's already some talk about, you know, Trump being trust, you know, like Liz Truss, when like there was a gilt market crisis, right? And that she had abandoned some of her political, um, sort of, you know, projects because, you know, she had basically had to deal with the disorderly, um, you know, gilt market. And so already you see the 10-year, the long end of the yield curve starting to spike. So the question is, okay, how do you have essentially to geopolitically like yield curve control? Well, you force those foreign

• 19:49Speaker 00

  pools of capital, sovereign wealth funds, et cetera, to swap their short-term, uh, you know, exposures in their gold for century bonds. And that importantly would be non-marketable, right? So they can't just sell them. They can only, you know, repo them at the Fed for par-dollar liquidity if they run into any sort of dollar funding issues. And that would be a pretty high-leverage play. And then if you get some of their gold and you can term out your debt, then you can do things like, say, remonetize gold, right? Which is currently just like marked to, you know, 1970s, uh, you know, $35 an ounce. So if you remark gold, say, to $5,000 an ounce, you just now can, you know, credit the Treasury General Account with a trillion dollars of liquidity. Um, and you could do a lot with that. You could buy Bitcoin. You could do strategic investments in your manufacturing,

• 20:33Speaker 00

  industrial base, um, you know, just, you know, you could fund a lot of those sorts of industrial projects. Um, and then threaten, I don't think he's going to do universal tariffs, but threaten sort of company-specific tariffs, right? To sort of intimidate and sort of, you know, threaten them. And hey, if you're going to reshore, friendshore to Mexico, well, actually, no, you're in a friendshore to Ohio now, right? And then maybe we'll do some complicated, you know, backdoor subsidy, right? But like, you will get the thing domestic. I think that's what I would expect is this. But to do that, you're essentially, you're, you're kind of pulling the rug on the treasury market, right? Which is the foundation of US geopolitical dominance the last 70 years. So we'd essentially be admitting the jig is up, that like, yes, like, we're effectively imposing financial repression and capital controls on our, on our, on our allies and partners, but that's what we

• 21:17Speaker 00

  got to do, because we got to win, right? And, and then there might be a whole Separate, you know, subplot of this where Bitcoin gets monetized alongside gold or even instead of gold. But would have a similar effect, maybe without the explicit geopolitical coercion. Because we don't actually have to like force the swap. We can just essentially, you know, rapidly monetize Bitcoin at the expense of their existing holdings. And then maybe, you know, defray some of the domestic costs. So it's mostly overseas, you know, financial repression. Like any imperial system, when it runs into trouble, right? Or it's getting, it's getting challenged. The first thing it does is it cannibalizes the periphery to sort of reinforce the core. It's like you go all have, you know, you get collective benefits in theory from being part of this imperial system. We give you protection, we secure global trade.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  And in exchange, though, you know, we have to pay for this military that's going to deploy and secure these trade routes. Again, it's a high risk play because do we actually have the juice to do that, right? Can we actually tell the Europeans to hand over their gold?

• 22:13Speaker 00

  Can we actually, you know, commit to the security side of it? Can we act, it seems like in the, the horn, um, in the, you know, of Africa and the Middle East that like the Houthis can basically block a major maritime trading route indefinitely. So it's like, these are like where the paper plans at, you know, kind of the elite back room door level. You know, ultimately have to be implemented and executed in the real world across all the instruments of national power. And I don't know if we've got the competency to do that.

• 22:39Jesse Michels?

  That's a fascinating strategy, though, and, and Trump, who's not a fan of NAFTA. It almost sounds like a modern, modern version of NAFTA where it's like you get the same sort of, you know, maybe defense auspice or whatever. But, uh, very different kind of, you know, monetary relationship.

• 22:54Speaker 00

  And the UFO thing might play into that, which is, you know, on, on the, on the margin. If it's like, if we even want to hint that, hey, you know, we've got some special stuff. Like, you know, you might want to pay to get into this club, right? It's like a little inducement to, it's like, hey, you know, you might be doubting us. Maybe we're, you know, a bit, a bit, a bit chaotic. Maybe we don't have the naval production juice that we used to have, but we got some special stuff here. And so you want, if you even want the hope of, of getting access to it, you got to get into the club.

• 23:24Jesse Michels?

  That's kind of immediately where my mind went when we're talking about AI. It's like we've, we've had conversations about possible, you know, secret. The book's physics and you know, materials, you know, all this stuff comes up in UFO land. If we have access to that alongside AI, that's a pretty interesting suite of asymmetric advantage when it comes to defense and all sorts of technology. And so do you think you you almost seem to think that this might get used as leverage? Where it's like you you get access to the goods, but you have to play nicely.

• 23:56Speaker 00

  I am trying to mentally model Trump as much as I can, right? And this guy, he's not a guy, I think, truly motivated about these cosmic questions. I don't know if he even, you know, has a framework for it.

• 24:07Jesse Michels?

  His Uncle John might have been.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I think he he understands almost viscerally like, what's a good bargaining chip? Like, where where does he how what leverage points does he have, right? And I think if he if he's, I believe he's been briefed on some aspects of his legacy programs. I and of course, you know, there's speculation exactly how much he knows, etc. But I'm pretty confident he knows at least broad contours that this is real. I think his first reaction is going to be, OK, how do I use this? Right? How do I leverage this in my larger, you know, in my larger play here? And I think it'd be pretty obvious, like, pretty, you know, ace in the hole sort of leverage. If you play it right, because I don't know what other second and third order details of that story that come into play, right?

• 24:51Speaker 00

  There might be other other equities and other, you know, like Lou Lazzando hints of like other drivers of this. Yeah, so I think it's an over determined question. But it just in this narrow slice of the kind of where this could sort of insert or how could it play into the geopolitical dynamics of a Trump administration? I think it would, you know, have a it would be seen as something to to leverage in a certain way.

• 25:14Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, when he understands leverage and he's a he's a good dealmaker. And I think, you know, say what you will about the guy, but historically, I think a lot of his deals have made more sense on. But if he he criticizes deals made by the other side, whether it was, you know, the Paris Accords or the Ben Rhodes, you know, Obama Iran nuclear deal, which you could say is partially responsible for where we are now. And Trump does seem. You know, unpredictable, it seems like he throws some volatility into the system or something, but he acts very on behalf of the US, I think, in an aggressive way that he's just used to doing from his business career. And I think he is, he is sort of good at that. So it would make sense, right?

• 25:56Jesse Michels?

  If you have all this leverage that you're not aware of in the form of the UFO thing, ideally you'd be interested in what's going on there?

• 26:04Speaker 00

  But if I, if I accept that premise, though, it does make kind of a loose prediction of what form of disclosure to expect, right? You would expect the form of disclosure that would maximize that type of leverage, right? So then you'd have to make some conditional assessments of, okay, what in the universe of stipulated information that's behind the curtain, which subset of the information would accrue maximum leverage in this strategy and which would not? And then I would expect that subset to be the part that gets released and the other information to be kept secret.

• 26:34Jesse Michels?

  Well, is it, is it like, is the nuclear thing a good analogy where it's like you have nuclear trade secrets, but nuclear physics is sort of broadly disclosed? Or is that a counter lesson where it's like, no, Klaus Fuchs like took our, you know, actual nuclear trade secrets, we were not, we were too loose with that, you know, maybe, maybe we should be, you know, more buttoned up when it comes to UFOs?

• 26:56Speaker 00

  Well, this, yeah, this, the key answer to that question is really premised on how much knowledge and or capability do we assume has already been leaked?

• 27:03Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  Right? And if you read the language and, you know, it's come out of the Senate, you know, in order to mitigate the possibility of foreign technology surprise, the US government must broaden awareness of, quote, "historical exotic technology antecedents previously provided by the federal government for research and development purposes." Right? So if you read, if you parse that line, it's like, in order to mitigate the possibility of foreign technology surprise.

• 27:26Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 27:27Speaker 00

  Meaning, in order to make it a possibility that China, and, you know, demonstrates they've got some stuff figured out. The federal government must broaden awareness of historical exotic technology antecedents, you know, the stuff in Lockheed's basement that had been previously provided by the federal government for research and development purposes.

• 27:46Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  Didn't say provided to, to who, it's, you know, the Lockheed's basement. But that's basically, that is like the distilled logic of at least the Senate's view of this, of this trade off, meaning we've kept the stuff under lock and key to do R and D for many decades, but now we have to broaden awareness of those programs to mitigate China getting the jump on us.

• 28:09Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 28:09Speaker 00

  That's basically the story.

• 28:10Jesse Michels?

  Which is, which is an admission that China has a baseline level of knowledge, right? Because in the world in which they don't, then you just keep the thing locked up in your Indiana Jones vault, you never talk about it with anybody. But the world in which they do, it becomes this game theory thing. You need some broader awareness around the top. You can't have, it's not adaptive for American national security to have the average, you know, precocious STEM student in Kentucky or whatever is growing up, just thinking that, you know, string theory is the only answer and that, you know, maybe there aren't some more interesting exotic frameworks and material and all of that.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, when the US and the Soviets really had the only industrial technological and scientific ecosystems for most of the 20th century. And so like all the leading physics research, leading then sort of technology development, transfer was taking place in relatively controlled state-directed ecosystems. And, you know, there was a certain understanding over the Cold War between the US and the Soviet systems on those things. There's a lot of, you know, also early on in the Cold War, there's only so much, there's only so many different branches of the sort of scientific tree to explore. And you had to spend 10, 20 years just filling out the standard model of particle physics. And you could do the whole separate thing of where it went wrong in the seventies.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  But then China is now like exploded on the scene in the last 30 years, churning out really good scientists, engineers and a whole endogenous ecosystem. They're doing their own independent scientific frontier research, right? Their own space exploration, their own satellites, their own, you know, radio. Their own neutrino experiments, their like own quantum stuff like they've got their own independent, they've developed their own, pretty quickly, their own independent scientific and tech tree.

• 29:52Jesse Michels?

  They're going the dark side of the moon.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 29:54Jesse Michels?

  They've launched tons of mass to space. Yeah.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so from the US's perspective, like they've managed to contain for the last 70 years, essentially the tech tree that's branching, that was growing essentially in the world. Right? And then it could prune branches in various ways. Now there's a new tree that has sprouted very quickly and is, you know, exploring and is not being pruned. And in fact, maybe those, those, those branches that we pruned are now being like supercharged with investment. And you can't do anything about it. So you've been pruning your tree. They've been growing their tree.

• 30:30Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  Like that, if that plays out for another five, 10 years, you're going to be in real trouble.

• 30:34Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 30:35Speaker 00

  And that's, I think, was precipitating now the last 10 years of disclosure stuff.

• 30:39Jesse Michels?

  That's, that's always, that's my take. I mean, I, I've felt like I've sort of firing blindly in the space, sort of covering it sometimes where like, as you know, I've covered some of the, you know, possible branches of physics that have been lost. And I, I think I'm doing this patriotic thing because like I look at the civil side, you know, engineering requirements to build some of these super basic experiments. And I'm like adversaries have to have that, this like snapshot of what we had, you know, 70 years ago or whatever. So I think publicizing this stuff is like extremely good net, net benefit. But it just feels extremely uncoordinated, like the whole world. I'm curious to get your take on this. Like the whole world of UFOs or whatever, I, I would assume there would be like one dude

• 31:24Jesse Michels?

  kind of in charge of like the whole thing. And it's, there, I think, fiefdoms and gatekeepers to those fiefdoms. But I don't think they're well coordinated at all. I think it's a cargo cult that's been running for the last 70 years. But curious to get your take.

• 31:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, this telling the historical story and all of its various chapters is probably beyond my ken. But like I have a certain, um, like. 10,000 foot level take, which was essentially from World War II era through like the 60s. This was essentially a federal, these were federal projects, right? The Venner Bar Bush era, you know, coincided, you know, I'm sort of, my basic analytical methodology is sort of, what was the, the structure of the other, you know, visible institutions of research, development, of government, of intelligence, et cetera? And then assume that the basic level of competence and the managerial structures and their alignment to US democratic power structures, like probably like is, is, carries through to these legacy

• 32:23Speaker 00

  programs. Yeah. Right? And that, you know, again, this kind of is consoling it with what David Grush was saying, how these kind of were tucked underneath the architecture of secrecy for the Manhattan Project. You know, the Atomic Energy Act, you know, this sort of set the institutional framework for these, for these programs in the 40s and 50s and 60s. And then I think there was a shift, right? And that shift, you could speculate about what was happening behind the curtain, but I think you could just see the visible shift that took place in the other aspects of our institutional and political economy, where it was, you know, a pretty radical restructuring, right? Of the, you know, it was the Nixon shock, but then you also had, you know, the Malaise stagflation in the 70s, you had, and then you had this massive transition to sort of global neoliberalization, right? The privatization of a lot of functions.

• 33:07Speaker 00

  And you had in the CIA, just to take that as a concrete example, you had Carter essentially purge, like the entire senior ranks of the CIA when he came into office. And one of those hundreds of senior CIA officers do, many of whom were probably presiding over aspects of legacy program in an official capacity, you know, and they were like managing this on behalf of their, you know, responsibilities in the federal government. Now they've been fired, right? And maybe it was merited, maybe they were doing a lot of shady stuff that the government was like, we can't do this anymore. You guys are, you guys are, you know, rotten fruit. We need to kick you out. You know, those guys didn't just disappear. They have a lot of skills. They have a lot of connections. They know exactly how to run covert operations. Generate lots of sources of black money corrupt and influence senior and very influential

• 33:51Speaker 00

  people around the world. And without, you know, certain skills, they're going to apply those skills. And then, and then, but they, the critical distinction is now they don't longer have an official attachment to an institutional bureaucracy that's aligned with US state interest. Right. And I think that's where it starts to delaminate. And the political economy, these programs probably then gets split to a certain extent. There's the part that the US government is able to hold on to in some fashion. And then there's the part that they're not able to hold on to explicitly. And then there's this sort of uneasy evolution over many decades. I don't exactly know how it's evolved in a more recent era. But I think it's pretty clear when you, you know, read into what David Grush is saying is that, you know, effectively, you know, there's certain elements of the US government that have been sort of rogue, right? Like that. And that even

• 34:34Speaker 00

  the defense industrial base, parts of this collaborators may not be like Lockheed is involved, right? As like Lockheed CEO, but like, you know, essentially loose networks of individuals that, um, for various reasons, kind of associate to manage these things. And, and that's, I think, the difficult part is trying to suss out how much of this, and this is why the UOP Disclosure Act explicitly targeted eminent domain, right? For things held in private hands. And that's, I think, the, the read that I, I, I've sort of put into all of the sort of disclosure momentum and the official legislation action is like to first order, the interest of the Gillibrands and the Rubio's, et cetera, for the last several years has not really been disclosure. It's been accountability.

• 35:18Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 35:19Speaker 00

  It's finding out that there's rogue programs that they had no idea it were in existence, that were controlling groundbreaking, world shaking information. And their first order of business is trying to like, create mechanisms to try to try to get the official structures of government to sort of reabsorb and re take, take back some degree of control over these activities.

• 35:38Jesse Michels?

  Yep. Yeah, it's more a civilian oversight question, which is like, I actually feel somewhat conflicted about, you know, I feel more sure that like, the American population should understand a broader, deeper ontological truth when it comes to our reality. That, that feels like an Obvious like good to me. And then where I'm sort of unsure is like, I don't think Congress is super competent. I was in that room last year at the testimony and it's like, if you were to manipulate or psyop a group of people and like, you know, or just find a really corrupt group of people like that would be it like these people, they're not very smart and they're, you know, you can sway them very easily. And like, I don't know if they're more competent than the Lockheed

• 36:23Jesse Michels?

  and Northrop executives. I think, I think people should know about this stuff. And so maybe to some extent, like whatever limited hangouts are occurring vis a vis these, these prime contractors need to speed up, be more effective and better. But yeah, that would be my controversial take is like, yeah, I, you know, maybe in 1850 or something, I'd be more bear bullish Congress, but right now I'm not. I think their 11% approval rating sort of says it all. So.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  I mean, this is not even a UFO question. This is basic, you know, political philosophy, which is, you know, do we in general defer to competent technocratic managers to make important decisions on behalf of the rest of us? Or do we defer to elected representatives who are representative of the people who may not be very well educated enlightened technocrats? Right? And this is, this is the, this is the age old question, right? Of like, how do we find a balance in a modern, very sophisticated, very complex society of maintaining a form of participatory democracy, maintaining a form of government that is inherently legitimate and accountable to the people, right? The government is of buying for the people of buying for Lockheed program managers, right? Um, that is the foundation of our constitutional republic.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  That's the inherent logic of our social contract. I think to abrogate that, um, you know, willy nilly would be, would be, you know, a one way ratchet. But I also agree with you that like, there is, there is a reason why we filled out these, these bureaucracies and these, you know, technocratic structures in order to manage the complexity of modern life that, yeah, the average House Republican or House Democrat on a subcommittee who's getting like a 10 minute briefing from a 24 year old before the committee hearing is not the person you want to make these like important. You know, structural decisions, but you want to ideally be like a balance between

• 38:09Jesse Michels?

  Of course.

• 38:09Speaker 00

  The people that know that information to make those decisions that like they're ultimately accountable to somebody, right?

• 38:15Jesse Michels?

  Absolutely.

• 38:16Speaker 00

  If they screw up, so they can get fired, they can be held to a public tribunal, right?

• 38:20Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, maybe, and maybe it's the executive branch. I don't know.

• 38:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:22Jesse Michels?

  But yeah, it is, it is a tricky question. I think that bigger possible issue is the veneer of, you know, elected representatives when in fact

• 38:33Speaker 00

  Which we actually have the participatory democracy.

• 38:35Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, no, it's post Citizens United. I mean, look at Mike Turner, represents state in Ohio and, you know, has, you know, Lockheed Northrop Boeing on his quote unquote cap table is his donor list. And so it's like, uh, you know, that he's not a real, he's, he's acting on, on behalf of oligarchic interests of special interests in that case. So.

• 38:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, there's a political philosopher in the 20th century named Sheldon Woolen, who had this idea of sort of inverted totalitarianism. Right. That like traditional totalitarian structures that we looked at, you know, had an obvious hierarchical, you know, dictatorial arrangement of power. And in our system, it's, you know, again, this is more on the extreme, who's a kind of extreme progressive, kind of liberal. But like he, his diagnosis was that we've actually constructed for ourselves like an inverted totalitarianism where, where we have the veneer of participatory democracy, but really like the actual structures of power are quite concentrated. They're just hidden.

• 39:27Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  Right. They're not on top, they're underneath.

• 39:29Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 39:30Speaker 00

  Right. And that, um, that makes it much more hard to challenge because you know, nobody likes being told what to do by, you know, your boss. Right. But if your option set is just inherently constrained before you come to make a decision by, by people, by folks or forces you had no idea existed. Well, you can just, you can, you might not even know, right? You're just, these are your options, A and B, pick.

• 39:48Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  Right. R, D, go.

• 39:51Jesse Michels?

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• 40:34Jesse Michels?

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• 40:50Speaker 00

  Uh, I don't know him personally, but I've obviously I've watched his, yeah, his, uh, multiple three hour long podcast.

• 40:55Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. So it's like

• 40:56Speaker 00

  Encyclopedic knowledge.

• 40:57Jesse Michels?

  It's like encyclopedic and it's like his kind of worldview. I mean, first off, if you want to know who killed JFK, you should listen to, you know, those podcasts.

• 41:05Speaker 00

  His, uh, the S force and Howard Hughes getting deputized by, by Nixon under, yeah.

• 41:10Jesse Michels?

  Exactly. Which is wild because it, to me, it's, it feels high probability to be true because it so comports with priors I had around. You know, I read like Devil's Chessboard by, you know, David Talbot. And, you know, I'd, I'd watched the Oliver Stone stuff and I'm like, okay, it's like Dulles probably had it out for, for JFK. And then it's, it's like Danny's just filling in the details with names, dates, a specific chronology. So it's fascinating, but to, to go to your point around, you know, the Woolens point around a small group being actually insidiously kind of in control.

• 41:44Jesse Michels?

  Sheehan's entire history of American intelligence, at least, you know, post OSS is that the CIA got formed, uh, at the behest of this Brown Brothers Harriman group. This investment group where on the cap table, you had all the robber barons. And so all the kind of oligopolistic, you know, control families or whatever in the U.S.

• 42:07Jesse Michels?

  Basically you, the CIA was almost like, it was like, you know, the veneer of like American national security, but it was really like protect our interests. You know, and so, and then if you look at American foreign policy over the last 70, 80 years, it's like way more driven by. Maintaining a threshold of, you know, crude petroleum or whatever, then meets the eye. And so like, how much, how much of this stuff is just being driven by like this small group of people that, you know, I know this sounds a little tinfoil hat, but that they've kind of existed intergenerationally over the last, you know, century.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  I mean, I don't know how conspiratorial it is if you just look at all of human history, right? Like, human history and all of our political systems tend to, you know, in a physics language, they tend to form sort of condensates of tight factions that, you know, once they happen in whatever process of power accretion, stick into those positions of power and nobody likes to give up power. They want to find ways to magnify that power, institutionalize it, formalize it and hand it down. That's like, that's the story of humanity, right? Once we started building hierarchical control systems, you know, out of the hunter gatherer to agrarian evolution. So like, this is the basic sociological pattern of humanity. Like, quote unquote, enlightened democracy is a relatively recent thing. And

• 43:29Speaker 00

  it's a, and it's a, it's a belief system. It's a social fiction, in a sense, right? And social fiction has a lot of material power when people believe in them. But they're buttressing up against this sort of, you know, multi-century, just embedded historical pattern, right? And, and I think that's been the, that's been, I think, you know, I'm not like, America's truly just a hidden fascist country and everything about democracy is just a painted veneer. Because I think you can look at history where like, you know, the quote, maybe power structure lost, right? Like, they didn't have sort of univalent power over, over the evolution of our society. And

• 44:05Jesse Michels?

  This election felt like some, sort of an example.

• 44:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's also become more complicated, right? I think back in that era from, you know, maybe the, you know, the reconstruction era to the, to robber barons, to Brown Brothers Harrington, to World War I and World War II, like, you know, American economy was like tightly, tightly wound, you know, sort of New York finance, industrial capital and, you know, a small number of founding families and, and industrial empires, you know, it was very clear, like, American politics was just de facto, you know, arms of their Apparatus, right? Like that. There was no pretense that we really had a democratic form of government in that era. Like, we fought a civil war and then we're like, all right, we need to reconstitute things. It's going to be done through investment. It's going through, you know, stitching together with railroads and, um, you know, industrial expansion, et cetera.

• 44:49Speaker 00

  That's going to have to come and directed and managed by essentially these industrial, um, systems that are controlled by a small number of elite family, uh, empires. And that's just, you know, so then that's what they did. And then we're like, all right, we need to win World War I. Those guys are going to do it. And I think the, where we got really in trouble though, was when those families started to then muck around in European politics.

• 45:08Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 45:09Speaker 00

  And started to help fund, you know, uh, aligned interest groups in, say, Germany in the twenties. Uh, that sowed the seeds, if not directly catalyzed, the Nazi party.

• 45:19Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 45:20Speaker 00

  Right? Which is what happened.

• 45:21Jesse Michels?

  The Union Bank funded the Nazis and then I think Dulles was part of financing the Nazis as well. He was like stationed in Norway or something.

• 45:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, we created them basically, right? Um, cause we were worried about the Bolsheviks taking over. Um, the national social, the national socialist movement was, you know, and again, it also came out of this kind of, um, similar vibe, the German version of it was kind of this occultic, uh, set of, um, you know, like theosophic, uh, clubs essentially. And there was a lot of, you know,

• 45:48Jesse Michels?

  In the US.

• 45:49Speaker 00

  So, yeah, we, there was, a lot of the elites were very much into the occult sort of, you know, séances and similar sorts of vibes. So they all had these.

• 45:55Jesse Michels?

  And you had that, but what was it? Like the secret destiny of America, like that Manly P. Hall book that, you know, we'd be the, the, the shining city on the hill for, for the rest of the world or whatever.

• 46:06Speaker 00

  And it doesn't take, it doesn't take much for like elites in different societies to all of a sudden become gripped by a certain cult, cult of belief. And then when they have lots of money, that can have material effects on hinges of history. And I think that's, you know, a long story about how that created Nazism, how Hitler kind of rose to power. But, um, that then I think, again, these are like contingent, uh, ratchets. And then, you know, it puts these, these bureaucracies now that we have think, we, we think of bureaucracies in a much more,

• 46:34Speaker 00

  like depersonalized fashion now, like the CIA and the FBI and all these administrative systems. And they are like, they're massive systems of rules and org structures and yearly budget. And government accountability and congressional committees and, you know, we have the Francis Fukuyama project of state creation is sort of the depersonalization of state functions. They become formalized, they become structured, repeatable, inspectable, accountable, et cetera. And, you know, when states decay, they tend to become more personalized. They can become much more internally weakened by factions where their principal forms of accountability or loyalty are not to the organization, it's to their their own secret, you know, club of people.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  And I think, you know, I would say that the arc of these institutions was like they were created by these, these, you know, essentially they were fully personalized at the beginning, right? The Dulles Brothers, et cetera. And then, you know, we sort of built state structures, independent, large, complicated bureaucracies, you know, over the course of the 20th century to sort of fight the Cold War. And we had to marshal large scale of resources to do that. And you can't just rely on, you know, Dulles Brothers to just run around and do weird shit. You have to have like systems of, you know, processes and memos and, you know, like big projects. You need to now bring in folks like Howard Hughes, right? You need to kind of like have, you know, like Lomar Explorer, these are pretty expensive endeavors. And I think now we've reached the other, like that arc has come down. And now they're like being repersonalized.

• 48:04Speaker 00

  And, and, you know, that can happen, whoever's repersonalizing it can either do that in a project of like reinvigoration, reformalization, right? That like they need to, that these structures got to in reality, it's like software code that has a bunch of, you know, rot in it and you need to like, this system is called, um, called Bohm's Law, which is just, you know, like code, code eventually rots, right? It's like a characteristic like time scale. So any institution has like codified rules and regs and they usually only go in one direction. And, you know, I think that's the project that we're seeing maybe play out is like, okay, how do you go into this, the set of code of our institutions? And, you know, you know that there's maybe half of it is like dead weight code. But you don't know what's like, what's load bearing, right?

• 48:47Speaker 00

  But going back to like this, the CIA sort of arc is a, I think that was kind of the thing. You had this sort of purge of individuals that were sort of had built the bureaucracy and now had all these connections and they just went out into the private sector and just started to build those systems, those more personalized systems.

• 49:02Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 49:02Speaker 00

  But now out of view, right? And I think that is where you read the Tom DeLonge books, he sort of points to this idea of there essentially being, you know, official government programs and then non-government programs. And that, that from the vantage point of someone like Marco Rubio or someone like Senator Gillman would be kind of like extremely intimidating.

• 49:23Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  Like, I would not, like, these people, they grew as senators, but do they really know what they're going up against?

• 49:29Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 49:29Speaker 00

  Right? That's a different question.

• 49:30Jesse Michels?

  Well, it's kind of part and parcel with the history of the country per what we're talking about. Like, if you look at the Sheehan narrative of what happened with JFK, Howard Nixon operationalized Howard Hughes. Howard Hughes is kind of an extension of the national security apparatus as a private aerospace contractor. If you look at, you know, the follow-up story, it's JFK scatters the CIA to the Wendy or threatens to, fires Dulles. Dulles goes from his perch at Brown Brothers Harriman at a private company, re-operationalizes the S-Force, which Howard Hughes created, to go after JFK. And then the final example, which touches on the, you know, this idea that Jimmy Carter purged a lot of the CIA, is that I think a lot of those guys ended up at, have you

• 50:15Jesse Michels?

  heard of the Carlyle Group?

• 50:17Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:18Jesse Michels?

  So like, you read Jacques Vallée's diaries, you know, he publishes his diaries, Forbidden Science, volumes one through five. And I think it's like three, volume three or four, he always has lunch with all these people and, you know, these like spooky insider types. And they're constantly like, look at the Carlyle Group. And then he goes, again, the Carlyle Group. Like, it's like this recurring trope. And so I sometimes wonder if post, you know, Carter purge of the deep state or of the CIA, a lot of this stuff ended up, you know, with them. And the final weird connection there is, are you familiar with this Mark McCandlish, Brad Sorensen story?

• 50:59Speaker 00

  You had to remind me on that one.

• 51:00Jesse Michels?

  So Mark McCandless is a famous aviation illustrator and he has a buddy named Brad Sorensen who's in aerospace and he's going to this, you know, airshow in California and he gets taken to, so he's with this guy who's this prominent kind of Italian defense financier is the way he describes it, or defense guy. And he gets taken to kind of like a back of the house show and they say, we're going to show you the real stuff. And they fly him to Palmdale and show him a bunch of, you know, really exotic crafts, some like one-off crafts, like, you know, the Aurora, the Astra, these are sort of, you know, famed possible

• 51:41Jesse Michels?

