Former NSA Director Breaks Silence on UFOs

Our American Alchemists this week are Dr. Haseltine and Dr. Gilbert. Shopify: Start your business for just $1/month at https://shopify.com/jesse. Sponsored by Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and 10% of all U. S. e-commerce. Factor: Head to https://factormeals.com/alchemy50off and use code alchemy50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year! Head to https://Americanalchemymerch.com to grab official American Alchemy merch and support the show directly. -------------------------- Support Our Other Projects Below! Grab Your American Alchemy Merch Here ➤ https://www.americanalchemymerch.com/ Join The American Alchemy Magazine Here ➤ https://americanalchemymagazine.substack.com/ Subscribe To Our Clips Channel (10 Minute Highlights!) ➤ https://www.youtube.com/@UC8ZKTXN9trt5dhixz6b6l6w -------------------------- JOIN OUR WHOP (Early/Ad Free Episodes) ➤ https://whop.com/jessemichels Instagram ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichelsofficial TikTok ➤ https://www.tiktok.com/@itsjessemichels X ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican Spotify ➤ https://tinyurl.com/jessemichelsspotify Clips Channel ➤ https://www.youtube.com/@JesseMichelsClips Apply For Jobs ➤ [email protected] Sponsor Inquiries ➤ [email protected] Media Inquiries ➤ [email protected] Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 03:25 - Interview Begins 04:31 - The New Science of UFOs 09:54 - Exo-Psychology 14:52 - Sponsor (Shopify) 16:20 - Noetics and Consciousness 21:52 - Time Travel and UFOs 32:13 - Sponsor (Factor Meals) 33:49 - The Nimitz and Plasma Spoofing 44:04 - "That's Funny" Moments 47:00 - Reverse Engineering Programs 51:31 - Laser-Propelled Discs 55:06 - Havana Syndrome 1:05:22 - UFOs at Nuclear Sites 1:16:27 - Stargate and Psychic Spying 1:25:36 - Exotic Propulsion 1:36:09 - Warp Drives 1:45:10 - The Shadow of Time 1:56:01 - Fiction Meets Reality 2:13:13 - Breakaway Defense Science 2:21:29 - Mind-Controlled Drones 2:26:05 - Net Assessment on UFOs 2:35:37 - Panspermia 2:42:54 - The Listening Cure 3:00:17 - AA Merch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPact.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Whenever you see something that doesn't fit what you know, a real scientist should get excited, not skeptical.

• 0:39Jesse Michels?

  My two guests today have credentials that are impossible to ignore.

• 0:46Jesse Michels?

  Dr. Eric Hazeltine was Director of Research for the National Security Agency. Basically, he was the tip of the spear on science and innovation for the US's most hardcore intelligence agency.

• 1:00Jesse Michels?

  Before that, he was an executive vice president at Walt Disney Imagineering. He's a neuroscientist, a futurist, and has over 70 patents to his name. He possibly has one of the most intriguing resumes of all time.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  When you look at all the many thousands of reports, and we've looked at all, and some I have guilty knowledge of from when I was inside the government. It's real, and it's something we do not understand.

• 1:25Jesse Michels?

  Dr. Chris Gilbert has an MD and PhD from one of France's top medical schools. She's worked with Doctors Without Borders across four different continents, and she's pioneered her own incredibly unique methods in holistic medicine.

• 1:39Speaker 03

  In our own body that we've studied so much, there are things we're discovering that we had no idea existed.

• 1:46Jesse Michels?

  She also happens to be Eric's wife. Together, they've co-authored several books, including "The New Science of UFOs: In the Shadow of Time", a book involving ancient archaeological objects with anomalous properties being systematically excavated by private corporations.

• 2:04Speaker 00

  This thing's a cover-up.

• 2:05Jesse Michels?

  So when I found out that a former NSA Director of Research, who is privy to just about every sensitive piece of intelligence in the United States, wrote a book about anomalous objects being recovered in the desert, I had to reach out and learn more. Do you guys have kind of a base case for what's going on?

• 2:25Speaker 01

  I think what we're seeing with these credible, real phenomena is something really bizarre and out there.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  We might all be Martians.

• 2:36Speaker 03

  What is to say that life doesn't exist 120 light-years away from us?

• 2:43Speaker 01

  I think it's almost certain that we evolved from building blocks that are extraterrestrial. There was some advanced civilization on Earth many hundreds of millions of years ago that discovered near-luminal travel.

• 3:00Jesse Michels?

  This whole interview is a fun game of cat and mouse. It's me basically trying to figure out whether Eric and Chris's fiction books were at all informed by what Eric saw behind the curtain.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  You can move something through the air where there's no engine on it at all. You're just pushing on it with photons.

• 3:15Jesse Michels?

  Did you do that at larger scale?

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:17Jesse Michels?

  Whoa. So without further ado, sit back, relax, and enjoy a mind-expanding conversation with a bunch of rabbit holes you won't want to climb out of with this week's American alchemists, Dr. Eric Hazeltine and Dr. Chris Gilbert. Ignition frequency five.

• 3:36Jesse Michels?

  How is this possible? Nothing too unusual about that.

• 3:43Jesse Michels?

  Their existence cannot longer be denied.

• 3:54Jesse Michels?

  Oh, man, this is a total honor. I feel very, as is often the case, but maybe especially today, intellectually underqualified to be in this room. Dr. Chris Gilbert, Dr. Eric Hazeltine, you are the former Director of Research at the NSA, the National Security Agency. And that role actually ended up... Up with you on an A and E history series, Alien Files reopen.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Having been at NSA and being one of their senior leaders, I find that highly unlikely.

• 4:24Jesse Michels?

  Which is fascinating. You guys co-authored a book about UFOs together, which I can't wait to get into. You also worked at Hughes Aircraft, Disney Imagineering, Dr. Chris Gilbert. You've done amazing work around the world as a physician, MD, PhD. And you guys have co-authored a few books together that I want to talk about those. You've independently offered, you know, a spy in Moscow station. And you guys have just an incredible background, both individually and together. So it's an honor to be with you today.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  It's a great honor to be here.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank you so much for having us.

• 5:00Jesse Michels?

  I wanted to talk about your book, The New Science of UFOs, because I think it's a really great kind of survey level overview of all of the possibilities. I think often in this space, there's a lot of kind of mushy brained thinking and, and you know, just almost people are over indexed on intuition. And you really kind of lay out all of the possibilities from spoofing techniques to manmade craft to, you know, genuine non-human intelligence. And then you even get into frameworks for thinking about the non-human intelligence. So, yeah, why don't, why don't we start there? What are the possibilities kind of high level when it comes to UFOs?

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Well, I'll start and then you can fill in where I miss things. First of all, a little context for the book. I spent years at the CIA after leaving NSA and ODNI, where I was basically the CTO of the US intelligence community, the whole thing. And I was an analyst for a particular target.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  And was trained in analytic tradecraft, which is basically the scientific method. And we call it the method of competing hypothesis. When we see a phenomenon or an event, we say, what are all the different hypotheses for what could be driving this? And then we go and we look for evidence that would support or contradict each of those. And at the end, we weigh it and come out with an assessment with the probability of what we think is the most likely of all of those with some confidence. And so, for example, in Iran, you have the Iran group at the different agencies doing that now saying, okay, we Iranians have a nuclear program.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  What is our best guess and at what probability about where they are in that program and what their intent is? Right? So that's an example. So with the UFOs, UAPs, we did the same. We said, okay, here are the reporting. What are all the different things it could be? And now let's examine them. So we have a matrix in there, which is a little bit geeky in that we present all of them that we surfaced. And then we evaluate the plus or minus, and at the end we come up with a conclusion. So we start with the observer themselves. When you look at a phenomena, you have to look at what's reporting it and how accurate and biased is the thing that's reporting it.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  So the human instrument as a neuroscientist and as a physician, we can both tell you the human instrument is highly flawed. Right? And so we look at things like optical illusions, emotional bias that make you see what you want to see, that make you see what you expect to see. We get into how your brain is wired to cut corners. And so we explore optical illusions or other kind of illusions. We explore atmospheric effects, some of which are just now only being discovered, like sprites at southern latitudes, things really weird, ball lightning, things like that. Plasma type effects.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  We explore the possibility, the mundane ones, like it's drones, balloons, things like that. We explore the possibility that it's of human origin, highly classified and super high tech. We explore the possibility that it's of non-human, but of earthly origin. I mean, we always assume if it's from Earth that it has to be human. Well, what we look at is old Sherlock Holmes thing. What isn't impossible?

• 8:54Speaker 01

  And we'll get into this more, but CIA, we used to have a saying in analysts that says, "Do not look for your keys under the lamppost."

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Right? Don't look only where you can see. So if you're not seeing something, it's probably because

• 9:15Speaker 01

  you don't know where else to look. So one thing we used to do is say,

• 9:22Speaker 01

  "What do we know or think we know? What can we see and not see? And if we're not finding the answer, it must be the opposite of what we can see. It's in the negative space." Right? So I was once involved in the hunt for a very senior Islamic terrorist, whose name I will not mention. And I was employed by CIA when I was at NSA. And I went to them and I said, "You haven't found this guy. Where do you expect him to be and where do you not expect him? Where do you want him to be and where do you not want him to be?" And I said, "Look for him where you least expect and least want him to be, because that's where he's going to be by definition."

• 10:05Jesse Michels?

  Well, my mind is now going to like dark matter or concepts like dark chemistry, parts of the universe that are honestly the majority of the universe, which isn't, you know, visible and doesn't seem to interact with light. And so I don't know if you guys have considered that as a possibility.

• 10:24Speaker 03

  We're talking also in the book about exopsychology, which we kind of imagine what would that be? An extraterrestrial, how, what would that be? So it could be made of dark matter and feeding on dark energy. It could be, and we, we, we said that it could be anything that we could not think about. So what are we not thinking about? What could we not predict? So we could not predict that they might not derive from animal forms, that they might not derive from plants, that they, they don't

• 11:03Speaker 03

  Require food or water to survive, maybe that maybe they are immortal, that maybe they don't sexually reproduce. We imagine that they sexually reproduce, maybe not. Uh, maybe they have no written or spoken language. Maybe they don't emotionally bond with others. Maybe they are not a social species. Uh, maybe they are not curious. May we we think they are aggressive, maybe they are not aggressive. What if they have all the resources they can ever need? Uh, what if there is there are a collection of single cells that originate, develop and live in space? And not on the planet. Maybe we're just surrounded in space, but we don't see them.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  Um, and and what if they use a type of propulsion that is unknown to us?

• 11:52Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  Uh, that we think about every possible ways of of of moving. But there is, I'm sure there is ways that we have no idea exist. And what are they? Um, what if they don't derive directly from biology? And they're hyper advanced digital AIs. I mean, we're we're trying to think about all the the elements that are completely out of the box. That nobody could think about, that nobody can even imagine, that our brain could not even compute.

• 12:27Jesse Michels?

  And then you have to think, you know, we discovered bacteria as late as the 19th century. And uh, Occam's razor is it's not zero or one thing. It's, you know, zero or a whole host of we're swimming in in life that might be more advanced than us.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  You never know it.

• 12:46Jesse Michels?

  You never know it.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. The way I think of it is we've all seen those cartoons where the coyote goes through a door. And you see the silhouette, you know, where he went through the door. And so you see where he went through, and that's the positive space. The negative space is the door. We tend to always focus on the positive space, which in human terms is in the intelligence world, we call this mirroring. We look at a target and say, they must be like us. Therefore, if they're doing X, it's for motivation Y. So what Dr. Gilbert just said is we did the opposite of that. We said, let's take everything that humans are and assume that extraterrestrials are none of those.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  They're the opposite because we would never think to look there. And we never think to understand the motivation. So for example, um, let's take the Tic Tacs. Suppose the Tic Tacs are driven by an extraterrestrial species that are unlike us in every possible way. And the way she just described.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  How then would you explain what they're doing? You wouldn't explain it with human motivations.

