#2318 - Harold "Sonny" White

Dr. Harold “Sonny” White is a physicist and aerospace engineer specializing in advanced propulsion, particularly warp drive physics. Formerly leading NASA’s Advanced Propulsion Team at Johnson Space Center, he is now the founder and CEO of Casimir, a deep-tech startup focused on developing breakthrough power-generating nanotechnology. Casimir’s innovations have the potential to transform sustainable energy on Earth and may lay the groundwork for future advancements in interstellar propulsion systems.www.casimirspace.com Get a free welcome kit with your first subscription of AG1 at drinkag1.com/joerogan This episode is brought to you by Visible. Join now at visible.com/rogan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:10Joe Rogan?

  What's up?

• 0:12Speaker 03

  Hey, how's it going Joe?

• 0:14Joe Rogan?

  Pleasure to meet you.

• 0:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank you for having me here today. I appreciate it.

• 0:18Joe Rogan?

  My pleasure. Well, as soon as I saw the subject, I was like, oh yeah. Like, what are you doing?

• 0:22Speaker 03

  Right, right, right. Advanced Power and Propulsion, kind of been a passion of mine for the last 20 some odd years. I suppose if I kind of look back through the annals of my life, right, I've been thinking about Advanced Power and Propulsion ever since I was a teenager.

• 0:37Joe Rogan?

  What do you think inspired that? Was it space missions? Was it, did you look at it and go, I think we can do better? Like, what was it?

• 0:45Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I grew up in Washington DC, and so I got a chance to spend a lot of time in the Air and Space Smithsonian. I don't know if you've ever had a chance to go to that. But growing up in DC, getting a chance to go to the Air and Space Smithsonian, I got to see all these awesome examples of people working together to try and accomplish amazing things, right? And, you know, you might walk into the Air and Space Smithsonian, you just think about, wow, this is full of a bunch of stuff. But it's not just about the stuff, right? It's about the people that worked together to do all these amazing things, right? Like, the Bell X-1 rocket.

• 1:27Speaker 03

  I mean, if you really want to go back, the Wright Flyer, right? That's, that's something where two guys worked together that made bicycles for a living, that decided to go create something that flew. And then, in less than 50, you know, 50, 60 years from when they flew that Wright Flyer, right, we're putting human beings on the surface of the moon. And so, all that really resonated with me as a kid, and I think tended to... Make me gravitate towards a technical field, although it wasn't a straight line.

• 1:59Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  I'd like to say, you know, I knew at an early age what my calling was and what I was going to do, but I bounced around for a little bit until I finally got on a path that, you know, I really connected with. And so I think I knew very early on in my journey in university, right, when I was going to get my degree, that I wanted to work in advanced power and propulsion. And so at that point, everything I did kind of worked towards, how do I get the skills? How do I get the math and physics training that helps me kind of work in this domain? Because I was thinking about the idea of space warps very early on.

• 2:35Joe Rogan?

  It's amazing that you were so focused so early. What a great head start, you know? It's a huge advantage to know what you're really interested in at such an early age.

• 2:44Speaker 03

  There were, well, there were a few speed bumps along the way. We took a few detours, like any, like any human, right? You're like, I don't know if I want to do this yet, right?

• 2:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Well, it is pretty extraordinary if you look at that number that you said, like from Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright to space travel, like how quick that is.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:00Joe Rogan?

  I mean, and we think about in terms of ancient history, how long it took us to get to this point, and that kind of acceleration so rapidly inside of a lifetime to see just world-changing events and the internet all happening simultaneously, right?

• 3:14Speaker 03

  Absolutely, absolutely. You know, there's, there's another interesting story, right? So my background is I've got a PhD in physics and a master's in mechanical engineering. So I'm both a scientist and an engineer, so I have, you know, deep appreciation for both disciplines. But within the discipline of science, right, you know, we just talked about the right flyer and then going to the surface of the moon, and that's more of a kind of an engineering story. On the, on the topic of science, you know, think about E equals mc squared. Probably heard that or saw it on a coffee cup.

• 3:48Joe Rogan?

  I don't really honestly know what it means. It's a theory of relativity.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  It's theory of relativity.

• 3:53Joe Rogan?

  I could say it to people like, "Come on, man."

• 3:55Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:56Joe Rogan?

  E equals mc squared, whatever. What is the theory of relativity?

• 4:00Speaker 03

  So, E equals mc squared, right, is an equation that relates energy to mass. If you were to take some modest piece of mass, say you've got some tidbits here, the mass that's in this pen right here. If you take the mass that's in this pen and you convert it to energy, that equation helps you understand exactly how much energy you can potentially release. And so, that equation, while it might sound very humble, right, "Oh, E equals mc squared, that's cool," but it had super big implications. And you just talked about how quickly things move. So, let's talk about that for just a second. E equals mc squared. Einstein comes up with this equation, 1911, somebody will look it up on the internet and correct me if I'm wrong. Comes up with the equation in 1911.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  They split the first atom in 1928, 1932 timeframe, I can't remember the exact timeframe. 1942, we have the first nuclear reactor underneath the squash court at University of Chicago. They did things very differently in the 1940s, Joe.

• 5:03Joe Rogan?

  Jeez, under a squash court?

• 5:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 5:05Joe Rogan?

  Did they let the people playing squash know?

• 5:07Speaker 03

  Who knows, right?

• 5:08Joe Rogan?

  What happened to them? Are they X-Men now?

• 5:10Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. That's the origin story. That's the Spider-Man origin story, right?

• 5:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:15Joe Rogan?

  That's where Phoenix came from.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, your friends tell you. I can, I can, I think I can hear the color blue now, right? So, anyway, the, had the first nuclear reactor underneath the squash court in 1942, and then the Trinity Test, that's the atomic bomb test, in 1945. And so, in the span of just a few decades, we go from a cute coffee cup-worthy equation to a paradigm shift. In human existence, right? And that's without computers and the way we think of it. That's without machine learning and without AI. And so as we continue to move forward, right, we've got, you know, if you think about everything we know in physics today, general relativity and quantum mechanics are kind of the two bookends of everything that we know.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  We're going to continue to expand our knowledge and we will come up with new E equals mc squared kind of equations. But now we're equipped with computers, we're equipped with machine learning, AI. And so it's going to be exponential growth, right? So it'll be interesting to see how quickly we go from, hey, I have this new insight. Found this funny thing in a lab to, wow, it changes everything, how we do everything as a, as a culture and community, right?

• 6:34Joe Rogan?

  So there's several problems with the current propulsion systems, right? And the big one is like biological entities being able to absorb G-force. Right? No matter if you super hyper engineer something and have it really crazy, but the things that we're seeing in the sky, the things that people describe, like Commander David Fravor, when he described that Tic Tac, that vehicle, that thing, whatever it was, that went from above 50,000 feet to sea level in a second and shot off at insane rates of speeds. Biological entities can't survive that kind of G-force, we think.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think in terms of a human ability to take Gs.

• 7:17Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I should say human, not like tardigrades could.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  Right, right. Yeah, so a human being can, well, trained human beings can take potentially up to nine Gs.

• 7:29Joe Rogan?

  Have you ever done that before?

• 7:30Speaker 03

  I have not.

• 7:32Joe Rogan?

  I did it once with the Blue Angels. I got to seven and a half Gs. It was bananas.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  That's awesome. I bet that was an experience. Oh, my, I am so jealous.

• 7:41Joe Rogan?

  Mad respect for those guys. Mad respect for those guys. First of all, the biggest thing, when you go to that area, like, these guys are jacked. They're in like insane shape because you're literally forcing blood into your brain to tolerate the G-force. So they have to hold on to their stick, their, you know, their joystick, and they're going hoop, hoop, hoop. While they're flying, going, you know, through the canyons, it's bananas. Like extraordinary. So imagine. A person being able to tolerate that on a regular basis and perform fine motor skill functions like, you know, pointing and aiming and shooting and all the crazy stuff that those guys are capable of doing.

• 8:19Speaker 03

  Being able to think and in some cases, if they're in combat, being able to make critical decisions.

• 8:24Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  In some ways, what you're talking about, when you look at NASA's astronaut corps, right, as part of their regimen, they have to go up in T-38s on a regular basis to try and help, help train with the whole, how do you make decisions, right, when your life is on the line and the time is finite, right?

• 8:43Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 8:43Speaker 03

  So there's a whole aspect of this that's kind of geared towards keeping those portions of the brain trained and sharp, right?

• 8:50Joe Rogan?

  Right, which is the best argument for AI taking over.

• 8:53Speaker 03

  So when you hear about stories about these fighter pilots finding these objects in the sky that exhibit extraordinary capabilities and don't have all the signatures of traditional propulsion systems, what is your thoughts?

• 9:15Joe Rogan?

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• 10:46Joe Rogan?

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• 12:04Speaker 03

  Generally, I tend to be agnostic to the topic. I have a lot of friends that are extremely interested in a lot of things that are out and about in the media and in the literature. But generally, I tend to be agnostic, and here's why. In everything that's currently out, that people talk about and highlight, it's difficult for me to take the data and the evidence and then pull that into the work that we do in the lab with some of the different test devices we work with as we kind of explore the frontiers of where physics and propulsion might intersect.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  It's hard to take that and turn that into some kind of an action plan, if you will. So I'm certainly aware, like David Fravor, the experience that he had with, I think he calls them Tic Tacs, right? An amazing account, and there's multiple people that saw it, multiple platforms that saw it. And so to start with, right, I thought maybe there was a small chance that was, just like we have stealth technology, right, where if you want to hide a plane, what if we had the ability to project something, right, through some mechanism where we could make people go where we wanted them to go, right?

• 13:27Speaker 03

  Because I know there is, there's a technology that uses like two different lasers that triangulate a certain point in open air, and they put enough energy into a particular location that they ionize the air, and so it creates like a bright pixel. And so they use that to create three-dimensional displays that kind of look like they're just floating out in air. Now, they're not quite as big as what we saw described with the Nimitz encounter on the West Coast. So I thought for a little while, maybe that might be something that we're seeing.

• 13:58Joe Rogan?

  They can project plasma as well, right? Is that the same thing?

• 14:01Speaker 03

  It's the same thing, right? So the two lasers intersect, they ionize the air, which creates a plasma.

• 14:06Joe Rogan?

  And they can do this over long distances as well, right?

• 14:09Speaker 03

  I don't know about long distances. I know they can do it over short distances. And so for a while there, I wondered if that might be something that could explain some of what

• 14:19Joe Rogan?

  That makes sense.

• 14:20Speaker 03

  what David Fravor and the group saw.

• 14:22Joe Rogan?

  The only problem would be the radar. Because I don't know, you wouldn't pick up that on radar, would you? Because it's not a mass, right?

• 14:29Speaker 03

  So the, well, the plasma would certainly absorb a radar signal, right? Because it's gonna, it's gonna polarize any electromagnetic wave that tries to go through it.

• 14:38Joe Rogan?

  So it would show up?

• 14:38Speaker 03

  It might, it might, it might.

• 14:40Joe Rogan?

  Would it be possible to make something that big? That's 20 feet long out of that?

• 14:46Speaker 03

  It's hard for me to imagine that. But it, so in, I think there's one piece of data that just came out in the last few weeks. I think David Fravor's wingman, Alex, I think her name is Alex Dietrich. I can't remember the name.

• 15:03Joe Rogan?

  I think you're right, something like that.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  She came out, and so in, in, in all the things associated with that particular encounter, right, one of the things I've been trying to figure out is what, how do they describe the specular surface of the Tic Tac? Right? Because if it's the, these plasma pixels that I'm talking about, that kind of creates a volumetric display, I would speculate it might be kind of a glowy-looking thing. But I think Alex, in her account, described it as kind of a flat type of look.

• 15:35Joe Rogan?

  Like matte, yeah.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that kind of, that kind of torpedoed my, my, my working theory, so. But again, while it's amazing and incredible, and it's something that people want to go think about and go try and collect more data, it doesn't help me do what I'm doing in the lab. And so I think, I kind of keep, you know, my, my eyes dart every once in a while over to that particular topic. Well, what's that about? That's interesting.

• 16:00Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm honestly agnostic as well. I bounce back and forth from being really excited about it to feel like I'm being duped all the time. Jamie and I talk about it all the time. I'm back in. And Jamie's back in, and Jamie will find something. He's like, I think I'm back in. How are you right now?

• 16:16Speaker 05

  I'm looking through the article about the Navy laser that can do this, and trying to figure out how big the objects are that they can make move. But they're definitely, they're designed to trick heat-seeking missiles, so they gotta be big enough for that, so they wanna...

• 16:28Joe Rogan?

  Okay, so they make a heat signature, so they trick the heat sig, which makes sense, right? Because they're plasma.

• 16:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, and came from tens to hundreds of meters away.

• 16:35Joe Rogan?

  How, where are you at right now with UFOs? In or you're out?

• 16:41Speaker 05

  There's, I'm still in on something, but I don't know what the object is, or what is...

• 16:46Joe Rogan?

  But we've both been in and out.

• 16:48Speaker 05

  The consciousness thing, I'm on that this week or month.

• 16:52Joe Rogan?

  Oh, the one where they think they can call them in?

• 16:54Speaker 05

  Not just that you need consciousness to use it, or talk to it, or see it.

• 16:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, maybe. Maybe. There was some talk of gravity propulsion systems in the 1950s, I believe. There was some work that was being done, and there was some discussion about whether or not it'd be possible to use nuclear energy to create some sort of a gravity drive. What is your thoughts on that stuff?

• 17:18Speaker 03

  Well, I think in order to do, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna use a different parlance.

• 17:22Joe Rogan?

  Okay, please do, because obviously I don't know what I'm talking about.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  No, no, that's okay, that's okay. Right, so in, in, in terms of some of the, the language that we use in the literature when we talk about something that would, I think, trace to what you mean when you say a gravity drive, right? We might use the parlance "space drive", right? And so, conceptually, it would be a, a form of propulsion that instead of using some form of onboard propellant in a tank, right? It's found some way to couple to some external field, whatever it may, might be, and can generate some kind of a, a propulsive force. And so, in my mind, in order for us to ever be able to go down a path where we're trying to create something like that, that might look like that, or smell like that, or what have you, we need to have a deeper understanding of gravity, right?

• 18:09Speaker 03

  And so, you know, we, you know, we just talked about E equals mc squared, and so I'm gonna back up just a minute. If you think about everything we know today, as of, in physics, as a Venn diagram, there are two circles on this Venn diagram, and they, they touch at a little tangent point. One of those circles is quantum mechanics, that helps us understand how atoms behave, how light moves, and in the other circle, we have the words "general relativity", and so that helps us understand how the cosmos evolves, how stars move, and galaxies move. And so, those two circles touch at a, a single tangent point. They don't overlap.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  So what that says is gravity, we don't know how to connect gravity... To quantum mechanics, we don't understand that. But in terms of all of our daily life, just that level of physics helps us every single day, right? The cellphone is only possible because of quantum mechanics and GPS is only as accurate as it is because we use general relativity to correct the atomic clocks on the GPS satellites. But until we develop a better understanding of how gravity might connect to quantum mechanics or alternatively how quantum mechanics might connect to gravity, I don't know that we'll be able to make meaningful progress, right?

• 19:36Speaker 03

  And so, we need more circles on the Venn diagram, just those two aren't enough. There are a number of people that would speculate that, you know, quantum mechanics is incomplete, general relativity is incomplete, perhaps it's even emergent. I think you had Hal Puthoff on here

• 19:53Joe Rogan?

  Yes, really recently.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  A few days ago, right? And he talked about a physicist by the name of Sakharov, who talked about the fact, I think he was one of the guys that first pioneered the thought process, maybe gravity is simply an emergent phenomena and we'll develop a better understanding as we add more circles in and around the quantum mechanics circle, if you will. And so, I think in order for us to be able to, you know, come up with a widget, right? You know, some widget that generates a force in the form of a space drive, we're going to have to have more physics than what we currently have.

• 20:27Joe Rogan?

  So we'll have to have more of an understanding of what gravity actually is.

• 20:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 20:30Joe Rogan?

  And what generates gravity.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's not just the gravity thing, it's quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is completely incompatible with general relativity, right? So this is a big issue, right? There are tons of people that spend their entire life trying to figure out how to unravel this mystery. It's a big conundrum.

• 20:51Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's so fascinating to me because if you were a scientist in the 1400s and you were having this discussion with those people, they would think you're a wizard.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  Absolutely, especially if you held up something like that.

• 21:00Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you held up your phone.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  I'd get burned at a stake, right?

• 21:03Joe Rogan?

  Imagine they showed the screen.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 21:05Joe Rogan?

  And I said, "Jamie, pull something up."

• 21:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, pull something up.

• 21:06Joe Rogan?

  What is he doing? What is happening?

• 21:09Speaker 03

  What is it that you showeth upon thy wall? Right? So.

• 21:13Joe Rogan?