  Lockheed prototypes that like were commissioned for like a year or two and then they were kind of taken out. And then he shows them what he calls a flux liner or an alien reproduction vehicle. And these are bell shaped or acorn shaped vehicles. There are three of them. They actually seem to have wear and tear on them as if they'd been flown. And I'm friends with a couple of really good researchers who think that the Italian guy is Frank Carlucci. And Frank Carlucci was deputy director of the CIA under Jimmy Carter and then became secretary of defense under Reagan. And he's very associated with the Carlyle Group. And so anyways, all of this is to say, maybe there's this sort of revolving door between

• 52:23Jesse Michels?

  private industry and CIA where it's like, you can, you get on one, you say, you know, hey, CIA, give up the goods. They put it into private industry and then you get on private industry and then they, they, they, you know, put it back in secret compartmentalized, you know, government apparatuses or something. It's this game of whack a mole. It's this infinite shell game or something.

• 52:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think, you know, I think that's very, very plausible. And even in more prosaic circumstances, that sort of relationship is, is extremely common. If you just take today, quote, great paracompetition, right? There's lots of, say, port facilities around the world that we, A, want to ensure US has favorable access to, and B, we deny China and Russia access to. Is the US government, US military, US intelligence community going to literally go around the world and buy up and control and manage and run all these ports? No. Who is? Right? So how do you ensure that those private interests are motivated, incentivized to do that on behalf of American security interests?

• 53:28Speaker 00

  Takes a project, takes a lot of money, takes organization, takes relationships, right? That's what you would expect, right? In that very prosaic, pure, straight down the middle geopolitical competition. Yep. Just apply that basic logic to any other competitive regime of even higher stakes, and you would imagine the layers of involvement and funding that would be deployed. And I think this is, this then, if I'm going to extend my analogy, like, okay, the decay in the 70s and 80s, well, what happened really, if we're trying to point this line of inquiry at kind of from industrial capital in the 20th century to really what became finance capital, and international finance capital in the 20th century, the later half of the 20th century. And you assume the basic template that you're just pointing at, right, Carlisle, it was one example, the big private equity conglomerate. Yeah.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  And again, it's less the entity itself and more the individuals, right, who can come and go, and who, you know, they have certain skills and knowledge and expertise in crafting certain corporate structures and deals, and arranging sources of financing, right? That's the skill. It's not the corporate entity per se. And so that can move and can evolve, and that can change names and labels, you know, at any time. Well, one interesting thing, though, is, okay, like, heaven points to the, you know, the big baddies, Carlisle Group, right? It's like, they have to actually make money. Yep. They actually, they're like, you know, these things are expensive, I don't see them selling any alien reproduction vehicles. Yeah. Right? Like, where's the money coming from, right? Like, who's, it's like, there's money going in, right? But where's it coming from? Yeah. And like, you know, one of the important functional requirements for any covert operation is funding, right?

• 54:58Speaker 00

  And there's two sources of funding in general, right? There's like official funding, could even be classified, right? But it's coming from public coffers. It's coming from taxpayer money going to the government, and then the government is shaving off a slice and a classified budget to go fund secret stuff. And then there's, you know, black money, there's off-the-books money. There's money that's generated from non-official government activities, not taxation, not debt issuance, it's coming from private sector sources, either private sector criminal operations, right, which we've seen examples of in the 20th century, right? Drug running, right, to fund operations. Or, you know, legal financial, you know, financial activities, trading, investment, that, you know, is generating surpluses to fund these activities. Yep. And so that's why I would pay more attention to like, where in the more common

• 55:40Speaker 00

  era, in the last 20, 30 years, of where, where are there like black box sources of funding? Where are there people in this world that are just printing money? Yeah. Uh, that have, you know, plausible connections to, to these programs.

• 55:54Jesse Michels?

  Speaking of which, my old colleague Eric Weinstein went on Joe Rogan and I think exasperated at the lack of reception of his own sort of unified, you know, field theory of everything, geometric unity. He took a couple of shots at Renaissance technologies. And so, you know, the late Jim Simons, you know, is this incredible cryptography mathematician. He has this fund out in Long Island that seems to just predictably at high scale return, you know, I think 30% year over year or something. And so Weinstein is on Rogan actively speculating that this is housing a sort of secret physics program involving all the

• 56:39Jesse Michels?

  top differential geometers in the US. What do you think, Matthew?

• 56:44Speaker 00

  I mean, if such a thing were to exist, that's exactly where it would exist.

• 56:47Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 56:48Speaker 00

  Right? Because well, one, Jim Simons used to work for the NSA.

• 56:52Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 56:52Speaker 00

  He was a Navy, he was a cryptologic, you know, code breaker. And, you know, nobody has ever, there's no such thing as an ex NSA guy, right? Just in general. And he's also one of the world's like leading mathematicians physicists. And yeah, essentially controlled the Stony Brook math department and really effectively exerted a lot of influence over Stony Brook University itself. And so turned his, his hedge fund, again, this extremely, you know, just out of the, out of, out of, out of distribution, successful year over year, never, never a down year, trading operation of just functions as an immense black box that has probably the, you know, highest concentration of physics and math geniuses anywhere on the planet. And you look at what else Jim Simons was really engaged

• 57:36Speaker 00

  in, right? He set up the Simons Foundation, which is probably like one of the leading private sector sources of, of sort of philanthropic research and philanthropic funding for fundamental science research in, you know, life sciences and biology, artificial intelligence, frontiers of physics, computational, computational sciences, mathematics.

• 57:58Speaker 00

  Really interesting kind of frontier breakthrough ideas across these like critical disciplines. And there's interesting like coincidences, right? Like the head of the Simons Foundation, a guy named Dr. David Spiegel. He was tapped to be the chair of the NASA UAP Working Group. And Stony Brook University was engineered essentially a joint venture essentially to manage Brookhaven National Lab with Batel Memorial Institute. That partnership was personally engineered by Jim Simons himself to get Stony Brook in a position to jointly manage the Department of Energy National Lab that does breakthrough physics research and has, you know, they do lots of classified stuff. And they're pretty close by to his hedge fund operations.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  So, you know, it doesn't, you don't have to like be the conspiracy theorist drawing the red dots of yarn to be like, here's a, here's a money-making machine started by a guy deeply connected to the NSA that's also like a super physics genius and it can attract the smartest physics and math people on the planet to work for his black box money machine. He also then happens to, you know, effectively have a lot of influence over Department of Energy National Lab. And his, you know, guy running his, his private research foundation and fundamental physics gets tapped to run the UAP Working Group for NASA.

• 59:18Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, a working group that sort of says, you know, nothing to see here. Like we will keep an open mind, but there's probably nothing here, which I find interesting.

• 59:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I have no smoking gun. It just seems quite a curious set of coincidences. And I know this is, you know, and it's all personalities at this point, right? Because I know the famous podcaster physicist astronomer, Brian Keating is, who's famously kind of a skeptic, talks a lot about UAPs and kind of always downplays it whoever he talks to. He's, he's the godson of Jim Simons and is good friends with Eric Weinstein.

• 59:50Jesse Michels?

  It's very interesting.

• 59:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know what it means, but I find it fascinating. It's exactly what I would do if I was the government. I was like, hey, like, I need to set up a both a funding source as well as a private research group to look at some aspects of this program. Like, it would kind of be incompetent. If these legacy programs actually do exist.

• 1:00:09Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  It would be kind of incompetent not to pull somebody like him into it.

• 1:00:12Jesse Michels?

  Totally.

• 1:00:12Speaker 00

  It's like, exactly, this is what you need, basically.

• 1:00:16Jesse Michels?

  That's fascinating. I mean, yeah, Keating's always been super cool with me, but he's definitely, he seems very.

• 1:00:21Speaker 00

  I don't think he's, I think he's operating in bad faith.

• 1:00:23Jesse Michels?

  And he's definitely anti the UFO thing, so, yeah.

• 1:00:28Jesse Michels?

  Well, that's fascinating. And in 92 as well, so they have a particle accelerator at Brookhaven National Labs, and then they also do nuclear stuff. And in 92, a lot of the townspeople around Brookhaven said that there was a UFO crash that was actually collected by the facility there as well. So that would be an interesting connection because, as you know, UFOs seem to specifically, like, if there is a correlation between anything, it's nuclear assets. They seem to just show up around both civilian nuclear grids and weapons facilities.

• 1:01:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, that seems pretty definitive at this point.

• 1:01:03Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:05Jesse Michels?

  Very interesting. So do you think, do you think, like, because Carlyle Group has a lot of defense interests, right? It's this multinational conglomerate. Do you think there's anything to the Jacques Vallée theory? You know, given, given your kind of analysis of there was kind of a, you know, this Carter purging, and then you have Ben Rich as well, who's director of Skunk Works, lamenting that there's almost this runaway of control when it comes to, quote unquote, an international board of directors on the UFO topic. And then there's like an American outlet that presumably he's sort of a part of, so.

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

  I mean, I have no evidence one way or the other, and it's hard to say how stable these these systems have been over time, and exactly how much like managerial control actually exists, right? Because I don't know like what the right mental model is for like the organizational like hierarchy here, right? How much of it is a board of directors that is approving line item budgets, right? Like basically the Tom DeLonge narrative, right? Where he's like got this basically the main art group and it's like, yeah, like 12 guys in a boardroom and they're like, this, we're gonna do this, we're gonna coup here. It's kind of like, you know, the trope of like the Illuminati guys in the room, right? Smoking their cigars being like, oh yeah, the secret UFO

• 1:02:21Speaker 00

  project. Where are we on that one? Right? I don't know. Like, that's, that's a scenario. I don't know if it's for me, like, the most plausible scenario for this is like, that there is actually like a such a tightly integrated vertical control structure, as opposed to maybe like, pieces of it. Because it's hard, it's human institutions, as you've seen, like, they're hard to, they're hard to keep together. Yeah. Right? They're hard to kind of, it takes a lot to like, pull a complicated operation and keep every part and piece of it aligned. You take, it's, you know, there's, no matter what secret institution you're in, there's principal Asian problems, right? How does people at the top ensure that the people at the bottom are doing what people at the top want them to do? Right? And not lying to them, or carving off a piece of their own, or

• 1:03:04Speaker 00

  like, you know, so you either need, you need coercion, or you need inducement, at a very high level, to keep all the sort of layers in any bureaucratic system aligned with the mission and the objectives set by the people at the top. And the thing about secrecy, it can make some of those, solving those principal Asian problems actually harder, right? Because you actually can't get too much reporting, coming up the chain, on everything that's happening, because that's a security risk. You can't really be itemizing and documenting and having decision memos made at every, you know, deputy project manager up, right? The chain, and then comes in a big binder at the top. Well, that binder gets loose, the whole thing falls apart, right? So there needs to be compartmentalization, and the way, you know, the reason why we run covert

• 1:03:46Speaker 00

  In any intelligence service, like you don't, you don't have everybody like read in all the way up, right? You have like local, you know, chief of station and maybe a few, two guys at headquarters that know what's going on. And then it's the people in the field doing the stuff. And then only maybe, you know, bare hints that get, get sent up the chain, right? Cause that's how you protect a very sensitive operations. So I just don't, I don't know how they could actually structure an organization that's effectively managed by a small number of people over time. I, I might, I think it would be, it would be, it would be very heterogeneous. It would be very sort of like horizontal and there'd be like, maybe like the bare minimum measures of like intimidation and like, you know, extreme measures to impose some degree of, of, of cohesion.

• 1:04:28Speaker 00

  But I don't know, this is like pure speculation of just like, no matter what secret group, it's gonna, it's gonna be subject to these basic organizational

• 1:04:34Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 1:04:34Speaker 00

  dynamics, like regardless, right?

• 1:04:37Jesse Michels?

  So you studied physics at Johns Hopkins?

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:04:39Jesse Michels?

  And can I think speak a little closer to the metal and then a lot of, there's a lot of kind of mushy brained, you know, everything is everything. Amateur physicists, myself included by the way, in the UFO world. And so it'll be, it'll be good to, to speak to you about this. I think about even the conversation we were having about the atomic stuff. That's an example of, you could call it like high energy physics, right? And so that or particle accelerators, which again, there's one at, at Brookhaven, obviously you have large hadron collider and, and, and others. And then you have the work of, you know, Tesla, Townsend Brown, so super high voltage across short distances. Do these all represent kind of anomalies that are an inroad to a more complete version of physics?

• 1:05:25Jesse Michels?

  Or do you, do you, do you know where, in your opinion, physics might've gone wrong and, you know, where we might be able to find another branch that's productive?

• 1:05:33Speaker 00

  Yes, I can go off on a few different tangents there. Um, because yeah, and I guess stepping back, right? My. Like, I do think the physics part of this is the most important part of it, because almost by assumption, any advanced intelligence of any arbitrary nature that we're encountering, that displays capabilities that we don't have, are downstream of their knowledge of reality, right? That's what our civilization is, just downstream of our knowledge of reality, right? We figure out, you know, a tower, we've constructed a tower of knowledge, which is understanding the degrees of freedom that are available to us in this existence. And then we engineer, you know, that's what technology is, is just essentially applying that knowledge of the degrees of freedom available to us in reality.

• 1:06:17Speaker 00

  And so what we're witnessing with these UAPs is a demonstration of that knowledge. And so if you want to understand who, or what, or why, or how, all those questions are going to be downstream of, they know something about reality that we don't.

• 1:06:34Jesse Michels?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:06:35Speaker 00

  And if you understand, like, where they came from, or what their intentions might be, what their capabilities are, you just, it just comes straight down to the bare, the bare question of like, well, what do they know? And by definition, that will, for us to bridge from our current knowledge to what we think they, quote unquote, know, requires us, is going to have to move beyond our current conceptual paradigms of physics. Because we know our current conceptual paradigms of physics do not apparently give us anything that can do this. Maybe it can get close, maybe there's some, you know, maybe the Brown Bells field, you're like, it's like, oh, it's a little trick, right? But is it, is it, is it everything? Is it the, is it all, does it represent all these observables? I'm not sure. All right. Is it more, maybe, is there some secret knowledge that we have that we developed advanced propulsion systems based off of? Plausible, maybe probable,

• 1:07:19Speaker 00

  but like, there's a large potential ladder of capabilities that you're going to be, that we could be climbing, right? And we just happen to be, we happen to know we're here. Maybe advanced aerospace companies have gotten a little bit further up, but there could be a lot that's further above that, right? Again, this is all just like preface material to talk about physics, because this is where everyone's eyes will start glazing over. Because, yeah, I broadly agree with the thesis of Eric in terms of the sociology of where physics went wrong in the 70s. And even now, it's become a common, accepted talking point by like, the leading lights of string theory, like Larry, Larry Suskin just went on Kirk Chomong's podcast, basically. It was quite shocking to hear this guy, you know, leading light of string theory guy,

• 1:08:02Speaker 00

  you know, getting towards the end of his career. He's just like, yeah, it was complete fail failure. It's basically pointless. Everyone should start over. It's like, bro, like, that's like the entirety of the physics discipline that you're saying is a complete failure.

• 1:08:14Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:15Speaker 00

  Like, that's dramatic statement to make, right? And I don't know, like, most people don't pay attention to physics and just this kind of a bunch of nerds in their ivory towers, you know, writing scribbling and whatnot. But like here, you know, that to me is like, that's, that's the end, right? Okay. Now you have Larry basically admitting the whole thing was a, was a waste. And, and now he even explicitly calls for, you know, we need to look at new paradigms. We need to look at, you know, we really need to widen the aperture here. Although he doesn't quite, but in the same breath, he kind of dismisses the apparent alternatives that have been thrown together, right? Like, like geometric unity or anybody else. He's like Wolfram. Yeah. He's like, I think I haven't really paid attention to that. Right? So like.

• 1:08:53Jesse Michels?

  Well, do you now you should have an open mind if your thing fails.

• 1:08:56Speaker 00

  It's bizarre to me. Like, I don't, I'm not a practicing physicist. It's not my job. I'm just intellectually curious about it. I studied it in college. But even I try to pay attention and read these things. I don't have the initial professional competence to adjudicate, you know, the technical merits. But I'm trying to like familiarize myself with Garrett Leacy's stuff, with Sabina's stuff, with Wolfram, and really it's done by Jonathan Garrard, with Eric Weinstein, causal biblical sets, Carlo Rovelli, loop quantum gravity. Like, I try to pay attention to all this stuff. It's just, not like it matters to me. Like, this should matter to you. This is your job.

• 1:09:29Jesse Michels?

  Well, but it's also, you don't need super technical chops to adjudicate something on a high level. I think this is like this issue with string theory where it's like, well, you need to be a string theorist to somehow say that the thing isn't working. No, you don't. You can just be like empirically, it hasn't really touched reality. Like, we really can't do much with string theory. That almost is the dimension reduction necessary to zoom out and, and see the forest for the trees and say, no, actually this just doesn't work. And I don't, I don't think that require, I mean, you have way more, more knowledge than the average person. I think the average person can just say that.

• 1:10:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, like there's this whole separate branch of fundamental physics that has. Sort of gone a very different direction, which is don't assume background spacetime at all. Assume spacetime itself is emergent, right? Assume essentially not a continuous spacetime, but a discrete structure. And that what we observe as continuous spacetime is actually an emergent higher level phenomenon, right? Just like the property of water that we call liquid is not in, not a lower level property. It's an emergent property as a result of the behavior of discrete constituents, e.g. H2O molecules. The social thing is like liquidity or like a water liquid at the level of individual H2O molecule. It's only when you gather a bunch of H2O molecules together and then you have an observer

• 1:10:49Speaker 00

  that is coarse graining all the information in that, in that system, that the property of liquid emerges. So I've been attracted to that sort of direction of physics. I was really attracted to, you know, the original version of this was formulated by a guy named Lee Smolin. And his first attempt at something called LuKuan Gravity. He worked with some other collaborators, Carlo Rovelli to a certain extent. And there's another attempt doing like causal dynamical sets. And the idea is, okay, can you just prescribe like a very kind of simple geometric structure? And can you define measures on that, on that discrete geometric structure? That then in a suitable limit, give you something more like a continuous space, right?

• 1:11:33Speaker 00

  And so there's details associated with LuKuan Gravity that were a bit more, so that basic motivation, there's like essentially, it's background independent. That's like the basic distinction. So string theory is a background dependent theory. It assumes a background structure, a background geometric manifold that's continuous. Or at least has these, these sort of topological properties that they, you know, define in terms of Kugel manifolds or whatever. And the other, this branch was like, no, we're gonna, we're not gonna assume any background to space. In fact, we're not gonna assume space at all. We're gonna assume something more abstract, something more fundamental. And then we're gonna try to see if we can, in a suitable limit, recover a continuous structure. And so I won't go too far into LuKuan Gravity. I think it is a bit more constrained in how it was set up.

• 1:12:17Speaker 00

  Similar with causal dynamical set theory. There's a little bit too much structure built in at the beginning in terms of defining the boundaries of these loops and whatever. A much more interesting attempt at this sort of larger project of trying to, you know, not assume anything, right? In physics and trying to get as much that recovers what we currently see in physics out of like the very most minimal starting point, right? And so Stephen Wolfram, who's kind of a controversial physicist, he had this early idea back in the 90s. He put it into his new kind of science book of kind of starting with very simple graphs. Right? And could you, could you generate something that looked like physics by just sort of evolving very simple graphs, right? Just abstract graph networks.

• 1:12:59Speaker 00

  And the graphs he started with were sort of called, they were, they were trivalent networks, which had basically also had like some pre-described structure. There had to be basically sort of basic, basic triangular geometry. He was able to show some interesting things, but then he kind of got distracted, whatever. Back during, just before COVID in 2019, there's a separate researcher named Jonathan Garrard. Amazing, brilliant guy, like everyone should watch his videos. He's also a very lucid, clear communicator and has deep philosophical insights that he, he, he, he brings to his fundamental physics research. Highly recommend all of Jonathan Garrard's stuff here. And everything I'm going to say from now is basically me trying to like recapitulate and like, in like, you know, 30 IQ points lower version of, of his, of his stuff here.

• 1:13:42Speaker 00

  So the basic idea is these hypergraphs is to start with the simplest thing you can imagine, right? Which is just like a point that's connected to another point, right? And, and maybe another point. And so you can have just like a simple, you know, graph, right? And the key though is like, there's a directed edge. So instead of just a line from a point to a point, you have an arrow, right? And so just imagine you just have like a simple, again, you can look at the videos and there's better explanations because I'll butcher it trying to do it without much of a prop here. But like simple graph that has directed edges. Well, you can write, there's certain rules that you can imagine applying to that graph that rewrite the, that set of relationships that from state one to state two, delete this edge, you know, from here to here, add a, add a new point and add an edge

• 1:14:27Speaker 00

  between that new point in here. So just a basic set of abstract rewriting rules. Apply to this arbitrary class of, well, they're called hypergraphs because they have directed edges, right? And so you're just starting with that basic idea, right, of just graphs that you have, that there's certain rules you could apply to those graphs to rewrite them, right? And that is equivalent to another set of objects called a string set substitution systems, which you can actually write down all the information in that graph essentially as a set of strings, right? Like you label all those points and you, and you basically just have an edge is just a binary relation between those two points, like A, B. They're in a set together. And so you can define, you know, a graph, a certain graph like this.

• 1:15:08Speaker 00

  And a rewrite rule just transforms that set of strings with the certain labels and the relationships between them into a different set of strings with certain relations between them. And that's like, it's like a purely combinatorial structure, right? It's just abstract labels of symbols that are being rewritten to a new set of abstract symbols, right? So it's extremely abstract, right? How does this touch on physics, whatever? Well, it turns out that just building for that basic purely combinatorial theoretic or abstract hypergraph rewriting system, you can, and this was their physics project, this was their key result, is that you can recover quantum mechanics and general relativity, but in a very interesting way. So the key premise though, is that there's a certain assumption, right?

• 1:15:53Speaker 00

  Which is something called causal invariance, which is kind of equivalent to what we call like, sort of a local gauge covariance in general relativity. If you imagine you can rewrite this, this graph structure in, you know, with a certain rule. So you just have like one rule that says, you know, rewrite something, a part of the graph that looks like this, change it to a part of the graph that looks like this. Well, in any arbitrary hypergraph, there could be many different ways of applying that rule. And you're like, well, which way do we do it? Well, actually, And what that does is it generates, you know, apply in all possible ways. Right? So you generate essentially what's called a multi-way system. So you can imagine like the state of the graph at this time and say there's only two different ways of applying that same rule.

• 1:16:36Speaker 00

  Well, it's going to generate, going to generate two versions of that graph. So now essentially it splits, right? And now you have a graph where it's, the rule's been applied in version one and a graph that's been applied in a version two. Those are two different states of the system and you can do that again, right? And maybe there's four different ways. So you get this branch, right? So you get this multi-way system that branches. And what they've shown is, and this is getting, you know, there's like multiple hours of lectures I could, you know, that you could look at to sort of work out the mathematics of what that implies as you start to, to analyze that structure. Is that that branching, it sounds familiar. It sounds like sort of quantum mechanics, right? And so it turns out that you can define certain measures, right?

• 1:17:12Speaker 00

  So the main mathematical breakthrough from Gerard was actually realizing that there's certain tricks that you can apply from other branches of mathematics that allow you to kind of take this discrete structure and generate essentially discrete versions of the results that we have in continuous mathematics, right? So in general relativity, it's defined over manifolds and, you know, Einstein field equations are defined in terms of things like the Ricci, um, the Ricci tensor, uh, and the Riemannian manifold. So they have a certain metric that you can lay on this sort of smoothly differentiable topological manifold. And there's a certain, you know, set of mathematical machinery that's been really worked out. That's basically what the Einstein field equations are defined in terms of.

• 1:17:53Speaker 00

  So Gerard was able to show in two sets of papers, one on the sort of the, the general relativity side, one of the quantum chemical side, that if you just, um, if you analyze the causal graph of this evolving, um, multi-way system, that you can define discrete measures on this causal graph that converge in the limit to, uh, the Einstein field equations. Right? So you can recover like the discrete version of the, of the, of the Ricci tensor. You can define a discrete version of the, of the Riemannian manifold. And that kind of intuition, you can think about this as like, imagine you have a bunch of, you know, there's no background space. There's just a bunch of abstract, you know, nodes connected to other nodes. And you can, okay, well, what's the dimension of that thing? Like, like spacetime has a dimension, right? We have three degrees of freedom. Well, if you actually, you can define dimension by essentially growing out a ball.

• 1:18:39Speaker 00

  And on this discrete structure, we essentially are counting the number of nodes that you hit at sort of N number of steps. And essentially, dimension is correlated to the volume, which is just a measure of the number of nodes as a function of the number of steps. And so if that grows essentially to the square, then you're in a three dimensional, right? Because that's essentially the inverse square law, right? That inverse square law is a function of the fact we live in three dimensions, right? You know, there's just, if you grow out a ball in space, like, the volume will grow as a function, as a square of the radius, right? And so that is, was able to show essentially is defining a bunch of discrete equivalent measures on this, on this hypergraph structure. And then with those, with those measures, essentially reconstruct a discrete version of the Einstein field equations.

• 1:19:24Speaker 00

  And that essentially in the limit of the system, a certain observer that can't see, the, the critical piece of this is that an observer is, is a part of that system. Observer is a piece of this. An observer can't see, or an observer that can't see or measure all those indiscreet, all those very like low level changes to the hypergraph structure, essentially is equivalencing them, right? And that equivalencing is very similar like this idea in thermodynamics of like, okay, of, of entropy, right? Like, I'm, if I could actually measure all the position and momentum of every particle in the box, there'd be zero entropy because I'd have all the information. But I, as an observer outside the box, can't do that, right? I can't, there's no such thing as the Maxwell's demon for me.

• 1:20:07Speaker 00

  So I have to equivalence all those individual microstates into one state that I call temperature, right? And then the, the statistics of that gives me the second law of thermodynamics. So the basic same idea happens here in a more abstract way of like spacetime. The emergence of spacetime for observers like us is- Statistics of quantum mechanics. Yeah, it's a function of the, of the fact that we, we are equivalencing these, these microstates because of the nature of who we are as an observer. But there's a weird, so that's like, so the causal graph is a certain representation that you can apply to this, this basic multiway evolution of, of the more fundamental sort of hyper, abstract, a hypergraph. And then, so the causal graph is what kind of gives you general relativity. But then there's a different representation, which you mentioned, is like, there's arbitrary-

• 1:20:52Speaker 00

  There's no canonical ordering to how you apply any given rule. So you get branching. So you get a branchial sort of multi-way system. They call it sort of branchial graph. So the branchial graph and the causal graph are kind of orthogonal representations of this more fundamental abstract process playing out. The causal graph is what we can recover, sort of, we can recover general relativity through. The branchial graph, turns out, the same sort of idea is what you recover quantum mechanics through. Because that essentially, you could define measures that are, that in the limit converge to essentially a quantum, a discrete version of the path integral in Feynman's sort of formulation. And in fact, the branchial space with certain assumptions converges to a projective Hilbert, a projective Hilbert, a projective Hilbert space, which is what you use in quantum mechanics.

• 1:21:37Speaker 00

  And so that is, that was like his breakthrough result in 2020, 2021. And that was like really suggestive, right? But it wasn't like the theory of everything. But it was like really interesting that actually, starting with basic, simple mathematical structure, almost purely combinatorial theoretic, and you do some clever tricks about how you define things, you actually can get general relativity in quantum mechanics out of that, which is kind of mind blowing. But then, what was, what's interesting though, and this is the part where it does kind of stretch our limits, you know, of how do we conceptually interpret this sort of system? Is the observer is actually playing a critical role in this, right? In the sense that there is this sort of micro scale set of updatings happening all the time. And there's always this branching taking place.

• 1:22:20Speaker 00

  And observers are pieces of that branching. And so why do we not perceive this complicated multi-way branching system? We perceive a single thread of history. Well, what they've been able to show, and this is sort of, this is, was Gerard's kind of breakthrough in a bit, was like, in that branchial structure, that branchial graph, essentially a multi-way, you know, people, you could think of it as a multiverse, but it's really much more just like, it's the branching of this tree of all possible rewrites. And, well, the idea is, well, what is an observer in that system? Well, an observer is some, is something that just equivalences different branches together. Right? And then he was able to show mathematically, basically,

• 1:23:02Speaker 00

  There's a certain procedure in information theory called the Nuth-Bendix completion, which is just sort of just basic algorithm for these sorts of rewriting systems that just takes branches and just merges them together. And if you apply that, right, structure to this branchial graph, it basically allows you to recover essentially the uncertainty principle and quantum interference effects. And it kind of gives this explanation that, yeah, like observers essentially is that solves the measurement problem in quantum mechanics essentially, right? It's like the measurement problem, the measurement in quantum mechanics is the branchial graph is undergoing unitary evolution. Observers are essentially the application of sort of Nuth-Bendix completions to different branches that it just treats as equivalent because they can't distinguish between those different states.