• 13:58Jesse Michels?

  No.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  You'd explain it with anti motivations. And when you do that, it's freeing. It's kind of like in that movie Pirates of the Caribbean. Someone says to Captain Barbosa, when they're looking for Captain Jack, and they say, Captain, we're lost. And he goes, I, you have to get lost to find something that can't be found.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  And that's deep. That is really deep. And that's why, like I say, in the intelligence world, when we're doing our job right, we understand our own limitations. And one very productive place to look is where we know we're blind. And then to purposely try to look there.

• 14:38Jesse Michels?

  Oh, that's so fascinating. Something I think about a lot with this topic is we think about mining resources. You know, we have this whole conflict with China around rare earth refinement, for example. What if their resources, like I think about what's most interesting about human beings? And it's probably not the material world that we're in. Maybe it's our, our consciousness. And so is there something around our consciousness or even our emotions or our thoughts that are more interesting to these beings than just, you know, they're here for gold or copper or whatever, because they're, you know, maybe their atmosphere is burning up. They need reflective material.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Well, now you're getting into a really interesting field called noetics.

• 15:22Jesse Michels?

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• 16:49Speaker 01

  Well, now you're getting into a really interesting field called noetics. And it's a fringe field of neuroscience and biology where, for example, they believe that consciousness is a property of the universe, not of us, and that each of our brains is like a radio receiver that's tuned in to conscious cosmic consciousness.

• 17:14Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  And that this is kind of the idea where the soul comes from, that consciousness isn't tied to our bodies.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Any more than radio waves are tied to a radio.

• 17:26Jesse Michels?

  I believe that because you have the binding problem, for example, in neuroscience, which is this classic problem of you have all these disparate pathways. You have, you know, Wernicke's area for, you know, comprehension and you have Broca's area for speech, but they're all disparate. And then we see this perceptually seamless kind of movie and there's this question of how that is. And I think about a radio and if you have the radio's components, you take away the battery, you take away, you know, the capacitor, you take away the antenna, any one of those might break the radio and the music might stop playing, but none of those productively explain why it's playing of all these four seasons. You need to know the frequency it's tapping into.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I'm not saying I'm a fan of noetics, but what I'm saying is that it's so interesting that these ideas show up throughout human history in terms of like, if you look at the Vedic scriptures in the Hindu and the whole notion of transcendentalism, like the deity, whatever it is, exists everywhere in all things simultaneously. And that led to transcendentalism and you could look at Jung, who believed in the collective unconscious as an example of the human instantiation of that. So it is interesting when you see these ideas. And I'd just like to make a comment and then turn it over to Dr. Gilbert.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  If you look at our language, we say things like, in our heart, I believe, in my gut, I believe, right? Or I have this feeling. Those were metaphorical when we thought, we thought they were metaphorical. What we now know is they may not be metaphorical, that we have more neurons in our gut than the cerebral cortex of a monkey and they're pretty damn smart. We have a huge number of neurons in our heart. And now we know that cells themselves can have perception and learning, and we have gut bacteria, which are this whole other hyper-complex organism. And so I think this is the subject of the Listening Cure,

• 19:30Speaker 01

  where Dr. Gilbert has come up with this idea of listen to your body, because all of these different entities that we call our body actually are not metaphorical.

• 19:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, so The Listening Cure is one of our books that talks about how our body has a mind of its own, how each organ has a mind of its own, how each cell in the liver, each cell in the gut, can have a mind of its own and a purpose, and maybe feelings and connection to the brain, and vice versa. But there are so many things that we don't know that we think we know. So how is it that we can believe we know everything about space, about the planets, when even in the body, in our own body that we've studied so much,

• 20:23Speaker 03

  there are things we're discovering that we had no idea existed? I'm going to give you an example. Like Stanford University researcher did a survey of DNA fragments circulating in the blood. And it suggests that microbes living within us are vastly more diverse than previously thought. In fact, 99% of our DNA has never been seen before. And then there is an entirely new class of life that has been found in the human digestive system called obelisks. And there are microscopic rods made of RNA that we had no idea existed, and we have no idea what they do.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  So, and also in the brain. In the brain, I mean, we think you talk about the Broca area, the Verneke area. We don't think they're isolated. They're, I think, we think they're working in conjunction of a multitude of other kinds of cells that are necessary. For their function, but we don't know exactly which ones and and we're studying this now. We we think that everything is related, every single item is related to other items in ways that we cannot comprehend yet. And and that's the relationship and and everything in the universe might be, that's my assumption, that's my belief,

• 21:49Speaker 03

  that everything in the universe is probably also related, interconnected.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:54Speaker 03

  Um, and and there's so much we don't know. And it is so fascinating to imagine and to to discover what we don't know. We probably know maybe one percent of what exists in the world. We think we know so much, but we know so little and discovering everything is like, oh, it's wonderful. Even in in the in in the human body, it's wonderful and but outside Earth, oh, my God.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  So much.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I want to circle back to your original question of which hypotheses did we surface in the new science of UFO? Because we didn't finish going into them. We talk about erasing the difference between space and time because Einstein didn't think of them as separate. Time is just another dimension is valid as up, down, left, right, and so forth. And it's interesting in all of his field equations, time does not have to move in one direction. The laws of thermodynamics say it does, but there is no physical equation that says it has to.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  And we have some really weird laboratory phenomena and theoretical phenomena that suggests that time. For example, there's this experiment called the quantum eraser. It's a famous three slit experiment and where you can do something in the present that influences which way a particle or wave behaved in the past.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  And then you have the whole business of non-locality, which has something in one part of the universe instantly, or nearly instantly, we now know there's a speed to it, but it's faster than the speed of light, affects something on the other side. And then we have the whole area of quantum neuroscience, where is entanglement between quantum states in one person's brain, or one part of the brain, entangled in others in ways that affect or influence? You know, so what we do is, let's take time.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Everyone assumes that if they're non-humans coming in UFOs, that it must be from outside Earth. And that may be true, but what if it weren't true? Let's, let's start with that fork and say, what happens if these things that we're seeing are from Earth? But either from the past, present, or future? You say, well, time travel backwards is impossible. Well, in our current framework, most physicists would say that. And yet, there are these weird phenomena that we talk about in the book, like frame dragging, where if you have a black hole that's spinning really fast, a Schwarzschild black hole, that's spinning really fast. The black hole itself isn't just spinning, it's spinning spacetime with it.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Right? And so if you were orbiting outside the event horizon of a spinning black hole, there is this thing called the closed time-like curve, where when you started the orbit and you finished it, you'd end up at the same place in time. So if you end up where you started, you went back in time. The math says that is theoretically not impossible. And there's a distinction. And so you're going to hear this throughout our discussion of what we like to explore is the not impossible. Because we think that's where the answers are. So to get back to this time thing, one of the things we explore is the possibility that there was some advanced civilization on Earth

• 25:31Speaker 01

  many hundreds of millions of years ago, whose evidence has been covered up by the relentless reshaping of the surface of the planet with tectonic and so forth.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Various environmental things had happened that we wouldn't necessarily see evidence of it. And they-

• 25:51Jesse Michels?

  You'd likely not, almost.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Unlikely, given, depending on where it was and so forth. The earth's crust has folded over on itself and got pushed under and subducted and blah, blah, blah. And so what if there were an ancient species that discovered near luminal travel, speed of light, or even faster, and we can get into that later, you know, what are the possibilities for faster-than-light travel that aren't impossible? And what, where that takes you is this civilization could have zipped out and to them only spent a few years in space and come back a few hundred million years later.

• 26:27Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Right?

• 26:28Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  That could be what we're seeing. It's, is it likely? No. But is it impossible? We can't say.

• 26:34Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  As she said, we know so little. To say that something's impossible is somewhat wrong. And then again, when you look at the future, right? And then you say, well, what about the present? There's some obvious mundane things like, okay, the Chinese or the Russians have cool stuff we don't understand, which is true. They do. But there are other more exotic, really exotic, like, you know, the multi-worlds hypothesis, that there are parallel quantum realms that are splitting off all the time. And in some of those, could there be some weird things happening? That one gets a little dicey, I think. But, but I think that the more important thing is to break out of the chains of expectation

• 27:19Speaker 01

  and what we know. And just be humble and say, there's so much we don't know. Don't ever rule out something unless you have really hard laboratory proof.

• 27:29Jesse Michels?

  I love that. And I think if at any point in history you were to see, you know, a repeated anomaly with an abundance of anecdotal evidence, but it didn't comport with the physics of the time. You'd get all these people saying, this can't be true because of physics. And those people would be wrong. And the people just saying, we gotta follow the evidence and look at the anomaly itself would end up being vindicated. And there'd be some new theory that would come to explain the anomaly. And per the kind of anthropocentric kind of bias and the extraterrestrial bias, you know, versus time travel. If you were in, you know, kind of North Sentinel Island, which is this remote island

• 28:11Jesse Michels?

  that's totally uncontacted, that's, you know, technically part of India, but, you know, has never been contacted outside of a few missionaries where I believe, you know, they've been trying to evangelize Christianity. You know, these missionaries, you know, I think in certain cases have met tragic ends. They go and, you know, they get speared or something or, you know, shot with a bow and arrow. And you always, I wonder, you know, do the North Sentinelis have legends of aliens coming and contacting them, when in fact, it's just, you know, human beings nearby. And so that

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:46Jesse Michels?

  Just cuts to this perceptual bias. And to the time travel thing, Kurt Godel had this, you know, model for time travel. And then Frank Tipler, who is a contemporary of Wheeler and a physicist, shrunk down the Godel time travel model. And it was, he had his thing called the Tipler disc. And it's a flying saucer. So I find that fascinating, too.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, well, I think the, the main point we want to make is that when we want to study something, the first thing you study is the thing that self is studying it. Meaning us. To look at that instrument and be very clear about its limitations and its strengths. So that you are more tempered in the conclusions that you reach. If you say, this instrument isn't seeing something, could be interpreted as the thing isn't there, or the instrument can't see it. And there's too little of that kind of thinking. And I'll just give you an example.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Hawking radiation. Okay, Hawking radiation, we believe, is due to particle antiparticle pairs popping out of the void, whatever that is, kind of the vacuum quantum field that's seething with energy. There is no such thing as nothing, according to modern cosmology. And these particle antiparticle pairs normally pop out of the void, whatever that is, recombined, where the matter antimatter completely annihilate, leaving some residual energy, which is one of the theories of dark energy that's pushing the universe apart. And if these particle antiparticle pairs pop out of nothingness on opposite sides of

• 30:32Speaker 01

  the event horizon,

• 30:35Speaker 01

  some of the energy escapes, which is why there is a glow or Hawking radiation around a black hole. And why they think maybe black holes evaporate over time.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  And it also solves some loss of information paradoxes around black holes, where physics says you can't create or destroy information in the physics sense. And maybe this is how that's conserved. And through entanglement, there are things that go out. Well, the point I'm trying to get to is, let's suppose that we live in an n-dimensional universe, four, that we can see, but there are many more. So imagine the analogy of a three-dimensional universe interacting with someone who only lives in two dimensions. So if all we saw was two dimensions, everything would be in a flat plane. There would be lines, right? So let's say I'm a three-dimensional person, and I have the surface of the water, which is two dimensions.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  And I put my five fingers, well, four fingers and one thumb through it. The two-dimensional being is going to experience me as five circles. Because that's where I intersect its reality. So when you look at these quantum things popping in and out, that could be something as simple as if we were a plane

• 32:24Speaker 01

  and there was something circling that hit us every now and then, we would see it pop in and pop out.

• 32:28Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  But it's only because we don't see the three dimensional reality. We only see the two dimensional reality of something popping in and popping out. And so that is where if we relax the assumption that there are four dimensions, whatever dimension is, and there are more, a lot of things now might make sense. Like something moving in impossible ways. Yes, in three dimensions or four, that could be impossible. But in five or six or seven, it could be totally possible. And that's why we really have to open up our minds when we look at UFOs.