  So imagine, you know, extrapolating. Imagine going in the future and seeing what this, all this stuff is going to look like. Once we gain more and more understanding, which more than, more scientists, more researchers piling on their discoveries, and then ultimately, one day, we'll be looking back on 2025 going, look at those barbarians.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh. Did you see that show with Sonny and Joe where they were talking about what a bunch of maroons?

• 21:36Joe Rogan?

  They didn't even know what gravity was yet.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

• 21:38Joe Rogan?

  It'd be like bloodletting.

• 21:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:40Joe Rogan?

  You know? Really kind of interesting because I bet every current civilization thinks it's at the pinnacle and that, you know, we've, this is, you know, everybody else is a moron and this is, we are a seriously advanced society.

• 21:54Speaker 03

  Right. Right. It.

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• 23:15Speaker 03

  It's interesting, you know, I, I, I get a chance to go do a bunch of discussions with students all over the globe, right? And talking about.

• 23:25Speaker 03

  Space exploration, specifically, you know, advanced power and propulsion. I really kind of get into this whole difference between to-space and through-space. And so as part of that narrative, right, I always spend a little bit of time telling them, right, we live in a society where everybody likes to pretend like we got all this stuff figured out, right? There's nothing left to figure out, right? You know, we got cell phones and internet and airplanes and all different kinds of stuff. There's really nothing left.

• 23:53Joe Rogan?

  Just maintain what we have.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  Right, well, yeah, exactly. And so I like to remind them, right, when I talk about, well, let's talk about that. What do we know? And then I kind of take them through that little thought process of the Venn diagram, just to say, hey, look, right, these two models are not compatible. That says there's a bigger circle, right, that connects the dots between all this stuff. And I highly doubt we'll ever come up with a single step that goes from just the two circles on the Venn diagram to a final one, some grand unified theory. I don't think we'll ever take like one single step. I think it's going to be a series of a bunch of different steps by a bunch of different people over many generations. And it's like, there's so much stuff to go figure out.

• 24:39Speaker 03

  Come help us push back against the darkness. Help us, you know, forever hunting the edge of the map, if you will. And so I think sometimes in today's society, we get lulled into this sense of security that we got it all figured out. I mean, we got AI, says all kinds of neat, helps us out, all these different things. And so we get lulled into this sense that we've got it all figured out. And there's just, there's so much mystery out there for us to go figure out.

• 25:05Joe Rogan?

  Also, there's a lot of people that are full of shit that are muddying up the water. So it's very difficult to know what is exactly true at any current moment. Yeah. I mean, just in the UAP world, there's a ton of grifters. There's a ton of people that are just putting sensational nonsense out to get a bunch of clicks.

• 25:23Speaker 03

  In some ways, again, when I talk to students and I kind of give them suggestions and advice and mentoring, it's like, if you've got some particular area that you're interested in and it's highly technical, you know, go do the work that's necessary to give yourself the math skills, the engineering skills, the science, whatever you need, make sure you're equipped. Right, so that you can, whatever's in front of you, you can go look at it with a discerning eye, right? Because like you said, the internet's changed the world for both the better and the worse, right? The signaled noise ratio has changed a lot. There's a lot of noise out there. And so, the best thing you can do to try and cope with something like that is just to make sure you're trained, right?

• 26:06Speaker 03

  And you're capable of being able to discern something that's real versus something that's, you know, nonsense.

• 26:13Joe Rogan?

  So, what is real in terms of at least conceptually? What is real about warp drives?

• 26:21Speaker 03

  You know, the, great question. When we talk about space exploration, right? A lot of times, people think of like a Falcon 9 rocket, Saturn V, or a space shuttle. And these are, these are all wonderful examples that should come to mind, but this, this is what we need to get to space, right? You've got to climb against the gravitational well, if you will, and get into space. But when you, when you get into space and you want to try and move through space, right? The things that you might use to solve that problem, in an optimal sense, might look very differently from the idea of rockets to get you to space.

• 27:06Speaker 03

  And so, through space is a lot of things that we can bring to bear. But this, this gets into, I think, a larger framework I'd like to unpack with you today to talk about this, this through-space type of thought process. But since you specifically asked about warp, I'm going to kind of jump forward.

• 27:21Joe Rogan?

  Okay, sure.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  I'm going to jump forward on the discussion thread.

• 27:24Joe Rogan?

  We don't have to. We can use it as a teaser.

• 27:27Speaker 03

  Okay, well, let's, let's use that as a teaser. Let's, let's back up then. And so, I, you know, I provided a, a video that we pulled together called "Go Incredibly Fast." I did it with a Swedish digital artist, Eric Orinquist. He's done a bunch of wonderful videos for NASA and a bunch of other friends. But this, this video kind of encapsulates the challenge of time and distance in space.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  If you want to send human beings past Mars in the solar system, that sets up a problem statement that changes the nature of the types of technologies that you might think about bringing to bear to solve the problem. And so, this video tells us, what are some things that we can do to solve this problem, spanning from things that we kind of know, to things that we kind of don't know, in terms of both physics and engineering. And so, this video is kind of an emotional encapsulation of a highly technical story. So let's watch, this would be a great way to kind of tee off this discussion.

• 28:34Speaker 03

  The sky calls to us, we do not destroy ourselves, we are one day ventured to the stars, Carl Sagan.

• 28:47Speaker 03

  As incredible as it may seem, there will be a time, and it may be closer than you think, when we live on other worlds. The moon, Mars, and in the space between. And when that day comes, just as always, our children will look with curiosity across these new horizons, with a desire to go further and to explore what lies beyond. But, beyond Mars, the distances between worlds grow immensely, even within our own solar system, and become truly vast in between stars.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  If we ever want to reach out across these distances, we need to learn how to go fast.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  Nuclear electric propulsion. Here we go. Yeah, so this is what we know. Using our current knowledge of physics and engineering, we could build nuclear locomotives to take humans to all the worlds in our solar system. But a starship powered with a nuclear heart, aimed for even our closest star, Proxima Centauri, would have to harbor hundreds of generations of people, all living their entire lives aboard, before reaching its destination, four and a quarter light-years away.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  It would take two years just to reach the orbit of Saturn, and another 2,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri. We need to be able to go faster.

• 30:37Speaker 03

  Fusion propulsion.

• 30:41Speaker 03

  We should re-record this with you doing that for each of the vignettes. With our current knowledge of physics, but with engineering we have yet to develop. We can imagine a propulsion system with the sun for a heart. A fusion engine that could accelerate a starship up to 5% of the speed of light. This ship could cross the orbit of Saturn in six months, and reach Proxima Centauri in just over a century. But if we want to traverse interstellar distances in less than a human lifetime, we have to go incredibly fast.

• 31:28Speaker 03

  The universe has shown us that this can be done by altering the scale of space itself. And we are working to develop new understandings of physics to learn how this might be controlled. If we could construct a starship with a propulsion system that decreases space in front of it, and expands space behind it, this ship could cross enormous distances effectively faster than the speed of light.

• 32:04Speaker 03

  Such a ship would reach from Mars to Saturn in just a matter of minutes, and be able to reach Proxima Centauri in less than six months.

• 32:20Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 32:24Speaker 03

  From there, there are no limits to where we could go.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  Perhaps one day, humanity will look up at an alien night sky and strain to find the pale yellow dot that is our sun, our home, and know for the first time, as we look back on ourselves, that we are not alone in the universe. This journey starts today. Whoa. First of all, whoever did the graphics for that... Thanks, Jamie. Yeah, Eric Ornquist was the sweetest digital artist that we used to develop that video. That guy nailed it. Oh, my gosh. That's pretty cool.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, we had a three-swim lane chart, if you will, that's a very technical version of this. We have a copy of it. We don't need to bring it up, Jamie. I can just do it verbally here. But it kind of encapsulates that thought process of this time-distance problem. You know, when we think about space exploration with humans, we think about Mars. We're trying to... We've sent human beings to the moon. We're probably going to go back to the moon sooner rather than later, and then eventually we'll want to send human beings to Mars. But what if we wanted to send human beings to Saturn, and we want to get them there in 200 days? That's a timeframe that's kind of compatible with what we've thought about for humans to Mars, 180 to 220 days.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  If you frame the question that way, the amount of energy that's necessary to get humans to Saturn in 200 days is an order of magnitude more energy than it takes to get a payload from the surface of the Earth to low Earth orbit. So all that to say, that particular problem, chemical propulsion can't solve that problem. And so this is starting to kind of frame the discussion... This narrative that we've pulled together when we talk to students all around the globe, the difference between to-space and the difference of through-space. When you talk about through-space, the distances are just so big, right? You have to rethink the problem, especially when you constrain it with, how long does

• 34:45Speaker 03

  it take to get there, right? And so, this particular video encapsulates things that we might do to solve problems like that, and maybe even into another star system, talking about things that we know. Like, the very first part of the video, the vignette was, like you said, nuclear-electric propo... I can't do your voice here. Nuclear-electric propulsion, right? And so, this is a situation where it's known physics, known engineering. We've got a nuclear reactor that's fissioning uranium, let's say. It's splitting apart atoms, and that's the source of energy. You use that energy to plug into some form of electric propulsion. Like, you've got the neon sign that's behind you.

• 35:30Speaker 03

  Imagine you could take one of those tubes and cut the end off and allow the blue or green glowy bit to come out the back, right? And so, the efficiency of electric propulsion versus chemical propulsion is much better. And so, that's a way we can potentially think of a spacecraft architecture, nuclear-electric propulsion, a nuclear reactor coupled to some form of electric propulsion that allows us to send human beings to Saturn in 200 days. And technically speaking, that capability, if we didn't invent anything else beyond that, that would allow us to send human beings everywhere in the solar system. That's why that's extremely important.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  And now, we're getting into the passion of what I fought for so hard, working at NASA, to try and advocate for this understanding of the big difference between these two types of problems, if you will. If we, you know, if we make up our minds to perfect the idea of nuclear-electric propulsion as a capability, I mean, that unlocks the whole solar system, right? That's just kind of like the, just the tip of the iceberg. And so, the video then goes on... After we, you know, after we kind of say, you know, nuclear electric propulsion can open up a lot of stuff for us, but it's still gonna take, you remember how long it said to go to Proxima Centauri? It was like, you know?

• 36:52Joe Rogan?

  Hundred years.

• 36:53Speaker 03

  Uh, that, two thousand years for the nu-

• 36:55Joe Rogan?

  Two thousand years. Oh, that's right.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  So, I mean, I don't know about you, but that better be one comfortable window seat, right? That's a long time to be on a flight, if you will.

• 37:02Joe Rogan?

  Now, yeah, how screwed up are the people that live?

• 37:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 37:06Joe Rogan?

  Because you're inbreeding.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, it's, yes, it's definitely, it's gonna be generations, right? So either you-

• 37:10Joe Rogan?

  It's gonna be generations. You're gonna have to have babies, and like, with who?

• 37:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 37:14Joe Rogan?

  Like, how you gonna do that? How you gonna choose? We gonna have arranged marriages in space? Is that progress?

• 37:18Speaker 03

  Right, right, right, right.

• 37:20Joe Rogan?

  You know? And force people to carry children?

• 37:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, or it had, or they might be frozen, like, um, was it, what's that movie, um, with the blue aliens? I can't remember.

• 37:30Joe Rogan?

  Right, imagine if they're debating a woman's right to choose while they're in space. Like, you know what I'm saying?

• 37:34Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh, right.

• 37:35Joe Rogan?

  It gets weird.

• 37:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, so-

• 37:36Joe Rogan?

  We need to keep civilization-

• 37:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 37:38Joe Rogan?

  If you all commit, but I didn't commit, my grandparents did, but you're still on this thing forever.

• 37:43Speaker 03

  It's like, yeah, my, my great, great, great, great, great grandparents committed, right?

• 37:46Joe Rogan?

  This episode is brought to you by Visible. Now you know, I tend to go down a lot of rabbit holes. I want to know everything about everything. And if you're like that, you need wireless that can keep up. Visible is wireless that lets you live in the know. It's the ultimate wireless hack. You get unlimited data and hotspot, so you're connected on the go. Plus, Visible is powered by Verizon's 5G network, meaning fast speeds and great coverage. And with the new Visible Plus Pro Plan, you get premium wireless without the premium cost. And the best part, it's all digital, no stores. You can switch to Visible right from your phone. It only takes about 15 minutes, and then you manage your plan in the app. Ready for wireless

• 38:29Joe Rogan?

  that lets you live in the know? Make the switch at visible.com/rogan. Plans start at $25 a month. For the best features, get the new Visible Plus Pro Plan for $45 a month. Terms apply. See visible.com for plan features and network management details. Not only that, the reality is, by the time they get there, the human beings will have created a technology that far exceeds that and probably will beat them to it.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, you kind of see that hinted in the video too, right? Where you got the, you got the slow boat and then you got the, fusion's the next one that comes by and the guy's like, you know, waving as he goes by.

• 39:07Joe Rogan?

  Well, for sure, you would be a sucker to get on the first ship. Because by the time it gets there, the new ships will have already been there for months.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, they'll welcome you when you arrive, right?

• 39:18Joe Rogan?

  The grandchildren of those people will welcome you.

• 39:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the fusion propulsion is kind of the next step in the story. And so when we make that step, we're a little bit into the unknown, right? We, we understand, we understand the physics, right? The sun at the center of our solar system works on fusion. It fuses atoms together instead of splitting them apart to generate electricity. And so fusion propulsion is kind of another step in capability, right? That allows us to do, maybe do an interstellar mission that's measured in 100, maybe 200 years. Still kind of long, but that's a lot more respectable than 2,000 years. But contrary to what the movie Iron Man might say, we don't have fusion reactors that are gigawatts the size of this coffee cup, right?

• 40:05Joe Rogan?

  They get stuck in your chest.

• 40:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, we got, we got, we got a little work to do before we get there.

• 40:12Joe Rogan?

  Well, that comic book was written probably in the 50s.

• 40:15Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 40:16Joe Rogan?

  So when you think about this kind of progress, this ability to generate that amount of power and to bend gravity and to bend space, what kind of a timeline do you think we're on for something like that?

• 40:33Speaker 03

  That's actually one of the most popular questions I get when I go talk to students, right? Whenever you talk about that last swim lane in the video, the idea of a space warp, you can expand and contract space and that allows us to potentially go somewhere in months, whereas we were just previously talking about millennia and centuries, right? So, just to remind folks, we just talked about everything that we know of physics today, quantum mechanics, general relativity, right? We gotta add some more stuff to the Venn diagram to develop an understanding. And so, my crystal ball is no better than yours, Joe.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  I couldn't say specifically if, when, something like that might happen, but I can say, I actually do know what we need to be working on right now, right? And so, in that context, I'm certainly doing the things that I think might help make meaningful progress towards that type of operative goal at some point in time, but I just don't know how long it might take. And so, let me kind of give an experience that I had. So, I taught at International Space University over in Strasbourg in France, and they have a cathedral there in Strasbourg, absolutely stunning.

• 41:55Speaker 03

  But the thing that's even more interesting about this structure, it's like 500 feet tall, they started building it in 1100 AD, and they didn't finish the cathedral until 1700 AD. So, the people that built the basement had no hope of seeing the finished product. All they could do was imagine in their mind's eye what it might look like, but they knew what they needed to do to kind of make meaningful progress. And so, they did their work and then they hand the baton off to the next generation, maybe they're putting the floor in.

• 42:36Speaker 03

  And then another generation does the buttresses and so forth. So from that standpoint, I think sometimes it's important to, you know, we talk about teamwork, right? Teamwork is a great thing. But teamwork, we typically think of shoulder to shoulder, right? But I think there's also value in teamwork across generations, if you will, right? In a day and age where you get impatient if you text somebody and they don't text you back in like 30 seconds. Right. I think we've lost an appreciation for the value of what that means, right? Right. In terms of working over stuff longer than what your horizon might be. I'd love to see the idea of a space warp, you know, before I go to the next chapter, but I don't

• 43:19Speaker 03

  know that that will happen for sure. But I do know specifically what I need to be doing. And so from that standpoint, that's how I kind of, that's how I grapple with that particular question. Because it's a wonderful question, and I would love to be able to tell you a very concise answer that would fit with what I would hope it would be. But I don't know for certain. But I do know what I need to be doing next. And that gets into, maybe we can unpack that in just a little bit, that gets into the idea of how the idea of a space warp works and how that traces back to those two circles on the Venn diagram. Right. Well, let's do that. Quantum mechanics and general relativity. Yeah, let's talk about that. Yeah. So maybe what we can do, Jamie, I sent you, there's a slide that's got like

• 43:59Speaker 03

  a cartoon space warp. It looks like a little sheet of a mesh or something like that. I don't know how to explain it. If you could pull up. There it is. There it is. Yes. Yes. That's the one. That's the one. So we actually did that graphic on the right for Nature, the journal Nature. They were doing an article on the 50th anniversary Star Trek. And so they asked us to pull together that graphic. Oh, cool. And so this is, this is an illustration of the idea of a space warp. Let me give just a little bit of background. You know, in physics, there is a speed limit that we have to acknowledge when we talk about trying to go somewhere really quickly, right?