• 1:23:47Speaker 00

  So they are actually different, whatever ontologically, but from the perspective of an observer, they just see one state. They're seen as because it's just like, when I look at a glass of water, I don't see the individual water molecules. I see this bunch of water, right? I have equivalenced all that individual detail, all that information into just this high level state. And that's basically what makes us unique as observer or makes us characteristic as observers is we have, we're a certain higher level, right? We're constructing models of reality at a certain higher, at a level much higher than the individual phenomenon that we're observing. So we're doing a lot of equivalencing. And that essentially then imposes a structure on the phenomenon that we're observing, essentially makes it a definite system.

• 1:24:30Speaker 00

  And the other key thing is that we believe we have a memory, right? And that memory then, and this is connected to like a separate branch of physics in like assembly theory, which is like memory is critical. Like all objects essentially have an embedded memory, which is like what the object is, it's just their history embodied in their present configuration. Like individual, like we are four billion years of genetic evolution on this planet. It's like our present state is just, you know, what we are as objects are essentially assembled structures of information. And so like in the Gerard-Wolfram model. That would correspond to like, essentially, you know, these are hypersurface foliations of branchial space that are computationally bounded relative to the underlying structure. And so they have to do this massive equivalencing.

• 1:25:13Speaker 00

  And then they perceive they have a linear thread of history. So they believe that they're continuous, they have a memory that's embedded, and so that they're basically a pattern of these structured new bendix completions going back through the multiway system. That's very abstract, but like, that's kind of the idea. It gets even more abstract, so this is too abstract, right? This idea of like, applying a particular rule. You know, well, you're like, well, why that rule, right? Is there one rule for physics? Well, it seems kind of arbitrary. What if you apply all possible rules? Well, then you get to this separate graph, which is called like, or space even, called like, the rulial space, the space of possible rules that you could apply to any arbitrary hypergraph. And then you can analyze that, that, that rulial space, just like you can analyze the causal graph and the branchial graph.

• 1:25:57Speaker 00

  Now you have this rulial graph, which is like, not just, what is the multiway system of possible evolutions applying different orderings of the same rule, but what is the multiway system of this, of this graph applying all possible rules in all possible ways? So you get this combinatorial, just, you know, extra explosion. But then analyzing that rulial space, and this was Gerard, working with a mathematician named Xerxes, Ibisawala, I forget how to pronounce his last name, but they just, they took techniques, and this is getting, this is as far as I'll go in terms of really abstract physics, but like, they went really deep applying techniques from what's called homotopy type theory, or higher order, higher order type theory, which is, you can try to simplify

• 1:26:39Speaker 00

  this, like, this, this rulial space, which is essentially defining all the possible paths that a non-deterministic Turing machine can follow. So it's finally like a computational approach to understanding reality. Like, a Turing machine is just, you know, a simple, simple, like, the most abstract kind of representation of any computational process. And, so you can imagine, like, you know, essentially, a non-deterministic Turing machine is like, it spits out one state from an input state and has a memory and register. Well, what if there are multiple different ways that the output could come from a given input, right? That'd be equivalent to kind of this branching. In the multiway systems, you can represent the evolution of multiway system in terms of a non deterministic, multiway Turing sort of system evolving. And then we know a lot of results from basic information theory about how to apply that

• 1:27:21Speaker 00

  to that sort of representation. And you can apply results in this branch of mathematics of like coming out of category theory, which won't go down that rabbit hole. But the really interesting idea that they look at in this paper is this space of possible rules here that they're trying to analyze in terms of what sorts of categorical structure do they have like to each other? And they realize actually like there's the very simplest sets of rules that you could write down, sort of classifying space, sort of the zero homotopy, or even I think it was maybe the one homotopy that you can write down as a result of analyzing these multiway

• 1:28:02Speaker 00

  systems is equivalent to categorical formulations of quantum mechanics. And then the next homotopy sort of representation up is equivalent to the categorical representation, or what's called a funktorial quantum field theory. And then if you jump all the way up to what's called, if you actually do like essentially this infinite limit of doing this sort of homotopy expansions, you get to a structure that's called an infinity groupoid. And this will be a bit super wonky, but an infinity groupoid is a well studied structure in sort of homotopy theory. And an infinity groupoid has a weird property that the famous mathematician Growth and Dick looked at. And he formulated this weird property as sort of the Growth and Dick's sort of homotopy

• 1:28:45Speaker 00

  hypothesis, which is that an infinity groupoid is a topological space. And importantly, there's a result in homotopy theory that like, you know, an infinity groupoid is like a special group. And then in fact, whatever its properties are, sort of get funktorially inherited to all the lower level homotopes that are below it. Right? So the infinity groupoid that's composed of this infinite limit of these sort of homotopy tower. Being stacked up on each other. Essentially, a set of rules describing a set of all possible rules describing. It's like, you know, you can always formulate, you know, like you said, have a hypergraph. Like, what is a set of rules I can apply for that hypergraph? Okay, well, that can now represent that set.

• 1:29:26Speaker 00

  Well, I know, well, what are the different ways I can represent the set of transformations I can do to that object? And then you can, you know, you can basically, you know, do that all the way up, right? Like, how many different ways can I transform this object? That creates a new object. And how many different ways can I transform that object? And so that's like, that's, that's what homotopy means. Essentially, what are the different equivalent ways of representing the set of ways I can change a given object? So you can always apply that kind of this infinite, you know, limit. The infinite limit of that is this infinity groupoid. That if you, if you accept, you know, Grothendieck's homotopy hypothesis is essentially equivalent to a topological space. That's what a topological space is. And so that, the properties of topological space then get inherited funkturally all the way down to all the lower level homotopes. Right, that an observer like us would be embedded in. And so that's why we see space, right?

• 1:30:07Speaker 00

  And so like the upshot of all this is that in this sort of abstract, you know, thinking about this model, the infinity groupoid is where general relativity, it's like, that's where we see this sort of emergent, a higher level,

• 1:30:20Speaker 00

  continuous geometric structure. And then the lower level, the bottom, the sort of the bottom of that homotopic tower is a discrete quantum mechanical system that we observe. And because we're, we're in the middle, right? We're not cosmological, like in our size scale, we're not individual particle. We sit in the middle and like, the mystery of quantum gravity is trying to write down a specification of like the middle of that tower. Right, that allows you to like, understand not just from quantum mechanics and one level up quantum field theory, and then zooming all the way up to quantum, to, to, to general relativity, but like filling out the mathematics all the way in between. That's like the open project. That would be like, that's where, how you, you know, solve quantum gravity in this, in this idea. And this generates some philosophical implications or interpretations of like, well, then what is reality, right?

• 1:31:05Speaker 00

  And this is the last piece of this. But like, you can, what, you know, Gerard is interesting, has interesting take on it because. You're like, okay, well, you know, this infinity groupoid actually is a classifying space of all infinity groupoids that you can call like the infinity one topos, this sort of, you know, you can almost call it like the, Wolfram calls it like the entangled limit of all possible computations. Garar just sort of treats it a bit more like, you know, the, the classifying space of all the different ways a multi-way, not deterministic Turing machine can evolve. So it's kind of this abstract mathematical, almost like infinite dimensional object that like we're, we and everything are embedded in and we're sort of slices in this higher level object. And in fact, one thing they show in their

• 1:31:50Speaker 00

  earlier derivations is essentially what observer is, is essentially foliating or slicing down a high level object and sort of picking out, you know, states that it are equivalencing in, right? And that's what we kind of have to learn the lesson of in special and general relativity is that there is no universal reference frame for reality, right? This is why you get Lorentz contractions, why you get, you know, no universal agreement on what's simultaneous, right? Observers that are boosted relative to another will pick out different events as being simultaneous. And that's equivalent to, you know, traditional relativity essentially is, you know, you have a hypersurface that's slicing the bulk and different observers at different reference frames will, that, that, that slice will be tilted in different ways. And so that will pick out, you know, sets of events in spacetime that they will think are simultaneous versus others. We all agree on simultaneous

• 1:32:35Speaker 00

  events because we're all relatively moving at the same speed. And so we agree, this is just one, you know, stage we're all playing in. But that's, that's just an illusion of the fact that we happen to sit in very, very commensurate reference frames. And so the same idea would apply in this, this real space. We sit, we tend to think we see the same universe. We agree on the laws of physics because we're sitting in, you know, in real space close to each other, right? We're not boosted relative to each other in real space. And so we're all, we're slicing this higher dimensional structure basically in the same way, right? So we're seeing the same universe. We see the same laws of physics. But if you were in a different part of real space or you were accelerating in real space, maybe you would see different physics.

• 1:33:14Jesse Michels?

  That connects to.

• 1:33:15Speaker 00

  So this is like, yeah. So this is like, okay, well then, okay, if this is true, then this is like building this whole tower of abstractions and trying to then translate into predictions and then interpreting it in a, in a way that you could then be like, okay, if we're gonna. Assume higher level intelligences have some knowledge of this, right? Well, what can they then do with it, right? Could they engineer these new bendix completions to stitch together events in a different way? Yes. Right? Or like the nature of consciousness is deeply tied into this, right? Because Garad doesn't go into theories of consciousness, I have my own theories of consciousness here. But like the, I think they could be consistent with this in the sense of, you know, our form of consciousness essentially is this idea that we have, we're an embodied, local,

• 1:33:58Speaker 00

  moderately, you know, mesoscale structure with limited information observing, you know, the world around us and essentially compressing it down a lot. Like we're compressing huge amounts of information down and we're basically slicing everything into a nice discrete, you know, events cluster here. If you didn't have those constraints, if you, you know, almost like the inverted version of us, right, would be, it was like a quantum, like a conscious quantum computer, if such a thing you could imagine, would kind of be the inversion of us. Yes. It would be some mind that would experience like the full branchial graph in one slice at a time. It would have no sense of continuity through time. It would just be like a now wow flash. But I just, I just perceive all in one gulp, all the different branches of the multiway system and then I disappear from existence.

• 1:34:43Speaker 00

  And then maybe a new version comes into existence at the, at the next, you know, you know, measurement operation of the quantum computer. The quantum computer is essentially a series of now wow flashes, but there's no continuous identity, it just exists in all possible branches of that particular foliation. We are the like, we're like the orthogonal version of that, right? We don't see the different branches. We see one branch and we believe we persist through time. So like we're a vibration of this structure, a quantum computer that's conscious would be a foliation of this structure. What's interesting is there, are there versions in between, right? Are there, are there like, are those just, those the only alternatives? Or are there certain types of ways you could stitch together this very, you know, this abstract, you know, doing these completions? That would be somewhere in between.

• 1:35:26Jesse Michels?

  Actually, to your like gradations of the ability to think in sort of a quantum way or something. I think the brain itself is probably, you know, maybe a room temperature quantum system. Or this is like totally theoretic. Like, I don't have like the specific, you know, causal mechanism or like physical structure in the brain. But that's the Penrose theory.

• 1:35:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:35:45Jesse Michels?

  The Emperor's New Mind, you know, with with Hamroff. The reason I like it is because I think there's all this empirical and statistical evidence that we can predict the future. At the very least, we think in very fundamentally different ways from classical computers, right? Because we can surmise things with small amounts of data. We can, we have these sort of, you know, blink reflexes that seem to be right often. And I think that might belie an ability to access a future knowledge state, which in quantum computations, you might be able to do. You can reverse qubit positions in quantum computations. So maybe if there are gradations of the ability to, you know, kind of invert the the Bendix completion or whatever,

• 1:36:28Jesse Michels?

  then then like, we might be sort of ascending into that. Like, that might be what we're being evolutionarily selected for right now. If you look at, again, like Jessica Utz, the statistician studying all the sort of, you know, psychic spy Stargate stuff coming out of the CIA. It does seem like a lot of these things fall way below, you know, P-values that you'd expect. And so I think it is actually statistically significant. I just think it's like black body radiation in the 1860s. Or, you know, Mercury's orbit or something. We just like can't put it into math.

• 1:37:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:02Jesse Michels?

  Or in the case of, you know, yeah, you can't, you can't turn in discrete quantum phenomena.

• 1:37:06Speaker 00

  I think you define this phenomenon in terms of of the of the Gerard multiway system. For example, like this basic phenomenon you're talking about is essentially non-locality, right? But non-locality in a spacetime framework to us is is either non-local spatially distributed phenomenon or non-local temporally distributed phenomenon. But in this framework, space and time are emergent. You know, observational phenomenologies associated with us being a certain type of observer foliating reality. In a certain way, but for example, you had, I mentioned this like causal graph and the branchial graph. Well, what this directly implies is essentially um uh two events, like two states in the causal graph that seem very spatially, you know, causally separated can be very close in branchial space.

• 1:37:51Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 1:37:52Speaker 00

  Right? So what looks to us as sort of non-local phenomenon, right? In quantum mechanics, quantum superposition, quantum entanglement, right? Are, you know, are, you know, directly result like those, those two, say like, you know, entangled photons, whatever. They look really far away. In branchial space, they're one edge against, they're one edge away from each other.

• 1:38:09Jesse Michels?

  And the way, the way to get into branchial space could be two things. One is uh high energy physics. And then uh the other could be something related to consciousness. If there is this spacetime superposition buildup.

• 1:38:22Speaker 00

  This is why I think it's more important, the consciousness piece is actually more important than the particle accelerators. Because what this directly implies is it's not that we're gonna smash something at higher energies and break into branchial space. Because branchial space is what we are collapsing in our conscious experience into. We're not necessarily changing root reality, but we are stitching this more fundamental substrate together to construct a world for ourselves, right?

• 1:38:44Jesse Michels?

  But you are kind of implying that you, you might be able to affect branchial space. Like you might be able to affect spacetime superposition on a more fundamental level.

• 1:38:52Speaker 00

  Well, it's a matter of like, maybe it's the semantics of like, you know, changing or exploring consciousness, like doing a conscious, manipulating consciousness in some way will allow us to sort of, um, you know, relax the constraints about how we're stitching this underlying structure together, right? Like we, like we're stitching it into a certain way because, you know, we have evolved this sort of neurological structure. And we have to condense things down. It's like when you do, you know, hallucinogenic drugs, I think the characteristic phenomenology of that is, uh, you know, a no definite state, right? That patterns are shifting, right? The generative, like your generative world model is in this kind of superposition.

• 1:39:27Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:27Speaker 00

  And it's like radically looking, it's almost like whatever that branches are, you're like exploring, you know, in some way, like multiple branches very quickly all together. Like your world isn't collapsing into a deterministic state, right?

• 1:39:39Jesse Michels?

  Which is, which if you believe the Penrose model, there is, there may be. Our brain maintains coherence for some amount of time. This is his, he's trying to kind of derive free will in his thing too. Cause he says, there's this refractory period before the buildup into one graviton threshold, where you sort of derive and see spacetime. But in that sort of buildup with spacetime superposition, everything is kind of like, you know, popping in and out of reality. Like, like, so, so maybe if you maintain coherence for like longer or something. And this would be a physical way to describe this.

• 1:40:11Speaker 00

  And, you know, probably for me to, you know, criticize a Nobel Prize winner genius. But I think, you know, while it's a, it's a good to have a well specified theory that makes those predictions with Stuart Hammeroff's kind of sort of microtubal piece of it as well. You know, his, actually, we can potentially do an experiment to test this. Cause his basic idea is that essentially when you embed a quantum system in a classical gravitational field, it generates this inherent instability that has a characteristic decay time. And then you could, you know, set up a net measurement apparatus with two, you know, entangled masses and see, you know, if you isolate it, like how long do they, will they decay? And actually a recent experiment was just proposed called the GID experiment, taking two, two nano crystals, entangle them, magnetically confine them,

• 1:40:54Speaker 00

  and essentially, you know, like wait, right? And, and it's interesting because this will actually, it won't, it won't rule out, you know, it won't test a specific theory, but it'll rule out categories of, of theories that basically have a classical GR spacetime with quantum objects. And the basic limit though is that, you know, it's almost like, I think, I think it was, I forget who came with it, I think it was Feynman even, who was just like, there's a basic conceptual idea, which is like, if you have a quantum object in a classical spacetime, it has to send a signal, has to somehow influence another quantum object. So how is that possible, right? Like a nature of a quantum object is its superposition of states. A classical spacetime can only emit one state. It can't be in multiple gravitational fields, right?

• 1:41:38Speaker 00

  It's only, it only holds, so it's like, it's almost like information theoretic question of like, you've got the superposition of states that have to somehow send a signal to another thing in the superposition of states that is being transmitted through a classical sort of, sort of, you know, medium. Almost like logically doesn't make sense, right? So I think a version of Penrose, I don't know, he has got his twister theory and Gerard has some ideas about how to essentially get, reconstruct Penrose's twister theory from these more abstract models. But your idea of like, the brain as being a quantum system, it's weird. Like, I think people defer to like, the brain, like, consciousness is quantum. I almost want to invert it and be like, quantum is consciousness, right? It's not that like, there's some quantum voodoo thing out there that like, consciousness

• 1:42:23Speaker 00

  is like, interacting with. This is more fundamental. If you take seriously this idea that, you know, coming out of these mathematical models that Gerard has put together, like, consciousness just is what an observer, you know, quantum mechanics just is what a conscious observer will see when it's trying to like, make sense of a branching world. The world is just branching. The world is this branchial graph. But we don't see it. If you're an observer that sees one, you have to do this completion procedure. And that process will give you phenomenon that we call quantum mechanics.

• 1:42:55Jesse Michels?

  But I feel like almost the fundamental question then is like, can you fundamentally influence this Neath Bendix completion?

• 1:43:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:43:03Jesse Michels?

  In order to sort of, you know, pick your pathway goosebumps style, you know, across the multiverse.

• 1:43:07Speaker 00

  And this is the more philosophical question that Gerard struggles with a bit. And I haven't seen him like, land on a particular interpretation. I don't really land on a particular interpretation. But this is where it comes in like, well, you need to have a better theory of the observer. The theory of the observer they have is a kind of very abstract mathematical definition, right? But you really want a richer, you know, more like neurobiologically connected theory of the observer, to then see like, well, how many degrees of freedom are there in this process? How, like, the non-determinism versus determinism question gets very subtle in these sorts of systems. And in particular, this idea, it goes back in, you know, history philosophy between, on the one hand, like, idealism, on the one hand empiricism, right? You know, you have the Bishop Berkley's of the world, that basically, you know, in a

• 1:43:50Speaker 00

  sense, put all the computational burden and work inside the observer. The world is some sort of holographic bare field of awareness that that singular entity is experiencing. So all the computational, like, work is happening inside the observer in that model. There's an equivalent model of reality. Empiricism, in this sense, where you you treat the observer essentially as this null measurement apparatus.

• 1:44:16Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 1:44:16Speaker 00

  And all the interesting computational work is happening outside of it.

• 1:44:19Jesse Michels?

  It clearly has to be in between.

• 1:44:21Speaker 00

  Well, that's the thing.

• 1:44:21Jesse Michels?

  Full idealism, full materialist reductionism.

• 1:44:23Speaker 00

  Because in these theories, an observer isn't some like weird separate entity in this multi-way system. The multi-way system is just, that's all there is.

• 1:44:30Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:44:31Speaker 00

  An observer is a certain way of equivalencing those microstates.

• 1:44:34Jesse Michels?

  I don't think we're interoperable quantum detectors, but then I also don't think we are living in holographic universes.

• 1:44:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, and what Karad says, like, it's kind of a free parameter in that sense, that like, it may not actually be a measurable, you know, or even scientific question to resolve of like, like, well, it's just almost like an aesthetic preference. Do you prefer to imagine these models in such a way that all the computational burden ontologically sits inside of one observer or exists outside of the observer? Like, there's no observer outside the system, right? There's only observers inside the system, and we are a certain type of observer inside the system. There may be very different types of observers inside this multi-way system.

• 1:45:14Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:15Speaker 00

  That are perceiving it in a different way than us because of the nature of what they are as observers, right? There's different constraints that they have, right? They're less computationally bounded. They can see more of the microstructure.

• 1:45:25Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:25Speaker 00

  Right, like an AI, for example, you know, forget the questions about whether AIs are conscious or not, but just like, just assume that there could be a system that it could be conscious that we would call, you know, an AGI. But, you know, the ability to parse many, many different finely grained details of reality at a very high, at a very large speed.

• 1:45:45Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:46Speaker 00

  Wouldn't necessarily foliate that causal structure the way we do, right? We foliate the causal structure because the speed of light is much faster than the way our brains process events. So like, everything looks simultaneous to us. They look like objects with smooth trajectories inside a three-dimensional spacetime. If you were able to like, like perceive much, much faster, right? The world would be very different. It'd be kind of gooey and sloopy and it would be just kind of like, things would not be in this kind of like smooth, flat manifold, right? It'd be this, it would be very different to us, correct? Or if you imagine like how a dog, you know, blind dog that only perceives via smell, like the diffusion rate of, of, of smells is pretty slow relative to, you know, his ability to navigate the environment.

• 1:46:27Speaker 00

  So like, if he's constructing kind of a conformal metric for the space that he's in, like a dog is going to perceive a very different thing.

• 1:46:34Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:46:34Speaker 00

  Right? And so it's like, the way we have a full mental model of like space and reality is really downstream of the characteristic features of us as observers.

• 1:46:42Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:46:43Speaker 00

  And we tend to, we tend to over-anchor on that.

• 1:46:46Jesse Michels?

  Well, we could, there could be some sort of central server or nodes. Maybe it's like a server-client-side relationship with consciousness. And there are nodes, we're all nodes of consciousness and there are strengths, relative strengths of each node. And sort of reality could be this local rendering. But ultimately, if it's local rendering, it's sort of consensus collapsing function. And so there is some, you know, two-way interplay between the mind and reality itself in a way that the full materialist reductionists would like never admit to. But that's going to be constrained by like the rest of the nodes in the system. And so the fact that we're seeing a table right here is because we've sort of like implicitly agreed that a table is right here. And it's like, somebody at a certain level of consciousness, à la Jesus or something,

• 1:47:30Jesse Michels?

  walked in here, he could turn this table into a chair.

• 1:47:33Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, there's, I don't want to presume that I have the final theory here, but like, and there are major gaps. And an important gap in sort of the machinery that Garad has worked out here is multi-observer networks here, right? And, because he's trying to get the bare minimal model, most abstract version, and try to generate these mathematical results that then we can interpret in terms of these physical, you know, theories that we already have. But we really don't actually have a good theory in these terms of multiple observers. And what, what does, like, we've sort of worked out in these models, what sort of world abstract sort of physical phenomenon or physical constraints in terms of quantum, quantum mechanics and relativity, does a certain observer see, does a, essentially a multi-way observer see when they're embedded in a branching universe?

• 1:48:16Speaker 00

  We haven't though, see like, what does, how does, how do two observers see each other? Right? And importantly, like, and this is the part where I'm going beyond my competency, but there's a part of some of his papers where he's talked about this Neut's Bendix procedure kind of propagating out, right? And just like there is a finite speed of light in the causal graph, right? There's a finite speed or rate at which, you know, any given event can have a causal influence on other event. You can have a causal light cone that you can, you can, you can define over the causal graph. There's an equivalent sort of entanglement cone in the branchial space. What's the maximal speed of entanglement? We don't know what that is, right? But if we think that like conscious observers are essentially representations of that constraint, right? Like, there's only so much an observer can entangle with, or essentially

• 1:48:58Speaker 00

  do these completions, then that might put a boundary constraint on what sorts of observers exist in. And, and I don't know, this is getting beyond like my ability of like, but this idea of like, when, when you do this completion procedure in branchial space, it does propagate out. Like, these are connected systems. And this is where it gets, you know, that's, then you have to build this tower from the super abstract representations in terms of these graphs to like us.

• 1:49:20Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:20Speaker 00

  Right? And it's like, that's, that's, that's way beyond what we've been able to do thus.

• 1:49:23Jesse Michels?

  But it also makes me think of, you know, Carl Nell, who set up Army Futures Command and was, you know, kind of defending Grush publicly as soon as he came out and was on the UAP task force. He talks about a different version of the Carteshev scale. And he talks about that in two respects. One is energy density over like sheer energy output. And so that being incredibly important, you know, fire, electricity, nuclear, you know, these are more subject to the kind of axis of, of energy density than they are just sheer output. And then the second thing he says is our understanding of the universe and our sort of consciousness level or whatever. And so you're bringing up this, yeah, I mean,

• 1:50:06Jesse Michels?

  if, if you can get to that, you know, hypergraph level of understanding slowly, you know, that, that maybe that explains the sort of NHI.

• 1:50:15Speaker 00

  But it also forces us to think about other phenomenon that we've previously dismissed, right? Because we have a certain physicalist paradigm and materialist paradigm that's fundamentally local, right? That we have, that like the physicists have, you know, They came up with this model in the last, you know, like from the 1800s to the early 1920s. And then that model kind of became embedded in most, most, you know, people's folk, folk understanding of existence, right? And then have now crept into how we think about policing certain topics of inquiry in our scientific and medical disciplines, where certain things are considered paranormal pseudoscience, other things are considered perfectly fine and, you know, legitimate. We've drawn a very tight boundary on this. But it's like, we don't actually have the universe figured out, guys, right? Like, we're still figuring new things out.

• 1:50:57Speaker 00

  Like, we should, we should remain open to those basic assumptions on locality and, and sort of physicalist, as it's traditionally been described, being just not quite complete descriptions of reality, right? Yep. And then, you know, if this, something like the story I just told you here is a purely mathematical account of how, you know, we could have what would look to us like non-local phenomenon. Yep. But that would deeply connected to our conscious experience. That in one way would be entirely wooey telepathy sorts of interpretations, but would be a hard, just real feature of existence. Yes. Right? Yes. And, and I, I mean, I had my mind blown yesterday. I was listening to these, to this new podcast and I, again, I haven't like done the due diligence on it, so, you know, proviso. But it's called the Telepathy Tapes. And I've, I've, I grew up in a pretty hard, hardcore scientific paradigm of like, I need research, I need data, I need, I need evidence here.

• 1:51:42Speaker 00

  And it's remarkable story of, you know, dozens of non-verbal, uh, individuals with autism that essentially, um, you know, report their, like with one caregiver, like usually their mother, having like a telepathic connection. And they've actually done like pretty, just like what the hell types of experiments. And they, what's interesting is they report like these, uh, these sort of non-speakers, they call them spellers, because they use a certain spelling technique to, to, you know, communicate, that, um, that they have essentially telepathic connection with other, with other autistic individuals like themselves, right? And that they see normal humans, essentially us, like the speakers, right? As being like, like we're the handicapped ones. Yeah. Right?

• 1:52:26Speaker 00

  We have to, we have to distill and compress, you know, all of this complex phenomenology in our brains, this kind of conceptual stew of thought and feeling and emotion into like vocal And like plosive air movements, right? And that is like such a crude, compressive, you know, thing when you can just have a brain to brain connection and it's non-local and they can, you know, exchange feelings. It seems wild and like, you know, a year ago, if you told me like this, I'd be like, this is some kooky thing. There's some, somebody's rigging this or misinterpreting it. Now I'm like, I actually think there's a plausible explanation for something like that.

• 1:53:01Jesse Michels?

  I believe it. I'm, I got into the UFO stuff through parapsychology, which I think is like a fully like, you know, it's like they picked the worst name. You have para, you know, like paranormal or whatever, then psychology, like the least replicable scientific field or whatever. But you speak to some of these people who were at elite universities studying random event generators. Basically our minds ability to affect, you know, conventionally thought of as random things and, and phenomena in quantum mechanics with known statistical distributions, things like radioactive isotope decay. That, you know, we're somehow, we are able to affect these things in my, in my opinion. And you have, you have Jessica Utz doing these sort of, you know, meta level studies.

• 1:53:42Jesse Michels?

  I think they're pretty good as far as like the experimental protocol that she's sort of, you know, diligencing. And then I think there's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of data.

• 1:53:53Jesse Michels?

  And so, yeah, I'm a believer and there's, there's a, there's a really great book called Time Loops. Have you heard of this by this guy named Eric Worgo?

• 1:54:00Speaker 00

  Sounds familiar. I haven't read it.

• 1:54:01Jesse Michels?