• 33:05Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  And say, it makes no sense in our framework. And that to me says our framework is wrong.

• 33:13Jesse Michels?

  We've talked a bit about longevity and life extension on this show. Extending your telomeres, metabolic optimization. And the through line is always the same. Most of what determines how long you live comes down to really basic stuff, not these more exotic treatments. I think about that sometimes when I realize it's 10:00 PM and I haven't eaten all day because I was deep in prep for the next episode, which is kind of the story of my life since I moved to Austin. Occasionally I'll be so deep in work that I'll forget to eat. And then I end up demolishing whatever's closest at midnight. Guys, this solution is amazing. It's a game changer for anyone who's busy. Meals show up ready to go. You heat them up in two minutes and they're actually made with real food.

• 33:56Jesse Michels?

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• 34:18Jesse Michels?

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• 34:39Speaker 01

  Our framework is wrong. We're seeing something real. We don't understand it, so we better start questioning our whole understanding of reality.

• 34:49Jesse Michels?

  There's a really cool professor named James Madden, who wrote a book called Unidentified Hyper Objects. And hyperobject is a platonic idea of, you know, objects that exist in higher dimensional space like tesseract. And you would just see kind of the shadow of these tesseract. And if, you know, you take this pen, you put it through, you know, 2D paper, all you see is a disk. And so I wonder, you know, in his model, it's like these objects show up in order to almost break your priors specifically. Like there is this, this, the wow factor that is on the human side is the intended effect. And the sort of, there is some sort of like almost intermittent reinforcement or conditioning

• 35:33Jesse Michels?

  going on where it's there. It appears it, uh, you know, excites you and then you keep going or something. And it's, it's this sort of synchronistic thing and it's impossible to, um, you know, kind of separate the observed and the observer, which we, you obviously would do in traditional science.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it's fascinating about that. And it gets back to something Dr. Gilbert was saying about the motivations. What if, I, I told you before the, we started, I was a therapist and as therapists, we try never to tell a patient anything. We need them to discover it on themselves or they won't quote, get it in their gut. People only understand that which they themselves discover. You can't tell people anything. There's this great book called, If You See the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him. No one can tell you anything. You have to discover it for yourself. So what if extraterrestrials are here to teach us? This is their mission. They want to bring intelligent life in the universe up to a kind of a standard

• 36:32Speaker 01

  level so we can join a galactic federation, or maybe they just are altruistic missionaries or something. And these events are anomalies that they keep introducing to say, hey, pay attention, there's something over here that tells you you're not looking at things right.

• 36:48Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Like, maybe there are N-dimensions. And we're going to keep hitting you with these things until someone says, hmm, maybe this is telling us about our own ignorance on purpose.

• 36:58Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  So, I mean, I'm not saying that's a case, but that's the kind of thing that we would never normally think about because we wouldn't behave that way.

• 37:07Jesse Michels?

  It's like in Star Trek, the prime directive, you can't kind of openly commune unless, you know, if you're pre-warp drive or not up to a certain consciousness level or whatever. And you might use these tactics, maybe it's like cellular automata or something where it's like, you know, this kind of biological network and you're hitting a little node with a little wow factor, they tell their friends, you know, and then it's sort of, you're influencing the teleology of the entire kind of, you know, Petri dish, you know, with these little appearances.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  Well, it's funny, we'll get into this later when we talk about the shadow of time, but we talked about a hyper-intelligent entity who has learned the hard way to have a very light touch. Because the universe is very complicated and the slightest thing you do here could have a huge effect there.

• 37:55Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  And so this creature realizes that.

• 38:00Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  And kind of works within the system to cause something they want to happen. And so there is some of that in our book, but I think that, again, just to kind of summarize the new science of UFOs, what we try to do in there is look into the negative space.

• 38:19Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  And to take people at a place they've never been before, and also to expose people not to the James Bond kind of side of the spy business, but the analytic. Academic kind of intellectual side of it, which is okay, we have spies that collecting information, but then how do we make sense of it? And when you look at intelligence failures, such as nine 11 Pearl Harbor and so forth, with one exception, which is we missed the Indian nuclear program. That was a failure of collection. We just didn't have the data. But in every other case, we've had the information. We just didn't know what was staring us in the face.

• 38:58Jesse Michels?

  That's what I mean. To me, that's why this whole idea of disclosure, I don't know if you saw this, but the White House just registered aliens.gov, which I found to be pretty funny. I don't know if you guys have a take there, but this whole idea of disclosure is kind of a misnomer to me because I think this space, there's a ton of data, there's a ton of asymmetric data on the government side, but the sense making is totally lacking. And so you have all these file releases going on now with JFK and MLK and Epstein and stuff, but nobody, it's like finding a needle in a haystack and nobody knows how to make sense of what's going on. To me, if you can't make sense of those things, which are like, you know, conventional prosaic political things, good luck with UFOs.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Well, I think AI is going to help that.

• 39:44Jesse Michels?

  True.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  I will tell you that the biggest problem in the intelligence world is not collecting. It's understanding what you've collected.

• 39:52Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  And, you know, there's so many reasons for that. There's the volume, velocity and variety of information goes up exponentially every day. Right? There's a lot more information out there.

• 40:03Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  And then, yeah, so the real frontier in intelligence is to understand.

• 40:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, except the problem with AI is that AI is trained by humans. So if, if any AI is trained by humans to detect one or two things, it's not going to see the thing called X that will appear out of nowhere.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 40:28Speaker 03

  So it will miss it also.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 40:30Jesse Michels?

  Yes. Yeah. If that low sample size, an AI classifier is going to mistake something, then at high sample size, it's still going to mistake it. And you need some sort of human supervised learning component in the loop to actually have good signal on the anomalies that are correct. And then you train up the, the model or something.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. But a good intelligence analyst will be humble and look outside the lamppost. In other words, be aware of their own biases. There's this great book called The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis by Richard Hoyer's. All analysts are taught to read it. It's part of our training. And it's to look at our own instrument. And he talks about all the different biases, confirmation bias, you know, and so forth. And it's true that AI is just, you know, it's like a Ferrari that'll go now a million miles an hour instead of 200 miles an hour, but it's still a Ferrari.

• 41:26Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  You know, it's not going to go into the air.

• 41:29Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  Or go below the water.

• 41:30Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. And there are things like, you mentioned time. Time to me is so interesting because it's like the, you know, there's a David Foster Wallace speech, and it's like these goldfish talking to each other. And they're trying to conceptualize water, but water is the medium in which they swim. And that feels like time in many ways. It's the most used noun in the English language. And yet, it's always defined with respect to something else. So macroscopically, the movement of bodies, and then microscopically, you know, oscillations on an electromagnetic wave. And you get into things like, you know, Einstein, you know, Einstein's equations, or even Maxwell's equations, I believe, work the same way forwards as they do backwards.

• 42:15Jesse Michels?

  And, you know, you have time treated as a formal axiom, or as a classical axiom, rather, in Schrodinger's equation. And so it's, but, but, but, but there's all sorts of possible time weirdness in certain quantum interpretations, obviously of temporal non-locality. And so it is, that seems like a very interesting foray into studying.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:36Jesse Michels?

  The UFO stuff.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, there is, for example, one minority theory that the Big Bang.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Spawned a matter universe, which went one direction in time and a simultaneous equal one, an antimatter universe going in the other direction in time.

• 42:55Jesse Michels?

  Is this a sakharov?

• 42:57Speaker 01

  I don't know who is, I just remember reading that and there are other theories. We live inside this huge, super massive black hole. And there's some weird paradoxes, like the more massive the black hole, the less likely tidal forces will stretch you apart. The math is very complicated, but that that's true. So it could be that what we call the universe is just what we see inside this big black hole. And how would we know? Right? I mean, I think that at the end of the day, if we ever know the truth, which I don't think we will.

• 43:26Jesse Michels?

  You don't?

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Well, no, this is a conversation I had with Marvin Minsky.

• 43:29Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  And I said, Marvin, are we as humans?

• 43:32Jesse Michels?

  For the audience, by the way, Marvin Minsky is kind of the godfather of modern artificial intelligence.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Right, MIT.

• 43:37Jesse Michels?

  MIT.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  And I knew him quite well and I love kind of BSing with him and, you know, kind of like you did in the dorm, you know, you're a freshman, like, oh, man, this thing's all connected, everything. Well, I said, Marvin, are humans either collectively or individually capable of understanding nature in its entirety? And he goes, of course not. I'll give you an example. My cat over there is the smartest cat I know, or have even ever heard of. It is a genius cat. I'll never teach it French.

• 44:10Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  And it turns out that was wrong too, because we now know that some cats can understand about 400 words of a language. But, but the point is that it's hubris to think that at whatever level of intelligence we've achieved is enough to understand nature.

• 44:29Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  Right?

• 44:30Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  Well, it's like, you know, whales and dolphins and elephants and parrots are like way smarter than we ever thought they were, crows. You know, a crow will remember your face for two decades and come after you if you pissed it off.

• 44:45Jesse Michels?

  That's wild.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Right? I mean, they're, animals are way smarter than we think they are. But do we really think we can explain partial differential equations to a parrot? Maybe, maybe not, probably not.

• 44:55Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  And so it stands to reason that there's way more to be known than our brains could ever comprehend. And to me, that's the exciting thing about UAPs and UFOs. It's, it's nature's way of reminding us how little we know. And Isaac Asimov said, "Science doesn't proceed with eureka, like, oh, we get this great insight." It proceeds with, "That's funny."

• 45:24Speaker 01

  You know, um, cause that's funny means, hmm, that makes no sense compared to what I think I know. And whenever you see something that doesn't fit what you know, a real scientist should get excited.

• 45:35Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Not skeptical.

• 45:37Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  But as Max Planck said, "Science precedes one funeral at a time."

• 45:42Jesse Michels?

  Right, right.

• 45:44Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 45:44Jesse Michels?

  Well, accepting that caveat around kind of having epistemic humility, you guys have done this amazing survey level overview. Do you guys have kind of a base case for what's going on, even if it's a soup of things?

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Well, yes and no. Yes, in that we believe when you look at all the many thousands of reports, and we've looked at all, and some I have guilty knowledge of from when I was inside the government.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  There is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction, uh, maybe a few dozen out of all the many tens or hundreds of thousands, where I feel confident saying, there's something real there. It's not an artifact of who observed it, of the instrument, of some mistake. It's real and it's something we do not understand. Right. And so that to me is why we are so passionate about this because as scientists that excites us. We are not threatened by it. We are not repelled by it. We are drawn to it. And so I guess I shouldn't say this, but you can comment for yourself, but I'm kind of on a

• 46:54Speaker 01

  mission to get serious scientists to take a look at this because right now it's very hard because there's the giggle factor. There's the, oh, UFO alien, little green man. And so really the world's best scientist, with a few exceptions like Levy and Harvard and places like that.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  They're staying away from it because it's a career killer.

• 47:17Jesse Michels?

  That's what it seems like. And then simultaneously you have, you know, you obviously were as high up as it gets in the US government when it came to to science. You were kind of the CTO of the country. And then you have this movie. I don't know if you've seen this, The Age of Disclosure, where you have guys like Jim Semivan, you know, high up at the CIA or Chris Mellon, who is Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, you know, also cleared do a lot of stuff. And they're saying, we have a program that's like reverse engineering this stuff. What do you guys think there? Do you think that's legit?

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Well, I gotta be careful what I say here. I was, I had access to a whole lot of stuff.

• 47:59Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  I never saw that.

• 48:00Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  I never saw anything like that. I, we have this thing. We say, yo, explain yo.

• 48:06Speaker 03

  It's maybe yes, maybe no, yo.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, when presented, we call it the power of yo.

• 48:14Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  When presented with something, don't say yes, don't say no, say yo.

• 48:18Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Maybe yes, maybe no. Keep an open mind.

• 48:22Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  And so I don't have any illusions. It's just because I should have known everything that I did. I know for a fact that people hide things.