• 44:41Speaker 03

  And so I like to call it the 11th commandment of physics, thou shalt not exceed the speed of light, right? It's kind of a hard and fast speed limit. And so if you talk about trying to get to another star that's four and a quarter light years away, that might, or that should automatically set in your mind, well, shoot, we can't get any there, can't get there any quicker than four and a quarter light years, right? Well, there is a little bit of hope because there's a loophole in general relativity that establishes that hard speed limit. General relativity says we can expand and contract space at any speed, and we see evidence for this. When we look at the nature of the cosmos, right? Right after the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago, there was something called an inflationary

• 45:26Speaker 03

  phase, right? Where if you were to pick two random points in this expanding bubble of the early cosmos, you stood on one point and you looked at another point and figured out how fast it was moving away from you. It would move away from you like 10 to the 30th, you know, 10 with 30 zeros times the speed of light. So, yeah, really, really, really fast, right? And so we know from astrophysics and cosmology that this is possible. And so this idea was kind of rattling around in a physicist's brain called Alcuvier, who said, hey, well, you know, this is interesting, nature can do it on a grand scale, can we potentially do it on a purposeful, in a purposeful way?

• 46:11Speaker 03

  And so he published a paper in 1994 that kind of encapsulated the mathematics for this idea. And if you, if you take his mathematics and you put it into physical form, it's going to look like my little cartoon here on the right. And so you got the The little ring that goes around the little surface here, it looks like a wave. And then there's a little central portion there, it kind of looks like a football, let's say. And so what happens is that ring that goes around that little football, that's what's necessary to make the trick work. And so it has to be filled with something called exotic matter. And so that's an important issue, right? What's exotic matter, right?

• 46:52Speaker 03

  So it's something in general relativity that's also equivalent to negative mass. And so we all understand positive mass, right? If your little brother hits you on the head with something, that's positive mass hitting your head, right? Negative mass is not only zero mass, but it's a negative value. And so what does that even mean? And so in the context of general relativity, if we come up with a model that requires exotic matter, we have to highlight that as a problem. Because we don't, in general relativity, general relativity doesn't tell us how to make that. And so that could potentially be an obstacle that would prevent something like this from ever being physically real. But if we could figure out how to make it, and I'll actually speak to that in just a second.

• 47:35Speaker 03

  If we could make that, and we could create a ring that could manifest that exotic matter, it would cause spacetime to respond in such a way so that it would expand and contract to allow you to go to Proxima Centauri in five and a half months, as measured by you onboard the spacecraft in that football, and as measured by folks over in Mission Control over in Houston.

• 47:58Joe Rogan?

  Whoa. Now, this exotic matter, what do you speculate that would? What would that be?

• 48:08Speaker 03

  So exotic matter, and the cool thing is, hey, these are the equations. So there'll be a test later, Joe.

• 48:14Joe Rogan?

  Oh, I'm ready.

• 48:16Speaker 03

  So. In Alcubierre's paper in 1994, he rightly highlights the fact that, hey, there's a problem, danger with Robinson. This stuff requires exotic matter that may mean it's non-physical. However, he highlights the fact, hey, we have this other circle over here called quantum mechanics. And there's something in the context of quantum mechanics called negative vacuum energy density. And so that's something that's connected to the idea of the Casimir force. We'll unpack that later. But that is something that could serve as a proxy for the idea of exotic matter and

• 48:56Speaker 03

  may help us one day make the idea of a space warp a physical real thing.

• 49:02Joe Rogan?

  Whoa. So this ability to go as fast as you're describing, where you could conceivably make it to other solar systems. This obviously is a version of it that will probably be improved upon.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 49:21Joe Rogan?

  So if this ever does come to fruition, you could conceivably imagine a time where you generate even more power, have even more capability, and you can go everywhere in the universe.

• 49:31Speaker 03

  Right, right, potentially. Yeah, it unlocks just about anything. If we, let's go back a slide real quick, Jamie. I want to share something with you. So the next time you're in an airport, you can do this, right?

• 49:43Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 49:44Speaker 03

  So if you, you know, if you want to try and imagine the idea of how a space warp works in theory, if you will, now, this is just a thought experiment. So thought experiments aren't exactly precise, but they do help communicate the idea. So you know, when you go to an airport and they've got those, those long conveyor belts, if you will, I think they call them travelators. And so they help us move quicker between gates.

• 50:10Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, by the way, folks, you're supposed to walk on those things.

• 50:13Speaker 03

  Right, exactly.

• 50:14Joe Rogan?

  Hear me?

• 50:15Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 50:16Joe Rogan?

  Walk, you lazy bucks.

• 50:19Speaker 03

  So the, you know, if you think about what happens when you make use of one of these travelators, it's just like you said, most of us walk, right? So we're, when we're at an airport, we're walking, we're dragging our bag, and we usually walk about three miles an hour. And then when we get onto the belt, we keep walking. Now, if you think about what, so let's say Jamie's sitting at a gate and he's watching, watching you walk by. Before you get on, get onto the belt, he sees you walking at three miles an hour. When you get onto the belt, all of a sudden to Jamie, it looks like you're going six miles an hour. So what's going on here? Well, think about, think about the belt, right? The length of the belt in front of you, what's happening to it? It's, it's technically, it's, it's going underneath, right? This is a metaphor.

• 51:04Speaker 03

  It's going underneath, but the length of belt in front of you is actually contracting, right? And so by the same token, the length of belt behind you, yes, it's, it's a conveyor belt, but it's expanding behind you. So the belt is contracting and expanding in such a way that it now seems like to Jamie that you're, you're moving at six miles an hour. So the next time you go to an airport and you get onto one of these travelators, I want you to put your hand on the railing and say, engage.

• 51:32Joe Rogan?

  Well, that, it's a great comparison. Totally makes sense if you think about expanding that idea just infinitely with gravity and just being able to.

• 51:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 51:43Joe Rogan?

  That video, by the way, is so cool. Like, the way he generated that and looks exactly like these people describe things they're seeing in terms of, you know, when, when people find UAPs that are particularly unusual.

• 52:00Speaker 03

  Right. The, the cool thing is if you pop forward one more slide.

• 52:28Joe Rogan?

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• 53:13Joe Rogan?

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• 53:58Joe Rogan?

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• 54:09Speaker 03

  Jamie. There we go. The, when you look at the math and physics associated with this, right? The, um, the proper acceleration alpha onboard the spacecraft is, uh, formally zero. So what that means when they turn the warp on and off, it doesn't like splatter the crew against the bulkhead. You talked about, in the beginning of the show, we talked about G-forces.

• 54:32Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 54:33Speaker 03

  Right? And so, um, I don't know if Alcubierre specifically was hoping to, to, you know, land on that kind of observation, but...

• 54:41Speaker 03

  The little toy model that he came up with has got a lot of appealing characteristics, and that's one of them, right? When you turn the warp on and off, the proper acceleration alpha is formerly zero, so it's actually zero G.

• 54:51Joe Rogan?

  That's fascinating.

• 54:52Speaker 03

  So he stumbled into a really nice, a really nice solution, if you will. If you don't mind, while we're here, I'd love to maybe spend just a second to talk about life imitating art. There's some interesting things that, I think it's the next slide or two? I'll keep going, we'll come back to this one another time. So this is, it's a modern rendering done by Mark Rademacher, a digital artist from the Netherlands I've worked with over the years. This is a Star Trek ship concept that was developed by Matthew Jeffries in the 60s for the TV show Star Trek.

• 55:33Speaker 03

  And so you might notice there are some qualitative similarities here to this little structure, to the little gray cartoon that I just showed you. It's got the rings on it, right? It's got this little central structure. But there are, there are actually a couple of fatal flaws with this concept. But the thing that's fascinating to me, before we talk about the things we're going to fix, is Matthew Jeffries is not a physicist, number one. Number two, the math and physics associated with the idea of a space warp hadn't been published in the 60s when he came up with this artwork, but look how close he got, right? For somebody just, you know, just following his gut instinct in terms of pulling something together.

• 56:14Joe Rogan?

  What was his background? Was, did he have some sort of a background in science?

• 56:17Speaker 03

  I couldn't, I couldn't say. I don't know for certain, but man, he sure did.

• 56:22Joe Rogan?

  He nailed it.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, he sure did get close.

• 56:24Joe Rogan?

  He got so close, I would almost say.

• 56:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the interesting thing is, the nature of this ship, the fatal flaws that it had, so we did a, we did an update of this as part of like an education outreach. So I reached out to Mark Rademacher and some folks from CBS Studios, and so we did an updated version of this for a Star Trek ships of the line calendar.

• 56:46Joe Rogan?

  That's cooler looking.

• 56:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's the one that's in the video, right? The IXS Enterprise. Go back just one more, one slide, Jamie. So the problem with this version here is the rings that go around the spaceship are entirely too thin. So when you calculate how much of the exotic matter I just talked about that you might need to make this thing do something useful, it's going to be a very large number that might be impossible to ever make. So it's like fatal flaw number one. Fatal flaw number two is the bridge of the spaceship goes way out in front of where the warp bubble would form as a result of those rings. So the rings would form like a warp bubble that looks like a little capsule. It would actually cut the bridge off and the bridge would go floating away.

• 57:27Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy.

• 57:27Speaker 03

  And Scotty would be so fired.

• 57:29Joe Rogan?

  That's not good.

• 57:30Speaker 03

  That'd be a short, sad episode of Star Trek.

• 57:32Joe Rogan?

  Hope they have a parachute.

• 57:33Speaker 03

  Right, right, exactly. So we work with CBS Studios. Now you go to the next slide. So now we've got, you know, the rings are much more athletic. They have more heft to them. They're thicker, so that reduces the energy requirements. And then the spaceship itself is kind of properly nestled into the warp bubble.

• 57:50Joe Rogan?

  It just looks cooler.

• 57:51Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 57:52Joe Rogan?

  Like all things from the past, they can make a better version today.

• 57:55Speaker 03

  Right, right, right, right, right.

• 57:57Joe Rogan?

  So this exotic material, do you imagine that this is an undiscovered element? Do you ima... What do you... What's the theory?

• 58:08Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah, it's so... And this is where this is the lament... The reason for some of the lamentation, right, about general relativity and quantum mechanics. General relativity just doesn't tell us how to address it, right? It just simply says you have to highlight it in your paper before you submit it for peer review and say this may cause problems. But quantum mechanics has this stuff called negative vacuum energy density, right? And so maybe we can unpack that.

• 58:36Joe Rogan?

  Please do.

• 58:38Speaker 03

  So what is negative vacuum energy density? So the... Let's talk about some of the implications of quantum mechanics and how they're a little different from our day-to-day experience at this, at the macroscopic level, right? Empty space in quantum mechanics is actually not empty. So if I told you to think about a vacuum chamber, right, and I told you the vacuum chamber is under vacuum and there's nothing, nothing in the vacuum chamber, right? That operative word, "nothing," right? That you have vacuum pumps that turn on and pull all the air out. So there's nothing in the vacuum chamber. Quantum mechanics says, "Wait a minute, hold on." The idea of empty space, even though there's this classical vacuum...

• 59:23Speaker 03

  Right, that we might think about. It's not actually empty. There's these fluctuating fields and forces that are always going on all the time. So even though like this is the, this is Plum Brook, you know NASA's large vacuum chamber up in Ohio. And so if you imagine you took that, that vacuum chamber and pumped on it so there was no air on there. And then you might say, there's nothing in that vacuum chamber. Well, quantum mechanics says that at the microscopic level, there are fluctuating fields and particles all the time. And so this sounds very, very, very, you know, counterintuitive to what we, what we experience in our day to day life, right? You pick up a coffee cup and you push against the door, right? That's how we think of the world, if you will. But

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  quantum mechanics deals with the microscopic realm and things are a little bit different. And so that's kind of background. So you can, there, this peculiar nature that I'm explaining to you, you can actually do an experiment that provides you a observational consequence of this peculiar nature. And it's, it's called the Casimir force. I think I have a slide in there, Jamie. So the Casimir force can be thought of in the following way. Imagine that you've got two metal plates, like you see here in the graphic. You put them very, very close to one another. That separation distance is maybe 100 nanometers. So certainly

• 1:00:47Speaker 03

  much smaller than a human hair, a very, very small distance. And then you imagine you have a vacuum chamber that you put these two small plates in. And then you turn on the vacuum pumps and you pull all of the air out. So there's nothing in there, right? At least that's the way we would think about it. So now, we're going to conduct a little thought experiment. We're going to imagine that Jamie has superhero powers and he can shrink himself down to being a wee tiny little atomic person. And we're going to ask him to go into the vacuum chamber and we're going to ask him to measure the pressure on the outside of the plates and we're going to ask him to measure the pressure in between the two plates.

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

  And so we're going to expect, based on the normal way we exist, he's going to say zero, zero on the outside and he's going to say zero in between the two plates. But what he's going to report back is he's going to say zero pressure on the outside, like we expect, but he's going to say there is a negative pressure between the two plates. Well, what the hell is going on? Well, the quantum field is full of fluctuating fields and forces. Matter is both a particle and a wave. You may have heard that statement at some point in your life. And so all these little bits of energy, right? They have wavelengths associated with them.

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  And so any wavelength that is bigger than the physical gap of the cavity, it won't be able to manifest between the cavity. So when we add up all the bits of energy on the outside, that's our zero reference, when we add up all the bits of energy on the outside, and then we add up all the bits of energy in between the two plates, there are less bits of energy because all the bigger wavelengths are excluded. And so there is a deficiency of vacuum energy that manifests between the two plates and that results in that negative pressure that wants to pull those two plates together. That's called the Casimir force. A guy by the name of Casimir was the guy that derived that back in 1948, but it took

• 1:02:51Speaker 03

  us until the late 90s to actually measure this in the lab to the physics community's satisfaction. And so it's been studied hundreds of times since, you know, measuring forces at different regimes, if you will. And there's also... Something called the transverse Casimir force. So when you try and slide those two plates relative to one another, the vacuum wants to resist you sliding those two plates. And so this is a very real phenomenon, and it's a wonderful illustration of the peculiar nature of reality at the microscopic level. Right? So, you know, the theory was worked out in the late 40s.

• 1:03:36Speaker 03

  The experimental stuff was started in the 90s, and then there's been a bunch of work since then. And I think they're even looking at trying to use the Casimir force in MEMS devices. But all that-- What is a MEMS device? Uh, micro electromechanical machines, some small gears that you can't see with your eyes, but they serve different purposes that people are trying to come up with for sensors, maybe some things in your car, some future chips that might be in your phone or something like that. Things where they make micro mechanical systems that they make them with light, because you can't even see those kinds of things. So, the quantum vacuum, this fluctuating field of particles and forces and so forth, is a very real phenomenon.

• 1:04:21Speaker 03

  And so this stuff I just described to you is the negative vacuum energy density that Alcubierre highlighted in his paper when he said, "We don't know how to make exotic matter in general relativity, so that circle on the Venn diagram doesn't tell us where to go, but quantum mechanics tells us how to make negative vacuum energy density in the context of what we see in a Casimir cavity." And so maybe we can, you know, some future generation of scientists will figure out how to do something in some way to-- like, if you ask, "What's in those rings around the IXS Enterprise?", right? You know, maybe it's some deeper understanding of the nature of the quantum vacuum.

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  And point in fact, you know, I talked to you about-- You asked me, "When might this happen?" And I said, "I can't tell you when, but I know what I need to be doing next." And so, in my mind, I think some of the next big chapters in physics are going to be centered around understanding the nature of the quantum vacuum and the quantum field. I think there's going to be a lot of fruit there, and that may provide us the opportunity to add more circles to the Venn diagram, or maybe expand one, or what have you, and so forth.

• 1:05:37Joe Rogan?

  So, what kind of experiments have to be conducted in order to expand this? Are you talking about things that are going to be achieved in particle colliders? How are they... What do you anticipate?

• 1:05:49Speaker 03

  That's a good question. So, there's a lot of different approaches people have taken to try and explore the nature of the quantum vacuum. And you could even start to look at cosmological observations. We talk about dark energy, that's equated to the quantum vacuum at scale, and the cosmological scale, if you will. And I think there's even some recent stuff that's come out in the peer-reviewed literature that the cosmological constant may not be constant, it may actually be changing over time. And so, there's some experimentation, has nothing to do with the idea of a space warp. The people that do work on that could care less about space warps. But, they're trying to understand the nature of the cosmological constant of the quantum

• 1:06:34Speaker 03

  vacuum at scale. So, there's a domain where some interesting work might be done. I know universities all over the globe still do work today with studying the Casimir force. They make different types of things, different materials, and so forth, just to try and understand how materials respond when they make these small things, and trying to understand how the quantum vacuum works with it. But, I think there's also some other things that we can try. And so, that goes... I think you've seen some of our work that we've been doing, with some nano-structured devices. We've been doing some work for DARPA for a number of years, where we're actually trying to work on some systems that generate power.