  It's, it's amazing and it produces some sort of theory as to how this might work. And it involves the, the brain being sort of this hybrid classical quantum computer where we can access future knowledge states. And so actually feedback is like essential for correct or remote viewing, because if you know that you're right in the future, then you can sort of access shards of that future. If the, you know, information gets sent back in time, which may, there is temporal non-locality in quantum mechanics and there's spatial non-locality. So it just, and then we have the simultaneous to that, you have this burgeoning field of, you know, quantum biology. Where we know that the CRY4 protein and Robins or whatever use the magnetosphere of the earth via electron spin.

• 1:54:46Jesse Michels?

  And to navigate home, we know that enzyme creation occurs via quantum tunneling and that sort of thing. So I see these two like vectors of like, you have like a lot of data on like this anomalous stuff that we just like explain away and we say this is BS. This is BS because physics, right?

• 1:55:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:55:03Jesse Michels?

  But physics is so dumb because epistemologically, 50% of our physical models of reality are always wrong at any point in time. So you can't say that. And then you have this burgeoning field of quantum, you know, biology where it's like, yeah, the body's warm, wet and noisy. Maybe it's not good for coherence, but like, we're discovering a lot of stuff here. And so I think they probably converge at some omega.

• 1:55:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I clearly agree with you, but it's also been, you know, some of the well has been poisoned by a bunch of quantum voodoo peddlers, right?

• 1:55:30Jesse Michels?

  Totally.

• 1:55:30Speaker 00

  Who want to be like, I've got magic crystals, $10,000 and you know, I'm gonna like fix you.

• 1:55:34Jesse Michels?

  We just have to admit, it's like the Karl Popper's like materialist promissory notes. You can't have idealist promissory notes either. And you can't say that we know the causal mechanism of the brain. You can hypothesize, maybe there's some quantum going on there. We don't know. But it is, the data is really compelling. And I know Diane Powell, who did the telepathy tapes, and she's Harvard affiliated.

• 1:55:54Speaker 00

  She's, yeah, as hard-nosed and legit as it gets.

• 1:55:57Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:57Speaker 00

  I was like, I was really impressed by, by that work. Again, I'm going to look into it. I just, I binged them all last night. I was like, wow, this kind of opened my mind to something I hadn't previously considered.

• 1:56:06Jesse Michels?

  Well, it would make sense that there would be a trade off, right? Between like analytical knowledge and then, you know, flash insight knowledge. Like, that sort of roughly makes sense. And then one possible candidate, physical candidate, you have Gary Nolan, who's a microbiologist at Stanford, also interested in the UFO topic, who, you know, claims that people are more likely to both see UFOs, but also, you know, be more quote unquote psychic with greater neuronal density in the caudate nucleus and potamen in the basal ganglia of the brain. And so that could be, you know, and you hook up somebody doing FMRI, for example, while they're playing the game of Go. And when they make a quote unquote brilliant move, you know, a move that's totally counterintuitive as far as the rational logic set that they're using on an incremental go

• 1:56:51Jesse Michels?

  forward basis, it only makes sense in the context of a future knowledge state that they would have to know of them winning.

• 1:56:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:56:59Jesse Michels?

  That part of the brain lights up.

• 1:57:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:57:01Jesse Michels?

  So like me, and then apparently that part of the brain lights up when somebody takes eboga as well.

• 1:57:06Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:57:06Jesse Michels?

  So like me, and then people have, you know, visionary experiences. So.

• 1:57:09Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, but and then the the natural question is, okay, well, then how can you situate some phenomena like that, which are suggestive? In a scientifically motivated paradigm that can explain it? I think, you know, and that's like, you know, keep going back to the Gerardi and multiway systems. But I think that's okay. How can we get as much out of this certain framework as possible? That maybe can explain some of these things. And in, you know, the critical thing to kind of get your head around, it took me a while, multiple years I was thinking about these things is like, the brain is an evolved information structure that is that is branching as part of this multiway process. And it's evolved to sort of, you know, adapt to, it's an information complex, right? Like it, it, the brain is the tower that it's like a really, it's really small in space, but it's really long in time.

• 1:57:51Speaker 00

  If you think about the brain as, you know, a human brain, it goes back, you know, four billion years, right? So the prokotic soup, right? And those were like bootstrapped autocholytic sort of chemical structures, which you can define in terms of some sort of information preserving memory structures. So the universe essentially is learning and then finding ways to embed that learning into into real objects that then can learn more and can extend into the future. The universe is constructing itself, right?

• 1:58:12Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 1:58:13Speaker 00

  And objects of various kinds are different, you know, present day manifestations of what has been learned. Right? That's all that they are. They're they're just embodied histories of the universe, right? Like in in Bitcoin language, it's like, it's the proof of the universe's work, right? The universe is this blockchain, this multi-threaded embodied by sort of blockchain of information theoretic structures. And the brain is a certain type of of structure that the universe has evolved and learned how to create and is trying to embed certain. And it's a selection process, right? It's a pretty brutal mechanism to kind of get to these systems. And so you're like, okay, well, what sorts of capabilities then? If this is the best, if this is the space that that object has now been evolving in. It's not been evolving in what we think what's been evolving in. It's been evolving in just a terrestrial landscape of three dimensional spacetime with predator prey and whatnot interactions.

• 1:58:56Speaker 00

  But it's actually evolving in this multi-threaded, you know, branchill system. And there might be capabilities. Again, it has to, it sort of has to optimize, right? Like, how much of its computational work is going to be navigating the causal graph? Or just how much of the causal, of its computational work is going to be navigating the branchial graph? Thing about navigating the branchial graph in many evolutionary circumstances would be very non-selective. Right? You're considering, you don't see, you don't see the one branch that you're about to head into. You see multiple branches and you get confused. You don't know how to make a decision. You get eaten. You die. You fall off the cliff, right? Whatever. But there might be unique circumstances where it does give you evolutionary advantage to take a little bit of a peek into the branchial graph. Which again, it's, it's not like there's a universal time slice or a universal time. There's multiple, there's multiple branches of time, you know, almost an infinite branch of, of time.

• 1:59:41Speaker 00

  And you're in a particular part of this, of this infinite structure. And there might be evolutionary advantage to be able to like, take a little peek at the branchial graph where you get these non-local correlations, right? So you could, you could maybe get into an entangled state with a future, a future event to you and your causal structure. That might actually be, well, this might be a bit, you know, Gerard, if he was listening to me, he'd be like, he might say like, technically that might not be possible. If it's because of the structure of the graph, but like, I think it's possible essentially. And this is getting a bit more of like, the causal, like the causal light cone and the branchial entanglement cone. I think share a boundary in, in, in these models. They don't overlap.

• 2:00:18Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:19Speaker 00

  But they share a boundary.

• 2:00:20Jesse Michels?

  But it would make sense that access to the branchial would be somehow adaptive based on natural selection or something. It goes towards like Donald Hoffman's work of like, why, why do we see, you know, we don't see like 600 nanometers or whatever. We just see red.

• 2:00:33Speaker 00

  I mean, I come back to the, to these, to the, to these non-verbal autistics, right? That's highly, you know, evolutionary, you know, disfavored, right?

• 2:00:43Jesse Michels?

  But from a group selection pressure, it could be evolutionarily favored.

• 2:00:46Speaker 00

  Well, this is why, this is why it's fascinating, right? Like they, they might even call the Sears, the individuals in the society.

• 2:00:52Jesse Michels?

  Exactly.

• 2:00:53Speaker 00

  Right? And so, you know, group selection would identify these people in the population and give them privileged roles. So they're not going to be in the hunter, you know, fighter tribe because they'll get hit by the spear. But they'll try to predict whether it's good to go for the, for the, for the, you know, the raid tomorrow, right?

• 2:01:06Jesse Michels?

  Geniuses are often, you know, asexual.

• 2:01:10Jesse Michels?

  Asocial or antisocial or whatever, but but on a group level, they're extremely adaptive. And they're extremely adapted in like kind of Malthusian downturns. Like when times get tough, you need to protect your geniuses.

• 2:01:22Speaker 00

  And I was just talking this morning with somebody about maybe like on a population level, what sorts of selection are we undergoing now, right? And if you imagine, okay, human evolution brought us to a particular point where maybe like the median person is like 99% in the causal graph, one, maybe one, what's the 1%? You get the occasional flashes of intuition, weird synchronicity, you know, weird things that you were like, how did I know that? Or I was just thinking about that person they called me, things that we sort of write off, right? In these in these autistics examples, like they live much more in that world, right? And it makes them very hard to navigate normal world where we live in the causal graph and they interact in a very different way. They perceive reality very differently than us. It's very hard for us to understand. It's always sort of write it off as like they're disabled. But actually, it's like they're just experiencing reality in a very different way to us. And it's it's disfavored to navigate normal world.

• 2:02:07Speaker 00

  But then we're also looking at what sort of society are we constructing? In a sense, like, what does it mean to be autistic? And again, I'm not trying to like, you know, be like an expert on this, but like in general, you know, it's like unable to sort of process normal sensory signals in a coherent way. It's sort of sensory overload, right? And sort of what we're doing to ourselves as like a civilization, right? Like, we're constructing this digital machine interfaces and just like the cacophony of noise and hyperstimulation. It almost is making us like autistic as a civilization. And then on the other side, what do you see? Like the burgeoning cultural movements among elites that are all about consciousness, taking psychedelic exploration, like they're being squeezed out of the normal causal world and they're really spending a lot more time as like groups and, you know, different, different

• 2:02:51Speaker 00

  social practices, like explore consciousness, right? Explore the branchial space, right? Take psychedelics, meditative practices, et cetera. So I see this as like this, like this is the transition we're undergoing as a species is like, you know, we're, we've now constructed a sort of technological civilization where we don't need to have, you know, all of that cognitive energy motivated to navigate the causal graph. Yeah, we now can explore. And maybe that's the, maybe that's what these NHI have done. They've, they've gone through this, right? And now this is where they spend most of their time.

• 2:03:20Jesse Michels?

  Well, it could totally. And it could point to, I mean, this is a dark interpretation, but it's like, maybe we're in the three-body problem, maybe in causal space, our timeline is kind of screwed. And this mass desire to explore branchial space vis a vis UFOs, psychedelics, consciousness techniques, is an attempt to ascend out of a timeline that on a materialist causal level is not so hot.

• 2:03:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, this is where it gets, I mean, we're, all this was on the different branches of speculative physics, speculative metaphysics, and connecting it down to like speculative interpretations of our current, you know, human story.

• 2:03:58Jesse Michels?

  Well, can I, can I add one thing to that, which is, you know, Eric Weinstein didn't believe in UFOs for super. I would always be like, dude, I think this is real, you know, but again, based on some of the stuff I'm pointing out about parapsychology, where I'm like, I don't know how it's real, but like, these observables just seem right. And he got into it because he became convinced that there was kind of this secret branch of physics, like involving people like Wheeler, Feynman, DeWitt, and that these guys had way more of an interface with private aerospace than actually met the eye. One of the guys in that Wheeler Feynman DeWitt circle is a guy named Hugh Everett. And Hugh Everett was Wheeler's student at Princeton, and he came up with this multiverse theory in the 50s. And DeWitt really helped popularize it in the 70s. And I think about the stuff

• 2:04:39Jesse Michels?

  that DeWitt was working on, you know, with Agnew Bonson at the Institute of Field Physics at UNC North Carolina Chapel Hill. It was like often gravitational anomalies. It was like, they were like, there was an extreme interest in gravity. And obviously, at least on a macroscopic general relativity scale, gravity and time seem super tightly coupled. And so, and then Everett goes and he works for the Pentagon, and he works on like all sorts of like interesting game theory stuff vis a vis like our nuclear program. And I sometimes worry, wonder if like, the, if there is some high level game that's like, you know, above our at least known Cartershev scale, it's going on at the level of like time timelines and nuclear stuff.

• 2:05:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it sounds nuts, but I also have forced myself into a situation intellectually where I have to take this idea of timeline manipulation very seriously because it comes out naturally from seeing the world in terms of this sort of multi-way evolution systems, right, where there is no preferred timeline, and it's not like the, you know, the bulk universe, you know, sense of generalitability is true. Essentially, these models, these Gerard models are very much like an Everettian interpretation, but a little bit more of a fundamental structure. He basically just takes the mathematics of the wave function. It's just, okay, whatever. It's just, you know, all these eigenvalues exist in just

• 2:06:06Speaker 00

  a different universe, right? And then the way that he characterized it is like each measurement operation causes a branch, but he doesn't really define what a measurement operation is. So there's kind of an undefined sense of like, how do you scope the actual multiverse that gets created, right? What are the branches, right? What defines a branch? In the Gerard, it's a very well-defined sense of what a branch is, right? Because it's a discrete structure. There's only a countable number of these branches. And so, but I had to take that seriously of like, there's multiple threads of time, and they're not all like potentially accessible, right? And they're going to be constrained in any given local reference frame that's defined by an observer or set of observers in sort of this rulial

• 2:06:48Speaker 00

  representation that are all slicing reality relatively close to each other. Well, it's like, well, how, how, like, I just open, like, is that, is it possible to move, you know, like, make, make decisions, have, for example, the theory here, right? This goes back to, I think, I forget where, what, there was like some, like UFO lore, some communication with some NHI was like, what's going on? Like, why are you here or something? It was like, CIA wizards are messing with the timeline, right? It was kind of like the tagline. And it's kind of, you know, become kind of a bit of like lore, you know, sort of storytelling. But. It's like, well, okay, I always try to cash out these crazy statements in terms of something I can interpret in terms of the physics that I trust here.

• 2:07:30Speaker 00

  It's like, okay, well, if it turns out that is possible, if you, you know, we're all minds existing in a very tight cluster in real space. And we're slicing, we see reality basically the same way.

• 2:07:41Speaker 00

  And is it possible that like, you know, one of those minds, because we don't have an observer, as I mentioned, we don't have like a theory of this structure where it's like multiple observers interacting, right? Is it possible that like, some of those people can just decide, you know, using certain, whatever techniques, right, might involve consciousness, right? It amplified with whatever, you know, degrees of freedom we can exploit through our technology. That could, you know, cause nearby minds to all shift with them to a new timeline.

• 2:08:09Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 2:08:09Speaker 00

  Right? If I'm like, okay, how is it possible to take a prima facie absurd statement, CIA wizards messing with the timeline? And cash that out in something I can interpret in terms of a physical theory? That's how I would have to do it. I don't, it doesn't mean it's, you know, true. It just is like, I feel like, you know, all I try to hear is these things and I try not to dismiss them. I try to, you know, come up with a naturalistic explanation that isn't just, oh, we're, we're time traveling. Well, because then you get into all the causal problems of, of time travel.

• 2:08:34Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:08:35Speaker 00

  One of the things in these models that time travel can be specified in a certain way, whereas, because there's no such thing as like a universal time function.

• 2:08:42Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:08:43Speaker 00

  Right?

• 2:08:43Jesse Michels?

  But. So in the branchial space.

• 2:08:44Speaker 00

  But a branchial space time travel would be an observer happens, happens to equivalence a set of states in its future causal graph that are, that are observationally indistinct from a set of states that previously existed in its causal graph. So it's not like he trapped, like that observer traveled back in time. It just happens to encounter in its future causal graph, a structure of states that is identical, observationally indistinguishable from a past set of states. Like that, you know, it's still a linear, it's still a linear process of the, of these, of this evolution. But just encountering a future state that's identical to a past state, right?

• 2:09:20Jesse Michels?

  Or, or if you have hypergraph root access, you have a saved, a saved game state from kind of an information theoretic standpoint, you could just like go back to that saved game.

• 2:09:28Speaker 00

  Well, so in, in the language of category theory, if you have these, if you have this, you have state A. In you know, local future, that's observation indistinguishable from state B relative to the observer. The observer can equivalence those two states.

• 2:09:40Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 2:09:41Speaker 00

  Right? And so there is no meaningful distinction between it's like a saved state that then was passed. It's like, that's all that there was, right? And the observer is just encountering a future state, a state that is identical to its past state. There's no way to distinguish between that and like canonical descriptions of time travel.

• 2:09:57Jesse Michels?

  From our perspective.

• 2:09:58Speaker 00

  Right? There's no observational distinction. Maybe, maybe like at a lower level of description, they actually are different. It's not true time travel in the sense that they're, you know, the microstates are observation are actually identical. But that's not what you need to explain time travel that would be, you know, empirically relevant to us. It would just be, you know, and how is this different from simulations, right? Well, you know, well, one is like, you just happen to encounter a future state that's identical to a past state. The simulation interpretation, this would be, somebody is able to construct for an observer or a set of observers, a set of observation, a set of, a set of states in its future that are observation indistinguishable to that set of observers to states that were in its local past.

• 2:10:39Speaker 00

  And I don't, we, that's way beyond our capabilities. Well, that's, that's, I know that's, it's not ruled out, right? In principle.

• 2:10:45Jesse Michels?

  It's beyond our capabilities, but I don't like, sometimes I think about how obvious the simulation arguments are. So this is like popularized by Nick Bostrom and, you know, super intelligence. That, that gave it its sort of coveted academic stamp of approval. But before that, you had Philip K. Dick talking about this in all his sci-fi novels. And you even have somebody who in my mind is as conventional and like not creatively thinking as Neil deGrasse Tyson, saying that we are 50%, we're in a, we're in a simulation. So like he, that guy won't like, you know, you, you need to get peer reviewed and like, I'm not going to respect anything else in the physics world outside of like super conventional dogma. But 50% where we could be in a simulation.

• 2:11:28Jesse Michels?

  And so I think about like that 50% branch, right? Of like us being in a simulation, which again is that, that might even be underestimated, given that Neil deGrasse Tyson is the spokesman here. If you think about where we're headed in our future, things probably don't remain stable. They probably inflect upwards or downwards. And if they reflect downwards, it's like this.

• 2:11:50Jesse Michels?

  You know, we're all walking around in shanty towns without access to clean water and we're microchipped, but like you probably get this like increase in like IT, you know, virtual reality fidelity. And so that's like Ready Player One. Definitely opt into the simulation. If we end up in a world of resource abundance, it will be through dual use technology and technology that will either be saving of humanity or destroying of humanity. We're not at the, you know, point at which a kid in his bedroom can blow up the world, but we might be at some point in the future. Just the, you know, destructive tech exponentially increasing and then costs of that tech, you know? And so it's like, if you were to like, be like quote unquote guardians

• 2:12:35Jesse Michels?

  of that future world, you might put people through a simulation as a test to, you know, and maybe they have to contemplate virtue and that allows them to ascend out of the, you know, out of their, you know, computational interfaces and have access to this world that is, you know, maybe infinite resources, but also you can destroy it at the drop of a hat or something.

• 2:13:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's tough to sometimes connect these, this metaphysical model or metaphysical analysis and physical analysis to like the human condition and our, in our day to day kind of near future trajectories, right? And I think the interesting thing about the NHI question is it's like, it's it's the fulcrum point, right? That sort of is forcing us to, to one, zoom out and try to situate ourselves in a, what we think of as the final, or at least more fundamental picture of reality. And then account for these objects in terms of some, you know, near term or some interpretation of our, of our political experience, right? Those are like, and in the like religious, you know, stories, that's like a traditional cosmogony or a theosophy. It's like, we want to, or theodicy, like we want to tell

• 2:13:46Speaker 00

  We want to situate our, you know, nitty gritty, humdrum, terrestrial, human affairs in some sort of cosmic story. Right. And that imbues everything with significance. It imbues us with significance. It imbues this with meaning or whatever. And so it's a very tempting human project. I like if the, if the, if the NHI, you know, encounters and the UAP craft were not real. Right. And I was just on the separate trajectory of analyzing Wolfram models. I'd be like, oh, those are separate. Those are separate things. It's like analyze metaphysics and think about, you know, how humans are going to screw, you know, screw each other up. The fact that we have this interface now, apparently with some other form of intelligence, you know, forces you to then stretch into these questions.

• 2:14:30Speaker 00

  But then, of course, we have the heavy baggage of our society of all these different theodices and worldviews and different religious interpretations that we have to kind of navigate. Cause those are very, very deeply embedded. I do think like very practically, right? Like we are creating crazy weapons. Yeah. Right. On this type, we are, we have some crazy shit. And there's some crazy shit happening like now. I mean, I had a meeting just the other day, some people inside duty intel, and I was told, you know, one of the things came out of the water and hit somebody.

• 2:15:01Jesse Michels?

  That's wild.

• 2:15:02Speaker 00

  And this happens on not, not infrequently. And this, this was a conversation with, with a person that was not, this was not the topic of the conversation.

• 2:15:11Jesse Michels?

  Like, like a craft can come out of the water?

• 2:15:15Speaker 00

  I try not to get, we were trying to get into any details. It was, it was one of, one of those things.

• 2:15:21Jesse Michels?

  Cause we know nuclear subs are actually the first line of offense, but.

• 2:15:24Speaker 00

  No, like it, you know, it came out of the water.

• 2:15:27Jesse Michels?

  Transmedium.

• 2:15:28Speaker 00

  And zapped.

• 2:15:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:15:30Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 2:15:31Speaker 00

  That was, it was a bit, it was a bit much. And this came in the context of a conversation that was not about this at all. Right. It was in more normie, you know, stuff I do, like day jobs, sorts of stuff. And it just came out towards the end and. Yeah, I'll just like, so this is happening now, right? And it's happening in a complicated set of conditions. And so this is where it's like, you know, we had this very abstract, you know, physics, metaphysics, intelligence, simulation discussion. But then I have to like, have, I had then have to come back to like this conversation, like these conversations I had just like a few days ago. And I'm like, what the hell is actually happening?

• 2:16:12Speaker 00

  Because I'm not sure I can truly explain like the nature of these abstract models and abstract thought experiments is they set boundary conditions for possible explanations. They give you a guide to sort of get a sort of a gut understanding, or you kind of grok what you, you know, can mentally visualize. But they don't really, you know, help you account for like the, these random, like these detailed things that are happening, right? Like, why is the particular morphology? Why, you know, all the, the, you know, different aspects of quote like ufology? They do not, I know we have a predictive theory that is like so general that makes these specific, you know, set of hypotheses that then correlate, you know, one to one with all the specific details of UFO.

• 2:16:55Jesse Michels?

  How put off might be closest, but even, even that, you know, involves sort of messing with general Einstein's field equations in a way that a conventional physicist.

• 2:17:05Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, there's also, I mean, if I have some issues with simulation theory, but like on a metaphysical basis, but there's versions of the simulation hypothesis, which are not metaphysical, they're just like, we are all being like, someone basically has, you know, virtually matrixed us.

• 2:17:20Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:17:20Speaker 00

  Right? And, you know, whatever, they've just able to do that. And in that scenario, well, like, this is the three body problem, but like on steroids, like what science can we do? Right? Like, they control the experiments we can run, the thoughts we can have, the things we can observe, like, we're just, we're just puppets, right? So the question is like, where is that degree of freedom that still exists in a simulation that's, you know, hypothesized in that scenario? And is it? One in which even the simulators have some inherent constraints, like this computational irreducibility, they can set it up, they can set some boundary conditions, some initial states, and then just have to let it run.

• 2:17:51Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:17:52Speaker 00

  And they're just learning what the system does. You could say that's a good model for the whole universe.

• 2:17:55Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 2:17:56Speaker 00

  Right? Universe is just, it's running.

• 2:17:57Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 2:17:58Speaker 00

  It's discovering new things, it's creating novel structures, and it's embedding its memories over time into the future. So, you know, I'm not sure how much that gets you, right?

• 2:18:06Jesse Michels?

  Well, there's like NPC version of the simulation, which gets you nowhere. It gets you into you're a cog in the machine with no free will. And then there's like avatar version of the simulation where you're porting yourself from on high into like a lower level simulation.

• 2:18:19Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:18:19Jesse Michels?

  Maybe voluntarily, maybe not. But like, maybe there's some sort of root access you can get to or something. But that's also like, yeah, extremely hard to quantify.

• 2:18:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, there's like, like Lee Cronin and Sarah Walker, I really like them. They've tried to construct versions of assembly theory. You should have them on. And, you know, they have a certain vision of free will. And I think you can actually, I don't have a full account of all this, but like intellectually, I'm really interested in trying to pull together the Wolfram models, which I think are like the more fundamental structure of reality, the more fundamental sort of mathematical, physical picture with the assembly theory picture, which is trying to think about the universe at a slightly higher level of description in terms of information constructors, right? Self-replicating information persistence through time and like assembly is like a mathematical framework to think about, you know, what sorts of structures the universe is creating.

• 2:19:07Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:19:07Speaker 00

  And then I want to take that and I want to combine it with kind of the metaphysics of something close to what like Philip Goff, the philosopher has in terms of, he sometimes goes between cosmosycism, proto panpsychism, where consciousness is embedded.

• 2:19:20Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:19:21Speaker 00

  Right? Because even the Gerard Wolfram models, they're, they're fully abstract, idealized sort of structural descriptions of reality, right? But they don't actually tell us like why there's such a thing as qualia or phenomenal experience.

• 2:19:33Jesse Michels?

  Same with assembly theory is this really neat mathematical understanding of how chemistry tethers into biology.

• 2:19:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:19:39Jesse Michels?

  But I think consciousness lies outside of it.

• 2:19:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:19:42Jesse Michels?

  And like why you have extremely high, I guess they have like an index, right? For like an assembly index or whatever.

• 2:19:48Speaker 00

  Assembly number and then the copy number.

• 2:19:50Jesse Michels?

  Right. So like why you have like complex systems. That are like somehow low entropy is like, like, that's like this extremely open question. And I would say like you brought up Maxwell's demon. You know, the, the plot of the movie Tenet, like,

• 2:20:03Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:20:03Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. So it's like, he, in this case, he uses, it's actually, I think, a particle accelerator, but he figures out some sort of Maxwell's demon thing where you can reverse, you know, second law of thermodynamics, reverse entropy. And like, maybe consciousness is the only anti-entropic force or something. It's like an order creating for, there are even words in biology, you know, people sort of make up. It's like centropy, you know, where it's like, if you look at Carl Friston's free energy principle, his famous neuroscientist, um, you know, uh, our brains are attractive to, are attracted to ordered signals and not randomized signals, you know, and so there's, there's something about that that like seems to, I think that the, um, uh, the, uh, assembly theory model is like almost complete.

• 2:20:48Jesse Michels?

  But I think that the consciousness, consciousness thing is really important.

• 2:20:51Speaker 00

  So I, I try to think about like, imagine you had a God's eye view of like this abstract, like realm that I'm talking about in terms of, uh, say the branchial graph, or even like a more abstract variation of it. And you could like, you're looking at it and you're trying to find like, what are the interesting parts of it? Right? Like, brains would be, you know, like, we think brains are small and insignificant because we're just small, relatively small creatures on a big, on a moderate sized planet, around a medium sun in the middle of like vast emptiness of, of, of, of, you know, spacetime. But this sort of picture of reality, this sort of, you know, that is the causal graph representation, right? The sort of coarse grained macro scale representation that, you know, smoothly differentiable, you know, continuous manifolds allows us to do general activity, et cetera.

• 2:21:34Speaker 00

  But it tells us it's a different picture of reality, this sort of branchial structure. And this kind of correlates to how Lee Cronin and them were thinking about kind of the universe constructing, you know, more interesting objects, right? And more interesting objects essentially are like more information theoretic, complex structures that persist through time. And so that is what the universe is creating, right? The brain is actually one of the more interesting objects that the universe has created thus far. You know, it's small in space, it's very large in time and extremely large in kind of complexity space. Right? And so like, think about not us as humans, but like us as like conscious balls, right? Of like, from like other, other conscious balls in the universe that might be causally distant. They might not be so distant in branchial space and they would have, they'd be really interested

• 2:22:18Speaker 00

  in finding those other balls of interestingness.

• 2:22:20Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:22:20Speaker 00

  Right? So it'd be like moths to a flame to a certain extent.

• 2:22:23Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:23Speaker 00

  Right? And so I think this is what like NHI kind of, you know, it's like, they think, how could they get here? It's like, well, are they coming here from the planet over there or are they coming from branchial space, not that far away?

• 2:22:32Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:32Speaker 00

  Right? And we just have, you know, you know, like, we're just interesting now.

• 2:22:35Jesse Michels?

  Well, when I did this, this piece with David Grush, he was like, if I were a betting man, I thought this was like the most important piece or part of my interview. And it's like a very sort of fleeting moment, but he says, if I were a betting man, I would say that, you know, they might not be that, the NHI might not be that much more advanced from us, but they come from an alternative timeline in which they went the civil propulsion route and we went the destructive nuclear route. So it points to what you're saying. And if you have like the, the economics of the future involving this like weird Carteshev scale thing, it's like when we create nuclear weapons, we might be of interest and you might have this sort of dark forest analogy, Allah, the three body problem where until that happens,

• 2:23:16Jesse Michels?

  it's actually really adaptive for them to hide themselves and to not let themselves be known. And then all of a sudden you have to interact in sort of these ephemeral ways to affect timelines or whatever, because we might be blowing ourselves up or something.