• 48:31Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  You know, and so the fact that I didn't know it doesn't mean it wasn't there.

• 48:35Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  You see, this is a fascinating thing. Your average layperson, when they look at the government saying, we're not going to release this UFO thing, thinks, ah, because they don't want us to know about aliens. But they don't think about other motivations. I'll give you one. Let's say we have sensors of a certain kind that are way better than we want anyone to know they are. Right, because we don't want the adversary to know, oh, we can see X, Y, or Z. That's called sources and methods. And in the intelligence world, that's what we protect more than anything. We can't let the adversary know what we know we can know. And so I have no doubt that some of the reluctance to release some of this stuff, it was captured by a collection system that we don't want people to know we have.

• 49:20Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  That can see farther, longer into wavelengths that they didn't know that we could and so forth. And I think some of the data captures have been through those kinds of systems. And that just to reveal that can reveal the capability that we have. And so I feel quite certain that there's some of that going on.

• 49:39Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, no, I mean, that makes total sense. You mentioned also Navy patents around laser.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. Yeah, well, this is interesting because in looking at the possibilities,

• 49:53Speaker 01

  I just start from first principles of physics. If something is moving really, really fast with a super acceleration, the most fundamental equation in physics is F equals ma. Force equals mass times acceleration. Right? And so if you look at an extraordinary acceleration, there are two ways to look at it. There's an unbelievable force or there's very low mass. Or both. And you say, well, what could do that? Well, when I was at Disney, we were developing electronic fireworks. And the way we did it is we had a Q switch neodymium YAG laser that we focused to a spot in the atmosphere.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  And we put so much energy there that we ionized the air and created ball lightning. Okay. And then we moved it around with mirrors and lenses so that we created voxels in open space. And we could move those around like fireworks or like anything else. Okay, those little plasmas reflect RF energy and give off tremendous heat and obviously a visual signature. So I thought, well, that has essentially zero mass. If I were going to fake it on purpose, and that is, by the way, one of the things we look at in the book, if someone was consciously going about faking something to make you think there was a UFO.

• 51:17Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  For whatever reason, like the Russians do this all the time. They call it maskirovka. They make us think they can do things that we never thought they could do to deter us.

• 51:26Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Right? And so I asked, this is what I used to do at Disney, fake things. And I talked to this guy Cliff Wong, who was the world's expert on drones. And I said, if you wanted to fake X, Y, or Z, how would you do it? And so he told me, he said, well, what I do is I would have a big, a huge balloon here that was towed by a little teeny drone, and you'd think it was this big orb, when in fact it wasn't. Right? So we get into all the ways of fake, but getting back to the plasma, I said, these glowing orbs could be free, free space plasmas that are being directed by a laser.

• 52:02Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Well, it turned out there's a Navy patent to do exactly that, to draw things in the shape of an airplane to fool missiles.

• 52:09Jesse Michels?

  And it would be, it would look like it's accelerating at, you know,

• 52:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:13Jesse Michels?

  Crazy G's and...

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it would, it would do everything that these orbs are doing.

• 52:19Jesse Michels?

  Seems like it's breaking conservation momentum, but it's just...

• 52:21Speaker 01

  It's not. It has zero mass.

• 52:23Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  If something is moving in a way that no mass could, maybe it doesn't have any mass.

• 52:28Jesse Michels?

  Maybe it doesn't have mass. Maybe that's the way to look at it.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:31Jesse Michels?

  Well, if you were to look at, let's say, the Nimitz 2004 case, which I know you guys are pretty familiar with.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  And the Roosevelt and Omaha, and yeah, yeah.

• 52:38Jesse Michels?

  Exactly. Yeah, 2015. So in 2004, you have, you know, Nimitz off the coast of San Diego, you have Sole Carrier Strike Group, you have radar, you have, you know, eyewitness observation, and then you have thermal imaging that's been released, this forward-looking infrared.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  And CCTV also.

• 52:57Jesse Michels?

  And CCTV. And so would this sort of plasma ball configuration be able to account for all of that?

• 53:04Speaker 01

  Yes, it would from a kinematic point of view, but the visuals don't line up. Those were Tic Tacs. And the plasmas... Actually can look like a Tic Tac because they're not actual balls normally the way you do them unless you really are good with

• 53:25Speaker 01

  adaptive optics. But generally what happens with these plasmas, it's a laser beam coming to a focus.

• 53:31Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  And what happens is instead of just a ball, you tend to get the actual caustic of the energy coming in like this. So you'll see kind of a rope of energy like this. And that could look like a Tic Tac. And then when you take into account atmospheric scattering and stuff, I would say possibly. It wouldn't be my first hypothesis. Cause they define it. They, it looks like it's, you know, made of white plastic or something.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  Under normal conditions, these plasmas wouldn't look that way.

• 54:02Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  But they also are louder than hell. In fact, when Mike Eisner, the CEO of Disney, I first showed him these things. He said, oh, we're not going to do this. It's really impressive, but we're not doing this. And I said, why? He said, Eric, there's something profoundly disturbing about the air over your head catching fire. And yeah, we like to stimulate our guests, but we don't want them running screaming out of the building. And it's really loud. It's really loud because it creates sonic booms. You know, and so, uh, you know, it's, it's part of it. But what I do, what we do in the book is

• 54:39Jesse Michels?

  But that sounds like a pretty good capability for a, like a Psyop or something.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Well, it is.

• 54:43Jesse Michels?

  If you want to do something on foreign land, you know, ace in the old tech or whatever, you, you, you know, fire in the sky and, you know, some plasma projection balls everywhere and things like that.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  That's right. I mean, um, let's get back to the faking theory. Someone isn't doing it and you're noticing it.

• 55:02Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  They're doing it on purpose to mess with your head. And the Russians in particular really do a lot of this.

• 55:08Jesse Michels?

  Do they?

• 55:09Speaker 01

  And because

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Patton said it, weapons change, but man who uses them changes not at all. To defeat an enemy, you don't defeat their weapons. You defeat their brain and their heart. You erode their will to fight. The Russians know this, they don't have the resources we do. So one of the things they do is make us think they can do things that make us think twice about messing with them. And so it is in, I'm not saying they're doing this. I'm saying it would be consistent with their modus operandi to be messing with our heads. And by the way, when it comes to directed energy, there's no one better in the world than the Russians. You know, Bazov and the laser, you could say they invented it, you know, and they are really good at directed energy. I mean, that's what Havana syndrome is all about. Directed energy.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  So I think it's entirely possible that some of these phenomena are a foreign actor deliberately messing with our head.

• 56:05Jesse Michels?

  Interesting. Yeah, there's, um, I think it's 1976, Salt Talks. And it's Kissinger is talking to Dobrinin, who's the, you know, foreign minister from the Soviets. And he's saying, stop beaming our embassy with microwaves. You've been, you know, blasting it for, you know, 12 hours straight. And Walter Stossel, who's the American ambassador, was, you know, not only hurt by this, he ends up dying of kind of a rare form of blood cancer. And so if that's going on in the seventies, and then it feels like we've had all this like, honestly, gaslighting on the part of, you know, CIA, a lot of people, a lot of diplomats who are stationed abroad, who are experiencing these things that, you know, they're consistently called psychosomatic

• 56:49Jesse Michels?

  or crazy or whatever. And then you have this Dear Spiegel 60 Minutes, you know, report saying, no, this is all real. And the Soviets have been doing it for decades.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  Well, you really, we're deep into that. I mean, I've been, I can't say exactly, but I'm very much part of that investigation and so is Dr. Gilbert.

• 57:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, we've been interviewing victims of Havana syndrome.

• 57:10Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 57:11Speaker 03

  And it's spectacular because nobody understands that there are a series of symptoms that are all linked together that people.

• 57:20Speaker 03

  Don't understand that are just unique. Hmm. Uh, but there are a lot of, there are like more, over one thousand US officials. You know, from State Department and other American personnel, their family members, their children also. That, that have reported, it's called uh anomalous health incidents now. A, A H I, just Havana syndrome. You know, and, and people are usually in their twenties, thirties, forties, they're in great physical shape. Um, and, but the, the, the, the symptoms started when they were uh stationed in Cuba. Uh huh. Or Russia, or China, Austria, Germany, Switzerland.

• 58:03Speaker 03

  And there are a lot of them in the United States and near, near the White House also. And, and people are staying uh at hotels, apartment, offices, or sometimes in their, in their cars. But, but there is puzzling combinations of symptoms that we, we've never seen before. So a few people described um like dizziness, combination of dizziness, headache. Uh, hearing loud, high frequency, very directional sounds. Hmm. That seem to come from a specific location. And both sounds and symptoms disappear when victims leave the room. And they reappear when victims re-enter the room.

• 58:46Speaker 03

  You know, and uh some um Havana syndrome victims uh describe disabling cognitive problems, like memory problems and slow processing speed, balance problem, hearing loss, ear pain, tinnitus, insomnia, irritability and sometimes depression. And, and the physicians uh could not understand what was going on. So we did a lot of studies and we find, ENT specialists found that that, that's the otolith inside the inner ear that get affected consistently in most of those cases. And now. What is it in the inner ear? The otolith, little, little uh tiny os uh. Crystals.

• 59:29Speaker 03

  Boni, boni structures inside the inner ear that are responsible for balance. And those get disrupted, uh and it's very difficult to find.

• 59:41Speaker 03

  To find what it is, I mean, people do, they do MRIs and they can't find anything. It's only when you study the otolith of the ears, of the inner ear.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  Well, that's the one cluster of symptoms that seems to be in common with many of them. And I'll just say, again, I have to be careful picking my words. Sure. But I think there was not unanimity within the community, the intelligence community on what was going on. You had one side saying, it's real and we know what it is with very high likelihood. And here it is. And then you had the other, which was the official version is there's no there, there, nothing to see here, folks. And those of us who are tightly connected on the one side who heard that were shocked, mortified, angry. Yeah. But you saw Dr. Relman, for example. Yeah. The Stanford MD.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  I think he said it best. Yeah. And in an essay I just published, I really talk about, again, the psychology of how that could happen. And I believe that the people in the intelligence community, at State Department and CIA, who say there's nothing there, there. I don't think they know it and they're covering it up. I think they don't believe it because I have seen that over and over and over again. And at the end of the essay, I quote Upton Sinclair, who said, you can't explain something to a man whose salary depends on not understanding it. Right. Because again, it gets back to the common theme you've heard us talk about, which is whenever you have an instrument reporting something, ask about the instrument itself. Yeah.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  Right. So the people who aren't believing it can't believe it. Yeah. Because if they believed it, their whole ego structure would fall apart. Right. Right. So they have to believe it. Yeah. And so I think they truly think there's nothing there.

• 1:01:33Jesse Michels?

  Speaking of which, yeah, go for it.

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  And they don't believe that something can happen that they don't understand. They think they have to understand everything. And if they don't understand it, it doesn't exist, but, but, but it, it sure does exist. I mean, we have interviewed a number of victims and this is not fake. This really, really exists and it's, it's devastating for, for the people.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  One of them used to work for me. I know him extremely well.

• 1:01:58Jesse Michels?

  Jesus.

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  And we had a long conversation with him recently. I can't mention his name or where he worked. But what bothers us the most about it is the victimizations of the victims. Imagine serving your country, being wounded in service of your country. And your country says, no, you didn't have that happen and you're crazy.

• 1:02:18Jesse Michels?

  Scary.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  It's awful. I mean, it, to me, actually, and a lot of them will tell you that's the worst part. Mark Polymoropoulos, who was on the 60 Minutes piece, said it very well. It's like, he loves the CIA, but they betrayed him.

• 1:02:33Speaker 03

  So we think what it is, now what we think it is, it's a radio frequency microwave or directed energy using repetitive pulse train, very short, very high peak power radiation that could be sent from anywhere within line of sight. Now, how big or small can the culprit device be? Well, it could probably be as small enough to fit in a backpack. And, and how can we detect something that is really very short? It could be a nanosecond of radiation, very high intense repetitive. We have no way to detect this nanosecond, very high pulse.