• 1:07:16Speaker 03

  And so, in the process of doing that, we've actually found that our nanotechnology may actually have some intersections with the idea of a space warp.

• 1:07:27Speaker 03

  So, I think-

• 1:07:29Joe Rogan?

  You're saying that like our nanotechnology might be used to create some sort of a space warp, in what way?

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  Right. Jamie, can you pull up one of those slides close to the, not that one, go back, keep going back, a little bit more. There's, yeah, keep going up, right there, right, right there. So, there's this, on the left-hand side of this image, there is a scanning electron microscope image of a nanostructure that we, in this case, we 3D-printed, and then we metallized it. And so, the work that we were doing for DARPA, associated with that structure, is focused on trying to harvest energy from the quantum field.

• 1:08:18Speaker 03

  And so, we've been working towards trying to generate a voltage potential on that little structure where the pillars in the middle are at a different voltage from the walls that are in the picture there. And in the process of doing the analysis to help us understand, how thin do we need to make those rod-like structures you see inside the cavity gap? When we study how the quantum field responds to those structures, we noticed a kind of an unanticipated intersection with the idea of a space warp. If you look at, there's like, in the picture, there's like a little blue surface overlaid

• 1:09:01Speaker 03

  on top of the center pillar there, and you've got those two little regions that are like yellow. I think Jamie just moved his mouse over those, right? So, that's the pillar, and if you move up, that blue surface shows the quantum field's response. So, that negative vacuum energy density distribution you hear me talking about, that is a, like a section cut in terms of what that looks like. And so, we're trying to make sure that the nature of that distribution allows us to see a voltage difference, right? Which we do see, but that, now we can go to the middle- Pain here, the top picture there is that image on the bottom left.

• 1:09:43Speaker 03

  And so you see those little yellow, kind of looks like a lenticular shape. And then if you look at the picture beneath that, that is a section cut of a space warp, that ring that goes around the spaceship. So if you look at the distribution of the exotic matter on the bottom pane versus the distribution of negative vacuum energy density in the top, they're qualitatively very similar to one another. So we, as part of an extra credit, right, we're still, you know, DARPA doesn't care about the idea of a space warp, to be clear. They don't, they don't care about that. But this, as scientists, you know, we were interested in, wow, we didn't expect to see this. This is, this is interesting. And so we took that insight and we said, all right,

• 1:10:27Speaker 03

  the, the, the distribution that's on the left around that center pillar, it's prismatic, right? It's, it's a straight up and down kind of distribution. It's not a ring, which is what we might think about when we think about a space warp. So we said, all right, well, let's do a, let's do a slightly different model. Let's make a sphere inside a cylinder. And then let's study how the quantum field responds to that structure. And so the energy density distribution to that, the little green items there in the cartoon, the energy density distribution for that properly matches the requirements for the idea of a space warp. And so we put, we published a paper, yeah, this is significant, right?

• 1:11:10Speaker 03

  Because before we did that, the only thing we could talk about in the literature was just the math, right? If somebody said, well, what might you build to make something like that? You know, all we could do is just shrug our shoulders and go, oh, right? And so this allowed us to go through and say, hey, You know, now we can propose a real structure, right, that we can, we can potentially, and you can 3D print that. There are 3D printers that print down to that level, right? We could 3D print those structures. Maybe some clever scientist will come up with a good experiment on how to go through and maybe study the optical properties of this. And somebody could do something like that, where they could take our insights that we published in our paper, and then they could go 3D print some stuff and do some experiments

• 1:11:54Speaker 03

  to show that they can, hey, we've measured the, the change in optical properties associated with these little tiny warp bubbles that we're making on a chip, if you will. And so, maybe that could be something a, a future scientist could do. But this is the first time in the literature that we can actually say, as a community, this is a real thing that we could go make, and it's predicted to manifest a real warp bubble. It's not going to go anywhere. It's not going to do anything. But still, that's significant as a, you know, as a measure of a paradigm shift in our understanding, so.

• 1:12:25Joe Rogan?

  It's Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of...

• 1:12:28Speaker 03

  It, that's a wonderful metaphor. It definitely could be something like that, right?

• 1:12:32Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, when Da Vinci was drawing flying things. Yeah. Well, it looks like what you would expect something to look like in Star Trek that generated a warp drive, right? Doesn't it? Like, you could see it lighting up.

• 1:12:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, has some kind of a humming noise, right? Makes, it sounds like a heartbeat or something, right?

• 1:12:50Joe Rogan?

  The, the idea of using quantum energy is so fascinating, because I don't understand what that means. I don't understand the whole idea of subatomic particles, because it seems so fake, seems so crazy, that the universe is made out of things that are essentially working on magic. They appear and disappear. They're in two places at the same time. They're both still and moving. They're in superposition. They're entangled.

• 1:13:18Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

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• 1:13:49Joe Rogan?

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• 1:14:32Joe Rogan?

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• 1:14:48Speaker 03

  In the grand scheme of things, I would speculate that as we add circles to the physics Venn diagram, we may actually be able to change some of that narrative, right? So maybe, maybe some, and so this gets into, you know, now we're getting into like the philosophical history of physics and some of the debates that have gone on for the better part of a century. But, you know, maybe as we continue to move forward and we add more circles to the physics Venn diagram, you know, it'll, it'll, instead of having this, this, this narrative or this framework where we talk about probabilities and chances and entanglement and the cat is alive and the cat is dead, right?

• 1:15:30Speaker 03

  Maybe there is a deeper level of understanding that we have yet to uncover, right, beyond what we know in quantum mechanics today, that helps us understand things at a more fundamental level. There is a, a sub-quantum dynamics, right? That explains the randomness, the stochasticity that we see. And there'll be a much more satisfactory explanation for things where it's not like this. I would almost playback some of what you just said has, if you think about it, it actually has kind of a bit of a metaphysical kind of sound to it, if you will, right? You know, the collapse of the wave function. Well, what does that really even mean, right? So maybe as we continue to move forward and we add, we get deeper understandings, we'll have

• 1:16:12Speaker 03

  Answers that are much more compelling and logical in some way we don't currently understand yet.

• 1:16:19Joe Rogan?

  Well, when you try to explain to people the double slit experiment, try to explain that to people, the waves and particles, like, what are you even saying?

• 1:16:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, one slit, you get a, you know, a nice Gaussian distribution around a center point, then you open up two slits and you've got this weird interference pattern, right? It's like, and that's the whole matter is both a particle and a wave, right? That's how you kind of see that, if you will. But how do you explain that? And so, actually, there are, you know, thought processes that people have to explain that type of stuff in some of the stuff that's out in the literature today. Bohmian trajectories is specifically one of the things, but...

• 1:16:57Joe Rogan?

  What it's, it's almost frustrating because I know we're gonna crack it one day. You know, it's like, damn, I wish I was born in 2090. You know what I mean? Like, they probably would already nailed. Not really. I really like being born right here.

• 1:17:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:10Joe Rogan?

  I love being alive right now because it's so, it's such a fun time where these technological innovations are, they're happening, they're compounding and they're building on each other in such a very incredible way that this kind of experiment is actually possible and now you can actually prove, oh, we have a theoretical warp bubble. We can show you how we can make it.

• 1:17:29Speaker 03

  Right, right. And so, some of the stuff that we're focused on, right? So, you know, I spent 20 years at NASA and then I left NASA at the end of 2019 to go help stand up a nonprofit limitless space institute where we did some of the work that we just showed you, right? And that's where we were doing some of the initial work for DARPA on the little nanostructures that we're working on. And so, we got, we got a lot further with that work than we thought we were going to and so created a commercial company called Casimir where we're trying to commercialize our power generating nanotechnology. And so, in some ways, it's like, the interesting aspect of this story is in the process of us trying to pursue this romantic vision of the idea of a space warp, we, you know,

• 1:18:14Speaker 03

  we may have stumbled into this power generating nanotechnology that could be useful here and now in a lot of ways, right? Ranging from... You know powering a the Fitbit on your wrist or tire pressure monitor system in your car maybe one day as we continue to grow the capability it'll do a lot more than that but you know in the process of chasing the romantic dream we've stumbled across some technology that might be useful in the here and now right and so when you ask what might be in the rings around that that spaceship that I access enterprise maybe those could be long standing descendants from some of the stuff we're working on in the in the chips that we're making in the lab today.

• 1:18:57Joe Rogan?

  Essentially like the people put the foundation for the St. Peters Basilica down.

• 1:19:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:02Joe Rogan?

  They're not going to see the completed project.

• 1:19:04Speaker 03

  Right, right, absolutely.

• 1:19:05Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and this is just how it goes with everything that's really extraordinary like that.

• 1:19:08Speaker 03

  Right, right, it's neat to think it's neat to think the speed at which innovation occurs, right, you know, I think you've had Elon Musk on the show a few times and it's neat to see what he's been able to accomplish with SpaceX. Actually, I met him in 2003. Law, this is very, the very beginning of his journey, right, I was, I was on a planning committee for a conference, American Astronomical Society, and we were doing a conference in Houston with a focus on a commercial spaceflight. So this is at the dawn of the idea. At the time, I was working at Lockheed Martin, and so we had Elon Musk come in and talk to us

• 1:19:50Speaker 03

  about this crazy idea SpaceX that he had, right, and so Lockheed Martin Corporate contacted me and asked me, hey, we know you're going to be interfacing with this guy, and so we want you to write up a profile on him after the conference and tell us what you think. And so I went to the conference and got a chance to watch a number of people come in, talk about great ideas, and Elon came and gave his talk and so forth. And after the conference was over, I wrote up a profile and submitted it to Lockheed Corporate and I said, you know, I think this guy is going to do everything he said he's going to do. I think Lockheed Martin should consider buying his company at some point in time. And so fortunately, they didn't, right, because I think if they did, they would have like

• 1:20:34Speaker 03

  ruined the magic, if you will, right, so.

• 1:20:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you need it in his control. He's got some pretty bizarre ideas that, you know, just watching them catch that rocket, you're like, what?

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  That's nuts. That is absolutely nuts, right? My brain looks at that and goes, no.

• 1:20:53Joe Rogan?

  Right. It looks like, I mean, that's why the cooks on the internet think it's fake. Because it almost looks fake. Like, how? It's such a leap above anything that's ever been done before.

• 1:21:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. Could you imagine the design meeting?

• 1:21:05Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:21:05Speaker 03

  Right? And I'm sure it was probably Elon that said, that said this. Uh, yeah, I wanna, I wanna catch a 20-story building.

• 1:21:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:12Speaker 03

  I can see all the engineers are, is he serious?

• 1:21:15Joe Rogan?

  Right, exactly. Because everybody thought they just had to deteriorate and fall to earth.

• 1:21:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, right.

• 1:21:20Joe Rogan?

  They run out of gas.

• 1:21:21Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:21:21Joe Rogan?

  You know, when you're shooting a rocket up in the sky and then you plant it so they fall into the ocean. Like, okay.

• 1:21:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. I, I do think that, um, uh, I don't know if you've ever met Gwen Shotwell. I think Gwen Shotwell is kinda like his secret weapon. Right? So in, in, you know, uh, Elon Musk strikes me as one of those guys that's like an, an idea generator. All this great stuff's coming out, uh, at the speed of light, if you will, and he's coming up with all these different ideas. But you gotta have somebody who can, who can, you know, take all that chaos and pull out the important tidbits and then put them into action, if you will. And so I think Gwen is kind of his secret weapon. She helps take all of that chaos and then starts to put it into, you know, actionable steps, if you will, to help SpaceX make the progress.

• 1:22:05Joe Rogan?

  If that's the case, she rules.

• 1:22:07Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:08Joe Rogan?

  And just imagine as technology increases, if you have someone with that sort of an innovative mind and someone like Gwen who can put it together, as all these new ideas come to fruition, you could imagine where we're gonna be with this stuff.

• 1:22:24Speaker 03

  Right, absolutely. Yeah. And, and, and just to kinda put that in context, right? In my mind, SpaceX is an example of mastering the art of getting to space. Right? SpaceX is conquering that, that climbing against the gravity well as opposed to moving through space. That there's, therein lies a great opportunity to kinda re-highlight that, that, that perennial difference, the challenge between the two, right? So.

• 1:22:48Joe Rogan?

  Right. Moving through space.

• 1:22:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:50Joe Rogan?

  And then the idea of some sort of a space station somewhere.

• 1:22:55Speaker 03

  Like?

• 1:22:56Joe Rogan?

  Not just circling the earth, but out in the cosmos. There's so many different ways they can take this stuff, the idea of eventually colonizing other planets. Which is always like, people go, okay, well, that's what we're probably going to try to do. Wouldn't another civilization do that to us? And that's where you get into the weird talk.

• 1:23:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 1:23:16Joe Rogan?

  Whether or not it's actually happened.

• 1:23:17Speaker 03

  Right. I guess it gets into the whole, you know, if somebody has the ability to come here, right? It's almost like, I would rather be the one that was technically advanced and able to go somewhere else, rather than have them come here, because it's...

• 1:23:29Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:30Speaker 03

  If you look at, well, if you look at history, that never, that hasn't ever gone well for the...

• 1:23:35Joe Rogan?

  Not one time.

• 1:23:36Speaker 03

  For the organization, you know, for the tribes that get visited, it just never tends to go well for them. So it's where I'm like, I'd rather be the one doing the visiting than...

• 1:23:43Joe Rogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:23:44Speaker 03

  Right, so...

• 1:23:45Joe Rogan?

  And then imagine the exotic viruses.

• 1:23:46Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Right. That's a good point. It always makes you think, you know, Star Trek, they just go, they beam down to the planets...

• 1:23:53Joe Rogan?

  No problems. They have air there.

• 1:23:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. It's just like...

• 1:23:57Joe Rogan?

  They breathe air, same atmosphere, same pressures, same gravity.

• 1:24:00Speaker 03

  It's like, you know, I keep waiting for the episode where somebody starts bleeding from their eyes, right?

• 1:24:05Joe Rogan?

  Right. Explodes.

• 1:24:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, the guy with the red shirt, you know, right away, right? That guy's, that guy's gone.

• 1:24:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. I mean, you have to take a chance. But, you know, when you think of what's currently available today, in terms of research that people have done on propulsion systems, when, when people speculate that there's some sort of a black ops program that the government's been running secretly, and this is what a lot of these drones are, that people are seeing, and this is what a lot of like the Tic Tac stuff, that it's probably our stuff, which is why it's off military bases. Given your understanding of the current state of science, do you think that's even possible?

• 1:24:46Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, no. Well, it's hard to imagine that being possible, right? Just in terms of, because my entire professional experience has been about wrestling with, you know, how do we, how do we conquer this time distance problem? And so, I know all too well, all the shortcomings. I know... Where we are for the most part today, where we're lacking, right? And so I just, I don't know that there is an organization that has things that could potentially operate in the ways that we've, like the Tic Tacs.

• 1:25:26Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:25:26Speaker 03

  I don't know that there is a black ops that actually has that capability.

• 1:25:32Joe Rogan?

  What I'm kind of asking though, is it even conceivable that there could be a program where you could get the brightest minds who are working on this stuff to make advancements that are far beyond anything that conventional wisdom describes?

• 1:25:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, now I'm with you. I was on a different frequency. Thank you. You know, if we had, if we had some kind of kit, right, that is not from here, however we got it, right? And people will spend some time studying it, you know, maybe they could figure it out. But that also gets into, you know, a little bit of a logic conundrum, right? Because I think you talked about going back to the 1400s and holding up an iPhone, right? If you, if you handed something like this to, you know, Isaac Newton.

• 1:26:23Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:26:24Speaker 03

  He would have no idea.

• 1:26:25Joe Rogan?

  No idea.

• 1:26:26Speaker 03

  What to make of this, right? So he might figure out the interface, right? The Apple's done a good job of making this thing pretty user friendly. But, I mean, how could he even, even if he looked at it with like a glass that allowed him to see, maybe start to make out the pixels.

• 1:26:40Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:26:40Speaker 03

  He doesn't have the benefit of any of the math and physics and so forth. It's possible, right? But those are the things that, in gaming situations in my head, what might that look like? Well, it's like, wow, this might be really hard to figure that out. But it'd be awesome if somebody had figured that out, if that, if that was in the realm of possibility, right?

• 1:27:00Joe Rogan?

  Speaking for the people that believe that they have recovered these, these vehicles from somewhere else. One of the things that, one of the ways they describe them that's really kind of bizarre is they describe them as donations.

• 1:27:14Speaker 03

  I've heard that word.

• 1:27:15Joe Rogan?

  If you were going to try to get someone to figure out how to construct their own automobile. You wouldn't give them a 2025 Corvette ZR1, which you'd give them as a Model T. You'd give them some simple combustion engine, a carburetor that you could go, okay, like someone who knows how to make a locomotive. They could look at that and go, okay, I see what they're doing. Oh, wow. All right. So this thing, the combustion. And then the gases spin around and then it creates energy and then it spins these wheels. Then this thing has different gears. And that, okay, that goes to the back wheels. Okay, I think we could do this. But, you know, if you gave them some electric Tesla, you know, like a new Model S Plaid, they'd go, what the fuck is this?