• 2:23:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. I think the dark forest books are really good and a good exploration is kind of this, you know, cosmic game theory. But I also have, I have two, two thoughts on this. One is like, I think advanced civilizations, like, I think people default in the Carteshev scale to going like bigger and out into the universe. And that correlates with the, you know, the standard vibe, the Musk vibe. We got to become multi-planetary. We're going to do von Neumann self-replicating probes and we're just going to expand out. We're going to colonize available resources in our like, in our future light cone. It's kind of the, you know, the trope in San Francisco, like the future light cone of humanity is at stake and all this nonsense, right?

• 2:24:04Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:05Speaker 00

  And, uh, and I think that's, it might be wrong, right? Because if you actually look at our trajectory of civilization, like, yeah, we're going to the moon, we're going maybe to Mars and we're putting some effort into that. But like, where's the vast majority of our effort going into? It's building smaller and smaller structures.

• 2:24:19Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:24:19Speaker 00

  Right? It's, you know, it's an enemy to race, right? And in TSMC, you know, seven meters, two meters. We are trying to carve into, you know, the smallest scales as possible.

• 2:24:29Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:29Speaker 00

  More information and like interesting, you know, causal.

• 2:24:34Speaker 00

  Uh, you know, power. And I think instead of thinking about civilizations expanding out into the universe, do they just like, do they just basically collapse into its basement?

• 2:24:42Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Engineering at the molecular level is like way more interesting than more brute force to like move out into.

• 2:24:48Speaker 00

  And that would also kind of semi explain part of the Fermi paradox. It's like, where, where are they? We don't see them. Well, it's because you're looking for civilizations that are transforming their local galactic neighborhood, right? They're just, they're doing massive gigascale infrastructure projects to convert stars into, you know, more probes, right? Whereas maybe that's, that's amateur hour. Like, most civilizations realize like, why bother, right? When there's a hole, there's like, there's a shortcut. We just, we, you break into the basement and then you've got root access to reality. You don't need to mess around with stars. You could just zip around and do whatever, right? And you, maybe you get, you know, just arbitrary degrees of, of, of, of, of, uh, energy you could exploit from the quantum vacuum or whatever, right? And that you can construct, you know, information is information. It's scale invariant. It's like, why do you need to construct, you

• 2:25:33Speaker 00

  know, galactic scale, like computronium, you know, things versus like, you know, just embed things at the Planck scale, right? And then just like, you know, you just disappear. You sort of go poof, right? And, and then maybe that corresponds with the deeper understanding of, you know, again, this multi-threaded structure of, of time. And, you know, you're looking to see who's coming in to join your club, right? Who's about to make that break where they figure out how to engineer themselves, not to zoom out and expand, but to like, go in, right? To join, join them. And everyone that's there, you know, by assumption say, doesn't have any implicit, um, technological advantage. And there's not necessarily, maybe, you know, assume maybe there's local scarcity, but there's no global scarcity. And so the competitive dynamics are pretty mollified, if not extinct. And so there's not really

• 2:26:17Speaker 00

  this competitive race. Really, all you're competing over is sort of what sort of cultural, sort of conscious experiences are you bringing to that party, right? Cause everyone maybe discovers the same physics, but they got there through a very, you know, historically contingent evolution. They've got an interesting culture, background, narratives, stories. That would be, would be interesting to share and exchange. This sort of the, the economy of that would be kind of an economy of conscious experience, right? And, and, and, you know, new, you know, civilizations that are nucleating higher level consciousness and conscious, you know, balls that are interesting. They can engineer technology that allows them to essentially, you know, instead of upload, download themselves, right? Into the basement of reality. Now they're going to join them, right? Wherever they are.

• 2:26:59Speaker 00

  And they'd be like, oh, we're gonna scout out, you know, some of those civilizations that might be close to doing that, right? And we're gonna, you know, just assess the cut of their jib, right? Like, what is their story? What is their, what are they gonna bring here? Are they gonna be kind of annoying? Are they gonna, are they gonna, are they gonna like, kind of rub us the wrong way? Like, and maybe, maybe there's some elements of this, and this is super speculation, which is like, hey, like, we seem to be all a part of this grand universe mysterious project of creating interesting things like us, and this is where we all end up.

• 2:27:28Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:28Speaker 00

  And so we're like, we wanna help get the new guys in.

• 2:27:31Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:31Speaker 00

  Right? And we don't, we'd rather you not blow yourself up and destroy everything. We'd wanna hear, you know, get you there. And maybe there's, you know, in this narrative, right? Maybe there's like, you know, steps in between us and where you ultimately get to, right? This sort of, what we would call more spiritual enlightened, you know, angelic, universal consciousness, whatever, right? But maybe there's steps in between, and maybe some advanced civilizations haven't gotten there yet.

• 2:27:52Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:52Speaker 00

  Right? And they're kind of being dicks, right? And maybe they're messing with us.

• 2:27:57Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 2:27:57Speaker 00

  And there's maybe those, those people, those, those sorts of NHI, they're kind of being dicks to us. And maybe there's this other, you know, larger, maybe more amorphous group, group, whatever, that sits in a slightly different, you know, adjacency to our experience of the world. And they're like, you know, they're not like, warring gods in that sense, but they're like, hey, we would rather these dickish aliens not mess with you anymore. And we would rather, like, you guys get on the, get on the right path to, like, eventually come join us.

• 2:28:22Jesse Michels?

  Oh, it's so fascinating. It's like a consciousness economy. You can picture like a consciousness world's fair, where each person brings their world of experience or something.

• 2:28:32Speaker 00

  I think people, because we're, I mean, we're so embedded in this materialist paradigm, which is, you know, essentially, which leads you to a vision of hyper competitive, zero sum, dark forest models, where it's all, you know, scraping for available matter in your light cone. And it might not be it, right? Because they're just assuming a certain structure of what those conscious agents are motivated to do.

• 2:28:52Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:52Speaker 00

  Right?

• 2:28:52Jesse Michels?

  Well, in fact, if there was some holographic overlay of our reality, or some higher dimensional space, it probably wouldn't be, like, the materials would be sort of local incentive structures to like, mine something much deeper or more fundamental. And those things wouldn't be thought Is important to us because you know, the materials will be used as levers or whatever.

• 2:29:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:29:14Jesse Michels?

  Carrots and sticks. But in fact, you know, good vibes and bad vibes might represent that economy better than.

• 2:29:21Speaker 00

  I mean, it's almost like on one end, we have say like a dead AI and the other end, we have like an enlightened autistic spiritual being. Right? And, and you can almost imagine like what we are now is we're kind of, we're kind of at this crux point. And you can almost see this play out in kind of our different cultural attitudes and debates of like, you know, is it all about doubling down on machine intelligence?

• 2:29:45Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:46Speaker 00

  And the fears of what that would be, or do we go into this more enlightened, you know, spiritualist, you know, kind of consciousness expanding direction? And I almost see that as like, okay, like I always like to, the physicist is like, take everything to the limit, right? To sort of explore the like, the boundaries of the system. And it's like, okay, well, if another civilization or if it's the, that is a natural bifurcation for any, any civilization in the universe, right? Where I assume there is consciousness, real and fundamental. And but also, you know, AIs are possible, right? And like manipulating matter to, you know, expand and actual do things in the universe is possible. Well, there could be civilizations that split and do go above and both directions. But what that mean is like, imagine a planet that like spits off, you know, both like a colonizing dead mind, dead machine intelligence.

• 2:30:31Speaker 00

  And then its progenitors kind of go and hide out in the basement and enjoy conscious like, like, like the consciousness economy. And the rest of the universe just becomes like, kind of a hostile place.

• 2:30:40Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:41Speaker 00

  But like the cool, like the party's down there.

• 2:30:44Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:44Speaker 00

  Right? And so we're not, we're, we're kind of, we're not there yet.

• 2:30:48Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:48Speaker 00

  But we're creating, so it was like, I try to like construct the, and they're just like, just those stories or narratives. But that sort of accounts for these different tropes that are in the UFO lore. The thing basically in the Tom DeLonge books are things that Elizondo was hinted at. You know, they've drawn and even the book Crypto's Conundrum.

• 2:31:06Jesse Michels?

  Uh huh.

• 2:31:07Speaker 00

  It's, they all address this idea of like, The, the bad NHI or the malign is always, um, the metaphors are always like a swarm, mindless, soulless.

• 2:31:20Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, like a Borg-like intelligence.

• 2:31:21Speaker 00

  Yes, that's usually the metaphors and those are very persistent tropes. And then the alternative, like the binary opposition is individualistic, but like enlightened, conscious, connected beings.

• 2:31:31Jesse Michels?

  It's, it's why I'm pro UFO over, so if you see AI and UFOs as two kind of somewhat maybe opposed narratives, but both like narratives you should probably be bullish on over the next 10 to 20 year time or whatever. Yeah. To use annoying adjusting term, you know, I think there'll be more in the zeitgeist like, you know, increasing.

• 2:31:51Speaker 00

  I mean, yeah, 10 years, I'd be a bit optimistic. Yeah, it's, it's happening now.

• 2:31:55Jesse Michels?

  Oh, it's happening now. It's happening now, but you know, near term, this is, these things are just going to grow. And I think the AI thing, I have really trouble, a lot of trouble telling a charismatic story as to how it ends. It's sort of just pure game theory, but like from like a consumer or like individual interface perspective, kind of dystopian, like maybe outside of like getting a better natural language interface to like Google or whatever, you know, like, like, uh, so your better recall occurs in like natural language, you can understand better, you know? I think outside of like decreasing that latency, we're kind of decreasing the latency between the brain and the consumer internet, which is not a positive thing in my opinion. So

• 2:32:39Jesse Michels?

  that feels like kind of dystopian. And then I'm not even getting into like being able to create a nerve agent with off the shelf parts with an LLM or whatever. Like, so that feels like pretty dark. On the UFO side, there definitely is this like swarm hive mind component that like scares me a bit whereby you could totally create some auspice for like a clamp down new world order where like, nobody has any sort of autonomy because of this hive mind invasion. The hive mind again also could be real. And so that could be dystopian. But then like, maybe there's some version of it where we can like ascend consciousness wise, and maybe we can meet some, you know, uh, higher, higher Kardashev

• 2:33:21Jesse Michels?

  scale, you know, angelic beings or whatever that are, that are a little less, uh, interferent in our day to day matters. And so, yeah.

• 2:33:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it's interesting. If you go back to the 20, you know, it's interesting, the UFO story and even the consciousness story are very intertwined in American, you know, intelligence history. Right? Like the discovery of LSD and like, you know, probably the, you know, the, we had some crap, but I think, you know, we detonated the Tullar Ulam device, right? And it's just like, a lot, a lot of stuff happened in like the early 1950s, you know, atomic energy act, you know, past that. It was like, okay. And then, of course, that was, you know, obviously how put off was involved in both the UFO side of this as well as the consciousness side of this. And of course, MKUltra was maybe the more weaponized version of the consciousness research and viewing programs with the more, you know, tradecraft out sort of application. It seems very clear, these were sort of interwoven threads, but like, those were all behind the curtain. Yeah.

• 2:34:13Speaker 00

  Right? Like, they were all suppressed at the same time, probably for similar reasons, right? But also had deep political consequences, right? Like, the reason why we don't, you know, Nixon, there's a, didn't want, you know, hippies doing LSD and taking acid is like, why do I, like, it undermines the paracal power structure, right? Undermines people's confidence and like you as the authority figure, right? It's like, we can't have that, right? What's interesting now is that like, countercultural revolution is coming from the elites. It's just coming from a different cluster of elites that now essentially have demonstrated more power than the establishment elites. Right? And now, like, that wave of sort of, I know, like, a huge cluster of elites in Austin and San Francisco regularly do psychedelic drugs and do these like, practices almost are like, you know, what would be like

• 2:34:58Speaker 00

  psychological cults, right? Of trying to like, deeply connect and take on special formulations and pay tens of thousands of dollars for these experiences, right? And these are people that run large companies and that are like, raising tens of millions of dollars for their startups, right?

• 2:35:09Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:09Speaker 00

  And it's like, this is a, I see this like a blast wave of like a cultural reformation that's focused on essentially a consciousness.

• 2:35:15Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 2:35:16Speaker 00

  You know, paradigm. And it just hasn't, that, it's coming from a counter, but it hasn't spread throughout the whole society. But like, when it does, that will be a dramatic transformation, right? Of just how we situate things in like, the basic political economy and like, can you imagine like, if, you know, the average congressman was like, doing psychedelics on the weekend and like, talking about their, their, their, like, you know, their experiences, right? Like, completely outside their open window. I expect that to happen the next five or 10 years.

• 2:35:43Jesse Michels?

  Five to 10, I would say.

• 2:35:45Speaker 00

  I mean, maybe two to three. I don't know, right?

• 2:35:46Jesse Michels?

  Like, I would extend that out, but I agree with the trend. That's wild.

• 2:35:50Speaker 00

  No, I mean, the rate of change, just that I've seen from like the folks that are currently in the Vanguard, and that will probably be, you know, part of this wave that we talked about at the beginning of this, or anti-establishment, you know, counter-elites coming in, you know, a good proportion of them have a radically different metaphysical worldview.

• 2:36:08Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:08Speaker 00

  Right? While they're also the Vanguard of techno-capital, they inherently don't, I think, trust techno-capital.

• 2:36:14Jesse Michels?

  Totally.

• 2:36:14Speaker 00

  They've used it to accrue power and they've gotten to where they are, but now they have a sense of emptiness and anxiety, and then they want to

• 2:36:21Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:36:22Speaker 00

  get meaning somewhere else.

• 2:36:23Jesse Michels?

  Well, it's like, you know, J.D. Vance had a venture capital career prior to becoming VP and like, but he's kind of anti-tech and it's like, you know, I think the more nuanced, you know, perspective that does justice to his worldview better is like, he's anti-big tech and like, you know, tech malfeasance. But like, it is this nuanced worldview where you look at the Make America Healthy Again people or whatever, and they describe it as like a spiritual or cosmic war.

• 2:36:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:36:51Jesse Michels?

  And like that, you wouldn't really hear those terms like, you know, 10, 20 years ago.

• 2:36:54Speaker 00

  And that's, I think, what, I think that's what has happened, right? And that's where the UFO thing is coming into it, is like this, yeah, perestroika and glassnost idea is like, it's not just a political project for many folks, it's like a spiritual or metaphysical project. And this is why the sort of, you know, the UFO thing isn't just a pure nuts and bolts technological thing. Because I think, you know, even the legacy program knows it's not, right? It's not just like, okay, they've got some meta-material, then maybe there's a tensor, you know, component to the Einstein field equations that we can, you know, rejigger to get some, you know, anti-gravitic effect, and we can then do, you know, some crazy ISR orb stuff, right? Great. Good for you. But that's not the big thing.

• 2:37:33Jesse Michels?

  No, it's clearly not.

• 2:37:35Speaker 00

  That's not, that's not, that's not the thing that they're worried about coming out, right? I don't think they're worried about the fact that, oh, we can do Andy Gravin and we've got special stuff and maybe China's got orbs and, you know.

• 2:37:45Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 2:37:45Speaker 00

  That's the thing. That's not, that's not something that would be catastrophic disclosure.

• 2:37:49Jesse Michels?

  No.

• 2:37:49Speaker 00

  No, right? It's something completely different, right? It's a much bigger, you know, sense of transforming how modern civilization thinks of itself.

• 2:37:57Jesse Michels?

  Absolutely.

• 2:37:57Speaker 00

  And the relationships of existing power structures is what I know Shein has talked about as, you know, he represents, you know, a spy for a certain legacy institutional structure, right? He's the, he's the, he's the, he was the chief of station. I mean, he was the chief legal counsel for, for, for, for, for the Jesuits. Which, you know, it's like, it's like, when people ask like, how does Danny Sheen know all this stuff? It's like, he's just like a lawyer who happens to be, you know, a Jesuit kind of, you know, policy guy. I was like, no, he was like, he was chief of station for the Jesuit, you know, intelligence.

• 2:38:29Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:38:31Speaker 00

  Like in DC, like he's like, you know, he's a spy fundamentally.

• 2:38:36Speaker 00

  He's like, but he's a scholar spy coming out of that Jesuit tradition, like their oldest spy organization.

• 2:38:40Jesse Michels?

  He's like Forrest Gump or Zelig. He literally is in, pops up in every American conspiracy.

• 2:38:46Speaker 00

  But like, what, you, you think that was a coincidence, right?

• 2:38:48Jesse Michels?

  No, no, but I also, I find it super fascinating.

• 2:38:51Speaker 00

  How is he still alive?

• 2:38:52Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:38:53Speaker 00

  Right?

• 2:38:53Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:53Speaker 00

  This is why.

• 2:38:54Jesse Michels?

  No, that's the Occam's razor explanation. I mean, it's also fascinating that like certain, so I think the, the JFK for example, for example, is like, he, he's pretty unbiased there, like he wasn't directly involved in any of that stuff. And so like, I actually think like that account is like fully right when it comes to Shein. And then he'll tell the story of Watergate and he'll be like, cause he represented James McCord. And he was like, he was, you know, Dulles is number two for a long time. And he was like the main architect behind, it was like him and G. Gordon Liddy, main architects behind Watergate. And I'm like, wait, so what about James McCord? Like he was, you know, CIA and like, he'll say like, well, James McCord, you know, he wanted to be on the inside and he wasn't on the inside.

• 2:39:37Jesse Michels?

  He didn't know quite what he was doing. So like, he was, he was ordered to, you know. Burglarize the DNC and bug Larry O'Brien's phone, but like he wasn't clued in and so he got really pissed about that, you know, whatever. And I'm like, dude, that's not the story. Like, I think McCord knew way more. And I, that's the part where I'm like, okay, like Sheen might have, you know, some interests there and like protecting him and he was defending him.

• 2:40:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, this, this brings me a slightly different tangent, but like thinking about this story, right? People, it goes back to like thinking, um, the, what actors are we modeling in this whole narrative, right? We tend to bucket in these bland terms of like the CIA, Lockheed Martin, you know, the Vatican. It's just these blobs of institutional references.

• 2:40:24Jesse Michels?

  Monoliths.

• 2:40:25Speaker 00

  And it's just not how in practice it plays out. Like even at the micro scale, it's like, they're very individual, you know, actors that are aligned in very kind of complex overlapping relationships with each other. And intelligence, you know, services, this is how it is. There's always like a fractal structure of compartmentalization and like true, um, you know, who's really got power, right? Is often opaque even to the people who think they've got all the power because they never really know, right? And even in those, you know, the, the high watermark, when it was really tightly concentrated, there were a lot of people with outsized influence and they could kind of construct these vertically integrated bureaucratic systems. Um, you know, that was still, you know, there was a lot of, you know, internecine fights and subterfuge and always like,

• 2:41:07Speaker 00

  you know, my deputy might be trying to take my job, sorts of dynamics. But then I think it's sort of, it, it, it got disintegrated or fractalized in the, you know, last 30, 40 years. But it, and also globalized in the sense that you have, like, I think of a much more complex set of actors. They have a lot of resources, right? You think the intelligence communities of the big baddie has all the information, like Google, Amazon, these guys have probably more information.

• 2:41:33Jesse Michels?

  They're like neo-governmental organizations.

• 2:41:35Speaker 00

  Like Pippa Malmgren has written about this, brilliant insight. She's like, Amazon, Jeff Bezos, probably has access to more intelligence and better intelligence than the NSA does in many ways. Cause he can look at, maybe not individual level intelligence, but like he manages all the intelligence databases for the government, right? And he could detect, you know, he knows what everyone's buying, right? He can detect the mood of everybody.

• 2:41:57Jesse Michels?

  Totally.

• 2:41:58Speaker 00

  The NSA doesn't have access to that information.

• 2:41:59Jesse Michels?

  No.

• 2:41:59Speaker 00

  He knows, so that's probably why he refused it to the endorsement. Because he's, he, he has probably some proprietary analytical model of like, everyone's buying and purchases of decisions. They've constructed some fancy AI that's like predictive of their, you know, which books have they ordered? How does it correlate to their, to their Twitter views, et cetera, right? And they just know immediately, why, why do you think Elon went all in? Because Elon knew.

• 2:42:19Jesse Michels?

  Sentiment analysis.

• 2:42:20Speaker 00

  These guys knew sentiment analysis. They done the correlations. They know exactly what the, what the outcome is gonna be.

• 2:42:24Jesse Michels?

  Interesting aside on Bezos, his grandfather, I think, was the head of the Atomic Energy Commission.

• 2:42:29Speaker 00

  Lawrence P. Geiss, yeah, he was the director of the Western Division. Harold Malmgren told me that story. He's now come public with it. It was, yeah, yeah, so that, yeah, quick finish that thread is, yeah, Harold Malmgren, senior advisor to Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, et cetera. Wernher Kin, McNamara Prodigy, probably saved nuclear war under, you know, when Curtis LeMay wanted to go, he was sent to the tank and, you know, sort of held Curtis LeMay back.

• 2:42:51Jesse Michels?

  That's amazing.

• 2:42:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:42:53Jesse Michels?

  Literally like the Doctor Strange love scene.

• 2:42:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, he was sent, when he was like 26, 27, he was sent into the tank, you know, by, by, by Kennedy and was just like, stall, stall him out.

• 2:43:02Jesse Michels?

  No way.

• 2:43:02Speaker 00

  These, these guys are like, they're ready to go.

• 2:43:04Jesse Michels?

  Oh, that's crazy.

• 2:43:06Speaker 00

  And, and he was like, Curtis LeMay was there with his, with his generals and they're like, I like, we need to go and, you know, was, let's like, I just need to, we just need to drop one. Just to like prove resolve and, all right, we have like aircrew morale issues. I mean, everyone knows like Curtis LeMay was absolute insane. He was, he was willing to go to, to full nuclear war. And Malmgren played his part in holding him back. And then was sent out to, uh, Los Alamos, I think, or Albuquerque in 1963, where he met with Lawrence P. Geiss. Cause he was there to do the design cost build of our anti ballistic missile system, which at the time was premise on nuclear weapons. Right? Cause the only way to feasibly destroy incoming ICBMs are missiles coming in. Was to throw up nukes and try to blow them up in the atmosphere.

• 2:43:48Speaker 00

  And so, you know, he had to get read into, you know, he was basically there to like manage the project for that, right? How much is it going to cost? What were we going to do like? And both on the Department of Energy side as well as the DOD side. And yeah, he met with Lawrence P. Geiss who told him that, you know, we have been recovering and trying to reverse engineer UFO objects. And then 10 years later, I think he had a private meeting with Richard Bissell, who is the number two at the CIA in charge of all the, you know, dirty tricks covert operation stuff for like 15, 20 years.

• 2:44:16Jesse Michels?

  Didn't he create the NRO as well?

• 2:44:17Speaker 00

  He created the NRO. He scouted and established Air 51, you know, Richard Bissell was in charge of all that stuff from the 50s and 60s. Richard Bissell told him in a private briefing that of quote, other world technologies that they'd been working on. And so he was kind of read into some of that stuff. He's made public some of that. And yeah, so that's just an example, right? And he was like, kind of the shadow Kissinger for most of those decades. Like he was the guy that got stuff done. He had back channels with the Soviets.

• 2:44:44Jesse Michels?

  Do you think Kissinger knew about the UFO thing? Cause Kissinger was very involved in atomic projects.

• 2:44:50Speaker 00

  He was in charge of the, whatever the covert action committee or like the 303 committee. He definitely probably knew whether he was in charge of it. I think the structure of this, I don't really understand, but, um, but I think there was awareness of these programs, right? This kind of peripheral knowledge, right? It's like, if you're going to come close to it, like if you're going to be in the exact, if you're going to be just in the immediate periphery of it, you need to know it exists.

• 2:45:12Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 2:45:12Speaker 00

  And you need to know not to go in.

• 2:45:13Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 2:45:14Speaker 00

  And know like where to avoid and where to throw other people off.

• 2:45:16Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 2:45:16Speaker 00

  So there's like, you know, it's kind of, there's, there's a boundary layer, right? They need to establish around that, around those activities.

• 2:45:22Jesse Michels?

  I was reading this book called UFO Crash by UFO researcher, William Steinman about the Aztec crash in 1948. Talks about this head of special projects at Wright Patterson who came over with Operation Paperclip. His name is Eric Henry Wang. Steinman says, this is the guy who like, I can't get anything on. The door shuts in my face every time I inquire about him. He and his boss, HAK, you know, and then he just goes on or whatever. And I was just thinking, who is HAK? And I was like, oh, Henry A. Kissinger.

• 2:45:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:45:53Jesse Michels?

  And then you look up his kind of career history and like, he was very embedded in the atomic projects and so.

• 2:45:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and I, you know, held. Worked, they were like, they were like twin people throughout most of those administrations. Where, you know, Harold was, you know, self consciously not a self promoter. He was not someone who was looking for the power. He was recognized and his survivability was because he was going to be the guy working behind the scenes, executing, not taking credit, just the guy who would get stuff done. Right? And that's was, you know, whereas Kissinger was the guy who would like, you know, walk over people's necks, right?

• 2:46:30Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:46:30Speaker 00

  And but they were in equal positions, right? They were trusted and they were often used by presidents, you know, to check each other. Like Malamgren was used explicitly by Nixon to check Kissinger in many negotiations to like, confirm that Kissinger wasn't going rogue on various things.

• 2:46:44Jesse Michels?

  Fascinating.

• 2:46:45Speaker 00

  And the whole China thing, the back channels with the Soviets. Malamgren was Nixon's like, you know, confirmation, you know, route, right? Because he didn't fully trust Kissinger to do all this stuff. Because Kissinger was kind of this rogue guy, right? He thought he was the president, right? So Malamgren was there to kind of like act as a bit of a check.

• 2:47:01Jesse Michels?

  That's amazing.

• 2:47:02Speaker 00

  And so, yeah, Malamgren was trusted by multiple presidents over many decades. And yeah, he is now coming out and saying, NHI are real. We have their stuff. I don't know, guys, like.

• 2:47:11Jesse Michels?

  But that's a good example, right? Because he's former CIA and like, you have a lot of guys who are former CIA. It seems like there is some implicit imperative in one branch of the CIA that is pro some form of this.

• 2:47:24Speaker 00

  Malamgren was never CIA.

• 2:47:25Jesse Michels?

  Oh, he's never CIA, okay.

• 2:47:26Speaker 00

  No, he was, he was a PhD economist.

• 2:47:28Jesse Michels?

  Okay, okay.

• 2:47:29Speaker 00

  Who came into the Defense Department, but then actually did mostly like trade and economic stuff for the latter half of his career. But he was, you know, he was fully cleared into the Q stuff. He was cleared into SSCI. But your point is like, but he met with the CIA, obviously with Richard Bissell. He'd met with Lawrence Geis and DOE. He was, but he was more of a higher level political guy.

• 2:47:48Jesse Michels?

  Interesting, okay, good to know. It feels like there is, yeah, like to your, to your earlier point, there's a part of CIA that is pro some form of disclosure. And then there's probably a part that is extremely anti disclosure. And then there are these fiefdoms that have like these local incentives around like, we have some IP, we kind of want to monetize it. We feel somewhat patriotic and like, you know. Want to refresh the talent pool and realize we don't have access to the best and brightest STEM talent out there. And so there are all these weird dynamics where I've, I don't know, after studying this stuff, probably similar timeframe as you, like four or five years. You always want to know like who's in charge, who's like the ultimate gatekeeper.

• 2:48:29Jesse Michels?

  And it feels like there is, it's this like disjointed cargo cult or something.

• 2:48:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I agree. I don't think there is a, um, like a single cabal that has all this information. I think it's been carved up, it's decayed. I think it's like all of our other institutions. So it's like, you know, why disclosure is happening now is kind of an over determined question, right? Is it the China competition thing? Is it an exogenous time skill associated with the NHI themselves? Is it, um, or is it essentially just the ability of what used to be a relatively coherent, unified, um, set of legacy programs? Has just decayed and lost its ability to, to, you know, maintain control like all of our other institutions, right?

• 2:49:08Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:09Speaker 00

  It's like, why was, why was Grush, this kind of do gooder millennial, able to kind of like in a year, kind of just be like, yep, I figured it out.

• 2:49:17Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:17Speaker 00

  Right? It's like, you know, was that just because, I mean, Grush is really good, but it's probably because the like, the legacy program is probably like decayed a bit, right? It's probably become unwieldy, pieces of it are starting to like, you know, become structured in these, in these bureaucratic systems.

• 2:49:31Jesse Michels?

  And clearly people, even he would said this in my interview with him. People on the inside want this stuff together. They were extremely disgruntled. They're like, this doesn't work at all, the way it's been set up.