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  And that's, that's what is it? We, the, the, all those organisms in the CIA doesn't think that this can happen because they think they would detect it. And interestingly enough, they would not, we don't have the devices that could detect that.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:03:36Speaker 03

  Or do we?

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  Gonna pick my words carefully here. Uh, I think that to detect something, you first have to be open to where it might be. And so let's take this radiation, this directed energy. Microwaves are one possibility because there is this thing called the microwave hearing effect, where you can beam a microwave at someone and cause them to hear things because of thermoelastic explosions in the endolymph of the inner ear that create vibrations like sound. And in fact, there's a program to modulate that with voice. We call it the voice of God, where you can project the voice into someone using this. And in fact, in our book, The Shadow of Time, we talk about that.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Is how one set of creatures who have hearing could talk to another set that don't, using that phenomena. But again, let's open up what isn't impossible. Remember I said we can do things with lasers and free air plasmas? Well, remember I said that lasers can interact and create shock waves in the atmosphere? And so it is possible that you could create local shock waves, very, very precisely located, that would cause some of this kind of damage acoustically. But the origin wasn't a speaker or an acoustic system, it was a laser. It could be a terahertz laser. It could be, you know, a near ultraviolet laser. It could be, it could be all kinds of, different kinds of directed energy. It could be millimeter wave, it could be terahertz, I mean.

• 1:05:08Jesse Michels?

  I worry about the other side of this, the extremely low frequency.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  That I'm less interested in because, you know, F equals H nu, which is to say that the lower the frequency, the less energy it carries.

• 1:05:20Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  And also ultrasound, the wavelength is so large, it's like many miles long. So what that means is the gradient of energy from here to here, across something like your head is extremely, it's basically flat. Now, you have resonance in your body. Your body is a cavity resonator. And if you hit it with something like six to 12 hertz, you can maybe cause yourself to have to go to the bathroom.

• 1:05:47Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  But it wouldn't create these kind of effects. It's probably something way higher. I wouldn't rule out. Acoustic, but that doesn't mean it's an acoustic source. It could mean it's a directed energy source that creates an acoustic effect. I don't think that's what's happening. I think it's straight up RF. But again, I'm somewhat humble in that we can't say we know for sure.

• 1:06:13Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  And I think if we too quickly reach a conclusion.

• 1:06:18Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  We're not doing anybody any favors.

• 1:06:21Jesse Michels?

  On the UFO front, one of the kind of data sets, so to speak, that I think I hold in highest esteem is this idea of UFOs showing up around nuclear weapons facilities and installations all over the world. Civilian energy grids even, there seems to be something there. Have you looked at any of those cases?

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  We have, and we're trying to be honest and say, yo, maybe yes, maybe no. First of all, there's a lot more sensors around nuclear plants.

• 1:06:51Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  And so you're going to see a lot more stuff because you have a lot more things looking at it.

• 1:06:56Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  So you see more frequency, but is that due to things showing up more frequency? Or because you have more stuff looking at it?

• 1:07:03Jesse Michels?

  It seemed to me, it seems beyond sensor bias.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  Could be.

• 1:07:06Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  But maybe, but then you have to ask, well, what happens around nuclear plants? You have very high electromagnetic fields, like for example, the high power. So you may have extremely high voltages. Right? Because power is transmitted at very high voltage to reduce resistance losses. Right? Because of Ohm's law. And so when you have extremely high

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  slope, high gradient electromagnetic fields, you can have plasma generation. If you have aerosols in the air, you can charge them up. Maybe you can cause some fluorescence and some weird effects. So if you're going to be intellectually honest.

• 1:07:49Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  Don't look at what you'd like to be true. Oh yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. They're interested in our nuclear perk. Well, maybe.

• 1:07:54Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  But if it's nuclear, what else is it about the nuclear?

• 1:07:58Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  That might lead to other phenomena?

• 1:08:01Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  And this is where we try to be objective because we want to kind of send a message to the world that hardcore, objective scientists.

• 1:08:09Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  Who are more interested in the truth than their particular agenda, who have rigorous. Scientific process are taking this seriously.

• 1:08:18Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  And so that's why we think it's really important to be hyper rigorous.

• 1:08:23Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  And look at all possibilities.

• 1:08:25Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  So again, about the nuclear, maybe yes, maybe no, I wouldn't come down hard yet. And what I think is happening there. I think, but the thing is really hardcore, serious scientists with resources really don't look at these issues.

• 1:08:38Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  Now, the government is prone to say, oh yeah, we've got this A team looking at it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Don't believe it. They have someone looking at it to some degree. But are the best of the best really going to risk their careers to look at this and volunteer for it?

• 1:08:53Jesse Michels?

  Seems like the most important thing, you know, to, you know, it's the frontier and it's, and it's can beget so much interesting, productive, useful stuff outside of obviously it being the nature of reality and kind of ultimate truth seeking, which I think is very valuable unto itself. But I think, you know, you could end up with, you know, new propulsion modalities and, you know, possibly new energy modalities, all these things could come from studying this stuff.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  See, I gotta say, I'm not objective here.

• 1:09:22Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  Because I've seen so many times being inside the government. Where for what we call in Washington, the optics. Congress wants us to look into this. Let's look into it.

• 1:09:33Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  And let's form a team and let's put scientists on it.

• 1:09:36Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  But you saw in 60 Minutes, that guy who said he quit, said, uh, that woman came to him and said, we got to turn down the temperature on this thing.

• 1:09:45Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  And so people inside the intelligence community told me, like, I was starting to work in my own lab to reproduce it and to come up with a sensor, to sense this stuff. And I said, I'm making progress, but it's on my own dime. I'll continue on my own dime, but I have to know if I succeed, you'd want it. And he goes, forget it. It is career ending here. If you even ask these questions. It's just optics. They don't really care. They already know the answer they want. This isn't serious.

• 1:10:15Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  And so when it comes to UFOs and all this other stuff, if I had to be a betting man.

• 1:10:21Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  I'd say they don't really take it seriously.

• 1:10:26Jesse Michels?

  There are, yeah, I don't know. I imagine you worked with James Clapper.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. He was the guy who gave me my Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal when I left.

• 1:10:36Jesse Michels?

  Well, there you go. So he publicly in the age of disclosure was like at Area 51, we had some censor program. We were looking for UFOs and then Mike Rogers, he probably also know.

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Which one? The Mike Rogers, the congressman or Mike Rogers, the head of NSA?

• 1:10:53Jesse Michels?

  Head of NSA. He said Clapper called him and in a public interview, he said Clapper called him and asked for all of the UFO data from the NSA.

• 1:11:01Speaker 04

  The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper calls me, Mike, I need you to go through all of it. I need the team to go through all of NSA's holding all of its files and I need everything that you have on UFOs. And I'm like, what, sir?

• 1:11:13Jesse Michels?

  So it seems like there's some, you know, internal movement, like even if you don't accept at face value, all of the, you know, kind of UFO crash retrieval and reverse engineering, which I think there's some evidence around that. That's like pretty good too, but like, you know, even if you don't take that at face value, there is some internal interest around this stuff.

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, there's some, but it's all not official.

• 1:11:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, we talked to pilots on the Navy base.

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  Aviators, they like to be called aviators. They aren't mere pilots.

• 1:11:45Speaker 03

  On a Navy, in a non official manner, on a Navy base. And they told us that they saw they were seeing phenomena that they couldn't understand on a very regular basis. But they were not talking about that. They were not mentioning that because it was career ending, would have been career ending.

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  They say all of us have seen a lot of stuff and none of us say anything because we want to keep flying.

• 1:12:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that's the same thing as the Havana syndrome also. The people don't, the officials, the government doesn't acknowledge the fact because if we acknowledge, I think my personal opinion, if we acknowledge the fact, then it's going to scare people. Who else is going to go abroad and work for? State Department, nobody will want to do that because they know they will risk their life.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:40Speaker 03

  If we acknowledge that there is something we don't know, the same thing in UFOs. Uh, who is going to go on missions, uh, aerial missions, they, they, they won't want to do it also. Cause they will risk their lives. So it's a, it's a big scare factor. It's going to scare a lot of people. And I think they don't want, our government doesn't want to do that. Plus they don't understand it. They don't understand it and they don't want to scare people. So it doesn't exist.

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and in the intelligence world, there's a really unfortunate thing that happens. It really bothers me a lot. And I've had it happen to me personally in the war in Iraq. And the connection between Iraq and, uh, Al Qaeda.

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• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  In intelligence, we're supposed to speak truth to power.

• 1:13:55Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  We're supposed to be objective reporters who report what we think is happening with what confidence. And to never let our own political agendas color what we tell policymakers. But you heard on the 60 Minutes interview where they said, well, look, if it's the Russians doing it to us, that's an act of war because they've done it. And against very senior US officials, national security officials on our own soil. They've attacked us. It's an act of war and it is. I think that is exactly what it is. Cause the Russians look at war differently. They're always at war. They call it gray war. Or active measures.

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  And their intelligence services are more about making things happen than reporting what happens. Very different philosophy than ours. And so, um, it's very inconvenient to have to tell the Russians, you just declared war on us.

• 1:14:56Speaker 01

  And the guys at CIA don't want that. They don't want a nuclear war. They don't want, because what are we really going to do to the Russians because they've been doing this to us? Really? Are we supposed to launch a nuclear war against them? Are we supposed to start killing their intelligence operatives? What are we supposed to do about it?

• 1:15:14Speaker 03

  Well, not only that, but it's so embarrassing because it's been going on since 1980s.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  So we're helpless.

• 1:15:22Speaker 03

  It started in the 1980s and we haven't done anything.

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  Well, yeah.

• 1:15:25Speaker 03

  And it was a war that, what?

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so the fact of the matter is, the Russians know very well that if they keep the aggression below a certain threshold, we're going to do nothing.

• 1:15:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  Right? And so they know that. And so they keep doing it. And if we say to the American voters, we know the Russians have been at war with us, and we're just going to sit here and take it. Well, how would the voters like that? But on the other hand, if we get too aggressive and react to the Russians, we're going to turn up the heat. So you have an example there of CIA saying, we're going to control the narrative to keep us from going to war with Russia.

• 1:16:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  Okay, that may actually be, at the end of the day, a good thing. But they don't get to decide that. That's not, and I've seen this inside where I see exactly that happened in other contexts. And I said to a very senior person at NSA, not the director, someone below them, I said, you don't, we were going to tell Bush something we had discovered. And she said, no, I'm not going to let you do that. And he said, why? And he said, well, this guy's crazy, you know, he'll go do anything. And I said, that's not your call.

• 1:16:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  You know, she said, well, we can't let him go off on a, you know, a tangent. I said, but that's not your call. She said, well, yeah, it is. And that's the reality.

• 1:16:46Speaker 03

  That's scary.

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  And you see, when that happens, people's trust in the intelligence apparatus starts to erode.

• 1:16:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  And I will tell you, I didn't see a lot of that.

• 1:16:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  But it happens.

• 1:16:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. And if it's something coming from outside Earth, it's the same thing because those pilots were describing a lot of near misses when they were flying, they almost missed something.

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  Their worry was flight safety over everything.

• 1:17:11Speaker 03

  And they were worried. So if it's the same thing and it's something coming from outside Earth that we don't understand, if officials acknowledge that this is what is happening, it's going to scare the bejesus out of everybody, right?

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  They're excited.

• 1:17:27Speaker 03

  And they don't want to do that because first, again, they don't understand it. So it doesn't exist because because otherwise it will make them look incompetent. And it's been going on for several years also. So how come they've let this happen for several years without doing anything? And the only way is to say it doesn't exist.

• 1:17:50Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, not good. Not the right orientation towards this whole subject. And another thing sort of like that, and I actually think it's more acknowledged probably by CIA than it is by the civilian world, but there was a psychic spy program. This is

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  MKUltra.

• 1:18:08Jesse Michels?