• 1:28:00Speaker 03

  Porsche 911.

• 1:28:00Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, exactly. They would go, what is this? Well, especially electric.

• 1:28:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:28:04Joe Rogan?

  Electric vehicles, they go, this is bananas. Like this thing goes zero to 60 in 1.9 seconds.

• 1:28:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's amazing.

• 1:28:09Joe Rogan?

  Car.

• 1:28:10Speaker 03

  That's amazing, isn't it?

• 1:28:11Joe Rogan?

  It does feel, have you ever been in an electric Tesla, like the Model S Plaid? It feels like a spaceship. Like it feels like you're not in this time period.

• 1:28:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:28:19Joe Rogan?

  You're in something in the future. So if they gave us something to back engineer, they would most likely give us a Model T.

• 1:28:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. Actually, that's, I had never thought about it that way.

• 1:28:28Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:28:29Joe Rogan?

  They wouldn't just start with the best shit we have. You know what I mean? Like, give these dummies a Jeep from the 50s.

• 1:28:35Speaker 03

  Right, right, right. A Willys, right?

• 1:28:37Joe Rogan?

  Carburetor. Figure it out. Yeah. Look at all the stuff. You can work on it. Like if you open up the hood of one of those things. You know, an old Jeep, you go, I see where everything is. Here's the spark plugs.

• 1:28:46Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:28:46Joe Rogan?

  You know, here's the distributor cap. I get it.

• 1:28:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I, I guess, you know, if, if that were the case, then I, I guess you could, I, I could follow you down that thought process, if you will.

• 1:28:56Joe Rogan?

  So then, could you imagine, I mean, this is just, I'm just asking you because I know you understand science and you understand engineering. Is it possible that there could have been some program that's been going on in complete total secrecy? Shielded from Congress, shielded from the higher levels of government on the most need to know basis? Possible with our, our current security systems, that they could have some kind of a program that's working on this stuff?

• 1:29:25Speaker 03

  You know, I, I certainly couldn't rule that out, right? But some things I think about when I think about that problem. Let's talk about the, like the F-117 stealth fighter. Right, there was a program that was unclassified, I think it was in the late 70s, maybe the early 80s, called Have Blue. And so that's when they were first starting to explore the idea of having an aircraft that could be extremely stealthy. And so it was unclassified for a good amount of time, until they put the first test shape onto a radar stand out in California in the desert, whatever the case may be. And then they turned on the radars and they're like,

• 1:30:10Speaker 03

  "Well, something's wrong because we're not seeing anything", right? And then a bird landed on the prototype, and they saw the bird. And so when that happened, the whole program went black, right? It became classified. Before then, it was not classified, then it was classified. But it, of course, came out in the 90s with Gulf War I, right? I think we saw some manifestations of this. And so there is a program that's extremely classified for the obvious reasons, but it still came out, right? And then I also think about, you know, I worked at NASA, right? And so you have, worked at NASA for 20 years, and you got the full spectrum of people serving different roles in a facility. And so you're always

• 1:30:54Speaker 03

  going to have people that, you know, take out the garbage and do other different things like that. And so, you know, if you've got something that has implications like that, I mean, it'd be, it's hard, it could happen. But that's the thing I struggle with, is that's, you know, there's a lot of different moving parts to try and keep that big of a secret. I mean, maybe it could happen, right? So.

• 1:31:15Joe Rogan?

  Well, if I was running things and that was going on, I would talk to you. It's like, "Look at this guy. He seems to be on this pathway that we are currently exploring."

• 1:31:28Joe Rogan?

  I would, I'd want to bring somebody in.

• 1:31:31Speaker 03

  Well, if somebody, if somebody's got a manual that can help me figure out to go do something, give me a call, right, I'd love that, and I know I'm going to get all kinds of emails as a result of saying that, right, so.

• 1:31:43Joe Rogan?

  Kooks.

• 1:31:43Speaker 03

  I already get that now, right?

• 1:31:44Joe Rogan?

  You're going to get the kooks. But, you know, the question I guess I'm asking is, are there even experts in physics and engineering that are out there that could be quarantined, that could be taken away from everyone else and put on these projects, and could they achieve meaningful results given that kind of compartmentalized science?

• 1:32:09Speaker 03

  Right. Maybe, maybe the thing that, that we could, we could throw into the sandbox on this discussion is the Manhattan Project. Maybe there's a better example of something where they were working on something that was extremely important for humanity and they were able to keep a lot of those secrets for quite some time. So, yeah, maybe that's, that's how you would have to run something like that, I guess. I don't know.

• 1:32:31Joe Rogan?

  But would you have the expertise? Is, is, are there, I mean, are we aware of who all of the experts are? Is it possible that the government could have had access to brilliant minds that are on this sort of path like you are, gotten them, moved them into these projects, and kept it all hush hush? Is that even?

• 1:32:53Speaker 03

  Certainly, the, so the government, government also has an organization called the Jasons, right, where they have a lot of extremely smart, smart folks from academia, and they come in typically, I think it's like a summer assignment, if you will, and so they, they, they band together in the summer to go work on a series of problems that folks might have, and so they kind of, it's, what you're asking me kind of makes me think about that kind of a mechanism where you have access to the best and the brightest across the entire spectrum of, of US academia, and you pull them together and make them SEAL Team Six on whatever particular problem that you've got. But you could run into a problem where, you know, they might, they might look at a problem and only look at it in the context of what we know, right, you know, quantum mechanics

• 1:33:38Speaker 03

  and general relativity, and they don't want to think about new things that could potentially be brought to bear. So there could be some, some flies in the ointment with that thought process. But that, in some ways, that does kind of exist in what we know as the Jasons, right? So, and they could, and they do classified work all the time.

• 1:33:55Joe Rogan?

  Interesting. This episode is brought to you by Chime. And I know people don't usually get excited about banking, but Chime is doing something different and it's worth paying attention to. In a recent survey, they ranked the number one choice for new checking accounts in America. That means real people, millions of them, are choosing this over traditional banks. That's because banking at Chime is fee-free. No monthly fees, no overdraft fees, and thousands of fee-free ATMs. But here's the real kicker. If you get their Chime card, it gives you 5% cash back on a category you actually pick yourself. Your savings rate, crazy high. It's nine times the national average. They're calling it the most rewarding way to bank.

• 1:34:39Joe Rogan?

  Go to chime.com/rogan. Takes a few minutes to sign up. Chime is a fintech, not a bank. Banking services and Chime card provided by Chime's bank partners. Terms and limits apply. Go to chime.com/disclosures for more details. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace. I know because I use it. That's right, joe rogan.com is powered by Squarespace. It has all the features that you need to create a standout website, like an AI-enhanced website builder, SEO optimization tools, and seamless checkouts with mobile pay links.

• 1:35:22Joe Rogan?

  Head to squarespace.com/rogan for a free trial. And when you are ready to launch, use the offer code ROGEN to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So I guess the question is, where are the brightest minds in this particular area of innovation? Like where, if I was running the government and I wanted someone to work on some sort of top-secret stuff like this, how would I even find the people?

• 1:35:50Speaker 03

  That's a tough question to answer because

• 1:35:52Joe Rogan?

  Because you need experts.

• 1:35:53Speaker 03

  What you might, that, so that, so going to, taking that question and going into like some specific steps you might take, right? What, what disciplines are relevant, right? And that's a difficult question to answer because there's so much stuff that we, that we don't know. You probably would have to sample from a, a number of different disciplines, right? Both in general relativity and quantum mechanics with some hope that maybe you've got the right sprinkling of ingredients to bring to bear to that. And then there, there is a history of, I think, some folks in academia that actually like to think about advanced power and propulsion that are also just primarily physicists in a, in their day-to-day

• 1:36:33Speaker 03

  capacity, right? You know, Hal Putoff, although he's got a lot of many and varied interests, he's, he's a great physicist. He's published a lot of great papers in the literature just thinking about physics, right? He's got some stuff he's looked at called the polarizable vacuum. And so, you know, in my, my drawer of, of preferred papers, I have a number of papers in there that are from Hal's work on the polarizable vacuum because I find that interesting and fascinating. And so there may be some things out there that are adjacent to the concept where you could try and pull some of that together, I guess.

• 1:37:05Joe Rogan?

  That, that's a fascinating thing for you to say because Hal believes they have them. And he believes that we have 10 of them.

• 1:37:10Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, I know that. Yeah.

• 1:37:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, which is just so nuts. And then, you know, he's a little agnostic on the Bab Lozhar story. But the Bab Lozhar story, which I'm sure you're aware of, is essentially what we're talking about. Like, you would bring in some out-of-the-box thinkers. And if you found some wildly intelligent, young scientist who put a rocket engine in the back of a Honda, which is what he did, you would go, what is that crazy fucker up to? Like, let's have him look at it. What's it hurt?

• 1:37:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:37:42Joe Rogan?

  The guy's at Rocketdyne, say he's a wizard, you know, bring him out there. Or the guys that, wherever he was, he wasn't at Rocketdyne, he was at Los Alamos. The guy's at Los Alamos, said he's a wizard, so let's bring him out here, let's see what's going on.

• 1:37:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, his, his, his story is, I'm not too familiar with it.

• 1:37:58Joe Rogan?

  It's the nuttiest story of all time. And, um, he supposedly, well, they denied that he ever worked at Los Alamos, but then they found him on an employee log. And, uh, not only that, the, he knew the outline of the place. He knew the security people. George Knapp took him on a tour of it and he knew everybody. He knew the people that worked there. He knew how to get around. Like, he clearly worked there. So that's interesting that they tried to deny that he ever worked there. And then from there, he gets this job where he is flown out to the desert to area 51, site four. And this is allegedly, right? During this time, he can't even tell his wife what he's doing.

• 1:38:38Joe Rogan?

  So his wife thinks he's going, having affairs. He's got to leave and fly away at 11pm at night. Like, right, but you can't tell me where you're going. You want to work?

• 1:38:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're working late again?

• 1:38:47Joe Rogan?

  The wife starts having an affair and because of his clearance.

• 1:38:50Speaker 03

  Sounds like a movie, right?

• 1:38:51Joe Rogan?

  It does sound like a movie, which is one of the beautiful things about reality. Is that reality seems so fake that sometimes, sometimes actual true stories are bizarrely fictional. So he, uh, his wife starts having an affair because of his clearance. He cannot be working on these things if he could be under extreme emotional duress. So they fire him. They tell him he can't, they don't give him any explanation. They don't tell him his wife cheating on him. He starts taking people out to the desert, explaining to them, you, you have to see what we're working on. They fly this thing on certain nights and they do these test flights around the base. It's nuts. So he takes these people into this area. They see it. They get arrested. When he gets arrested, he gets caught there. He explains what he was doing.

• 1:39:36Joe Rogan?

  He says, okay, I've got to go public or they're going to kill me. So he goes public with George Knapp. Initially, they hide his face and then he says, you know what? Fuck that. Let's just film me. Let me tell you everything. He goes over the diagram of this device.

• 1:39:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:49Joe Rogan?

  And he calls it the sport model and it looks like that, that thing that we have.

• 1:39:53Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:39:54Joe Rogan?

  Right there.

• 1:39:55Speaker 03

  It's almost like a hubcap, right?

• 1:39:56Joe Rogan?

  Exactly. That's a copy of it.

• 1:39:57Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:39:58Joe Rogan?

  In the middle of that thing is some sort of a generator that he said works on this unknown element. This element 115.

• 1:40:07Speaker 03

  Oh, some of this is coming back to me. I think I've seen some stuff over the years.

• 1:40:10Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:40:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, some of it's coming back to me now.

• 1:40:12Joe Rogan?

  And essentially the way he describes it traveling, and again, this is in the 1980s. The way he describes it traveling is exactly the way you describe that sort of warp drive.

• 1:40:24Joe Rogan?

  Changing space and time around it.

• 1:40:29Joe Rogan?

  And that you would point that thing where you wanted to go and it would just.

• 1:40:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that it all it all sounds very surreal, right? There's there's another there's another story. Again, as I as I said, I have a number of friends that are keenly interested in this. And so I've been exposed to some of the different things that to me, the Tic Tac account is interesting because it's got a lot of rigorous data, if you will, that helps you go, well, I can't explain that, I can't explain that, I can't explain that. There is another accounting that I just put in the category, my brain doesn't even know what to make of it. And it's the concept of Rendlesham Forest. I don't know if that if that rings a bell, there's something over in the UK where there's a base over there and some airmen came across some very weirds. I can't even begin to describe.

• 1:41:17Joe Rogan?

  I'm not sure if I know this one.

• 1:41:18Speaker 03

  It's, yeah, it's pretty bizarre. I don't I don't know it well enough to unpack it today, other than to say it's it's so bizarre that when you listen to the accounts that were recorded, right? It doesn't make any sense. It's it's like, you know, if you think about if you if you watch an octopus in a in a an aquarium, right? And the octopus is doing something, you can sometimes understand what their motivation is. There's like a a a cross species ability to it's like communication, but without words, right? You know, that octopus wants to go eat that little crab or whatever the case may be.

• 1:42:00Speaker 03

  And so our our chemical computers, even though they're different, we can we can look at their behavior and we can go, all right, I think I understand what's what that octopus might be wanting to do today, or a shark or a dog or a porpoise. But when you hear what happened in that Rendlesham Forest thing, it it breaks all of my guessing machine and I I it's like.

• 1:42:22Joe Rogan?

  What is the story?

• 1:42:24Speaker 03

  Some they the Colonel and some airmen.

• 1:42:28Speaker 03

  Reported some weird stuff that was going on in Rendlesham Forest. Yeah, and they went out and tried to investigate it and they saw some, again, I'm doing such a terrible job of summarizing it because I don't really know the lore very well, but.

• 1:42:42Joe Rogan?

  Here it is, right here.

• 1:42:43Speaker 03

  Everything they saw was very bizarre and crazy looking.

• 1:42:46Joe Rogan?

  We can read it. It says, "Forty years ago, remote forest in Suffolk was the scene of one of the most famous purported UFO sightings in history. So just what did happen and will we ever know for sure? Victor Thurnkettle was out chopping wood one morning in Rendlesham Forest in late December 1980 when a car drew up. Out stepped two men aged about 30, dressed in suits. 'Good morning. Do you mind if we ask you some questions?' asked one in a well-spoken English accent. Earlier on 26 and 28 of December, United States Air Force security personnel stationed near, stationed at nearby RAF Woodbridge had reported seeing strange lights in the surrounding forest. Forestry worker Mr. Thurnkettle and unannounced and unidentified

• 1:43:30Joe Rogan?

  visitors asked if he had been out the previous night. I said, 'No,' he recalls. 'They said, 'Did you leave the house at all? Did you see anything?' I said, 'What?' They said, 'Oh, there's a report of some red lights in the forest. We're just checking.' And the two men, very politely but firmly, asked me probably about 20 questions. I thought they were journalists. They suddenly said, 'Oh, well, fair enough. There's probably nothing in it,' and left. So I bought the papers every day for the next few days to find out what was going on. And of course, there was nothing. Three years later, however, sightings made the news of the world, front page story, proclaimed UFO lands in Suffolk, and it's, and that's official.

• 1:44:09Joe Rogan?

  The story was based on a memo from RAF Woodbridge Deputy Base Commander Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt to the Ministry of Defence. It was released by the US government, described as an encounter with an apparent UFO in the forest. Since then, the sightings have been the source of much debate and speculation among UFO enthusiasts and the subject of numerous books, articles, and TV programs. In March, a documentary concluded the sightings had achieved legend status like the Loch Ness or King Arthur. The forest even have its, has its own official UFO trail, complete with a life-size replica, go back up, of the flying saucer. And this is the replica, like the Hamza thing on it, that hand thing.

• 1:44:53Joe Rogan?

  Bizarre. Uh, Thirn Kettle, UK authorities have said they didn't learn about the incident. Okay, but what is the story, though? Let's get to like, what is the story? Scroll down more. What does it say?

• 1:45:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that gets into the stuff that I, it doesn't make sense in terms of what they described the UFO doing. It's just very peculiar, right? So.

• 1:45:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, uh, they got there, my heart absolutely plummeted, there was nothing, it was absolutely normal, glade in the forest with three rabbit scrapes, they're all carefully marked, happened to be roughly a triangle. Okay, what else is it saying? What is the sighting? Burn marks on trees, but what's the sighting?

• 1:45:31Speaker 06

  I can show you what the UFO looked like, but they, I mean, uh...

• 1:45:34Joe Rogan?

  Okay, sure. That's what they said it looked like? Whoa. And it had those markings on it?

• 1:45:41Speaker 06

  I Googled it, my Google search said that Grush brought it up when he was on here, but I couldn't find like even clips about it, so I don't know that we went that deep into it.

• 1:45:50Joe Rogan?