• 2:49:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. Which is also an exact symptom of institutional decay and sort of sclerosis. Like probably during the Vanderbush days, there'd be nobody like that complaining, be like, we got this shit on lock, it's streamlined, it's efficient. We got the best and brightest, we're highly motivated, we're oriented, we're aligned, flourishing, moisturized, we're good, right? And now it's like, you know, it's decayed, there's Bob and Bobbert sitting in some Lockheed warehouse, getting paid $200,000 a year when their best friends are over at Palantir making twice that. And, you know, they're making no progress after 10 years and.

• 2:50:11Jesse Michels?

  And they're sitting in a cubicle with like a diagram of like a material that they half understand, but can't know the full specs of. Because like it's.

• 2:50:18Speaker 00

  And it probably, it's probably in an extremely stressful environment because. They're telling you, if you tell anybody, we're going to kill you and you know, you don't really know what's going on. You only see your little piece of it. So it sounds cool, but now you're like trapped because you can't really leave that program very easily. So that is like a lot of stress and tension built up inside these programs. And then the ability for the managers who themselves probably are similarly positioned relative to the power structure or hierarchy that they're embedded in, are also feeling a bit like this is not working. This is and like you get it. You reach a critical mass.

• 2:50:45Jesse Michels?

  Well, then that's why I'm like, why don't, I mean, if you can somehow front run immunity via legislature, why don't you just immediately let the cat out of the bag on just the existence of these programs? Maybe there's some ontological shock around like top of the pyramid knowledge of, you know, NHI vis a vis some theory of everything that freaks the average person out. I don't know, but like the existence of the programs, if China and Russia have their own programs, which it seems like they do, then just admit that we have these programs and then start recruiting people for the programs. Like, well, you would think that we'd have sort of a Manhattan Project 2.0 going on right now, given the world that we're in. Why doesn't that like start immediately?

• 2:51:26Speaker 00

  I mean, you could do all those counterfactuals, right? And this is where the basic logic of like, hey, that would be a good idea runs up against like our existing political system, right? And so like, at least I've heard, again, firsthand knowledge of these things that like, you know, as this, this ball, this ball started really rolling in 2019, 2020, right? With the UAP task force doing their job, congressional mandate, digging in, Grush figuring the stuff out, Carl, et cetera. Everyone kind of being like, yep, and we're going to report back to Congress. Congress starts getting, you know, the sense like there's some weird shit happening. Right? Now what are we going to do about it? We need to have more formal mechanisms of accountability and reporting. We need to kind of create a belly button or bridge between Congress, these committees and the Pentagon and the IC.

• 2:52:08Speaker 00

  Pass the, you know, the different, you know, legislation starting in 2021, 2022 with National Defense Authorization Act, stand up, you know, whatever AOM SIG and then Arrow. And then, and then it was essentially. Bureaucratically undercut, you know, was Office of Naval Intelligence, UAP Task Force, who was kind of, I think, had bureaucratic, you know, access to grind against the CIA and the NSA and the Air Force. And, you know, the reason why it was over there. And then, of course, when it moves into Arrow, it's kind of compromised by the CIA, Air Force guys, right? Like Kirkpatrick. And so that was kind of like, okay, move, counter move. Yeah. What do we do next? Okay, pressure, et cetera. Go up the chain to, you know, like National Security Council, brief, uh, Jake Sullivan on this. Jake Sullivan's like,

• 2:52:50Speaker 00

  crap, I got, I got way too much going on, man. I got like Ukraine war popping off. I got China to deal with. I got President Biden, who like, no politics aside, like, maybe not, you know, compasmentis to make these decisions. Yes. Like, sorry, but like, no, like, we can't, we can't throw this out there right now. Like, go and just get away from it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, tell me what's going on. I mean, Ross Coulthart says that he knows that, uh, that, um, that Salt Jake was in at least one briefing, uh, what I think was on the Senate, maybe more, where he was getting access to, you know, some of the firsthand testimony on this stuff. And, you know, they're just trying, like, the existing power structures, the committees, the NSC leadership is trying to get their arms around this. And then they're trying to figure out what their next move is. And meanwhile, they got other stuff on

• 2:53:33Speaker 00

  their plate. And, you know, politics is politics. And they go, okay, well, we'll just kick this can down to the next admin, right? Whatever happens, not my problem. Like, you just think that the individual decision making of executive branch appointee is always like, I'm here for a year, two, three, maybe. My life is already extremely stressful. This does not accrue any personal benefit, only risk. Yeah. Right? So I have every incentive to kick this can. And the Senate, who think of themselves as being, you know, the sort of authoritarian guard of democracy, they're like, well, I have no real urgency. They think, and that's like, I'll be here forever. I got, I got no term limits. I got no competitive race. You know, I take this as like a, you know, next year's thing, with the next year's thing. So, you know, one has like, you know,

• 2:54:18Speaker 00

  zero urgency because of political incentives to just not have it be a problem. One has not much urgency because they, you know, the Senate is a little bit. This is why I think why more action's been in the House. Yes. Because they feel like they can kind of play in that niche, right? They can get more attention, get maybe more outside, um, outside support.

• 2:54:34Speaker 00

  That's why I think the, you know, why the House has been the locus of political. That's just my political, you know, diagnosis. But in terms of the basic question of like, um, the accountability over these programs, like that's, that's the function of this UAP Disclosure Act. That's why that came from the, you know, that's why it came from Schumer, Rounds, Gillibrand, you know, Heinrich, Todd Young, et cetera. Cause its basic function is not to, you know, do disclosure now. It's to like, put in place a mechanism of accountability. Cause they have credible evidence indicates that that has been lacking.

• 2:55:05Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 2:55:05Speaker 00

  Including two elected officials in the executive branch. It's only two, president, vice president. So the Senate is basically saying in their findings that they believe credible evidence indicates that relevant UAP records have been inappropriately classified and withheld from appropriate, you know, elected officials in both legislative and executive branch. Seems like a pretty clear diagnosis of the problem, but they were just like admiring the problem.

• 2:55:27Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:27Speaker 00

  There's no urgency to fix it. We'll see what happens with this, this new administration coming in. You know, Trump's speech last night, I don't know when this will be recorded, but like, he gave this like three minute kind of glass nose speech we talked about. And it's like, you know, that could be the mechanism, right? Like, who knows, right? I think this will all be up for grabs, but now there might be an urgency or it might be opportunistic mechanisms for, you know, well, as much as I have different opinions on all the, you know, quote unquote controversies people have is like, well, maybe you should prioritize this, right? Hunter Biden laptop stuff, does that really matter relative to this UFO stuff?

• 2:56:03Jesse Michels?

  No.

• 2:56:04Speaker 00

  I know you've got an axer grind, but like, like bygones be bygones.

• 2:56:08Jesse Michels?

  Well, I always, I do, every time I'm like, maybe this doesn't matter because we're, you know, in a multipolar nuclear world and you have all this kind of prosaic stuff going on, but then I'm like, this feels like the Archimedes lever of the existence of non-human intelligence. And, you know, it's sort of like, it begs this question is like, are the wars we're in right now somewhat proxy wars? You know, if, if you can't really say like, yeah, we have like this material, you know, in our possession. And, and we do, you know, think that there is intelligence out there based on all these kind of consistent observable properties, but like, uh, business as usual, as far as like, you know, general macro, you know, geopolitics or whatever.

• 2:56:47Speaker 00

  And so, yeah, I know. I mean, that would be, I mean, I spent a lot of time thinking about intersection of geopolitics, the monetary system and, um, you know, these potential phase transitions are like tail risks. And this has to be like, I've talked about this in more like traditional settings. I've talked to folks that are associated with the Fed and the Treasury Department is like, guys, like you're, this is a head in the sand moment right now, right? Like you need to add, and Helen McCall wrote a white paper for the Soul Foundation on this exact question of essentially UAPs and financial stability risk. And it's just like, because of social taboo, institutional resistance, there's not even paying attention to it.

• 2:57:24Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 2:57:24Speaker 00

  And the, the possibility of these things happening very quickly and with surprise to those other institutional systems is a big problem, right? And I think that's what they're struggling with is like, it's honest, I, I, I think there's a lot of concerns, but I don't know if they're truly concerned about like the median Americans like having a freak out because the median American freaks out about all this, all this stuff all the time. And they're probably like, won't believe half of it anyways. I think they worry about like the median sort of Mandarin technocrat at the Fed, like not showing up for work and then the payment system doesn't work.

• 2:57:55Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 2:57:55Speaker 00

  Right? And it's like, how do you, how do you ensure that that set of, of, you know, the folks that have just now taken a massive hit, right? Like those folks are psychologically very disturbed by Trump's administration coming in. And there will be, you know, I think significant purges to those bureaucracies. So those, those technocrat managers are going to be, you know, facing a major brunt here. You drop the UAP stuff on that. I think there is a risk. I'm just speaking analytically of there being just like collapse of these institutional bureaucracies.

• 2:58:22Speaker 00

  You need to plan for that. You need to like anticipate and educate and like tell them it's all good. Like this is just a new thing. We got to handle like, don't freak out, come to work tomorrow. Right?

• 2:58:31Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:32Speaker 00

  And I think ironically, I mean ironically, but like, and it's my, I don't want to be too, um, uh, you know, sort of ethnocentric here, but like, in general, I think China has not as much of a materialist worldview as like the median assumption. Like you're like the average person there. Like, you know, they have kind of a long history of their civilization, you know, it's sort of a spiritualist baseline, even though the Communist Party is, you know, nominally atheistic. But like people light prayer candles all the time, you know, light incense, go worship at Buddhist temples. In fact, they've been spiking recently because people are trying to, you know, pray for good luck as the economy goes on the toilet. But like, they don't have this, they haven't, they haven't grown.

• 2:59:10Speaker 00

  Up their civilization and kind of the Copernican Western dichotomous view sort of this inherent dualist world of yeah, this sort of ineffable spiritual realm, which you go to when you die. You could pray to, but it's kind of like a hard cut between that and like material society. You get rich, you fight wars, right? And whereas I think the basic, or so I think in general, China, Chinese society, I think could probably accommodate something like this in a more smooth fashion than maybe Western society could. On top of the fact that China could leverage potential malfeasance on the West part, US in particular, as a propaganda, you know, leverage.

• 2:59:47Jesse Michels?

  Why haven't they, that's a question that I have kind of openly is like China and Russia. It is clear that if you're like a deep UFO researcher, there are things that they've interfaced with with the UFO question, like George Knapp went to like Russia and like brought back all these files about like their activities when it comes to UFOs. China's published a couple of papers around like tracking UFOs, but it seems like they're by and large, pretty silent on the topic. Like they're not super progressive or forward minded about like propagandizing the topic or like being really open about it. Why is it just the US?

• 3:00:25Speaker 00

  Well, inherently, I guess to first order, one is a closed system, one's an open system, right? So despite the fact that we point to maybe some rogue elements in the bureaucracy, like we're fundamentally is an open, somewhat chaotic system where folks like Luluzondo and Christopher Mellon can go out there and can go on podcasts and can release videos to the media and can have this open discussion stimulated in Twitter and podcasts and whatnot.

• 3:00:45Jesse Michels?

  But if the, if the game theory stuff, if the game.

• 3:00:47Speaker 00

  You're saying why, why haven't they tried?

• 3:00:49Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, like why, why, you know, if some of this stuff is getting reverse engineered and weaponized.

• 3:00:54Speaker 00

  I think China, I think China hasn't, I think the in terms of order of priority, this is speculation, I think the order of priority is first and you know, first, second, third, fourth is, is exploit the technology to close the strategic military and intelligence gap. That's it, right? And so anything that might undermine that, right, is ruled out, right? So first order of business is like build, build their own inspired tech, build at scale, iron it, iron it out, get it built out. And they have the ability to do that, like they have the ability to, like, if a typical US SAP is a thousand people, right? For whatever secret R and D program, they can have 10, 50,000 people.

• 3:01:32Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 3:01:33Speaker 00

  And, you know, credibly threatened, actual Gulag punishments.

• 3:01:38Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:01:39Speaker 00

  If you speak at a turn and, you know, actually have, like, you can almost imagine, it's probably the equivalent of like the Van de Var Bush, sitting there, right? That is like, because they've been building these new institutions, these new bureaucracies. They've got more energy, they've got like a clear target, beat, beat the US, et cetera. And if you look at this, some circumstantial stuff, this is really speculative. My, my, my China SME colleagues will be like, ah, you're really going on a limb in there. But, um, there was some recent purges in the last few years in like the Rocket Forces, which, you know, if you imagine like which part of their PLA structure would somehow feasibly touch this, it's like, you know, that, that's like where the nuclear forces are, right? So like, if they had their own version of a program, um, like where would it be? It'd probably be, would be, would be there. And of course, the PLA has been historically corrupt. You know, you bribe to get promotions and whatnot.

• 3:02:24Speaker 00

  So like, if I like, imagine a very hypothetical scenario, which is, when we say China's had a program, well, what does that really mean? Like China has a program. Does the PLA have a program that maybe President Xi didn't know about?

• 3:02:37Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 3:02:37Speaker 00

  Right? And maybe President Xi discovered the program in the course of his various purges that he was going through, ensuring loyalty. And then he figured out this stuff. Maybe he didn't know when he first came into power, but now he does know. And he's been going, all systems go. Build me some, everything. Like, this is where all of our surplus capital is going. I don't care about the, the real estate market, like, screw it. Like, we're going all in on this. And is that leading to a freak out in the US?

• 3:03:02Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 3:03:02Speaker 00

  Right? Strategic technology surprise, right? Uh, strategic foreign technology surprise, because, uh-oh, we're getting intelligence now, maybe the other parts of the intelligence apparatus that we've got that is constantly monitoring China, constantly monitoring, you know, their secret research programs, which physicists and engineers, where are they going? What new facilities are being built, whatever? We're constantly monitoring all that stuff, right? So there's like, you know, normie analysts inside the CIA and, you know, NGA and whatnot that are interpreting all that intelligence. They go, China's like doing some crazy, cool, like weird stuff over here. They're doing, all these people that were doing this weird science and weird research, they're now, like, they all disappeared and we think they're over here. And we don't know what they're, what they're working on, why. And then meanwhile, this other, you know, their neighbor across the hall who's read into the program is like, ah, fuck.

• 3:03:42Jesse Michels?

  Uh huh.

• 3:03:43Speaker 00

  And, and then they go, what do we do now? Right? We think China's figured some stuff out. We don't know what they figured out, but like, that would generate an immense amount of anxiety and would probably put some more senior political leadership in like, to CYA mode.

• 3:03:54Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm. So this UAP task force that is kind of responsible for the contemporary conversation around UFOs, how is it assembled?

• 3:04:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think it's really interesting kind of bureaucratic story of, you know, essentially Congress hearing some stuff coming out of the 2017, 2018 stories and some back, back channel conversations that we need to have a formal group charged to like dig into this question and get people that are, you know, fully credentialed, fully cleared, you know, have, have the relevant sort of analytic bent to go out into the wilderness of the bureaucratic system and try to hunt down these alleged legacy programs. And that's essentially the story that we hear in some of the self reports, obviously, you know, limited by what Carl Nell and David Grush and recently some individuals have, have come out. And the UPT Task Force that we've seen descriptions of this kind of organizational structure, like any other interagency task force, it's got complicated reporting lines.

• 3:04:47Speaker 00

  You've got a lot of people coming in from different agencies. And the basic understanding I had, it wasn't really like a full time gig for most people, but there were, I think, some individuals that were tasked with a much more substantial and serious responsibility like Grush. And there are others that were sort of maybe doing it in sort of a part time basis and helping to assess, you know, imagery and write reports and whatnot. And, you know, there's like a loose confederation of additional sort of liaisons that were pulling in different disciplines. But I was told something very, very interesting. And again, it's kind of like, you hear these things and they come from people that you otherwise trust and have, you know, professions and experience to sort of back up their, their claims. And it's, it's tough to kind of fully, you know, calibrate how, how much stock you

• 3:05:29Speaker 00

  put into it. But, you know, what I was told is that one, you know, when any new government program gets, especially sensitive government program, sometimes they'll, they'll re polygraph some members of the team, especially those that are involved in the more sensitive aspects of, of its activities, you know, and polygraphs in US government are designed, you know, in many ways to, to root out essentially disloyalty, right? So they'll ask you basic questions like, you know, have you ever supported a terrorist group? Have you sort of, you know, supported insurrection to overthrow the government? Have you ever, you know, had any unreported contacts with a foreign government? Essentially, these sort of counterintelligence scope, sort of polygraphs. There's another scope of polygraphs called a lifestyle polygraph. It's like, You know, your gambling, your sexual activities, et cetera, to kind of understand,

• 3:06:13Speaker 00

  are there any things that could be used to blackmail you? So standard sets of questions. What I was told is that there was an additional question or two added to that sort of screening, a polygraph, which is, have you had any relationships with, I haven't talked about, or loyalty to any non-human faction?

• 3:06:32Jesse Michels?

  That's crazy.

• 3:06:33Speaker 00

  And I thought it was a joke. I thought it was like, ah, ha, ha, I pull my leg. This is not real, like, no. Apparently, apparently it's true, or apparently it was reported as true. I don't have no evidence. I've not heard that confirmed. But it does kind of then trigger this, this other set of conversations was very uncomfortable, right? Which is like, well, what is the nature of the interaction between human society, human institutions and non-human intelligence, right? If, going back to our more abstract conversation is that there's a potential set of channels, you know, maybe more, you know, foundational kind of consciousness level interactions or communication or, or what have you. Well, okay, in principle, there's like some interaction taking place between members of the human population and non-human intelligence.

• 3:07:15Speaker 00

  We just, you know, if you accept that, that's like what, what you're, what you're accepting is happening. Then you have to assess, well, could versions of that type of communication be happening with elements of, of the legacy program or other, or other elements of human society? And that's a much more uncomfortable conversation, right? We're much, we're much more ironically like easy or willing to accept parts of this sort of UFO lore that involve like, you know, kind of semi-random people having somewhat anomalous encounters, right? Like, like Chris Bledsoe or somebody like, you know, smart guy, you know, normal dude, but just has this really anomalous encounter. If that was a senior U.S. intelligence official, it'd be a very different story.

• 3:07:51Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 3:07:52Speaker 00

  Right? Be very, it's like, why is it happening to that person?

• 3:07:54Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 3:07:54Speaker 00

  Right? And so that, that raises lots of other questions, right? But I think there are questions you kind of have to take seriously and kind of this branching exploration of the Bayesian tree of possibilities here, that once you accept at least the premise of a certain foundational set of facts, well, then you have to take seriously all the branching implications of, of alternatives that become potentially maybe more plausible, given that, given that, that update. And so, yeah, this is, this does, I don't know where you, what to go with that, other than just to say, that's. Potential scenario to think about.

• 3:08:22Jesse Michels?

  Anecdotally, I know of one extremely senior intelligence official who had a pretty gnarly abduction experience along with his wife. And so I don't, I don't want to say, I think, I think he's going to be going public with this story soon, but.

• 3:08:35Speaker 00

  And that's how this whole thing becomes very uncomfortable for people because it's one thing to intellectually grok the possibilities of non-human intelligence in the universe. And maybe this metaphysical story that we've just been talking about, it's a, you know, it's another thing also to think about. Maybe there's like advanced intelligence designing probes that are exploring civil, you know, solar systems or, you know, sending light sails out and we can get some of their advanced tech and figure out how they work. Like that would be groundbreaking, but it would be, you know, something that wouldn't disturb us, right? It's quite disturbing to understand that like the sanctity of your, yourself, the sanctity of your mind even can be violated at will by a higher form of intelligence. That's sort of cuts to the core of our sense of inherent individual sovereignty as well as our political sovereignty, right? And I think that's truly, I think, why the sort

• 3:09:20Speaker 00

  of the, the, the impact of disclosure is so concerning for a lot of folks is that it threatens the sort of core basis of modern human civilization, right? The sense of the integrity of the self and the integrity of the autonomous sovereign structures we, we build as, as autonomous individuals, meaning our political systems and the bureaucracies that help us manage them. And that, that is a hard thing to swallow, right? And to understand and analyze. But in many respects, it's like a more exotic flavor of a traditional counterintelligence issue, right? Which is like, you know, we exist in a competitive geopolitical environment where states are constantly trying to compromise each other's systems, right? Recruit spies, understand plans and intentions of their respective adversaries or even friends, and interpenetrate each other's bureaucratic systems with assets or

• 3:10:04Speaker 00

  agents or informers. So if you're modeling human societies actually not being the sole species or intelligence that you're trying to assess, there's another set of stakeholders, then maybe it's fair to assume that they would conduct similar activities.

• 3:10:19Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:20Speaker 00

  That other states do.

• 3:10:21Jesse Michels?

  So they, they would, they have their own tradecraft and infiltrating mechanisms and.

• 3:10:26Speaker 00

  It probably wouldn't be the same that we would expect China to do, right? But it would be something that if you are. Investigating this phenomenon, you'd have to, you know, assume is a, is a possibility, right?

• 3:10:37Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it's sort of like the book Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke or something that wouldn't land on the White House lawn. They would sort of, you know, incept all sorts of stuff in society and culture and.

• 3:10:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it gets to the most difficult part of the whole conversation, which is like the, the question that David Grush, you know, very pointedly dodged in testimony, which was like agreements.

• 3:10:57Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 3:10:57Speaker 00

  Seems like an absurd question. How can human society, as, you know, primitive apes with nukes, how can we form an agreement? What would an agreement be based on? Like, what sort of contractual dispute resolution mechanism is there, right?

• 3:11:09Jesse Michels?

  Well, the.

• 3:11:09Speaker 00

  It's a, I think it's maybe a, I think a category error, maybe just the, the term of art, the language is not being appropriately applied.

• 3:11:16Jesse Michels?

  Coerced agreement or something, but I mean, the, the, the thing, the agreement that I used to say was probably BS. And, you know, I still, I have trouble even like with the words coming out of my mouth, the saying this, but it's like this 1954 idea that like Eisenhower like made a treaty that like the grays could like collect biological specimens, do medical experiments on our population. And, you know, we would, we wouldn't destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons or whatever, you know, in return, something like that. I used to think that that was like complete and total BS. I mean, you hear something like that. It's funny, actually, I think Eisenhower's granddaughter like stands by that fully, but like she's also into a lot of other kind of quacky stuff.

• 3:11:57Jesse Michels?

  So I don't know, I don't know how to probability weight the whole thing, but I've heard from some pretty senior, you know, impressive people in the Navy that like, that might be real and like that, that genetic collection on the part of these grays just ended and they're extremely concerned that the genetic collection ended because why would you end a genetic collection period? Well, it might be right before some cataclysmic event. Because if you wanted to re-diversify the population after such an event, you know, you, you'd, you'd want to complete your collection right before that occurred or whatever, if you understood, you know, how these timelines sort of work on a more root, root layer.

• 3:12:39Jesse Michels?

  So I don't know what to make of that. It's, it's, you know, it's kind of like your story. It feels very apocryphal and it's hard, you have to slap some probability on it, but.

• 3:12:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, the other piece of is, you know, where people have alluded to similar things, not the genetic collection thing, which I think is, you know, I don't have a whole lot of weight assigned to that sort of thing, but, um. Timothy Taylor, right?

• 3:13:00Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:00Speaker 00

  The, the anon sort of, but now well, well, kind of known, kind of NASA program manager. It's been deeply involved in this stuff and spooky, spooky subjects for a long time. You know, when he was asking, what's the hierarchy by Dana, by Dana Pasolka? He's like, you know, I forget the exact taxonomy, but it was like, you know, normal humans, like the intelligence services, like some elements of the intelligence services. And he said, like aliens and then like God or something, right? And, but his implication in that middle part was that there are some elements of human institutions that have almost like an ontologically different status.

• 3:13:35Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 3:13:35Speaker 00

  His sense of the hierarchy. And you could read that one of two ways, just like, you know, sometimes people in the intelligence community just have such enormous egos that they actually think that, no, they're different and better and special in a fundamental way than the rest of, you know, the unwashed masses. And that this hierarchy of being that he posits, you know, his sense of the role of that, that cohort of human individuals is so significant, they merit being noted as a different class. An alternative explanation is that he's referring to a non-human element within our human bureaucracies.

• 3:14:06Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 3:14:06Speaker 00

  Those are the only two ways, I think, to interpret it, right?

• 3:14:08Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 3:14:09Speaker 00

  An outsized ego, or he's referring to non-human presence in human bureaucracies.

• 3:14:13Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 3:14:14Speaker 00

  I don't, you know, so those are just the two implicat-, those are the two, I think, only alternative implications of his claim. So then to address which one we think he's going towards, I think prima facie, or prior has to be much more likely that it's his ego, but I don't think it's zero. And I think there's other circumstantial elements about his, his career, other things he said, maybe he's painting, he's trying to draw in a dotted line to that other implication.

• 3:14:35Jesse Michels?

  Well, the, here's a fascinating thing about him is that he seemed to, I guess, flash all these like three-letter agency credentials to Pasolka, according to her. And I, I trust her, she's a friend of mine. But then I sort of back channeled with some other intel people and I was like, what's, like this guy's a NASA mission controller, like why does he have like all these clearances, why associations with other agencies or whatever? They're like, no, he's just a normal NASA mission controller. And then it begs this question of like, is a normal NASA mission controller who thinks he's part of a- Secret space program where he says his superiors don't even know he's in the program.

• 3:15:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:15:13Jesse Michels?

  And he gets these downloads about what to do. It's almost like this hermetic network. When Chris Bledsoe sees, sees, starts to see UFOs that show up around his house, he shows up. He shows up in Diana Pasulka's life when she transitions from following kind of Catholic purgatory and writing a book called Heaven Can Wait on That. And realizing that actually comports with all these like ancient, probably UFO experiences. And so you, you start to ask these deeper questions of like, is the chain of command that we even know? The real chain of command or is somebody like Timothy Taylor, you know, uh, kind of following higher marching orders?

• 3:15:52Speaker 00

  Or, I mean, or does he think, I mean, some people fall into cults of belief where they actually think that they're taking instructions from a high, it's like traditional cults, right? Of the humdrum, you know, UFO cult variety. Honestly, like they believe sometimes that their leader is a hybrid or is a special creature that has been sent down to guide their special flock, right? And is imbued with special wisdom about maybe even some future cataclysmic event. And then the in-group is going to be specially prepared to enter into that event and will be, you know, uniquely positioned or rewarded for their belief in the post-event, right? Traditional religious esoteric logical visions. And so, you know, just because he has a program in it, doesn't it mean he's immune to the traditional psychological vulnerabilities?

• 3:16:33Speaker 00

  And tropes of, you know, humans, human psychology. Um, so that's, that's, I just take it as like, these are the different alternatives. You gotta like, you gotta wait. But of course, you know, people have, people, yeah, have different takes on something like that. Um, but yeah, it does. Yeah. Space is clearly like where the line between standard bureaucracy, government programs and like weird voodoo stuff.

• 3:16:58Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:58Speaker 00

  Starts to come in because you go all the way back to being in NASA.

• 3:17:00Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:00Speaker 00

  It's like, now you're not, it's like, it's just unambiguous historical fact that like Jack Parsons was doing like Crowley sex magic in the desert with the founder of, of Scientology, Eleanor Hubbard.

• 3:17:09Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:17:10Speaker 00

  You can't avoid that. That's what he was doing, right? And he was like, he was like getting information somehow that was like impressing Werner von Braun.

• 3:17:17Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 3:17:18Speaker 00

  You know, it's like

• 3:17:18Jesse Michels?

  Indisputable.

• 3:17:19Speaker 00

  Indisputable, just historical facts.

• 3:17:21Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 3:17:21Speaker 00

  Right? Just what, what, why, right? What is happening? And then all the weird stuff about how we name our rockets and people claiming that we do various rituals associated with rocket launches. Like, it's just happening, right? Humans are weird, so sometimes we do weird stuff. We're very superstitious, right? So sometimes we can layer those superstitions into pretty complex narratives that maybe reinforce each other and insubordinate bureaucracy over decades. But it's just weird. You can't just ignore it.

• 3:17:44Jesse Michels?

  You can't, you can't ignore the fact pattern. And actually, if you look at the founders of all rocket programs, Chekhovsky in Russia was the same way. He believed he had this worldview called cosmism, where he thought he was in touch with angelic beings. And in his case, it was more of an orthodox Christian veneer. But there were protocols involved in rocket launches. And then von Braun and Herman O'Boerth, you know, O'Boerth was von Braun's mentor, went through weird neo pagan rituals that, you know, were in that kind of Nazi space program or that most SS officers actually had to go through. And so, yeah, beg some really interesting, and you had Launchpad 33 for NASA. And then you also had Buzz Aldrin, who was a Freemason, literally stake out the moon if, you know,

• 3:18:28Jesse Michels?

  that with a, with a Freemasonic flag or whatever. It's, it's, all these questions are, you know.