  Well, there's MKUltra, but there's also Stargate. Do you know about this?

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:11Jesse Michels?

  And so there's, to me, a bunch of evidence from CIA circles that there is some sort of mind-matter connection, or there's maybe we're talking about kind of transmission theory of consciousness, something else going on as far as our epistemological circuitry than anybody in academia would ever admit. And something that I feel very passionate about is like, science should not be locked up in any of these agencies. To the extent that there's some trade secret that confers a tactical warfare advantage, fine. But the idea that like something that fundamental is just, you know, kind of stuck in these agencies. And I mean, this is all, by the way, this is FOIA in 2017, these programs

• 1:18:55Jesse Michels?

  are public now. But that's pretty wild, right? And like, no one in academia would, they'd all laugh at this. If we're, you know, they'd laugh at the conversation we're having right now. But then the people in aerospace and in these agencies that like, need every advantage they get with intelligence modalities.

• 1:19:13Jesse Michels?

  Use it.

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know. I wouldn't go that far. I will tell you this, the Russians take this stuff way more seriously than we do. And to the extent that in chess matches, they would have something like beaming negative mental energy at our opponent of a Russian. You know, and the Russians are much more open to things that we aren't.

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  And both good and bad.

• 1:19:39Speaker 03

  And things that don't cost anything because they don't have very much.

• 1:19:42Jesse Michels?

  That's right. The resources.

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

  No, that's true. And I think, I think that some of the biggest discoveries in this area probably will be the Russians because they have much more open minds than we do. I think they tend to be more spiritual and mystical maybe than we do because of their history. But, um, uh, you know, let's talk about this remote consciousness thing and these phenomena where a psychic can tell you there's a body buried under a bridge and they go there and yeah, the body's there.

• 1:20:11Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:12Speaker 01

  One explanation is ESP or clairvoyance or non-local consciousness. And that's possible, but then let's look at the other possibilities. We know there are some humans that are savants. You know, someone who you could say what day of the week is, you know, 50, 55, uh,

• 1:20:32Jesse Michels?

  Rain man.

• 1:20:32Speaker 01

  October, yeah. And so there are some people with unbelievable weird genius capabilities.

• 1:20:40Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  You know, who's to say that someone couldn't have absorbed all the news and everything about the human condition and reached the conclusion that a serial killer of a certain kind is going to put a body in a certain place in a certain date. Right? That this is not ESP. It's just elevating analytic skills to a genius level. Right? And so to me, something like that is more likely explanation than something that's totally outside any range.

• 1:21:10Jesse Michels?

  So I would disagree with you.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  Well, but I always look at, you have to respect what we don't know. And I'm not going to say impossible.

• 1:21:19Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  I would go that far, but at the same time, I am a scientist and I look at evaluate possibilities based on the best tools we have available to come up with. Is there an explanation within the science we do know? And I would start there. And then deposit a science we don't know is such an unknown realm. It's almost not worth looking at because there's no way of evaluating that information. You don't rule it out. And we say, maybe there's something there, but um.

• 1:21:50Speaker 03

  But then you become the cat that doesn't know one that cannot learn French.

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  No, no, I'm saying, look, this is a fascinating thing about the scientific method. We assume it's the end all. But clearly it isn't because it fails us over and over again.

• 1:22:05Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:06Speaker 01

  And so I went to a hundredth reunion of my PhD program at Indiana University, you know, where BF Skinner was there, you know, these luminaries. And I, I was in industry and I said, you know, I've been out 10 years and I think the scientific method is really flawed and limited. And I said, why? And I said, because in science, you have to narrow things down so tiny and so narrow to reach a real robust conclusion. You have to control so much that it becomes inapplicable to the real world where nothing is controlled. And I said, in my world where I'm in the fighter simulation business and I have to figure out how to make a pilot think he's flying at 20 feet off the ground with very limited cues, there's no science for that.

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  I just have to try a bunch of shit and see what works. And I said, I think the, the, the method is seriously flawed and limited. And oh my God. So I think that I will give you this, the scientific method itself is limited.

• 1:23:05Jesse Michels?

  Agree.

• 1:23:06Speaker 03

  It's the same thing as, you know, when you're looking for the body, a body that's buried, maybe that person has an extra sense of smell that could smell what it is. Maybe that person has an extra sense of something that we don't know, we don't acknowledge that exists and we don't have the tools to evaluate. So I think it is very possible that, that that particular person has a capability, capacity of finding a body somewhere. And we don't know, and we don't know, um, we don't know how to evaluate that possible capability. So I, I do agree. I think it's, there's, it's something we don't know and we have no idea and we should be open in, in.

• 1:23:47Speaker 01

  I'll give you both a big yo.

• 1:23:49Jesse Michels?

  I like it. I like it. Yeah, it is one of those things where it's a paradigm shifting thing if real and then we don't know if it's real. But you have, you have this woman, Jessica Utz, who is president of the American Statistical Association. She looked at all the CIA data around Stargate, did a meta-study, and she came out saying, if this were any other field and not parapsychology, which has this inherent kind of stigma stench attached to it, it would be beyond a shadow of doubt with the p-values she was looking at, that this is totally real. And then, to me, it's like, okay, it's like black body radiation in the late 19th century, where you can say it's fake because of the prevailing theory at the time, or let's like, try to find a theory. And I don't know, but-

• 1:24:31Speaker 01

  But like I say, maybe.

• 1:24:33Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:35Speaker 01

  But you see, the thing is, one reason you'll find me to be such a stickler-

• 1:24:39Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:39Speaker 01

  Is I kind of have to be to have credibility, because I want hardcore scientists-

• 1:24:45Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  To look at someone like me and someone like Dr. Gilbert and say, they're not wild-eyed crazies.

• 1:24:50Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  They are, they are disciplined.

• 1:24:53Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  And so, I'm purposely that way, you know, that I want to maintain healthy skepticism, at the same time, oh, because the very best scientists realize that we're, we're much more limited than we want to admit. And so, what I want to do is speak to those scientists and say, play in this space, because there's some exciting stuff here. I have no idea what it is. But I know what it isn't. And what it isn't is something we understand.

• 1:25:23Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Was there any, while you were at NSA or ODNI, anything that's now declassified around the UFO stuff that came across your desk? Any signals intelligence? Or-

• 1:25:36Speaker 01

  No, and I'll tell you that inside the highest levels of the intelligence community, this is not something we spent a femto-second thinking about.

• 1:25:44Jesse Michels?

  Anytime.

• 1:25:44Speaker 01

  I don't think there was any point. I did get involved in some FOIA requests at NSA as a senior executive, but I, none of us spent any time on this.

• 1:25:55Jesse Michels?

  There's one guy I interviewed, who's, his name is Dan Sherman, and he said he was taken to an NSA complex, and he was like, kind of humming these like, tones with his headphones, and then it was, that was all meant to, so he could communicate with non-human intelligence?

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  And he said, "I'm gonna play a tone." And I want you to mentally hum that tone. And he said that you will eventually feel a connection. The line will change. When I saw the sine wave move, I went, oh, okay. Oh, I heard about something like that.

• 1:26:34Jesse Michels?

  It's called Above Black is the book he wrote. Yeah. Project Preserve Destiny. Do you have a take on that?

• 1:26:38Speaker 01

  No, no, I, I heard about it. I, I know, but, uh, but I will tell you that, uh, look, at that level, you're interested in budgets and policy.

• 1:26:49Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 1:26:50Speaker 01

  And I'm trying to get more money to do high risk, high reward research.

• 1:26:54Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  In the community. That consumed a hundred percent of my time. And I, except when I was going to be interviewed by 60 Minutes and they wanted to ask me about this. I never even came up.

• 1:27:05Jesse Michels?

  And thinking about, um, kind of terrestrial propulsion modalities that could explain what we're seeing, because this is part of your book. Is there anything you guys are aware of or think could be possible? That transcends chemical combustion?

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:27:21Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:27:21Speaker 01

  Yes, um, I'm glad you brought that up because we go through NASA's innovative, uh, propulsion program.

• 1:27:29Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:27:30Speaker 01

  I think it's fantastic because it's one part of the government that's saying, we will fund anything that isn't impossible. I love that approach. And they give you a little funding if you can play with it. And an example of that is a warp drive.

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  And, um, again, in our book, The Shadow of Time, we get into the possibilities of, uh, you know, what people don't talk about when you talk about traveling near the speed of light is the acceleration and deceleration. Right? You've got to accelerate from nothing to this, near the speed of light. And then you've got to slow down to get where you're going to go. Well, either those take a really long time.

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  Which gets rid of a lot of the advantage of traveling that fast. Or you have an organism that can withstand unbelievable Gs, which.

• 1:28:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:19Speaker 01

  Which.

• 1:28:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, we studied, there were, there were some studies done on, on, on that. Because for, um, for organisms to be able to travel uh from outer space to earth, for example. Uh, they need to be able to resist extreme cold, extreme heat, extremely long journeys. Uh, so extreme accelerations, extreme decelerations and intense radiation, cosmic radiation. So is it possible, is, has there been any, any, anything like this, where there has been? Um, so the, the, we've, we've done studies on the, on the, like, for example, when we're talking about nuclear, nuclear.

• 1:29:01Speaker 03

  Nuclear plants. So there is an organism, a bacterium called Deinococcus radiodurans. Which can uh resist intense radiation, it can actually thrive on intense radiation. But also it can survive cold, dehydration, vacuum and acid. So it's, it's an extremophile and we've got a few that are extremophiles. And this one, the Deinococcus radiodurans, has been found to survive three years in outer space. Based on the studies conducted on the, on the International Space Station. Now we've done studies on ants, there are certain type of ants that can sustain 5,000 Gs.

• 1:29:46Speaker 03

  So 5,000 times the force of gravity.

• 1:29:49Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:29:50Speaker 03

  Um, they're tardigrades. What are tardigrades? They're little, little bears that are from half a millimeter to 1.2 millimeters. They have eight legs and they're found on moss or fresh or seawater sediment. And they can sustain 16,000 Gs, like 16,000 times the force of gravity. When a human will be killed with a sustained exposure to 12 Gs, 12. So, and, and those little. Cardiogrits can survive thirty years at zero degree Fahrenheit, can survive ten years in a dehydrated state. And NASA did an experiment where they survived eighteen months

• 1:30:31Speaker 03

  in the vacuum of space, same thing outside the International Space Station. Now, there are fruit flies. Fruit flies, surprisingly, those little teeny things are able to withstand up to seventeen thousand Gs, seventeen thousand times the force of gravity. There are roundworms. Roundworms are parasites, they can be parasites in animals or also in humans. They can withstand eighty thousand Gs. And in twenty twenty-three, it was reported that an individual nematode was, has been revived after forty-six thousand years in the Siberian permafrost.

• 1:31:16Speaker 03

  And talking about organisms that are resistant to extreme conditions, like in the bottom of the ocean, near the bottom of the ocean, at five miles below the ocean, which is twenty-six thousand feet below the surface, near hydrothermal vents, there are cells that can survive. There is the, an ocean worm that the home is located near hydrothermal vents. And it's not, it's not crushed. There's a mariana snailfish that can live near the mariana or in the mariana trench in the Western Pacific Ocean.

• 1:31:56Speaker 03

  So imagine an organism that is under five miles of water, that heavy, heavy weight that would crush any kind of organism, would crush us. And it does not crush a snailfish. It doesn't crush a little worm. Why is that? How is that?

• 1:32:19Speaker 01

  So I think the bottom line of everything that she's saying is we should never say never when it comes to nothing could sustain interstellar travel, nothing could sustain the kind of Gs that we see with the Tic Tac, that we actually have existence proofs that those things are possible. But getting back to the question you asked about propulsion, which this is relevant because some of these propulsions get to extreme accelerations and radiation even. The ones that I think are the most interesting are where you're not putting the power source on the vehicle. So for example, we have this video, and we know the guy who did it at Sandia National Lab and White Sands, where you take a disk,

• 1:33:01Speaker 01

  a flying saucer basically, and you put a pulse laser, just like I said, and you shoot it up and you propel it with laser energy.