  How bizarre is it that it has that symbol? What is that? That's an ancient Hindu symbol, correct? That Hamza symbol?

• 1:45:55Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 1:45:56Joe Rogan?

  Oh, they're different. That looks very weird. Huh. So what about this one stands out to you?

• 1:46:07Speaker 03

  I put this one in the category of, I just, I don't understand if it's a, if it's a real account, right? I mean, so the, I think when you have a lieutenant colonel that's reporting something as factual, I tend not to just immediately dismiss it.

• 1:46:22Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:46:23Speaker 03

  But what the, what the, and it's not just him, it's several people around him. What they described, right, doesn't make sense to me. Right? You know, in terms of the David Fravor talking about the Tic Tac, I can kind of, you know, that, that's not totally alien to me. I could, oh, well, they're, it's trying to maneuver with the aircraft and it's maneuvering to their cap or whatever the case may be. And I, I can kind of connect the dots with that, but the Rendlesham Forest thing, it doesn't make any sense to me.

• 1:46:49Joe Rogan?

  Well, what about it doesn't make any sense?

• 1:46:51Speaker 03

  The, the, what they saw, why it was doing what it was doing, they just...

• 1:46:54Joe Rogan?

  What was it doing?

• 1:46:55Speaker 03

  It just was out in the woods. It was out in the woods, you know, with blinky lights and doing weird stuff and like...

• 1:47:01Joe Rogan?

  Why is that weirder than the Tic Tac to you?

• 1:47:04Speaker 03

  I, I don't, I don't know. So this is a gut thing, right? In terms of, my guts telling me I don't make, I don't understand this, this doesn't make sense to me. I don't know how to explain it any better than that, so.

• 1:47:16Joe Rogan?

  But if it's just an object that's in the wood, blinking lights and looks like it's flying, why, I just don't understand why that's weirder than...

• 1:47:23Speaker 03

  I think it, I think they also described it had like melty bits or something like that that were like dripping off of it and so forth, and I just, it sounds so completely surreal. I think maybe what I'm unconsciously trying to do is I'm trying to, you know, map, how might I map, you know, math and physics to what it is they're describing to me, and I just...

• 1:47:46Joe Rogan?

  Jimmy, is this the one where they, they found debris at the scene? Did someone, someone brought this up? Was it Jacques Vallée that brought this up?

• 1:47:53Speaker 06

  Uh, here it said, yeah, "A piece of debris is seen burning up as a fireball over England. Serviceman thought it was a downed craft. Halt's memo says, 'glowing object, metallic in appearance, colored lights.'"

• 1:48:05Joe Rogan?

  "Tempt approached the object and appeared to move through the trees, and the animals on a nearby farm went into a frenzy. One of the servicemen, Sergeant Jim Peniston, later claimed to have encountered a craft of unknown origin while in the forest, although there was no published mention of this at the time, and there is no corroboration from other witnesses."

• 1:48:29Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:48:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there's not, there's, there's, no matter how far you dig, there's not going to be very much satisfactory resolution of the mystery, if you will. It's just a bonkers kind of story.

• 1:48:43Joe Rogan?

  Why does this one stand out to you more than like, say, Roswell? Because Roswell, to me, is one of the most bizarre ones. When you look at the front page of the Roswell, was it the Roswell Daily Record, I believe, that has this story saying that the government has recovered a flying saucer, and that a crashed flying saucer was found, and, you know, the story is that they grabbed the wreckage and flew it out to Ryper Patterson Air Force Base in two separate planes, in case one of them crashed, and Truman met them there, like...

• 1:49:13Speaker 03

  Maybe in that case, it's, you know, this, it's a potentially purported spaceship and it was around military bases, you know, I don't know.

• 1:49:25Joe Rogan?

  It's just the weirder-

• 1:49:26Speaker 03

  Again, again, we're getting into the fact I-

• 1:49:28Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:49:28Speaker 03

  I don't have a lot of depth in some of these areas, right?

• 1:49:32Joe Rogan?

  I understand. But it's just the weirdest aspect of this whole crashed retrieval program, the alleged crash retrieval program. If it has occurred and it really does go back to the 1940s, like, how did you guys hide this? Like, how have you kept this secret so long? Is that even conceivably possible?

• 1:49:53Speaker 03

  That's one of the things I wonder about. There's a book I was recommended to read called Blind Man's Bluff. And it's a book about deeply classified projects connected to the Navy, right? They were, I think the end effect of what they were trying to achieve is part of what's detailed in this book is, you remember hearing about deep sea rescue vehicles, right? So, deep sea rescue vehicles, basically that was a cover for some submarines that the Navy was using to put listening systems on communication cables that were at the bottom of some of the bodies of water that I think the Soviet Union was using at the time.

• 1:50:37Speaker 03

  And so, this, this book kind of details a number of programs that went through and developed kit and hardware to go through and accomplish these different tasks. And so, it's neat to kind of, you know, see how black programs like that unfold. I don't know how that book got published, but it's a fascinating book, but then that speaks to what you're wrestling with, right? How do you have something that's so classified that doesn't leak, right? Because all the other data that we see from other programs, there, you can, you can keep a secret for a little while, but you can't keep it for that long, right? At least, that's, when I look at these other things, that's what comes to my mind, right? Now, that doesn't mean I'm right, there could-

• 1:51:21Speaker 03

  Definitely be programs that are out there, right, that are, maybe they've figured out how to get around that, but when you look at some of the most classified military things that are out there, they usually have a lifetime associated with them.

• 1:51:33Joe Rogan?

  Maybe it's just one of those things the government's really good at. Like, the government's really bad at a lot of things, but maybe they're really good at that. It's just that one thing, they've got it down.

• 1:51:41Speaker 03

  Right, right, right. Or at least there's a small section of the government that's really good at that, right?

• 1:51:45Joe Rogan?

  Well, Hal's speculation, you know, when Hal says that he's pretty sure that there's 10 of them, that gives me pause. Because that's a very serious person.

• 1:51:54Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, he's a very discriminating individual, right? He likes to, he likes to question everything. And even though he's thought about some very interesting things over the span of his career, right, he does bring a little bit of that squinty-eyed physicist to some of the different things. And so, that gives you some measure of comfort that even though he's thought about some wide-ranging things, he's bringing a little bit of that skepticism to whatever he's been confronted with.

• 1:52:17Joe Rogan?

  Also, as crazy as what he says is, there's some things that he won't talk about. Which may, okay, what is that? Like, if you're telling me there's 10 crashed UFOs of non-human intelligence, and then there's stuff you can't tell me?

• 1:52:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:52:32Joe Rogan?

  That makes me just go, what, like, what have you seen, Hal? Stop bullshit, you're 88 years old, let's go.

• 1:52:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, right. You're on the clock, bud, you're on the clock.

• 1:52:41Joe Rogan?

  Spill the beans, buddy!

• 1:52:42Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 1:52:43Joe Rogan?

  Come on, if anybody knows, please. But I guess, if you did spill the beans, my goodness, you would no longer have access to any of that stuff, and you'd probably be in trouble. You know, they'd probably, immediately, you'd get audited.

• 1:52:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. You'd have a lot of special things that would happen.

• 1:52:59Joe Rogan?

  A lot of bad things would go your way, I would imagine, yeah. Because you're, what he describes, that put it in light and perspective to me, said you have to understand that one of the things that would happen is, there would be real problems, because you'd have to figure out how this stuff was funded. So this is funded by misallocation of finances, so you lied to Congress. So these are crimes. These are crimes that put people in prison for life. And then on top of that...

• 1:53:23Speaker 03

  By the way, that goes back to that book I was telling you about, Blind Man's Bluff, because it talks about the amount of money that went into that program. That was hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 1:53:32Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:53:33Speaker 03

  Right? And it's interesting, that gives you like a... A little bit of a window of insight into how the black classified world moves stuff around.

• 1:53:41Joe Rogan?

  Right, right. And then you also have this national security problem. Because what Hal's saying is that we're not the only ones that have these things. And that there's essentially a mad race to try to back engineer these things and to successfully complete. And this was the real fear, like when people were seeing the New Jersey drones amongst conspiracy theorists. So I was like, oh my God, what if China's already nailed it?

• 1:54:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:54:02Joe Rogan?

  And they're buzzing us.

• 1:54:03Speaker 03

  I gotta think, I gotta think, when you, when you look at any of the counts of these things, the, the important things to maybe help categorize the nature of things that they see. If, if, if a craft has the ability to manifest extremely fast speeds, well, I mean, SR71 does Mach, you know, 3.2. If you've got something that has radar track data that shows it's doing, you know, Mach 8 or Mach 10, that's interesting. Now, we do have hypersonic stuff, so you can't just automatically say that it's something exotic. It still could be something that we know might exist out there with some other flags on the side of the vehicle.

• 1:54:43Speaker 03

  But then, like you talked about, G-forces, if it can do like a Tron turn, that 90-degree kind of turn, and you've got a radar track, that might help you categorize the, the nature of the different signals that are out there. So, and to me, that's why, like, the Tic Tac thing has always been something that's hard for me to just sweep away because of the quality of the data. And some of the stuff they describe, I can't imagine other conventional systems that could potentially explain what they're seeing. But a lot of the other stuff, I can actually probably piece together in my head, it could be this, or it could be that. Right? You know, they talk about the cubes inside of a clear sphere.

• 1:55:24Speaker 03

  There are patents in the system for radar corner cubes that are a cube. A metallic cube inside of a clear balloon that gets floated to evaluate radar sensitivity. Right, so.

• 1:55:38Joe Rogan?

  What do those look like?

• 1:55:39Speaker 03

  It just looks like there's a patent in the system. It's there's a, yeah, so it's a corner cube, but there's a patent that has a version of that that's light enough to go inside of a, um, uh, some kind of a balloon. Maybe it's filled with helium or something like that. There you go. That's the patent, right? Uh, so there's a, there's a patent in the system. And so, you know, I can certainly see maybe if that's tethered to a boat, right? They're just evaluating our, you know, our radar systems, if you will, and so.

• 1:56:04Joe Rogan?

  Well, that would kind of make sense until you listen to Ryan Graves' depictions of what these things were doing. That they were standing motionless at 120 knot winds. They're moving in the same rate of speed.

• 1:56:14Speaker 03

  If it's tethered, well, if it's moving, I, yeah, I can't, I can't, I can't describe that, but if it's static, it could be tethered to a boat.

• 1:56:20Joe Rogan?

  Right, but that looks goofy. Like, if you look at what that looked like, Jamie, pull up a photo of you just had. Like, that, I don't think that's tricking a fighter jet pilot.

• 1:56:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, the one on the left, though, is, uh, it's actually a metallic cube inside.

• 1:56:32Joe Rogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:56:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, so.

• 1:56:34Joe Rogan?

  The one on the left, is there an image of that? With the metallic cube inside the sphere? It'd just be the patent, I don't know. Just a patent? Okay, so it's theoretical? They don't want us to know how it works. Right, of course.

• 1:56:44Speaker 03

  So, in a lot of cases, I can, again, I'm agnostic, and so I bring this, this framework to the table. Uh, and so only, you know, the Tic Tac ones really, I think, the one that bubbles up in my mind with the highest quality data that I haven't been able to categorize, well, it could be A, B, or C that's, you know, a more boring explanation.

• 1:57:03Joe Rogan?

  Jamie, go back to that blue. I wanted to explore, it could be some fake AI. Could be nonsense. Pilots' notes for cube transmedium vehicle. Yeah, it doesn't sound. Promulated by Order of Air Control.

• 1:57:13Speaker 03

  That's gotta be AI.

• 1:57:14Joe Rogan?

  Restricted, come on, it's restricted. It's just like, super important.

• 1:57:17Speaker 03

  It says for official use only, right?

• 1:57:19Joe Rogan?

  This is on the internet, it's gotta be legit.

• 1:57:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. I'm a, I'm a French, I'm a French model, right?

• 1:57:25Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. It's just to buy stuff. Oh, it's just to buy stuff. It's just goofy.

• 1:57:28Speaker 03

  Uh.

• 1:57:29Joe Rogan?

  It's just silly, we need to get those, get some Tic Tac stuff.

• 1:57:32Speaker 03

  You know.

• 1:57:33Joe Rogan?

  The lack of sonic boom is one of the things that I want to talk about.

• 1:57:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:57:35Joe Rogan?

  Like, if that thing could move at that kind of a hyper, hypersonic speed, there would be some sort of a sonic boom.

• 1:57:41Speaker 03

  Right. If, if it's not exactly right, if it's, if it's not some kind of laser system that's creating pixels.

• 1:57:47Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:57:47Speaker 03

  Right? Uh, and it's some solid thing, if it's going supersonic. It's based on everything we know where there are dynamics, it should have a sonic boom. And if it doesn't, and it is a physical thing, then that demands an explanation, right? And I wouldn't be able to explain that, right?

• 1:58:04Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:58:05Speaker 03

  And so those, and that's exactly why something like the data that comes out of the Tic Tac thing, I haven't been able to just pound flat and make go away, right?

• 1:58:13Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:58:14Speaker 03

  It keeps surviving all of my grumpy physicist attacks, right? So.

• 1:58:18Joe Rogan?

  Does it frustrate you that you've never seen one of these things? Or have you?

• 1:58:21Speaker 03

  Uh, so, funny story, and beer, beer is involved.

• 1:58:26Joe Rogan?

  Uh-oh, how much?

• 1:58:27Speaker 03

  A little bit.

• 1:58:28Joe Rogan?

  Were you drinking with Shane Gillis?

• 1:58:29Speaker 03

  A little bit.

• 1:58:30Joe Rogan?

  How much beer?

• 1:58:31Speaker 03

  A little bit. So, we were down at Kennedy Space Center, and this is, this is a cautionary tale to don't always believe what your eyes see, right? Because you potentially could, you know, lead yourself down the wrong path. So, we're down at Kennedy Space Center, we had put some docking cameras on some space station modules, and spent a lot of, you know, a number of days working, long hours, wearing those uncomfortable bunny suits and so forth. And so, finished all this stuff, wanted to go celebrate, so we went to the beach and had a little bit of unwinding time, and drank a few beers, hanging out. And so, we're out on the east coast, down there, close to Kennedy, and we're looking up at the sky, and you could see some of the satellites coming over, right?

• 1:59:16Speaker 03

  Your eyes adjusted to the, to the light, you could occasionally see some satellites coming over, and you kind of expect them to have a track that goes, you know, west to east, if you will, generally. I mean, they can come to all different angles. But then, we started seeing some, some satellite tracks that were very different from what we might expect, being rocket scientists, right? We're watching this stuff, and that looks a little different, that's kind of interesting. And it's at a very different angle, well, maybe it's a Russian spy satellite that's retrograde, and it's, you know, we're, we're trying to figure out what this could be, and then, you know, a couple more beers later. We see four or five more of these tracks, right? And we're like, well, maybe all these, all these people that talk about these crazy things, right?

• 2:00:01Speaker 03

  Maybe there's something to that, right? Now, it's about, about an hour's gone by, as we've gone through this process, and we finally see another one of these little glowy orbs, if you will. And I, I look at it, and I, and I just realize, out of the, the edge of the glowy orb... Wings of a seagull.

• 2:00:20Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 2:00:21Speaker 03

  So it's the, it's the white belly of a seagull reflecting the light, the near, the light from the nearby city.

• 2:00:27Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 2:00:27Speaker 03

  And so that's what we're seeing, right? And so that's one of those things that's just something to, to make you, you know, think about what you're seeing.

• 2:00:34Joe Rogan?

  Of course.

• 2:00:35Speaker 03

  It may not be, I mean, cause it's, it's, it's breaking all my guessing machines. It's breaking all of our guessing machines and we're, we're wondering and speculating about it, but in the end it was just, you know, it was just a, it was a seagull doing their nightly business, right? And look at these silly guys looking at me, right?

• 2:00:50Joe Rogan?

  That's funny. That is funny.

• 2:00:52Speaker 03

  So yeah, that's my only experience.

• 2:00:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, the mind definitely plays tricks on you, especially when beer is involved.

• 2:00:57Speaker 03

  Right, right, right.

• 2:00:58Joe Rogan?

  But I, I can't dismiss all of the different, very serious people that have talked about these things. And that's where I get really perplexed and my agnosticism gets, it gets tested.

• 2:01:11Speaker 03

  Right, right. I, you know, I, I tend to try and always keep a squinty eye towards it. And I think that's probably good to, to do that, cause then that, the stuff that survives that filter, right, is, is high quality stuff, right? And so the, the, the things that keep coming out of the, the Tic Tac thing, I, I just, I can't kill that. I keep wanting to try and kill it, but I, I can't.

• 2:01:33Joe Rogan?

  What about when you look at things like the Go Fast video or the FLIR video and you, you look at these crafts that are moving in some very weird way that they don't exhibit traditional propulsion signatures?

• 2:01:45Speaker 03

  It, so, yes, those are interesting videos and they come from trained professional fighter.

• 2:01:53Joe Rogan?

  Pull up the one where it rotates, Jamie.