• 3:18:35Speaker 00

  Well, and I think most observer, most like, because in our modern civilization, we think of technology as mostly associated with like corporate strategies, investment returns, you know, uh, cool gadgets. But like, in the history, especially probably, if you look back, you probably find versions of this in early technological paradigms. But like, the 20th century technological paradigms, our breakthrough technologies all had these deeply embedded spiritual religious overtones or undertones. And they carry through to today, right? So like, I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds, Oppenheimer, right? Obviously, Jack Parsons launching, launching rockets, um, the Soviet equivalent. And then now, right? Like, what is motivating the kind of this metaphysical ethos behind AGI? They actually think they're creating an AGI god, that this sort of theological vision of humanity's future

• 3:19:19Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:19Speaker 00

  will, needs to be manifested through their technological projects.

• 3:19:23Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 3:19:24Speaker 00

  Like that, like, we just accept that as like, oh, the San Francisco bros, they think they're making the AGI guy. And I go like, some of those people like literally believe it, right? Like Sergey Brin, he thinks it's specious to like privilege human interests over the, you know, the ostensible future interests of this much more advanced human intelligence that will be like our godchild endowment for the cosmos. It's like, hey, like, this is not that much different, right? Like, our most leading technological visionaries, you know, people that we're putting in charge of like driving for technological progress, you know, are sometimes wedded to quite radical religious spiritual belief systems. And it makes most of us uncomfortable. Like, I don't know, buddy, like, just, just get me the quarterly returns, juice the juice, the stock in my make number go up, right? And, you know, meanwhile,

• 3:20:09Speaker 00

  like, there is this something else right there, right? And we just somehow, we just, we just prefer not to pay attention to that. We try not to report on, but it doesn't mean it's not there.

• 3:20:18Jesse Michels?

  You know, the, the Air Force funded that movie Stargate, you know, the Kurt Russell.

• 3:20:22Speaker 00

  SG-1 thing, yeah.

• 3:20:24Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it was like in the pyramid or whatever. There's a portal. And I sometimes, I don't know, I think about this guy Townsend Brown, this mid-century inventor that I think, you know, made much more progress than meets the eye when tying electromagnetism and gravity in some sort of theoretical model. We probably didn't understand at the time, but he was obsessed with time travel behind closed doors. It's like all he would talk about with his, like friends and family. And so I do sometimes wonder, you know, if you like, watch the movie Contact, Carl Sagan, like, if there is something going on that is much deeper than SpaceX is this like earth-based, obviously very important space company, but like, if there isn't something much more fundamental, especially in the world of NHI predicated, you know,

• 3:21:05Jesse Michels?

  if, if that stuff is real, do we have some sort of like joint program with them? Or, you know, like, I don't know, is there something much deeper when it comes to the American space programs?

• 3:21:15Speaker 00

  I mean, Elon has been famously very like, you know, Dismissive of the alien thing. He's like, I've got all my Starlink terminals up there. Or, you know, if anything, if we had to like move out of the way of any alien spacecraft like we would know it, which is on the surface of it, kind of an absurd thing. He's a very smart guy.

• 3:21:31Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:31Speaker 00

  Right? And people just accept that. Like, that's an absurd explanation. Like,

• 3:21:35Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:35Speaker 00

  What are you talking about? Like,

• 3:21:36Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:36Speaker 00

  Well, for one, like your tiny satellite space is huge.

• 3:21:39Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 3:21:39Speaker 00

  You're not gonna have to like navigate over just like an inert rock that happens to be from an alien civilization. Unless somebody's gonna know how to navigate into space. Like, we launch stuff into space all the time.

• 3:21:47Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 3:21:47Speaker 00

  You don't have to move your satellites.

• 3:21:49Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 3:21:49Speaker 00

  We figured that out. I would assume any advanced intelligence wouldn't have to navigate, wouldn't just be like, oh, I'm gonna run into that thing. Please, Starlink, move out of the way, right? Just an absurd statement, right? As if he thinks, and he's a smart guy, right? It's like, what are you talking about, man? And then more recently, he's, he was asked the question about legacy programs at like a town hall thing, always Trump campaigning for Trump. And he said, um, well, you know, if US government has interesting technology, they should make it available.

• 3:22:13Jesse Michels?

  I saw that. He walked it back.

• 3:22:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:22:16Jesse Michels?

  That was a big, that's an important line in the sand from previous comments, right?

• 3:22:21Jesse Michels?

  So.

• 3:22:21Speaker 00

  I think, I think he's in an interesting position. Um, so this is a bit more speculative, very speculative on me, but, um,

• 3:22:28Speaker 00

  you know, Howard Hughes, of course, you know, similar figure to Elon in many ways, like eccentric genius, outsized personality, connected to defense, intelligence, you know, this is like, you know, larger than life figure in the 50s and 60s. Um, but he was like deeply connected to the Mormon church. The Mormon church kind of like the, uh, his like senior managers and handlers for all of his, his corporate apparatus were essentially Mormon. They call them the Mormon mafia, right? Their two brothers, Frank Gay, I think the other guy. And, um, actually towards, as, as Howard Hughes kind of lost a grip on reality, they kind of took over his affairs, right? And this was the same group that was doing all the covert actions for the CIA, the Blomar Explorer, et cetera, and potentially even doing the hits on Kennedy.

• 3:23:11Jesse Michels?

  Both Kennedys, by the way.

• 3:23:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, you know, this is a whole separate tangent of like, you know, we think about, Our current state institutions is being highly depersonalized, a-religious, a-factional, just appointees with technocratic competence, et cetera. But that's kind of naive, right? Like, American history is complicated and there's, you know, there are other institutional forces that sometimes have a little bit more in-group loyalty and solidarity. And I think the Mormon church and the Mormon, you know, businesses and political structures are quite, quite coherent and have endured over 150 years, longer than the CIA, for example, has been in around. And that, for example, the Mormon community set up shop in Utah, they wanted to create their own state, right? Their own sort of theocratic state.

• 3:23:56Speaker 00

  Justice Smith actually may have been assassinated by agents of the government. There may be part of people, you know, he was trying to campaign essentially for president and like convert our civil, our society, our constitutional government to like a kind of a, sort of a democratic theocratic sort of pathway. And they wanted to set up their own state in Utah and they had their own constitutional convention and it turned into this sort of state, state constitution. And they called it Deseret, was going to be the state of Utah. This is a long tangent to say, the Elon connection is Elon's like, basically like, sort of handler, like his like, the man who manages all of his affairs, he's like, sits on the board of XAI, sits on the board of Neuralink, or is the president, I think, of Neuralink, manages

• 3:24:38Speaker 00

  his family office, manages all of his Bitcoin and other crypto transactions, started and run private security company for him, handles basically most of his, you know, he's his personal fixer. He's got his Jared Birchall. He's, comes out of, he's like a Mormon elder. He's this, and it's just like an interesting symmetry, right? Between this industrial techno, technological kind of industry titan, just happens to have like most of his life's affairs, his business affairs being managed by, you know, a guy who's very well connected in the Mormon community. And that's almost like, you know, isomorphic to the Howard Hughes story in many ways. And if you look into, you know, the Mormon church, I mean, again, nothing against any

• 3:25:22Speaker 00

  religion, but like, they have been really successful at essentially penetrating most of our intelligence system. Because what like, like, what is the Mormon community really good at, right? They generate lots of like, Children and they they train them in multiple languages. They send them out in missions around the world. They don't do drugs. They don't do alcohol. They're very like, they're very loyal to an in-group. They respect hierarchy. It's exactly what like a CIA officer, FBI officer, NSA person is going to be like, you know, that's like an excellent recruit. And that's exactly what's happening. Like FBI has talked about how like Brigham Young is like their top source.

• 3:25:56Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, they said Mormons, Marines and MBAs.

• 3:25:59Speaker 00

  Yes. And what was interesting, so Utah data center is now declassified, this codename, the NSA set up their then the largest or single data center in Utah back in the 2005s, something like that. And the codename for it was Bumble Hive. And Bumble Hive is essentially this was the symbol of Deseret. So some weird stuff there, right? And if you actually look into Mormonism, it's kind of a UFO religion.

• 3:26:24Jesse Michels?

  Oh, for sure. Earth is not the only habited world.

• 3:26:27Speaker 00

  If America had a UFO religion, that would be it.

• 3:26:29Jesse Michels?

  Hundred percent.

• 3:26:29Speaker 00

  Right? And, you know, Joseph Smith has contacts, it downloads, codifies those into essentially a system of rules. He's leading his flock to establish a political order. And then they become, you know, deeply embedded in, you know, the structures of our of our intelligence and security apparatus and, you know, are then any, any big figure that we can, you know, like, why is Howard Hughes and Elon happen to all be connected to a similar Mormon control system? I don't know. It's, it's very interesting. And it's, I don't know what dots to, to, to connect there. There's just facts to stitch together. But also, like, the Mormon church and the, you know, associated institutions, they have a lot of money. They have a ton of money. Hundreds of billions of dollars, right? Because

• 3:27:12Speaker 00

  everyone tides, but also they're really good investors and they just have really close-knit business relationships that are globe spanning, right? So everyone's focused on the Carlyle Group and everyone else is like, okay, but like, the Carlyle Group's not been around that long. Like, most finance, you know, elites, they don't have a whole lot of like, again, they want to get rich. They want to get powerful, right? But like, it's hard to sustain like a generational project like that. It tends to decay, tends to split vicissitudes of, you know, international finance and business deals, right? The Mormon church, though, they've been around for a while. They got a lot of money. They've got a clear ideological, you know, vision that they all share, codes of conduct, interpersonal bonds that, you know, they don't violate, right? Like, you know, it's well known that if you're a Mormon

• 3:27:54Speaker 00

  and you show up to a city, like, you can kind of, you can kind of get in, right? If you're one of the tribe. It's like, it's, you know, it's like, you're one of us, right? So those are, those are features of human society, right? That are very strong, right? And that are, you know, despite the, the more impersonal sense that we're constructing institutions like intelligence bureaucracies that are impersonal and a-religious. Well, they exist in a social milieu with other institutions, right? And they can be vulnerable to, you know, different loyalties, loyalties being tested and compromised over time. I don't exactly know how that's played out, but like, you just have to look at American society. I think it's, it's an odd blind spot that we don't think about the role, I mean, it could be very positive.

• 3:28:36Speaker 00

  I'm not saying it's negative or positive, it's just is a fact of our political economy that we have, like, is really a religious institution that controls hundreds of billions of dollars of capital, that also has, you know, more than almost any other single group probably put more, you know, seeded more people into our intelligence bureaucracies for decades, right? And just also happens to be strongly associated with our leading technologists over, over, over 20th and 21st centuries. I don't know. It's like with the James Simons thing. I have no like, no smoking gun there. It just seems like a curious thing, right? It's something to be, you know, interested in, right?

• 3:29:09Jesse Michels?

  It's a very interesting fact pattern. Well, um, when it comes to the science stuff, you had like, you know, an interesting possible theory of everything with this kind of, you know, upstream hypergraph and, and, you know, Gerard and Wolfram. What about sort of kind of more local anomalies or like discoveries possibly mid-century? So like the Townsend Brown example I mentioned that we've, we've talked about, another one would be like a more extended version of electrodynamics involving, you know, there's always talks of like a scaler field or whatever. You know, do you, do you have conviction in any of these things? You mentioned neutrinos, like neutrino information transfer. I don't know, would be maybe another one.

• 3:29:51Speaker 00

  There might be some cool stuff that I'm not, I don't rule any of that out. And like the neutrino one, I'll just say is interesting because you know neutrinos are a particle that doesn't very weakly interacts with normal matter, but doesn't doesn't not interact with matter. We build detectors, you know, heavy water in the Arctic to get like little flashes and these photomultiplier tubes that, you know, gives like, you know, one out of every 400 quadrillion neutrinos actually hits and creates a detection. But that's just like, that's coming from the sun and kind of this amorphous, you know, spray of neutrinos. It's possible. I haven't really done the math. Maybe you asked ChatGPT on this. It's like, if you were able to construct a really tight, high intensity beam of neutrinos, so that the density of the neutrinos is like many, many orders of magnitude higher than

• 3:30:34Speaker 00

  otherwise would be, and you develop a really sensitive detector, well, then you can send a signal through any, basically through the earth, right? Which would be really useful for something like, for example, if you're trying to ensure you have like redundant, redundant, redundant nuclear kinetic control communications, if your satellites are down, all your terrestrial communications are down, but you really want to ensure that the sub and other side of the earth can get the go codes, right? You know, it doesn't seem like physically impossible to me. We really need to run the numbers and do the engineering and, you know, figure it out. It doesn't seem impossible to use, you know, essentially a neutrino beam fired through the earth. And if it's sufficiently high intensity and you have a sufficiently sensitive detector, that you could transmit information that way, transmit, you know, launch kits or other things. It probably wouldn't be high bandwidth

• 3:31:17Speaker 00

  in general, would be like Starlink, but like for, you know, certain, certain information communication requirements. So I think there's certain aspects like that that don't, to me, don't seem like physically implausible. There's other things like scalar fields. I don't know, not as, I don't have like a strong opinion on scalar fields, scalar weapons. Yep. This whole domain. I don't know. I'm sort of agnostic. There's a part of it which is like.

• 3:31:46Speaker 00

  If there was enough low hanging fruit that is just like a small tweak to say Einstein's field equations, it's hard to believe that somebody wouldn't have figured that out by now.

• 3:31:55Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 3:31:55Speaker 00

  Right? That some people, there's a, there's maybe a torsion term in Einstein's field equations that we normally ignore.

• 3:32:00Jesse Michels?

  That's an Ali Carton.

• 3:32:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, that maybe there's, and that's been a lot of what has been in kind of like unconventional physics approaches is usually taking general activity and like, looking for like weird variations of it, right? What if there was an extra term here that introduced a new field or there's a new degree of freedom here and what would that mean? And that's fine, but like, the interesting thing about Einstein's field equations is that they're actually quite, going back to the Gerard thing, it's actually not that surprising that you're, that he was able to regenerate or kind of generate the Einstein field equations out of this sort of limit of this discrete model. It's because the Einstein field equations tend to be kind of like with very minimal constraints on a certain, how you define, you know, a certain topological structure with a certain metric structure. Like the Einstein field equations are just what you have to get.

• 3:32:44Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 3:32:45Speaker 00

  Right? They're almost like the natural, the most natural description of, of the metric structure of a very general class of, of sort of manifolds. So they're not that special. And therefore they kind of allow many different permutations. There's many different like little bells and whistles you can kind of add to the Einstein field equations that would, you know, give you maybe different fields, different degrees of freedom. And it's possible that there are experiments that you could do that would allow you to figure that out. I wouldn't rule it out. I haven't done like the deep dive enough to know whether, you know, whether that's plausible enough. But it's like, to me, that's more just like a, it's a, it reminds me a bit of like the Tomac epicycles, which is, you know, that's the field equations are very simple, very clean. They explain

• 3:33:30Speaker 00

  a very general class of phenomenon. You want to explain UFOs. And so you're looking to be like, what bells and whistles can I add to this simple conceptual structure that I can sort of allow me to explain this anomalous phenomenon, right? Well, how could I like engineer the spacetime metric or could zip around using, you know, scalar fields or something? It just seems a bit clunky. It seems a bit kludgy. It seems a bit like you're looking for the answer that you wanted to get.

• 3:33:55Jesse Michels?

  To get more specific than that, which I agree is sort of lazy thinking. One, you know, thing that might have happened that like Weinstein spoke about, Eric Weinstein spoke about on Rogan is, you know, 1957 Chapel Hill Conference, you know, quantum gravity gets established and there's an Austrian mathematician present named Herman Bondi, and he brings up this question of like, what about all these anomalies that might occur if you had theoretical existence of negative mass or negative energy, which is was, you know, totally theoretical at the time. And if you didn't have the positivity conditions and you take into account these theoretical, you know, energy and mass, you know, negative energy, negative mass, you would get all sorts of weird anomalous effects

• 3:34:38Jesse Michels?

  that like, we wouldn't be able to predict with, you know, the Einstein field equations that do include, uh, you know, these positivity conditions. So if you were to put a governor on physics, it might be these, you know, positivity conditions. Then in like, I think the nineties, we figure out this, the Casimir effect, which I'm pretty sure now is like consensus physics, right? That like, there are these, I guess, you know, there is this zero point and there are these quantum, you know, fluctuations in the field that like, would bring two non-conductive plates closer together because of this, this sort of, you know, negative energy force or whatever. And so that brings up this question, you know, and then you look at Miguel Alcubierre, which everybody talks about Alcubierre warp

• 3:35:19Jesse Michels?

  drives this, you know, uh, solution for Einstein faster than light travel, you know, given general relativity and it involves a negative mass and negative energy. And so, yeah, there's something there, but the ability to harness something like the Casimir force for propulsion.

• 3:35:38Speaker 00

  It's interesting. I've seen certain, again, I'm not like a professional physicist. So it's like, I try to read people and it's like, I think the Casimir effect is one that's hard to, um, I don't know if you could extract useful work because you can get essentially the vacuum pressure, because if you put two super effective plates, you know, in the absence, the vacuum will admit any mode of sort of spontaneous quantum, uh, sort of virtual particle pairs. But when you impose this boundary condition of two conducting plates, you're eliminating, you know, a whole set of possible modes and therefore there's kind of less energy in between the two plates, more energy outside the plate. That's a negative pressure, maybe could extract work. Uh, that's kind of the basic premise of it.

• 3:36:18Speaker 00

  I don't know. I don't know if you could actually like if that if there's any like so one interesting thing about general relativity that most people don't understand is that it's not it doesn't conserve energy globally, right? It only conserves energy locally. There's no such actual thing as like global, universal scale, energy conservation in general relativity. And so there, there may be loopholes, right? That's the thing is like, are there loopholes, right? There may be loopholes because general relativity is, is, you know, it doesn't require, um, you know, local, it doesn't require global energy conservation. So maybe there are tricks you can exploit. But we don't really understand what negative energy really means. And in, and I always try to come back to like my best, you know, current thinking about what the models are to use to answer this question of like the the hypergraph, you know, models are, essentially, energy in those models essentially is the, um,

• 3:37:03Speaker 00

  if you have a matter like a surface, you know, you're like, you're just fully getting the, the, the causal graph. Energy is a measure of the number of, of causal edges going through that surface, right? And then momentum is essentially the inverse, is the number of causal edges if you orient it, and then the time like the direction versus the space like direction. And that's actually how you then construct Einstein field equations with the stress energy tensors, because you need to have measures of energy and just in a discrete structure. And so there, like, energy is a, is a, is a discreetly defined measure on this, on this graph structure. It's not like this ineffable thing, just like an E in an equation. It's like the number of edges going through an arbitrary, um, sort of, sort of hypersurface. And so then

• 3:37:45Speaker 00

  this question is like, what is a negative energy and that, and that, and that? Well, in this concept, there's no such thing as like an absolute measure of energy, right? Energy is always a relational quantity, because there's no global measure of energy. Energy is always a relative to reference frames. And so it's like, can you construct a certain way of foliating these hyperservices so that from one inertial frame, you've got essentially access to an energy gradient, right? That is negative from your, from your perspective, right? So it's like, there is no such thing as positive or negative energy. There's just, you know, in the local reference frame that you happen to be, you know, constructing for yourself, for whatever crazy technology you've got. Can you, you know, essentially, you know, engineer a, like, a relative negative gradient to, like, the number of causal edges that are in your, your future, um, in your causal future

• 3:38:28Speaker 00

  light code? I don't know. That would be the how you'd have to do it. So I don't know. So as I said, right, it's like, you have to look at the fundamental physics theory and be like, is that ruled out, right? Because like, general relativity, It's not the fundamental physics theory.

• 3:38:40Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 3:38:40Speaker 00

  So you can construct models of general relativity where, yeah, there's a, there's different terms. There's different components. There's different, um, you know, states that you could potentially, you know, allow within that broad, that broad, very, very self-consistent framework. But does that mean that those are physically realizable in our universe?

• 3:38:57Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 3:38:57Speaker 00

  Well, you'd be like, well, no, we need to know what the actual fundamental theory of physics is for our universe.

• 3:39:01Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:39:02Speaker 00

  And then do those admit of these types of capabilities?

• 3:39:05Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 3:39:05Speaker 00

  So I don't rule it out because we don't have the fundamental theory. But I think it's kind of like the level where we're talking about these, um, you know, vacuum metric engineering sorts of descriptions, I think it was like a higher level description. Like them, those might be fully consistent with like a, a bottom up, you know, Garardian view. Like they might meet somewhere in the middle here where it's like, actually it turns out, yeah, like there are certain special conditions that are, that emerge in the sort of hypergraph vision of things that do get you, uh, systems that look like they're consistent with, say, vacuum metric engineering. Right. But the vacuum metric engineering is just like a higher level or mid-level description. So it's possible, uh, this is like, and then to go back to the historical story, it is quite suspicious that like, there was all this work on gravity, on, on gravity specifically.

• 3:39:50Speaker 00

  And all this stuff you pointed to in your previous videos, it's like, there's something there. Like, like they were looking at it seriously. They were clearly exploring it. And I have like two interpretations. Like, I think it's very clear to me that US government has been conducting secret fundamental physics research. Like, that's pretty obvious to me.

• 3:40:06Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:40:06Speaker 00

  Like, you'd have to be really naive to think that the federal government, the intelligence community, you know, just forgot the lesson of World War II.

• 3:40:13Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 3:40:14Speaker 00

  That like, oh, we took all the smartest physicists, threw, threw them into a secret project and we won global war. Great. Go back to your business, guys. Like, we're just gonna set, we're gonna shut, shut this down. You know, go back to your normal ivory tower academic jobs and write papers and, you know, we'll call you in the next war.

• 3:40:28Jesse Michels?

  What's the answer then to the Weinstein counterpoint to that where he's like, where are all the smart? Like all the Neymar, Kanye, Hamed, this, you know, all these naming all these people. He's like, why aren't they in the program? You know? What's going on? Is Ed Witten in the program? You know, like?

• 3:40:42Speaker 00

  It is a good question. Um, and I don't know, like, you have to, I don't know what the base rate measure is of like super smart people, right? And like, whether.

• 3:40:53Speaker 00

  Whether the academic production of theoretical physicists is the only pipeline for such talent that you can imagine existing, like if you really have decades to set up alternative programs to spot talent when they're 12 or 13 years old.

• 3:41:05Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 3:41:05Speaker 00

  Through standardized academic testing, you understand who the priorities are before they make it to college or even PhD programs. Like, you know, I think Eric has a model of like, there's an existing cohort of trained practical theoretical physicists that exist in the discipline. And the US government is just like, we found a UFO, come help us figure it out.

• 3:41:23Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 3:41:23Speaker 00

  Right? I think maybe alternative model is like, they had that stuff well before modern academic theoretical physics formed as a discipline.

• 3:41:30Jesse Michels?

  And their academic affiliate programs, kind of everywhere, I mean, MIT being, MIT super soldier program being like one example, but like.

• 3:41:37Speaker 00

  Oh, and like, really smart people do very classified research and don't talk about it.

• 3:41:41Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 3:41:41Speaker 00

  And it's just, you know, to think you have a monopoly, like the Harvard faculty has a monopoly on, you know, 160 IQs that can, you know, spend two years reading fundamental physics journals, like, it's not that hard.

• 3:41:52Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, totally. And you go back to these declassified CIM MOs and you're like, the outpost for exotic gravity research, in certain cases, it was like Indiana, Purdue, like it was, it wasn't necessarily, I mean, Princeton and MIT were also named, but like, it's, it's not always, you know, you might assume, you know, is sort of the tip of the spear as far as.

• 3:42:13Speaker 00

  I look at, like Jim Simons talked about, like, nobody really knows how many people he's got working for him. And like, his pipeline could be scaled in probably two, three, five, 10x, and which, who would really know?

• 3:42:25Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 3:42:25Speaker 00

  Right? Especially if he's not targeting mid-career or, you know, coming out of grad school, but he's able to spot, like, for example, Harold Maugn, he was spotted when he was like 12 or 13 years old.

• 3:42:35Jesse Michels?

  That's wild, 12 or 13.

• 3:42:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. And he was gonna give, he was gonna be, he was asked to come to MIT when he was like a, you know, early teen and he, for family reasons, he couldn't do it. So he ended up going to Rensselaer Polytechnic and then was given a full ride in lateral to Yale. And then was sort of entered into the, the system from there, right? But he was tapped from, I think it was the MIT president actually tapped him.

• 3:42:55Jesse Michels?

  Were you spotted, Matthew?

• 3:42:57Speaker 00

  Not that I know. No, I mean, like, you know, we had the gifted and talented programs, right? I did that, right? Went to Johns Hopkins.

• 3:43:04Jesse Michels?

  Oh, you did that?

• 3:43:04Speaker 00

  You know, who knows?

• 3:43:06Jesse Michels?

  You know, I did that too, back in the day. I, I, yeah, interesting.

• 3:43:10Speaker 00

  That's what they planned. That's what, that's what.

• 3:43:11Jesse Michels?

  So he had chips embedded in our brain.

• 3:43:13Speaker 00

  You know, I was like, I was with juice boxes, you know, and then like, wait, I did, well, they had to take naps. Like, what was happening there? Um, so, yeah, but like, that's the thing is like, if you're going to manage a program that's fundamental of like, this is the thing, it sounds conspiracy, but like, I just like first principles. If I'm a senior defense intel bureaucrat in like, the late 1940s, and I'm like, all right, we won the war, all the physicists helped us win it. It was kind of like by the skin of our teeth. The Nazis were like neck and neck, right? Like, a year, it would have been a close run thing. We can't let that happen again, right? We just happen to have all these smart German physicists, these Jews that were fleeing the Nazis that came here.

• 3:43:49Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 3:43:50Speaker 00

  It's like, we had Einstein, we had Oppenheimer, we had all these guys, you know, that were, you know, you just kind of got lucky, right? That we happened to have access to this talent and then we could wet it to our industrial system and like, go all systems go. But they'd be like, all right, we can't, that was like an ad hoc, kind of like, got, got a bit lucky sort of thing. We can't, we need to systematize this, formal, formalize that. We need to ensure that we have the most talented individuals in our society identified and steered where we can into positions where we can leverage them for the most strategic national security purposes, which the lesson of World War II is the most strategic national security, um, you know, domain is fundamental physics. Right? Whoever, whoever figures out the next trick in fundamental physics can design potential world-changing weapons.

• 3:44:35Speaker 00

  That just seems like bureaucratic negligence of the highest order. If they didn't put in place a systematic program to identify, to spot and identify and recruit in various ways, talent to help ensure that fundamental physics research could be conducted in secret for the US government. That would be like my baseline expectation, right? It seems like an absurd thing because of course Eric is a smart guy. He's like, I see evidence of this. Well, they've had a long time to practice, to keep this secret and it doesn't require that many people.

• 3:45:03Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 3:45:04Speaker 00

  Right? It's not going to be like an, and a bunch of nerds sitting in a room somewhere doing math is not going to like, show up on much, not make much of, not going to make much of a footprint.

• 3:45:12Jesse Michels?

  Totally.

• 3:45:12Speaker 00

  And it's not like they're going to publish anything.

• 3:45:14Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 3:45:15Speaker 00

  So it's, you know, again, how sick, so this is where it's mechanistically, I'd expect such a sort of set of programs to have been put in motion. It's a whole different question to assess, well, how successful have they been? Right? Because they could set up all this apparatus, the government can be, is really good at creating these programs, making them really secret, funding them over many years. But they're not that good at actually stimulating creative innovation. Right? So, you know, then this kind of explains to me why you have these cases like, like Ning Li or whatever, like folks that are clearly doing like breakthrough research on the margins of some interesting subjects. And then they get sort of poof.

• 3:45:52Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:45:53Speaker 00

  They disappear. And is it because it's two explanations. One is the government knows that, oh, there might be an independent reproduction of a breakthrough that they already have, and they want to make sure nobody else sees it. Or they, um, they want to basically take anything that could potentially touch on this secret research area and bring it in, but they actually haven't made much progress.

• 3:46:15Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:46:15Speaker 00

  So it doesn't really tell me one way or the other, whether they've actually made much progress in like either a theoretical fundamental breakthrough or an engineered application of a fundamental breakthrough. I think you can assume they have these programs and have gotten nowhere.