• 1:33:08Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 1:33:09Speaker 01

  Right? So you can move something through the air where there's no engine on it at all. You're just pushing on it with photons.

• 1:33:14Jesse Michels?

  Did you do that at a larger scale?

• 1:33:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:33:16Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 1:33:16Speaker 01

  In fact, this guy that we've talked to did it for the government, and he's been forever trying to say, look, you want clean energy? You don't need any fuel at all. You just use a laser beam or a microwave to push it.

• 1:33:29Jesse Michels?

  What's the, can you say the guy's name?

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  Um, I'd have to look it up. Um, he, and I don't know he'd want himself. He's a little private.

• 1:33:39Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:33:39Speaker 01

  But, but you can go online and you can look at laser propelled disc.

• 1:33:44Jesse Michels?

  Cool.

• 1:33:44Speaker 01

  And you can see a video and it looks exactly like a flying saucer just levitating up.

• 1:33:50Jesse Michels?

  Why are we investing heavily in this?

• 1:33:52Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:33:52Jesse Michels?

  If you could do that at high.

• 1:33:53Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:33:53Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 1:33:54Speaker 01

  Well, this gets into another thing, and this is his frustration.

• 1:33:57Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:58Speaker 01

  Um, is that if this were successful, it would threaten a huge established, you know, jet engine and.

• 1:34:06Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 1:34:06Speaker 01

  And he wants to use it for civil aviation.

• 1:34:09Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:34:09Speaker 01

  Right? And he's done the math. And now with adaptive optics, at the time he first doing this, you could only do it at short distances.

• 1:34:15Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  But we have adaptive optics now where we can control for atmospheric losses and distortion of the beam and stuff like that. And I think when it comes to getting things into low Earth orbit in particular, this ought to really be looked at.

• 1:34:30Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:30Speaker 01

  But, but in NASA's program, they look at a lot of things from laser propulsion in space, light sails, and they also look at fusion reactors.

• 1:34:43Speaker 01

  Where you basically create a fusion reaction and you spew gamma rays out the back. And again, it's photon pressure. You know, a photon doesn't have any mass, but it has momentum. So when a photon hits something, it imparts its momentum to it and it will move it. Right? And so, uh, I think that to me, those are some of the more interesting. But there are some other really weird ones like magnetic levitation. Right? For example, did you know it's possible for me to levitate you with a super strong magnet?

• 1:35:17Jesse Michels?

  Levitate me?

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:18Jesse Michels?

  No, I didn't.

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  But we've done it with birds and frogs and spiders.

• 1:35:21Jesse Michels?

  What?

• 1:35:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And here's the way it works. Magnetism isn't just what you think of as a, uh, uh,

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

  like a piece of iron or a rare earth magnet or something like that. It's what we call ferromagnetism. There are a zillion other kinds of magnetism. There's ferromagnetism, there's diamagnetism, there's paramagnetism. And these all have to do with, if you have a charged particle with spinning, it will create a magnetic field. Okay. Sometimes that magnetic field works in the direction of the inducing magnetic field. Sometimes it's with diamagnetic, it's the opposite. So you get, you get, instead of things being attracted, they get pushed away.

• 1:36:02Jesse Michels?

  Like Bismuth.

• 1:36:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:36:04Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:36:05Speaker 00

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• 1:36:35Speaker 01

  Yes, and that was found maybe with the UFO and they think, yeah, maybe. So it could have magnetic levitation.

• 1:36:41Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:41Speaker 01

  And that's possible. And you can take non-metallic things and you can tractor beam them, basically. Right? There's also such a thing as optical tweezers.

• 1:36:51Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  Where if you create a very, very strong electromagnetic field with a laser, it's very precise. You can move particles of dust around.

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  With this laser, it's called an optical tweezer. So, remote force fields, if you will, are absolutely possible. Now, when you do the math of how big a magnetic field you would need to control something many miles away, it gets to be, but I wouldn't say it's impossible. And what I'm saying is, magnetic fields decrease as the cube of the distance as you go away. It's not inverse square, it's inverse cubed. Because they're dipoles, there's no such thing as a magnetic monopole. So, it's the same time you have one magnetic field reinforcing, you have the opposite end taking away. So, this is in Maxwell's equations, right? So, essentially, to a first order, is, goes off as a cube.

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  So, to have a steep magnetic gradient that would cause this at a very long distance, we have no idea how to do that, but we can't say it's impossible. So, pushing and pulling with magnetic fields is possible. These fusion drives are kind of interesting. And the most interesting of all is the warp drive. Okay, so, now, this is when you get into, NASA has funded this, okay? Even though they don't know that it's possible, they don't know that it's impossible. Okay. Some physicists have postulated what they call negative energy, which isn't the same as the energy we see, you know, black, dark energy.

• 1:38:33Speaker 01

  It's not the same as dark energy. Yeah. Negative energy, because energy and mass are basically the same thing. Yeah. They create gravitational effects. So, pure energy has a gravitational effect and so forth, slows down spacetime, all that. But what happens with this energy is that it creates a repulsion. So, the Alba Curie drive, right? Is basically, you have a huge

• 1:39:03Speaker 01

  Mass or energy in front, which is positive mass or energy. And you have a huge negative in back. And so you create a wave of spacetime that's moved. So the way the warp drive works is imagine a surfer who's on a wave and is stationary with respect to the wave.

• 1:39:20Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:20Speaker 01

  The wave is moving. And we know that spacetime can move at faster than the speed of light.

• 1:39:25Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:26Speaker 01

  Because the hyperinflation that happened after the big bang, or some think that happened, which is a pretty good evidence for it, is that spacetime itself can move faster than the speed of light. Which means that if you're in a bubble of spacetime that's moving faster than the speed of light, you're not going to experience any acceleration or deceleration. Cause you're not moving in that frame.

• 1:39:48Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Seems like a really hard engineering problem.

• 1:39:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Well, first of all, we don't know that negative energy exists. It's the same kind of thing that would have to keep a wormhole open.

• 1:39:58Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:39:59Speaker 01

  Right? The only way a wormhole works is if you have that in the middle to keep things from collapsing.

• 1:40:05Jesse Michels?

  But it is interesting because Miguel Alcubierre did this proof that theoretically, even within general relativity, you could get faster than light travel if you do have negative energy. And so.

• 1:40:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, so again, and in our book, The Shadow of Time, we explore this as a kind of a plot point, you know? And so that's the kind of thing that I find kind of exciting. And here's kind of what I think is going to happen. Someone's going to keep looking at that and they won't find that. That'll turn out not to be possible or not to be true, but they'll discover something else.

• 1:40:39Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:40:41Speaker 01

  And this is why the study of UFOs is so important.

• 1:40:45Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

  You know, if we don't make any other point, I want to make this point, that in all of science, the biggest discoveries are by definition, those we don't expect. And why is that? You know, if I ask you to imagine a color you've never seen before, it's really hard to do. Right? But if you saw it, you could recognize it. And because when we imagine something, we have to do it from the building blocks of our experience.

• 1:41:10Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:10Speaker 01

  If we have no experience, we can't imagine it. But if we put ourselves in a position to observe something new.

• 1:41:17Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:17Speaker 01

  We may see something we could never have imagined. And that's where the biggest breakthroughs almost always come from. I set out to do A. I looked while I was doing it in my peripheral vision and I saw B and I go, ooh, that's more interesting.

• 1:41:31Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:32Speaker 01

  And I think the reason for people to really get serious about studying what's going on here is we're gonna see B, C, D, and E.

• 1:41:39Jesse Michels?

  Hmm. We shoot for the stars, you land on the moon and the moon's pretty.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  You land somewhere unexpected.

• 1:41:45Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:46Speaker 01

  And again, remember, that's where discovery has to happen. Where by definition, you can't imagine it.

• 1:41:51Jesse Michels?

  Yes. Yeah, I love the Henri Bergson quote, which is the eyes can only see what the mind can comprehend. And you need a hypothesis in order to see something to begin with. And so I think that's probably actually the most underrated aspect of the phenomena is that our vision is, I mean, this is kind of an iconized virtual reality interface and we superimpose our, we have like a meme library in our heads and we superimpose these pre-existing building blocks onto the thing. And so in the 1890s, people would see airships, which were like on the edge of what was even possible at the time. You had like zeppelins and stuff.

• 1:42:33Jesse Michels?

  And now we're seeing these like faster than light, you know, saucers and that sort of thing. So it's, there's something going on where we are using what's available to us and superimposing it, I think.

• 1:42:46Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:42:47Speaker 03

  And that's why AI is so important, but I'm not worried about AI supplenty or being there instead of our brain. I think AI will always be important in the future in addition to our brain, because it can only work together, because the AI will not be trained on anything else that the, that it doesn't know. But the brain will be able to detect something that is different and will be able to train the AI. So it will always have to be an augmented brain that will be allowed with the AI. But I think the, our brain will always be necessary. We should not rely.

• 1:43:28Speaker 01

  Yours will. I don't know about mine.

• 1:43:29Speaker 03

  We should rely, but we should never rely on AI, solely AI, because it will never see anything else.

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  I think there's something very powerful, though, in what she said, if you extend it. And take into account what I said about the negative space. We should train up an AI that is the opposite of us. In every way. Not like us. But the opposite of us and ask it to look at these questions.

• 1:43:55Jesse Michels?

  Hmm, that's a great, yeah, I love that.

• 1:43:57Speaker 01

  We need an anti AI.

• 1:43:59Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  Right. Train it on everything that isn't.

• 1:44:02Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that.

• 1:44:03Speaker 01

  And see what it says because I mean, that's the clear implication of what she's saying where, you know, an AI can just do what we do only better. Okay, that's useful. But an AI that can do things we cannot do and would not ever do.

• 1:44:17Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:18Speaker 01

  Is the one that's really going to pay off.

• 1:44:19Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:20Speaker 01

  The question is, would we ever believe it?

• 1:44:22Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, exactly. Well, that's the problem with L L Ms is they kind of inherently triangulate actually the consensus. So they're going for usually the middle of the road, kind of most acceptable answer. And so if you could train a more kind of heretical thinking AI or something, you know, something AI on the bleeding edge of what's acceptable and maybe decamp it from the instinct that you were talking about. You know, even I think before we were filming Eric, where people are socialized and ideas are fashion statements. And, uh, you know, it's hard to truly think in a heterodox way. If you could train an AI to do that, that'd be amazing.

• 1:44:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that's why we need an increase in the research budget and not a decrease in research budget.

• 1:45:05Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:06Speaker 01

  Get me started.

• 1:45:07Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:09Speaker 03

  But I think research, uh, all over the world, research is going to increase and, and

• 1:45:15Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:15Speaker 03

  A lot of governments are going to discover a lot of interesting things.

• 1:45:19Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, well, there's, um, a great essay, um, called the, the usefulness of useless things. I don't know if you're familiar with it. It's by this guy, Abraham Flexner. And it was kind of the charter for the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton back in the day. And it was all about, we should pour a ton of money into things that don't have immediate use. If you think about, you know, Quantum theory, which is responsible for semiconductors and, you know, a third plus of our economy today, it was like people philosophize, you know, thinking about the kookiest, weirdest stuff, and then it turns into something that's super productive. And so I agree with you. I think the idea that, you know, we should only spend money on things

• 1:46:01Jesse Michels?

  that are super locally useful is not only counterproductive, not only myopic, but it's it's actually counterproductive from like even a GDP boosting perspective. Like it's dumb politics, too.

• 1:46:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:46:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. That's what we love to do with Eric. We love looking at completely outside the box of the weirdest things that are happening because we think that in the weirdest things are the clue of the clues of the future.