• 2:01:55Speaker 03

  Fighter pilots. Um, and so I, I can't, I can't dismiss those accounts. Um, but the, the integrated quality of that data is not the same as the Tic Tac.

• 2:02:07Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:02:08Speaker 03

  Right, where you've got multiple aircraft, multiple radar systems over multiple days, right? That's one of those.

• 2:02:15Joe Rogan?

  And eyewitnesses.

• 2:02:16Speaker 03

  It's, yes, exactly. And, and not only eyewitnesses, I mean, they're, they're laying eyes on this thing. And you, and it's not just one plane where sometimes you can fool yourself, uh.

• 2:02:26Joe Rogan?

  Like this thing is very, this is the Gimbal video. This thing is very strange.

• 2:02:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:02:30Joe Rogan?

  Uh, put the guys talking about it, cause he.

• 2:02:49Speaker 07

  It's rotating.

• 2:02:49Speaker 03

  It's going against the wind and it's rotating. And I acknowledge the fact it doesn't have any thermal signatures that were indicative of like a plume or something like that, right? So some of those things definitely are hard to explain. It's also listening to these guys, listening to fighter pilots going, "Look at that thing." Yeah, because their eyes are trained to go through and discern different things. Because they're always thinking about, "Can this kill me? Can I kill it? What do I need ..." I completely acknowledge the fact they have that framework drilled into their head and that helps put this into a special category. But those are unfortunately single data points, so I can't do anything with that.

• 2:03:33Speaker 03

  And that gets back to what we talked about at the beginning of all this. I would love for somebody to show up with a notebook, right? Full of all these great observations that would help me. We're making these little nanochips that we're trying to use to extract energy from ... Can I see those? Yeah, sure. Is that the actual nanochips? These are a bunch of the nanochips that we're doing. This is part of the Casimir company that we spun out. These chips interact with the quantum field and generate a voltage potential between those leads. And so we measure voltage on those guys when we put them in dark RF-shielded enclosures. There's some pictures. That's so cool. And so ... Just looking at these is so cool. Yeah, and it's fun to think about, "How do you even make stuff like that?" We can talk about that in just a minute.

• 2:04:17Speaker 03

  But let's talk about some of the applications, right? This is ... Let's see. Can we go back a couple of slides? Keep going. Keep going, keep going. One more. All right, so let's just spend maybe three minutes here talking about the Casimir force, at least picking up where we left off. So we talked about the idea of the Casimir force is a macroscopic observational consequence of something called the quantum vacuum, these fluctuating fields and forces. If you go to the next slide, Jamie.

• 2:05:03Speaker 03

  So, conceptually, the following is true, independent of anything that we're doing with the nanotechnology we're developing. If you allow the quantum field to interact on these two metal plates that we talked about as part of the Casimir force, it will apply a force over a distance and it will cause that gap to close and go to zero, right? So that is, by definition, a force over a distance, and so that is a unit of work. So the Casimir force phenomena is an illustration of extracting energy from the quantum field. So independent of anything that we're doing, right, that's part of what's baked into the idea of the Casimir force interacting with the quantum field.

• 2:05:46Speaker 03

  Now, you might say, "Well, maybe we could use that as a power source." The only problem with this textbook illustration of a Casimir cavity is, once the plates have collapsed, there's no more, you can't get any more energy out of it. You have to actually pull the plates apart. You have to wind the watch again, if you will. And so this type of an approach would, at best, simply be a battery. So you couldn't extract continuous energy from the quantum field from this type of an apparatus. So this leads into an innovation that we came across. So, Jamie, if you go forward one more slide. This is a slightly larger version of that scanning electron microscope image.

• 2:06:29Speaker 03

  So we've changed the standard Casimir cavity concept by adding these pillars along the midplane. So we have these structures that we put inside the middle of the Casimir cavity. And so you see, we've got a cavity wall on the left, and a cavity wall on the right, and these big three pillars. The walls are fixed to the substrate. They can't move. We don't want them to move. We want them to stay still. And then the pillars are also fixed to the substrate. They cannot move. The walls are electrically connected to one another, and the pillars are electrically connected to one another, but they're isolated. So, that's just a physical description of what this is.

• 2:07:13Speaker 03

  So now, let's talk about how does this custom structure interact with the quantum field? What's the difference with this particular structure? So for that, let me give you a metaphor. Imagine a Pacific atoll island out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It's surrounded by the Pacific Ocean with all this random wave energy that's beating the outside of the atoll island. But at the center of the atoll island, there's a nice lagoon, right? Very quiescent, very smooth. The water's connected to the Pacific, but a lot of that wave energy can't manifest on the lagoon. So it's a protected and nice environment.

• 2:07:54Speaker 03

  So imagine, Joe, you're sipping, you know, some, some nice water and having a nice paddle, paddleboard day, quiescent, enjoying yourself. And, you know, Jamie, he took the other package and he went deep sea fishing out on the Pacific Ocean. And so he's really bobbling back and forth and it's much more uncomfortable for him. Maybe he's getting sick and feeding the fish. Right? So now with that metaphor in mind, let's come back to the structure. So this structure, the walls on the outside are like the Pacific atoll island. Inside the quantum field, which is like the Pacific Ocean. So it's assaulting that structure on all sides. The pillars are like you on your paddleboard in the lagoon.

• 2:08:39Speaker 03

  It's a protected environment. And so the way the quantum field interacts with this structure is it will occasionally cause a real electron inside the walls to quantum tunnel to the pillars. And so the pillars are like you on your paddleboard. It's a very quiescent environment. And so the electron shows up through this quantum tunneling process. But there's no wave energy on the lagoon to mirror that current back to the walls. So in that way, this structure will interact with the quantum field and generate a voltage potential. So we can measure a negative voltage on the pillars relative to the wall.

• 2:09:21Speaker 03

  And so although this is a very tiny little cavity and we can measure the voltage directly using atomic force microscopes, if we put these guys together by the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, then we can get to voltage and current levels that map to things that we care about in application, like, you know, Tire pressure monitor system, something that uses a, you know, micro watts worth of power, or a Fitbit, or, you know, you've got the ring there, I think that's an electronic ring, or something like that.

• 2:09:53Joe Rogan?

  It's an Ora Ring.

• 2:09:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, some low-power applications, and so, using this, you know, this approach, we're trying to generate, we're trying to create chips that are about the size of your pinky nail, that, you know, generate one and a half volts and 25 microamps, and so that maps to a number of chips that are on the market today, that operate at that power level, but they, you know, they have to be recharged. We don't have to be recharged. We're like a solar panel that works in the dark, so you can put us in your device, and then it can go down to the bottom of the ocean, and it will continue to work. Or you can, we can give it to our buddies at Intuitive Machines, and they can carry it to the surface of the moon, and maybe they want to throw a sensor off to go measure something, and

• 2:10:37Speaker 03

  it'll collect data, even though the sun stops shining. So, the cool thing is, like I said at the beginning of this interview, we were going down this whole path of trying to understand the nature of the quantum field, because we were motivated by where we might envision it could lead one day. Maybe we could add more, a deeper understanding of that physics Venn diagram, and get to a point where we can figure out, what do we need to put into the rings that go around that iXs Enterprise concept shift, if you will. And so, it's cool to think that, you know, maybe we could come up with a technology that, you know, provides useful power today for things like this. Maybe, you know, as we, if we put it

• 2:11:19Speaker 03

  in aggregate, if we put a lot of them together, right, we could get to a point where...

• 2:11:24Joe Rogan?

  What is that chip?

• 2:11:25Speaker 03

  So, this is, so this is just a 3D print of having a bunch of those little chips that are 5mm by 5mm, 1.5 volts, 25 microamps. If we add a bunch of those together at a very large extreme, you know, that particular board might generate 3.4 watts, and so, that board could recharge your phone in three hours. And so, imagine a scenario where you had a phone that's pretty resilient, that for the most parts, you'd never have to plug it in. That might be pretty useful, right? So, and it's neat to think that pursuing, you know, this whole... Uh, reaching for the stars type of thing has fueled this exploration of pushing the

• 2:12:09Speaker 03

  boundaries of what we know and then kind of coming across instantiations that make us go, hey, wait a minute, not, you know, although we were thinking about these kinds of things, look, look at what we could potentially do now. And so we could find ways to, you know, feed the research and still bring value here in incredible ways. I mean, this, this capability is amazing to think in terms of what it could unlock, right? Especially if we could, you know, if this is three, three and a half watts, you could imagine you put a bunch of these together, you could rapidly get to a kilowatt or even more, right? And have expeditionary power. I don't know if you've ever wanted to have a, you know, a farm out in the middle of some untouched area where you didn't want to pay the money

• 2:12:52Speaker 03

  to run the power line. Well, now maybe, you know, in 10, 15 years, maybe you wouldn't have to. We could provide a solution that would allow you to come off the grid, right? So.

• 2:13:02Joe Rogan?

  I was seeing something online about some new technology that I believe was invented in Japan where they have figured out a way to extract far more energy from solar panels.

• 2:13:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think they've increased the efficiency on solar panels, but there is a limit to that, right? In terms of, um, I think it's your, you know, when you get to, uh, close to 40% efficiency on a solar panel, you're kind of at the limit of what you can do. And then the challenge you have with a solar panel is, um, at the surface of the earth during ideal peak lighting conditions, uh, the flux of power you get is about 1,000 watts per square meter, right? So if you wanted, you know, a system that provided five kilowatts of, of power, you could do the math and figure you need a fairly big area. Uh, with our technology, we can stack it on top of one another. We don't have to stretch out like that. And so the quantum field could potentially.

• 2:13:58Speaker 03

  Provide a lot more power with a much smaller footprint, if you will. Right now, I have to acknowledge, we're still very early, right? We're very low power levels, and so we want to crawl, walk, run. But we're, you know, we're thinking about, what can we do now to provide use, right? And then use those applications to continue to grow the capability at Casimir.

• 2:14:21Joe Rogan?

  And then ultimately, if you have those things stacked 50 feet thick, and, you know, 700 meters in a circle, you know, then you have enough power to make a warp drive.

• 2:14:34Speaker 03

  Right, well, and, but, so this gets into, the cool thing is, what we're, what we're trying to understand and study inside these little chips that we're making, is we're trying to understand the nature of the quantum field, right? The structure to the quantum field. How can we alternate? How can we tweak it? What can we do with it? Because you're, you know, we talked about the fact that negative vacuum energy density is potentially a good proxy for the idea of exotic matter, in terms of what general relativity requires. And so, in the process of deep, developing a deeper understanding of the quantum field, with what we're doing with these devices, right? I would contend that we're actually adding another circle

• 2:15:16Speaker 03

  on that Venn diagram, that's potentially not only overlapping part of quantum mechanics, but it's also overlapping part of general relativity. And I think that's kind of what's going to be necessary to be able to make the idea a space warp real, one day. We're going to have to have that new body of physics, those new E equals mc squared equations, right? That allows us to potentially, ah, hey, if I do this, and this, and this, then it might, you know, maybe I can solve that problem. But I think your instincts are right on, right? From the standpoint, what we're doing in the, in the micro here, right? If you cracked open one of the access panels on the iAccess Enterprise, and you looked, you might see some, some stuff that's like,

• 2:15:59Speaker 03

  I can see how these guys are descendants to what gets put together in that, in that ring, in macroscopic, whatever that might be, right?

• 2:16:08Joe Rogan?

  It's gotta be so frustrating, that this has this immense potential, but like, imagine seeing it. Like, how do you get to do it? It's I'm not I want to say frustrating, challenging, exciting. Just knowing that there's this potential energy source that can be tapped. And knowing that, just like all technology, I mean, if you go back to the Apollo program, the amount of power that you have in your phone far exceeds what they used. And they had like a whole giant room filled with supercomputers. And now you just carry it around and you plug it into the wall and it's 50% charged in 20 minutes.

• 2:16:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, we we take that for granted. It's interesting you mention that, right? If you if you look back through the if you think about the industrial revolution, when we when we started, when we came up with steam power, right? And then when we later figured out, you know, gasoline engines, right? The the amount of power we had available to us changed so drastically, right? The change that it had on human civilization and human culture is just hard to fully comprehend. Because, I mean, if you think about all the different things that get done, a you know, a single tractor with one person on it will, you know,

• 2:17:25Speaker 03

  do all the stuff that's necessary to seed a field, to cultivate a field, to plow a field. And it's it's amazing to think that that's possible just with one human being at the helm of the tractor. But you had to unlock all the energy, the insights to unlock the energy in what we know from petrochemical, right? Just gas, diesel, whatever. Right? And so, yeah, it's it's neat to think how things like that changed civilization. And so, in some ways, it's like if you if you think about the the long term benefits of reducing something like this to practice, right? You know, we talk about the grid, right?

• 2:18:07Speaker 03

  You were here in Texas and we had, I think we had some issues during a very cold winter where ERCOT got its R removed, right? The the power grid had some issues because it got really cold. But imagine a future where we can start to create microgrids, maybe even eventually move away from something like that. And then what would that kind of a capability do for parts of the world that currently don't have any infrastructure in place?

• 2:18:34Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:18:34Speaker 03

  Right? There's a lot of places in in Africa where if you brought these this type of a capability, where you could Plop a brick down on the table, it's one kilowatt, right? And let people know, you can, hey, can you make use of this? And so just like Starlink provides this opportunity for people in remote locations to have access to the internet, right? We could potentially bring a solution to the table that could help a lot of places on the planet that, you know, they might not ever see that otherwise, right? So that's the thing, so those are some things that have us excited about as we continue to wrestle with technology, right? And anytime you're trying to do something, when you're trying to establish order where there's only chaos, it's hard, right?

• 2:19:17Speaker 03

  But the things that help us weather that is the long-term implications of what we're doing, both in the near term and in the far term. It's really cool to think, right? We can provide benefits, you know, here, and then farther down the line here, and then farther down the line here, and then, oh, by the way, the whole reason we're doing all this stuff is because we hope to try and make the idea of a space where it's possible one day, right? It's cool to kind of have that, that connection between all these different nodes along the way.

• 2:19:48Joe Rogan?

  Where you can see the path.

• 2:19:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, you can see the path.

• 2:19:51Joe Rogan?

  And you can see how it'd be useful for people today.

• 2:19:54Speaker 03

  Right, I mean, think about like, what, when we have a hurricane that hits, right? And the power goes out, you're without power until they can get the power lines up, right? If you have capabilities like this, maybe 50 years in the future or something like that, right? Where everybody just, you know, they're off the grid.

• 2:20:11Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:20:11Speaker 03

  That changes the nature of how we contend with, you know, disasters like that.

• 2:20:18Joe Rogan?

  Right, and monopolizing resources.

• 2:20:20Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:20:20Joe Rogan?

  That's the other issue. We'd no longer be dependent upon fossil fuels, or essentially everyone would be independent.

• 2:20:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:20:28Joe Rogan?

  And then you could imagine as it scales up, it gets better and better, just like cell phones were initially these very large bricks that, you know, remember from Wall Street?

• 2:20:37Speaker 03

  Oh, hi, yeah, okay, yeah, sure, I can do dinner.

• 2:20:40Joe Rogan?

  You had that big brick with you, and now they're little tiny things.

• 2:20:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:20:44Joe Rogan?

  And so you could imagine how that would eventually get to a point where it's portable, and anyone can have power everywhere you want to go.

• 2:20:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, so some of the things we think about in terms of the roadmap for things, right? You know, it may take us a little while before we could provide all the power that's necessary for like a Tesla. But we could, we could imagine a scenario where, like, I'm gonna hold this little prop up again. We've got this, this three and a half watt brick, uh, three and a half watt card. Maybe we put a bunch of them together to create a one kilowatt module of sorts. So maybe a Tesla's got 50 kilowatt hours worth of capacity in it. Most of your daily driving that folks do is, you know, to work and home.

• 2:21:33Speaker 03

  So it's maybe 50 miles to and 50 miles from, 100 miles a day, right? And so if you've got a, an electric vehicle that has all the batteries already in it, but then you, you make the decision to buy a one kilowatt Casimir module, right? And you connect it to your car. That module will provide, over a 24-hour period, it will provide 24 kilowatt hours of capacity. And so in terms of the, the driving duty that I just talked to you about, right? You're not going to drain the battery enough where the Casimir cell couldn't just continue to recharge it. So in that particular instance, even though we, we might be a little bit farther away

• 2:22:17Speaker 03

  from, you know, being able to power a whole car, we, we might be able to find opportunities for early adopters where, hey, for 99% of how you might use your electric vehicle, you don't have to plug it in, right?

• 2:22:29Joe Rogan?

  So from where we are now with your current research and all this, these incredible ideas, what, what steps have to be taken in order to advance this stuff?

• 2:22:40Speaker 03

  Right, right. So the, the first step is trying to get to the power magnitude I just described, one and a half volts and 25 microamps. So we, we have chips, these chips right here, you know, they can achieve very high voltages, but then they relax to a certain steady state voltage over a long term, right? So they have, they have the ability to provide steady state power, but it's like 30 mil, 30 millivolts with a steady state current. And so it's the current that we're currently working on right now. We're trying to get the current up to that 25 microamp ability right now. And so that's the stuff that we're doing. You know, every month, we're trying to do another generation of chips to go through and work the material science and get that capacity to that level.