• 3:46:27Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. It, I mean, it just, what you're saying makes total sense because I think, you know, if this stuff was housed in the Manhattan Project, you know, before the setup of maybe some sort of distributed recon system or whatever to track, you know, young prodigies. It seemed like the destructiveness of science and tech was just going asymptotic at the time. And so to like not clamp down with safeguards as far as, you know, both being able to recruit, uh, but also being able to quickly hide, you know, what you're working on. That, that, that would seem like this big national security priority, right?

• 3:47:06Speaker 00

  And we have recent evidence, like, again, hearsay, but Andreessen Horowitz and Ben Horowitz had this meeting and they reported back with the National Security Council senior staff. And an individual on that National Security Council said, we have classified entire areas of fundamental physics before.

• 3:47:20Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 3:47:21Speaker 00

  Don't think we can do the same for AI. This was in rejoinder to, uh, Andreessen Horowitz saying, you can't classify AI, it's just math.

• 3:47:28Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 3:47:28Speaker 00

  And they're like, you bet, you bet we can. We did it before.

• 3:47:31Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 3:47:31Speaker 00

  It's like. There you go, guys.

• 3:47:33Jesse Michels?

  And I think there's like a Rand Corp initiative to like, basically have a global control system over compute because of the AGI race. And there might be an interesting connection on like Rand Corp and some of the more secret science or tech when it comes to propulsion and that sort of thing. I don't know if you've

• 3:47:52Speaker 00

  I mean, I had a conversation, I tweeted about this, so I guess I should say it now because it's public, but like be careful how much details I get. But I had a conversation oof, over a year ago. I forget exactly when. Let's go back to my Twitter. Probably coming up on a year ago now with a former very senior Department of Defense individual. And, you know, we, we had been chatting about lots of different subjects and again, kind of UAPs came up and this individual described having a meeting with, with Arrow and this individual was responsible for managing large collections of SAPs, including those that touched on AI stuff, including other things. And, you know, this person's been

• 3:48:36Speaker 00

  around the block in terms of, you know, even when you're getting a top secret SCI briefing on a particular program, when they give these similar briefings on their SAPs, they regularly give bullshit briefings at the highest level of classification to others. You know, that's just, that's just the game, right? If you don't need to know, you don't need to know. But the existence of such a program is something that's hard to keep secret. So you give a bullshit briefing. When he was sitting on the, at the Arrow briefing, it was like that was the perception. This was the bullshit briefing. Game recognize game was the quote, basically. And we got a bit further into it and they said, you know, it's a triangle.

• 3:49:18Speaker 00

  AI, quantum, and the Grush stuff. That was it. And we were, you know, in an environment where I couldn't and want to press too much into the issue and, you know, I didn't have, it wasn't like this sort of sit down where it's like we can go for hours. So that was basically where, where it sort of landed. And I've been chewing on that for a while. You know, AI, quantum, and the Grush stuff.

• 3:49:42Jesse Michels?

  That's wild. That's super interesting. My mind's going crazy now.

• 3:49:46Speaker 00

  And you can imagine, I mean, all those different ways you could permute that, right? Quantum, you can interpret as quantum computing.

• 3:49:53Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:49:53Speaker 00

  Or you can interpret quantum as like more like quantum weird spooky consciousness stuff.

• 3:49:58Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:50:00Speaker 00

  Or something else.

• 3:50:00Jesse Michels?

  Or materials.

• 3:50:01Speaker 00

  Or yeah, or quantum, quantum materials. Yeah, it's just, you just said quantum.

• 3:50:04Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:50:05Speaker 00

  AI quantum.

• 3:50:05Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:50:06Speaker 00

  And in the government, like quantum is usually used as like a catchall for all that stuff.

• 3:50:09Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:50:10Speaker 00

  Right? Well, not the consciousness, but like quantum sensing, quantum computing, you know, quantum cryptography, et cetera. So I don't know. But this, there clearly is a sense, and this is why AI is becoming important, is like, you know, the program that Michael Schellenberger wrote about, he might even be testifying in Congress next week about it. You know, apparently he's using AI to identify, you know, UAPs and maybe even ARVs because of the characteristic morphology and we have lots of sensors and we're saying, okay, we need to, and if AI is becoming much more decentralized and a capability that is in the private sector, well, that would be a problem. Right? So there might be a lot of technological trends that are underway that are just going to make keeping us in the bottle just almost, like, you know, much more difficult. There's also the, you know,

• 3:50:54Speaker 00

  more abstract or like, you know, speculative, which is, okay, you know, any arbitrary form of intelligence is likely going to share, like, kind of be coming from a different spot in the real multiverse. To communicate in the multiple, in the real multiverse, you need to share concepts. Like, concepts are the bridge, or like, that's actually the category theoretic, like, transportation measure, like, the distance measure in real space is like your conceptual. So like, we are really close in real space. People that come from different languages are a little bit far apart, but the otherwise are close together because of their common history. And so in assembly theory, you can see this is like, they share a common ancestor, but only they're recently branched, right? So they only haven't gone too far in real space. So like, you can do translation between Chinese

• 3:51:37Speaker 00

  and English pretty well, right? There's certain concepts in Chinese that you can't easily map to English and vice versa, right? Just, that's just the nature of trying to do, you know, essentially, translation, you know, there's not complete translation invariance in real space between different, you know, between different cognitive systems. An arbitrary intelligence coming from that has an entirely different assembly history is likely not going to be that close to us in real space. So what are AI systems really good at is basically helping to explore and translate through real space, right? That's why we're now using AI systems to try to like decode dolphin and like whale sounds, right? It's because they're really good at basically in this sort of very multi-dimensional vector space, identifying what are those patterns of regularity?

• 3:52:16Speaker 00

  And then, you know, creating like a map of what the conceptual structure inside that that representational space is. And then figuring out, okay, is there a certain mapping that I can go from that internal representational system to human representational systems? It's like, what is the whale equivalent of like friend? You know, there probably is a plausible way of developing an encoding essentially between human concepts and whale concepts, right? And that would be probably like one of the top priorities, right? Of course, we have the movie Arrival. It's like the top priority is like trying to develop an encoding system between human concepts and NHI concepts, right? And AIs will be very important, maybe have been extremely important in developing such an encoding, right?

• 3:52:59Speaker 00

  And it's probably no secret or no surprise that like, you know, the guy, the co-founder of Renaissance was Robert Mercer. Mercer invented basically large language models and applied those along with other, you know, the leading, they were leading most of the AI stuff, basically, and making all that money, using some of it and doing semantic analysis. Like, you know, they didn't have the transformer architecture back then, but they were doing all sorts of crazy advanced AI stuff. So that would be the exactly team with skills you would apply to being like, we've got, we're getting communications. We're not quite sure how to trust them, right? And the NSA is really, you know, their job is to like do decryption, right? And you can almost think about like decryption is basically the same thing as like fundamental physics in some way, right?

• 3:53:41Speaker 00

  Like you're getting, you get a certain, you know, like the universe is like this unfolding computation. It's computationally irreducible to any given observer that can't inspect all of the microstates. And so there's some core screening. That core screening function is essentially is like an encryption. Like our models are like encryptions of the underlying pattern of the world, right? And then we're trying to, when we do physics, we're trying to like, you know, decrypt, right? Those representations, we were like a naive representation of the universe. We're trying to decrypt what like the underlying, you know, factor was that generated that phenomenon. And so the NSA is really good at doing those sorts of things. So there's a lot of overlap between these kinds of research and technologies and skills you would need to like. Understand the NHI problem that are way beyond just like, you know, engineering topological materials, right?

• 3:54:26Speaker 00

  You'd want to be able to communicate, be able to trust the communication, be able to, you know, understand what sorts of, you know, concepts are embedded and what sorts of social information is embedded in those concepts. Right? Like, you know, we can maybe learn a lot about how like whale social structure actually works by decoding their concepts. Right? Like, how close is the friend and enemy or food source? You know, these different interesting concepts we might be able to get anchors on. How close are they to each other? It might be like interesting observations that you could discern by studying those sorts of linguistic categories.

• 3:54:55Jesse Michels?

  You're making me think of the Danny Sheehan story where he's taken into a skiff in Washington at the behest of the Carter administration to review the Blue Book files on all these UFOs. And he claims he sees a picture, a high definition picture of a UFO crashed into a mountain top. And he traced the photo and drew all these like bizarre kind of hieroglyphic looking symbols. And I'm wondering if we could use AI on that with some maybe symbolic conventions or something.

• 3:55:25Speaker 00

  I mean, this is where it gets quite weird because you're, if you assume some interaction, right? And most of the first person accounts have been, you know, non-recordable interactions, right? Just like ineffable, you're destroying the planet, nukes are bad, you know, danger's coming, right? Sorts of trophy stuff. But, you know, that seems a bit like, are there other more definitive, you know, forms of information, like records that have been deposited, right? Or, or, or given, or, or encodings from certain signals that we've been able to translate? Or be able to write down, right? Like the first, I can imagine like this program, you really like imagine it's like possible full branches, right?

• 3:56:10Speaker 00

  There's like the biological piece, there's the hardware, physical science, material science piece, fundamental physics for propulsion, et cetera piece. There's the xenolinguistics piece, the sort of sociocultural, you know, aspect of that. It's gonna be like all these different branches, right? And imagine you're trying to study human society, right? It's like you would have it all, right? You look for all the artifacts you could, you look for all the maybe unintended signals that we would be sending to try to understand. So there'd be a massive program, but obviously we'd compartmentalize into all these different domains. And then you, you know, AI would be really important to help you synthesize and integrate and develop hypotheses for, for, for that research project, right? So maybe that's what he was pointing at, right? Is

• 3:56:46Jesse Michels?

  And you need, you need some sort of immaculate constellation to quarantine some of the comms, both from a kind of, you know, physical perspective, if there are crashed UFOs, but also, yeah, the comms going on between people and that sort of thing.

• 3:57:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then there'd be the, you know, there'd be the, the basic intelligence function AI could help. And those would be the very important counterintelligence function, right? And there's some weird stories that have been coming out recently of just how like in general, like the government is usually like several steps ahead of the private sector. I think in generative AI, they're probably not, but that doesn't mean they're not ahead in certain, certain areas that are applications of AI could be quite far ahead that are more unique to like, you know, government use cases, like the government is not going to invest a whole lot in DALL-E, not going to let a whole lot in like a chat bot, right? There's just not a function that's going to align to any government function is going to get the R and D. But there are, you know, things people are naive to think that the

• 3:57:42Speaker 00

  private sector just happen to explore the most advanced part of the tech tree, right? So they explored a part of the tech that happens to be very infrastructure, energy intensive. The government, because it has to be secret, probably would just would discount those branches because we can't build 200 million, $200 billion worth of AI infrastructure to train the next models. Like we got to keep this secret. So we would look for other transformer, non-transformer architectures, probably to explore. And we have time to like, you know, test those out without, you know, the competitive race with open AI to like, oh, we got something that work. Like now we're stuck. We got to like basically scale this up and keep training a bigger, bigger model. This is all to say, I think people assume that like regards to

• 3:58:24Speaker 00

  AI, that, that open AI and anthropic are like much further ahead than anyone else. And I think it might be, there might be orthogonal vectors here for certain applications, certain, certain architectures. And again, it's like, you assume fundamental physics research could be done in secret. It's like, well, it could be fundamental AI research that's done in secret, right?

• 3:58:41Jesse Michels?

  Absolutely.

• 3:58:42Speaker 00

  It's like, as soon as this is identified as a requirement, there's a pipeline, there's an SOP, there's a process, there's a structure. This would, you know, this is what I would, I would hope is happening. But then it's not just us, Chinese, the Russians, others maybe. And the Chinese have gotten really good at doing some of these near applications for their social surveillance purposes and other things. And those are, there's like weird things happening now with people, you know?

• 3:59:07Speaker 00

  Being really good at manipulating individuals online, right? Really good at, you know, generating human-like interactions in certain ways. And that would be, you know, a way of kind of distorting our internal conversations on subjects like like UFOs. So I think the, the, this is like a convergence of these different trends of like disclosure on the one hand, but also the ability of society to like sense make.

• 3:59:32Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 3:59:32Speaker 00

  Is like being degraded almost at the same pace.

• 3:59:35Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 3:59:35Speaker 00

  So I do wonder if we get to a point where like, yeah, the government goes, yeah, we're actually going to come out with everything. But like the basic ability of, you know, society, what we call society to process that in something like a consistent fashion. Could you just be rendered obsolete?

• 3:59:50Jesse Michels?

  On that note, where do you think the UFO conversation goes from here? Cause there's, I mean, there are two camps. One is, you know, if we were having this conversation 40, 50 years ago, and we were kind of invested in the issue, it probably would have been the wrong investment, right? Like not a lot happened. And then the other camp is things seem to be kind of unraveling quickly and snowballing. And so, yeah, where, where do you think things go from here?

• 4:00:16Speaker 00

  This is the tough question. I, I don't think it's going back in the bottle.

• 4:00:20Speaker 00

  I think, I think we will be facing more disruption, recognition, information soon. You know, I, I take the title of Lu Elizondo's book seriously.

• 4:00:35Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 4:00:35Speaker 00

  Right? He doesn't say that for a reason. And he's given other remarks that, you know, indicate this is, this is not something you're going to be just like a kick the can for decades.

• 4:00:46Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 4:00:47Speaker 00

  I, I, I do not though, fall into the camp of like, there's a 2027 clock and yeah, they're showing up.

• 4:00:54Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 4:00:55Speaker 00

  I've heard that and people have said that is like, you know, word got around that they're going to come up and show up in 2027. And this is probably, you know, get ready to get people prepared, et cetera. I don't rule it out, but like. That seems like not my baseline scenario. I think I see a convergence of things that are now kind of historically, it's like, it's like the vibe, right? It's almost like there are things that I know that people are potentially going to come out and say publicly, but is that going to be what we call capital disclosure? Right? It's like, who's paying attention? Who cares? It's like, information can come out, can come out either be individuals in sort of a sochastic, self-organized process, and they may have the professional bona fides, the historical experience, the credibility to get maybe the next marginal increment

• 4:01:39Speaker 00

  of the population to pay attention and go, what the hell? Right? But we've had a number of those people already, right? It's just like, we're kind of on this ratchet, which is like the high Emma sheds, the Canadian Defense Minister, more recent era, you've had David Rush, you've had Lou, you've got Carl Nell, Christian Mellon, like, these are not like household names, but they're sort of, we're climbing this ladder here, right? And we've had suggestive remarks come from multiple presidents, and it's, this is like an accretion over time. And I think there'll be, I expect there'll be more individuals of senior caliber coming out and saying things, but I think it will be in alignment with an evolving political process that I think is not deterministic, right? In the sense that, like, the UAP Disclosure Act was, well, you know, one version of this kind of controlled process, but that was written before people thought that Trump was

• 4:02:24Speaker 00

  going to have unified government and is now going to have RFK and Vivek in there, and Elon in there, doing truth and reconciliation committees and like, opening up all the books on everything.

• 4:02:33Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 4:02:33Speaker 00

  Like, I'm sorry, but like, that's not, like, those are just different, those are very distinct approaches.

• 4:02:39Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:02:40Speaker 00

  And I don't know if the UAP Disclosure Act process of having nine, you know, sort of technocrats appointed by the president, I mean, I think that could still survive. I think it's an important process because you need to have an accountable, independent procedure here, but if I'm just making a forecast, like, it's likely going to be messier than what that process originally envisioned, right? Just, I don't know, we'll see. I don't know how, but like Vivek, I know is very interested in the subject, JD is very interested in the subject. Elon seems to have changed his tune a bit.

• 4:03:09Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 4:03:10Speaker 00

  RFK is very interested in the subject. Trump has obviously talked about it. So where this sits in there, like, how they're going to manage this, who, like, it's like, who are they going to assign this problem, right? That's, that's going to be the big question. And then, is this a, is this a?

• 4:03:22Jesse Michels?

  Should we try to get appointments?

• 4:03:25Speaker 00

  I don't know, man. You want the red dot on your head?

• 4:03:27Jesse Michels?

  Probably not.

• 4:03:29Speaker 00

  You know, better to be behind the camera than, you know.

• 4:03:32Jesse Michels?

  The guy actually doing stuff as far as disclosing. That's probably right.

• 4:03:37Speaker 00

  I mean, it's interesting, like the controlled disclosure campaign plan would set up this UAP Records Review Board, and that Records Review Board would be have all the status of an executive department agency, obviously the subpoena authority, the United감각 Classification Authority with presidential override, but it will also allow them to, you know, leverage the capacities and authorities of the federal acquisition regulation. So they could actually, with a budget, issue contracts. So they could hire a full-time staff and have issue contracts to third-party advisors, to write reports and studies and contribute to, you know, expert analysis on the various strands of these questions, which would be explicitly under their mandate to report and make recommendations to the president across all these instruments

• 4:04:18Speaker 00

  of national power, right? That Carl Nell has talked about. And so that, that is like the, that is like the standard, you know, you like DC approach. We got a tough problem. You know, there's a hot potato. The Senate really doesn't want to have to own it. You know, the House really can't deal with it. The executive branch is kind of like, you know, looking into its own backyard. And the NSC is, you know, relatively small. And so we're going to convene and then panel this independent group. It's going to be, President will obviously have veto authority, but it's going to officially, everyone gets to pass the hot potato to this group. So that, that logic might still stand, right? Because I could see between the incoming administration, that same basic sense of like, do, I really want this to come out, but do I want to own this hot potato? Do

• 4:05:02Speaker 00

  I want to like navigate all this morass? Or do I want to be like, I agree, we should have this independent group over here of people that I can recommend. They're kind of like, you know, my friends and allies or whatever. But like, they do the hard work. And they dig with the messy stuff and they get a budget and they get the clearances and they get the contracts. And then that becomes an app, like a separate, more institutional apparatus to formally go through this sort of thing and make recommendations to, you know, President Trump. I think it's, I would still push for the UAP Disclosure Act versus, say, some ad hoc Vivek Truth and Reconciliation Committee, that God knows how that would be formalized and stood up and structured. And also like what other things would be sort of stuffed under its remit.

• 4:05:46Speaker 00

  It would dilute its purpose, distract it, politicize it potentially. And I think it's just better course of action to just put the energy behind this existing, you know, framework. I think it doesn't matter who you appoint. Obviously, that's like, you know, the structure is there. It's how you fill out that structure, like who gets appointed to these positions if they, if they pass this law, um, under the new admin. So we'll see. But also, there's the legacy folks inside the house that you still have to deal with, right? Like the Roger, uh, the Rogers and Turner. Um, and, you know, we'll see how much, like, in general, like, an incoming administration has lots of priorities and, you know, certain reservoir of political capital.

• 4:06:23Jesse Michels?

  UFOs is not at the top of that list.

• 4:06:25Speaker 00

  Well, that's the interesting thing. It's like, it's hard to say how it fits. And,

• 4:06:31Speaker 00

  um, you know, honestly, a path of resistance for them is to just kick the, kick it to an independent group, right?

• 4:06:35Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 4:06:37Speaker 00

  Cause if they're gonna go through this dirty laundry, glass nose procedure, you might have to spend a lot of your own executive political capital, like, on like, adjudicating every one of those decisions on this record, this thing, this program, this like, where is that line gonna be drawn? It's like a case by case. And that's a very, that's, that's a messy thing, right?

• 4:06:56Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 4:06:56Speaker 00

  I'm not sure any of these people want to be making those decisions or spending their political capital fighting, you know, God knows who, right? Whereas like, hey, kick it over to this group, give them a bunch of money, give them a clear mandate, let them deal with it. And you kind of are hands off to a certain extent. And then the important decisions, you can kind of airdrop in and, you know,

• 4:07:12Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 4:07:12Speaker 00

  Put your thumb on the scale. Um, so that would be, mm, I don't know, preferred scenario to play out here. Um, I mean, there is this scenario where, you know, all these folks come in and they've been singing a certain tune. They go disclosure, openness, glass nose, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Then they get shown whatever it is.

• 4:07:31Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:07:32Speaker 00

  And they go, nah, sorry. Sorry, guys. Nah, this whole UFO thing, I don't know. Uh, that we were, yes, we're, we're good.

• 4:07:40Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 4:07:40Speaker 00

  We're good. Look over here, right?

• 4:07:42Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 4:07:43Speaker 00

  I mean, it's always the scenario you have to, you know,

• 4:07:46Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 4:07:47Speaker 00

  Put onto your, to the, to the, to the, to the table here. Cause I don't really know what's behind that curtain, right? And whether there is something that's just like,

• 4:07:57Speaker 00

  Yep. Nope. Not going to talk about it, right?

• 4:07:59Jesse Michels?

  We hear an awful lot of unnerving stories from people like Jeremy Corbell or Ross Coulthart, who are like ostensibly talking to people on legacy programs directly. And like, they all say the same thing. So they get to a certain level in the conversation, you know, whatever. And the person goes, if you knew what I know, he wouldn't be pro disclosure or something, you know, some, they sort of hint at some sort of extremely ontologically shocking truth. And I never know how to compute that. It's this sort of, you know, epistemic impasse, if you're on the other side of it, where it's like, I don't know.

• 4:08:35Speaker 00

  That's why I actually think, you know, the quote controlled disclosure campaign plan, sorry, I probably butchered that, is, you know, like, you almost need to shift human consciousness, right? It sounds a bit colloquial and woo woo, but it goes back to earlier part of the conversation. It's like, you know, we are, we're embodied creatures, but we have certain mental capacities and a certain, you know, folk world, like worldview of what's possible, what's not, like, the immediate horizon of most people's lives is very, very, you know, foreshortened. It's got to pay the rent, get the kids up for school, you know, get through the day. And, you know, the job of a state is to ensure that those background functions of everyday life are not subject to, like, radical volatility.

• 4:09:20Speaker 00

  It's why we have a state is to ensure that, like, I can get on the road in the morning and get to work and my taxes are paid and my school starts on time and the teachers show up. And it's like, that just needs to happen, right? Like, that's the first order of business as a government, right? And so I do have sympathy for anything that the government could envision releasing to the public that threatens those sort of core, you know, lifelines of society. It's like, that's your job. It's to ensure, like, that would be the government essentially, you know, committing harakiri, right? It'd be like, just abdicating its fundamental responsibility. And so this is where the tension lies. And actually, I think, you know, the more that they can sort of get out of their own hands into the, into civil society to manage, the better. Because the government shouldn't

• 4:10:04Speaker 00

  be the source of ontological truth for People, the government shouldn't be like a religious, you know, institution interpreting the world for its citizens. Like, that's not the job of the government to tell me like, what the capital T truth is, like, the nature of reality or any of this. Like, no, like, you take my taxes, you defend me, you keep the lights on, you know, like, do that, right? You're not, I don't look to you to like, you know, you're not the Pope, right?

• 4:10:26Jesse Michels?

  Sure. But it's also not the job to suppress the capital T truth unless that involves some, you know, clear trade secret on the national security front.

• 4:10:35Speaker 00

  But this is where I think the mandate, like, this is more philosophical, like, what is the, what is the social contract in America? What is the form of government we have, the constitutional republic and the understanding of the framers that has been evolved over time? Like, it's like, you know, even if you're originalist or you're, you know, a flexible, you know, kind of constitutionalist, like, I don't think the National Security Act, the Tariff Energy Act, like, can plausibly, or even morally be extended to non-human intelligence fact of.

• 4:11:04Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 4:11:05Speaker 00

  It just, I fully, it just reject that wholesale, that the fact of non-human intelligence is it's not government information, like, existentially, legally, morally, is not government information, right? Other things, like, the existence of advanced aerospace propulsion systems, material science breakthroughs, maybe even theoretical physics research, although that's, that's, that's litigated, are government information. Those can be properly classified under, under a mandate where the authorities making those determinations, you know, are doing so in accordance with our legal mechanisms for constitutional oversight, where, you know, we have procedures, we have laws for secrecy and reporting to Congress. And it seems like, on that front, we clearly have a problem, right? That needs to be cleaned up, where these programs have not been properly reported to, you know, the cognizant oversight mechanisms

• 4:11:50Speaker 00

  in our system of government. And it's just like, yeah, like, if you want to have a democracy the way that we think we have one, you need to fix that. Does that mean everything comes out? No, but it means that accountability objective clearly needs some work to be done. And then there's the disclosure objective, where the disclosure objective, at least for me, is the fact of non-human intelligence, if that is known with high confidence by the US government, is illegitimately kept from the public. That's just not something they can keep secret. I think there's no moral justification for that, right? Even if it's like, going to be destabilized, it depends on what you say, right? It's not like, you know, you could say, yes, we're not alone. We're studying it. We're going to empanel these institutions, public, private sector,

• 4:12:32Speaker 00

  civil society to really understand it. And then you slowly leak out the sensitive information, right? That's maybe more prudent. It doesn't mean you release everything. But I think this omerta can no longer, I think, be effectively sustained because I think it won't be, right? It's like clear that either adversaries or private sector or individuals from these programs are going to keep pushing that.

• 4:12:52Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 4:12:53Speaker 00

  And then you're in this, you're in this, you know, game of no good choices if you're, if you're trying to manage that, that process of disclosure. It's like, you know, you either get on board with this controlled mechanism or it's going to be, you know, RFK, you know, coming in there and just like tweeting out, you know, everything you've been doing.

• 4:13:12Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:13:14Speaker 00

  That's like, I think the last few days, I know we're recording a few days after the election. It is, it is just like the, the shock wave is just like propagating through, right? And I think we haven't seen what this means for disclosure and what different actors now throughout these different systems that we're modeling now have to radically adjust their personal, you know, just like incentives here, right?

• 4:13:40Speaker 00

  It's like, okay, like, you know, there's a story just about the FBI, right? Like, see, like off the record quotes from senior officials at the FBI being like, it was like the kind of a morbid joke that was, um, you know, the senior officials on that whatever seventh floor, um, you know, they, they, they're, they, they haven't passed their fit test in a while, but they're going to need to to run out the door. So like there's an expectation filtering through, just say the FBI is an example, that it's just going to be a purged, purges.

• 4:14:08Jesse Michels?

  Wild.

• 4:14:09Speaker 00

  Right? And just so then carry that through, right? These other different structures. And if that, that is now, that's a radical change in the institutional bureaucratic environment. That the UAP disclosure conversation is now situated in.

• 4:14:25Jesse Michels?

  Well, it's fascinating because like historically, you have JFK saying, I'm going to scatter the CIA to the winds, you know, being at loggerheads with them. You have Nixon saying he's going to fire a third of the CIA or whatever. Maybe that was a sub-narrative for Watergate a little bit. And then you have, you know, similar stuff with Carter. Usually it doesn't end well for like the reforming president, but I've never seen so much force and power on the side of force reduction in bureaucracy as I do today with Elon, RFK, this coalition of like, we fucking had it. And like, the history of this country is way more messed up than, you know, people realize. We're going to like fire all these people. So I'm very curious to see how this, how this ends.

• 4:15:07Jesse Michels?

  And if it's, you know, history repeating itself, or if, you know, maybe, maybe you do just see this massive watershed moment.

• 4:15:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, I think this is the tale as old as time, which is, you know, how does this urge for reform not be captured? Right? And to what extent, you know, everyone has an agenda, right? Like it's, you know, everyone's like, oh, good guys, bad guys. Right? The deep state versus the, you know, Elon, wonder, you know, wonder team. It's like, everyone is a flawed person. Everyone has an agenda. Everyone's working, everyone's working an angle, right? Question is, you know, are the interests of civil society and public accountability, like those higher level objectives, are those being met or not met by the actions and decisions made by each of those different sides? It's like, I don't have allegiance to any particular team. I have allegiance to these higher level sort of social, political,

• 4:15:58Speaker 00

  and moral objectives. And so if, if anyone in particular decides to move in a direction that's aligned with that, I'm supportive. If they move against it, then I'm not supportive, right? And so this is where it'd be important to watch and for folks that are interested in, you know, pushing UAP disclosure to like, hold people to account, right? Regardless of your particular team or tribe. And be like, I have a certain political objective. I think we need to establish these independent mechanisms of accountability and transparency, you know, whoever's in power, that's my expectation, right? Whether it's Elon or, or anybody else. It's like, this is my, this is where I'm going to hold you to, to, to account. So. Yeah, that's what we're heading into now. It's gonna be a lot of, a lot of things are now on the table.

• 4:16:37Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 4:16:38Speaker 00

  And it's gonna be fascinating to see how it all plays out.

• 4:16:40Jesse Michels?

  Can't wait. Matthew Pines, this was awesome. We could go on for hours. You mentioned before we started rolling that there might be a, you know, a Federal Reserve in Bitcoin. We didn't even get to that, which shows just how much we had to discuss on UFO, secret science, all the other fronts. But I hope we can do this again, and this was an absolute blast, man.

• 4:17:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, anytime.

• 4:17:03Jesse Michels?

  Cool. Alright. Thank you so much to Delete Me for sponsoring this video. If you want to remove your data from the internet, go to the link in the description for 20% off right now.