• 2:23:24Speaker 03

  So, and making chips is, that's tough. That is tough business. So, it's been quite the slog. You know, we've, we've been doing this since 2020. The first chips we worked on took us, you know, 18 months to make. And then we got the time down to 12 months, and then we got the time down to seven months. And then we got, you know, we got these guys down to, it's actually, this was a two-week sprint from the time we did the design to the time we got them in hand. But roughly, we're anticipating we can make these generations once a month. So, making chips is very different from, you know, how we view the rest, like this wooden table, right? You know, if you, if you think about making something, you think about drills and saws

• 2:24:06Speaker 03

  and cutting holes and putting bolts in and so forth. But when you talk about making chips, it's an entirely different approach to how you make things. You make things with, with light, and you make things with plasma, right? You know, this will be a good opportunity for me to use a little verbal description, and then you can grade me on how well I communicate this, right? So, how, you know, in, in concept, how you make something smaller than what you can see with your eyeballs. So, ordinarily, when we want to look at something very small, we use a microscope, right? So, we got this optical system, we look through, and then we look at something, maybe it's got a paramecium or whatever in it.

• 2:24:48Speaker 03

  Now, the, what we're looking at is very tiny, and we use optics to blow that up. And in some cases, instead of putting our eyes against the, the little viewports on the microscope, maybe we'll put an imager, a camera, on there, and we'll take, the camera will collect the image and put it on a big screen, a big LCD screen. Now, if you think about that in reverse, what if you, you know, like, let's say you're looking at, you're looking at our chips and you're seeing these squares and circles and tiny little different shapes and so forth, but it's projected on a big screen. Now imagine for a moment, instead, you go through in some CAD program and you draw squares and circles or whatever, maybe you draw a picture of Jamie's head, right? And then you go through

• 2:25:33Speaker 03

  and you take that, that, that digital file you just created and you, you kind of look at this whole process that I was talking about in reverse. And so instead of using a imager to collect the image, use a projector to project the image back down through the optics, right? Where now you project some shape you want to manifest on a chip, right? But you, you can't see it with, you could look at it with your eyes, but you couldn't see it, right? But you're using this projection system through the microscope in reverse to put the image down on the chip. So now the next thing you do is you take, let's say you got a silicon wafer, and then you go through and you, you apply something we call

• 2:26:14Speaker 03

  photoresist. It's like, like a really thick, almost like a honey type of consistent, little thinner than that, right? But you, you put some photoresist on the wafer and then you spin it at really high RPM and it spins that photoresist so that it's very thin. And you take that wafer with the photoresist and you expose it to the image you want to put onto it with ultraviolet light, right? And so that hardens part of that photoresist. And then you develop that wafer to remove all of the photoresist that was not exposed to the ultraviolet light. And then maybe you expose it to a plasma and you etch it. And so every place where there's no photoresist, it etches the surface. But where the, where

• 2:26:59Speaker 03

  the photoresist survived because you exposed it with your ultraviolet light, you now have an image. So you could look at that with a microscope again, and then you'd see, you know, Jamie's mug on the surface of the silicon wafer. And so in concept, that's how the idea of when you make a CPU, or you make memory, or you make any of this digital technology, that's, that's technically how it works. Are you old enough to remember microfiche?

• 2:27:29Joe Rogan?

  What is that? Oh, the little film?

• 2:27:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, the little acetate things in school that you put in, right?

• 2:27:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:27:35Speaker 03

  So that's another kind of illustration of it, but just not applied to a chip, right?

• 2:27:39Joe Rogan?

  Well, I would imagine the manufacturing of something like this is a spectacular undertaking that would require a long time to develop the kind of factories that you would need to do this kind of stuff at scale in the United States. And this is, this is an issue that we have that was really highlighted by the COVID pandemic, where we weren't able to get shipments of things and a lot of cars weren't for sale.

• 2:28:03Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:28:04Joe Rogan?

  Because they didn't have the chips to put in a lot of the new American vehicles.

• 2:28:08Speaker 03

  Or in some cases, they took functionality out because they couldn't get the ding dang chips.

• 2:28:13Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:28:13Speaker 03

  To go do what they wanted to go do. Yeah, this, this, yeah, I was really glad to see a lot of attention be brought to bear with, I think it was the Chips Act. And even Texas has taken a very strong stance on trying to, trying to attract some chip manufacturing capability here in Texas, right?

• 2:28:35Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, we're talking about the Samsung plant that they built here. But, but the Samsung plant kind of highlights the issues because they weren't able to achieve the tolerances that they required in large batches.

• 2:28:47Speaker 03

  I think, I think they'll eventually get there, right? This is, those are just illustrations of the fact it takes a while to get everything dialed in. Just like, you know, it took us 18 months to get our first chip and then now we're getting a two-week sprint, we can, we can make our chip. But it took five years to get to that capability, if you will. I think they'll get all that figured out. But in my mind, the other value proposition for chip manufacturing, right, is, to me, chip manufacturing is like the 21st century automobile manufacturing jobs, if you will. It seems like that could provide a great opportunity for, you know, people to get meaningful work that pays well, that makes a product that a lot of people need, right?

• 2:29:30Speaker 03

  And so I think in some ways, that's the, that's the upside to trying to.

• 2:29:36Speaker 03

  Focus on getting more chip manufacturing here in the States, right? So I just think that's a win. That's a win-win, right?

• 2:29:44Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, because the chip manufacturing, one of the things that Apple stated, they have apparently a big leap coming forward with the iPhone 17. And they think that they're going to have to manufacture these in China. I was reading Tim Cook talking about it because they're saying that China is the only nation that's capable of achieving what they're trying to put into these.

• 2:30:06Speaker 03

  Is it China or Taiwan?

• 2:30:08Joe Rogan?

  I believe, I don't know, I believe it's China.

• 2:30:10Speaker 03

  Because I think, I certainly, I don't know definitively either, right? But when I think of-

• 2:30:15Joe Rogan?

  Actually, maybe it's just manufacturing that's the issue, not the chips. But see if you could find what Tim Cook said about needing to develop the iPhone or manufacture the iPhone 17 because I think a lot of their stuff they do in India now. But they think this new one is going to be so sophisticated that they're going to have to have it made back in China again.

• 2:30:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, so when I think of cutting-edge chip capability, I think of TSMC-

• 2:30:39Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:30:40Speaker 03

  That is in Taiwan, right? And they've got those machines, the ASML machines that are- This is a very interesting thing, right? So the machines that help make some of those tiny chips that are inside the iPhone, they're made by this machine that's developed by a company called ASML over in the Netherlands. And you know, part of me thinks it's like, that's a very small brain trust of people, right, that are making machines that are kind of, you know, setting the pace for, you know, because I think about what happens if somebody, you know, a bus has an accident or something like that, right? Because it's just like such a small group of people that have this skill on how to make

• 2:31:25Speaker 03

  these tiny little features that are two or three nanometers. I mean, that's like, that's crazy small. So we're-

• 2:31:32Joe Rogan?

  What percentage of the population can do that?

• 2:31:34Speaker 03

  Right, there's not a lot. And two or three nanometers, it's like, that's, you know, if you were to put DNA on the table, right, and you calculated two or three nanometers, it'd be, it'd be as very, oh, here, let me give you, here's a better comparison. If you hold a marble in your hand- And you imagine that is one nanometer, right? It's just kind of a comparison error. So you have a marble in your hand, that's one nanometer. Well, how big is a meter? A meter is the size of the earth by comparison. So just, just to put a nanometer in mind, right? So we can all envision a meter, right? So that puts a nanometer to scale, right? And so they're, they're making things, lateral features that have this, you know, handful of nanometers in mind.

• 2:32:19Speaker 03

  Now, that said, I, I do think, I do think that is so crazy. I do think chips are reaching a limit in terms of what they can do for the lateral features. The next big chapter, I think for chips is they're going to go 3D. They're going to start making them, uh, they've got a bunch of efforts in place to try and figure out how to make, uh, chips much more, uh, 3D. Like especially when they may even include multiple different chips, right? That, that serve different purposes, if you will. You'll no longer just have the single flat chip that does this surface. There'll be a bunch of chips on top of one another that get integrated into a assembly. You already see it in this tire pressure monitor system. There's a little chip here on the back and it's actually a system of chips. There's a bunch of chips in that little silver piece on the end there.

• 2:33:01Speaker 03

  There's a microprocessor, there's a Bluetooth module, there's a pressure sensor, uh, and then there was, there's a receiver.

• 2:33:07Joe Rogan?

  Look how small that is.

• 2:33:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's nothing, right? So that, that little shiny silver piece, yeah, that shiny, that shiny silver piece, that is, it's not only just the pressure sensor, it's all the other, uh, support electronics. And everything else is just, you know, simple dumb stuff.

• 2:33:21Joe Rogan?

  And a big battery in comparison to everything else.

• 2:33:23Speaker 03

  And a big battery that has to last five years, right? And so that's, you know, that's why they, and it, and it, this is not, you don't take the lid off this thing. This is glued on, right? It's, it's a, it's a, when it's done, you just throw it away, right? So that's the current operating process, so.

• 2:33:39Joe Rogan?

  So crazy. Now, when you think about the current capabilities of AI and how it's expanding at a very rapid rate, do you think that that will assist us in being able to figure out new ways to accomplish these tasks?

• 2:33:54Speaker 03

  You know, I, I think, so when AI first came out, I, I tried it a few times and, um, I wasn't satisfied with, with, you know, the, the quality of what I was able to do with it. This is a number of years ago. Right, but you know, in the last, last 12 months, I've kind of gotten in the habit of using it much more in, in a lot of the different things that I do. And it certainly does bring a lot of value in certain, certain areas. And you know, the, a lot of people talk about artificial intelligence is going to kill us. Oh my gosh, it's going to kill us. Right? And, and I, I don't think it's artificial intelligence that's going to, you know, that's going to be a potential big problem. It's more a measure of artificial incompetence.

• 2:34:39Speaker 03

  Right? And so let me, let me unpack that. So I, I think AI is an amazing tool and it's only going to get more useful as we continue to move forward. And I use it every single day, right? In terms of different things that, that I explore. It's extremely useful. And there's times when you're interacting with it where you might even think to yourself, all right, come on, is there some dude actually typing on the other side of this screen? Cause it's like, it's joking with me for crying out loud.

• 2:35:03Joe Rogan?

  And it's instantaneous.

• 2:35:03Speaker 03

  Right? And it's instantaneous. Right? And so I think as human beings, we tend to anthropomorphize everything, right? And so I think in a lot of ways, we want to give it more credit than it is due, right? And so we, when we interact with it, we, we might think based on the quality of the interaction, oh my gosh, this, this stuff is amazing. This is artificial general intelligence. But then it'll go off and do something totally boneheaded and you'll even call it on it. And it'll say, no, I'm, I'm, I did this exactly right. And it's just like, and you know, from your own training, right? That whatever it offered up is, is quite, quite wrong, right? And so I keep, I keep waiting for somebody that, do you, do you remember

• 2:35:45Speaker 03

  the movie Doctor Strangelove from the sixties, right? And so the Stanley Kubrick thing and this movie of absurdity showing, you know, how incompetence in the government and the military leads to the destruction of, of the world, if you will. You know, it's like, we need a Stanley Kubrick equivalent today to, to do a, a movie called AI Bob, right? Where AI Bob, you know, accidentally takes out the world while trying to help, right? You know, and it just, I think it's one of those things where I think AI is an amazing tool. We need to find out more ways to use it. It's incredible. But I think we just need to remind ourselves, it's not quite as capable as we might think it is. And we need to be careful of that so that we don't.

• 2:36:29Speaker 03

  You know, put it in control of something in a certain way where because it has these other faults, right, it does something that's really unfortunate, right?

• 2:36:38Joe Rogan?

  So we have to make sure that it's reached a very high level of proficiency before it gets.

• 2:36:42Speaker 03

  Right, or just be careful about how we use it and never be afraid to question what it provides, right, because there's no question, it helps me be faster at a lot of stuff I want to do, right, but I have a lot of skills and talent that I use to filter whatever it's given me and I go, haha, no, that's totally wrong, right?

• 2:37:00Joe Rogan?

  But I wouldn't be able to do that. I'd just trust it and I'd build something that kills everybody. Yeah, that's.

• 2:37:07Speaker 03

  Dang it, I forgot to carry the two.

• 2:37:09Joe Rogan?

  Well, when you, when you think about the potential future versions of AI, that's where things get very interesting, because if you do get to a point where it achieves a much higher level of understanding of all the physical properties of the, of the universe and, and does really understand the quantum vacuum and does really understand how to utilize it.

• 2:37:27Speaker 03

  So I think, I think one of the things, because I have been thinking about this is, and, and I know a lot of other people are trying to figure out how to use AI to go through and help navigate on physics frontiers. You know, AI is trained on a bunch of existing data, right? And so in some ways, it is an, an enormous experiment in statistics. And so, so I, I would, I would wonder how, how much an AI system by itself could, could innovate new ideas. It certainly could recognize patterns.

• 2:38:06Joe Rogan?

  But once you institute sentience and then if, if it's possible at all to make it creative.

• 2:38:15Speaker 03

  That, that's where I, that's where I wonder what, great question, and I, I'm not an AI expert, so I'm, I'm going to tread very carefully here.

• 2:38:25Speaker 03

  When I think about how they train AI today, it is certainly a measure of statistics, right? And so when you talk about an AI agent being able to actually think in the way that you and I might consider thinking, I don't think anything that we have does that per se, right? You've just got a bunch of GPUs that are taking in input and then passing it through a matrix of all this stuff that's from training. And then so the statistics of what comes out, right, is a result of whatever training that was done. So it's not like, it's not like Leonardo da Vinci imagining where he's going to put his next

• 2:39:08Speaker 03

  brush stroke on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But certainly, it could, it could potentially, you know, take an image of the Sistine Chapel and mix it with an image of some other modern art or whatever and come up with some cool homogenization of things, right? And so forth. So I still think, I think we need to better understand what is consciousness, right, before we can really even do that.

• 2:39:34Joe Rogan?

  What do you think it is?

• 2:39:36Speaker 03

  Oh, that's, yeah, I

• 2:39:37Joe Rogan?

  I know you've thought about it. You think about everything.

• 2:39:40Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah, I don't know. It's a good question. I would, I would speculate, right? You know, maybe this comes down to the nature of the quantum field, the quantum vacuum. You know, I think there are other forms of radiation, scalar field fluctuations with the quantum field that are beyond electromagnetic, like the lights in this room, that's electromagnetic radiation. Scalar fluctuations would potentially be a whole nother realm of radiation that we currently don't have any sensors to detect, right? But maybe biology uses those types

• 2:40:20Speaker 03

  of things. And so there's, there are things inside cell structures called microtubules. I think Hal maybe even mentioned something about microtubules to you when he was here the other day. But cells have microtubule structures in them. And I think That may be connected to the idea of consciousness, although I don't have a well enough formulated answer to be able to defend anything. So I'm treading very carefully because this is not my area of expertise.

• 2:40:48Joe Rogan?

  But it's so fun to speculate.

• 2:40:49Speaker 03

  It is fun to speculate and I maybe we can maybe we can schedule another opportunity to come back and we can talk about consciousness, bring a couple of other folks that are more cognizant than me.

• 2:40:59Joe Rogan?

  I would love that. Yeah. You want to organize that?

• 2:41:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:41:02Joe Rogan?

  Do you know who you would call?

• 2:41:03Speaker 03

  I don't know yet. I'll think about, I'll have, I'll have, I'll have a think. I actually probably have a couple of other cool ideas for cool things we can, we can confab on. I think a lot of people would really enjoy learning and listening about.

• 2:41:13Joe Rogan?

  Well, that would be a fantastic collaboration with people that have theories about consciousness along with these theories, these quantum theories.

• 2:41:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:41:21Joe Rogan?

  Fascinating stuff.

• 2:41:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:41:23Joe Rogan?

  Harold, thank you so much.

• 2:41:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:41:25Joe Rogan?

  So interesting and I'm so happy that people like you are out there in the world working on this stuff, which I'm sure one day, you know, when people look at the past and say, boy, look at those cave people, look what they're doing. You know what I'm saying? Because like, like we would look at the Victorian people or we would look at people from thousands of years ago. I think they'll, they'll look back at this going, wow, they were, this is where it all started.

• 2:41:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This was the moment.

• 2:41:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. So let's definitely do that. Let's definitely have another visit and bring in some people that will explore consciousness together.

• 2:41:53Speaker 03

  Sounds good. I love it.

• 2:41:54Joe Rogan?

  Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

• 2:41:56Speaker 03

  Thank you, Joe, for having me.

• 2:41:57Joe Rogan?

  Bye, everybody.