• 1:46:28Speaker 01

  I agree. Asimov's, that's funny. We're always interested in that's funny. But again, we're hardcore scientists, so our interest is there, but we try to be disciplined when we look at those things. And most of them, you know, are unlikely, but there are a few, and those are the ones that really excite us. Like those Tic Tacs, there's something real going on there. I mean, there's just too many independent, parallel

• 1:46:51Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:52Speaker 01

  sensors on that thing by people who didn't want to see it, but saw it anyhow. And so those in particular, and so that's why in our book, The Shadow of Time, the novel, that's why the Tic Tacs show up because those in particular, we come up with a narrative of what could really be going on there.

• 1:47:09Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Well, I can't wait to get to the shadow of time because in many ways it is the maybe best conclusion, but embodied in fiction of this survey level overview of what you guys talk about in the new science of UFOs. And so it's this really cool thing. But I wanted to talk real quick on the propulsion front. I'm particularly high conviction in this thing called the Byfield Brown effect. Have you ever heard of that?

• 1:47:33Speaker 01

  Tell us more.

• 1:47:34Jesse Michels?

  So it's this idea that you take a capacitor and you have a negative electrode, a positive electrode, and you have a high K dielectric in the middle, which is, you know, the ability to store, you know, high electric fields.

• 1:47:45Speaker 01

  Love it when you talk dirty.

• 1:47:47Jesse Michels?

  And I think there's all this interesting, you know, data around this mid-century inventor Townsend Brown and his ability to transcend, you know, chemical combustion in this very cool way with these high voltage experiments that he was doing with this capacitor experiment, which to me would lead to Stuff that leads us beyond SpaceX and I'm just very passionate about the idea that I think SpaceX is just limited. You know, it's takes with chemical combustion, it's 80,000 years to the next habitable planet, Proxima Centauri. And that's unacceptable and nuclear thermal propulsion maybe cuts that in half or something. And so you, you need something like this and I, I think it's, I think it's legit. So I don't, I don't know if you guys have a take there.

• 1:48:32Speaker 01

  Well, okay. I know how capacitors work. I know how dielectrics work.

• 1:48:35Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:36Speaker 01

  And so in what way could this be used for propulsion?

• 1:48:40Jesse Michels?

  So you get thrust from the negative electrode to the positive electrode. And you could do this, apparently you get more thrust actually in a vacuum than you do in air. And a lot of people try to explain it away because of the, the ionized air. Bombards, you know, the ionized wind bombards the air and then you get this equal and opposite reaction and you get thrust. But I think you see even more thrust in a vacuum. And so you could end up with all sorts of cool space propulsion modalities. And then, and then, yeah.

• 1:49:11Speaker 01

  Oh, they, there have been things like the EM drive.

• 1:49:13Jesse Michels?

  The EM drive, sure.

• 1:49:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:15Jesse Michels?

  But the EM drive got debunked, but I think by.

• 1:49:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it keeps getting debunked, but they, people keep throwing money at it anyhow. Yeah. And I think this thing you're talking about has that quality because conservation of energy says that can't happen. Or Newton's.

• 1:49:32Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:49:33Speaker 01

  Newton's law where you have to have a reaction mass in order to get thrust. In other words, you have to throw mass or energy out the back in order to move in a particular direction.

• 1:49:42Jesse Michels?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:49:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:43Jesse Michels?

  And, and the reason I think I put it in the parapsychology, the, the thing we were talking about earlier, I put it in that camp of. There's a lot of evidence that these high electric field strength differentials result in thrust. And then we just don't have a good theory around it. Like there, maybe there's something quantum electrodynamics we don't understand, but.

• 1:50:02Speaker 01

  Well, there's something interesting where there's this effect where if you take two plates. Kind of like a capacitor and they're very, very flat and very, very close together. Because of quantum field, you will get the, the plates moving with respect to each other, a tiny amount. And this has been observed in the laboratory.

• 1:50:24Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Casimir effect.

• 1:50:25Speaker 01

  The Casimir effect, exactly. And, um, but that only works in one direction.

• 1:50:29Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:30Speaker 01

  And it's, uh, but yeah, I mean, it's, it's one of these weird quantum things. That is moving in the direction you're saying because, okay, the thing we're attracted to each other, but what was the force? It's a quantum field and that starts to get outside of, you know, the quantum realm is so bizarre.

• 1:50:49Jesse Michels?

  It's so bizarre.

• 1:50:50Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:50:51Jesse Michels?

  You have this guy Sonny White out here who's at NASA Eagle Works and he claims that he can power up 1.5 kilovolts microchip with the Casimir effect. And so it's bizarre and he's published this and so I think that's so cool, you know? I don't know if it's right, but.

• 1:51:07Speaker 01

  Yo.

• 1:51:08Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yo, there you go. And then one other thing on the astrobiology front is you were mentioning tardigrades and all the extremophiles. Have you guys thought of fungi or mushrooms as candidates? You know, they've been found on the International Space Station and Francis Crick, who of course discovered the double helical structure of DNA and his whole thing was like, you know, the hundred million years on earth for DNA synthesis was impossible. Nobody's ever replicated this primordial soup experiment to create it. And so maybe you would send fungi across long distances in some sort of spaceship or something. Maybe you'd feed it algae and CO2. And the thing I like about fungi, so interesting.

• 1:51:48Jesse Michels?

  If you were to think about like a Kartashev three or four scale civilization, you wouldn't create this kind of like biological meat suit. You know, you show up as this, you know, gangly, you know, you know, bipedal being, you know, on some other planet and you're immediately treated as a foreign invader. You would send an extremophile, which is like a zip file of consciousness. Humans all have microbiomes, but we have mycobiotics as well. So it affects our thinking and they're extremophiles that you have, you know, cordyceps mushrooms in the Amazon kind of co-opting the actions of bullet ants. And so there's something I think very interesting about. And then human, human tissue is very susceptible to fungal disease because it's so similar.

• 1:52:33Jesse Michels?

  You know, we're actually more similar to fungi than we are to most other plants and animals phylogenetically. And so it's this really interesting thing of what you'd send this thing off that would like merge with the host, you know? And then it would affect their consciousness.

• 1:52:49Speaker 01

  Well, if they came here, it would be a fun guy.

• 1:52:52Jesse Michels?

  There you go.

• 1:52:54Speaker 01

  He'd be a load of fun.

• 1:52:55Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it would. Yeah, there you go.

• 1:52:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, but I want to follow that thread just a little bit.

• 1:53:00Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:01Speaker 01

  And. You know, just as we should never say they would do it the way we do it. We have to say, maybe they would. And when we see in space probes, we don't send intentionally organisms. We send automated probes. And now with our AI, you know what's going to happen. We're going to be sending AIs out there because we don't have to have a life support system. We don't have to worry about any of that. And as our AI gets better and better and better, I think,

• 1:53:31Speaker 01

  because you know, Elon Musk said, we're not going to Mars after all. Right? More or less. And I'm on the Explore Mars Foundation group and that was big. That was depressing for us because we want to explore Mars. But the fact is, we don't know how to send a human to Mars and bring him back in good shape. Radiation, low Gs and hazards on Mars and so forth. And so where all that takes you is the first thing you're going to do is not going to be biological. It's going to be AI. And so that tells us that if something has come here from another civilization, it's probably not, certainly, it's probably a machine.

• 1:54:06Jesse Michels?

  That's right. It's probably some sort of von Neumann replicator probe or something.

• 1:54:10Speaker 01

  Or something. And, um, and that doesn't mean it's not alive. Because now you're getting into what is life? You know, and could an AI in a machine be alive? And this gets into what is life? And the biologists I know say it's simple. If a ball rolls downhill, it's dead. If it rolls uphill, it's alive. Meaning life is locally negentropic. It behaves, it rolls uphill.

• 1:54:38Jesse Michels?

  I love that definition. That's interesting.

• 1:54:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so could you have an artificial machine that to all intents and purposes, you know, had maybe emotions, had feelings, probably. We kind of have an existence proof that it could be done with atoms. It's us. So I think that,

• 1:54:56Jesse Michels?

  It's like Maxwell's demons. Macroscopic Maxwell's demons.

• 1:55:00Speaker 01

  Yes. Oh, yeah. Exactly.

• 1:55:03Jesse Michels?

  Negentropic.

• 1:55:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean,

• 1:55:05Jesse Michels?

  Entropy reducers.

• 1:55:06Speaker 01

  Exactly. Oh, you're, yeah, exactly. So, so the point is that when you look at these Tic Tacs and you see them moving around, you say, well, no. Biological being could do that. Well, maybe that's true. Maybe it's not biological. Maybe it's hardened electronics of some kind or bio, you know, something. But to me, if we're being visited by a probe from another civilization, it's probably technology, not biology.

• 1:55:30Jesse Michels?

  Well, there's all this lore in UFO world that the crafts are alive and that even David Fravor, Commander David Fravor, said the crafts seem to be like breathing or something like.

• 1:55:39Speaker 01

  That's another possibility. Like that movie, Nope, which I loved.

• 1:55:42Jesse Michels?

  Oh, yes. Jordan Peele.

• 1:55:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, where it's a cloud. And the cloud just doesn't move and you go, hmm. But, uh, yeah. Or, you know, as she was saying, as Dr. Gilbert was saying, what if, this is worth thinking about. Dark matter is dark to us because it doesn't interact with us, except very weakly, right? Or maybe not at all. So here's a flip it around. What do we look like to dark matter? We look dark.

• 1:56:10Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 1:56:10Speaker 01

  We, it doesn't interact with us. We don't interact with it.

• 1:56:14Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:56:15Speaker 01

  And so to it, we're dark matter.

• 1:56:17Jesse Michels?

  Yes. Yes.

• 1:56:19Speaker 01

  Right? And we're alive.

• 1:56:20Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:56:21Speaker 01

  So what's to say it can't be alive?

• 1:56:24Jesse Michels?

  Right. Totally.

• 1:56:26Speaker 01

  Right? And so there's an example of a mind expanding idea.

• 1:56:29Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:30Speaker 01

  It's like way outside what a normal human is going to think about.

• 1:56:34Jesse Michels?

  Or I sometimes think about the ideas that we live in a kind of a computational universe like.

• 1:56:39Speaker 01

  We're in a simulation.

• 1:56:40Jesse Michels?

  Some sort of simulation. And then you look at Fermat's theorem, which is the travel of light. And it looks algorithmically optimized for, you know, kind of shortest path between two observers.

• 1:56:50Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, but that's kind of the path of least resistance. And you see that as a fascinating subject of fractals and how the veins of a tree or capillaries in your body or filaments of mega structures in outer space all look the same. At the highest level down to the lowest level. And it's the path of least resistance.

• 1:57:11Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:57:11Speaker 01

  That's why those structures exist because if you're trying to move atoms of water.

• 1:57:16Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:16Speaker 01

  From A to B in the most efficient path with the least energy, that is the path.

• 1:57:22Jesse Michels?

  But then all, I don't know, you think of, if I were simulating something, I would, I would copy code chunks and then you'd get Fibonacci sequences and golden ratios and some of these things that seem like consistent architectures and.

• 1:57:36Speaker 01

  See, that is so fascinating, these mathematical things like Fibonacci and fractals and holography and things like that, where math isn't a property of the, doesn't describe the universe, it is the universe.

• 1:57:52Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 1:57:52Speaker 01

  I mean, but now you're getting into Wolfram philosophical kind of stuff and that's, that's above my pay grade.

• 1:57:58Jesse Michels?

  Me too. Well, I want to talk about this amazing book, The Shadow of Time, which you guys should all go out and get. It is just fascinating and I don't want to spoil it for people. So I think high level, it talks about an object that should not be found in the desert. That is a total kind of anachronism and involves kind of seemingly like, you know, elements or things that like, you know, shouldn't exist on earth and look more advanced than, you know, the carbon dating and a very kind of doggedly persistent paleontologist who

• 1:58:37Jesse Michels?

  is kind of pursuing this stuff and finds himself honestly in like a mafia war or something? Like it's this wild, wild west landscape of people fighting for this forbidden archaeology. And as somebody who's mired in UFO world, I think there might be some truth in fiction here.

• 1:58:56Speaker 01

  Well, what was our motivation? I think that's very important for the readers to understand. We finished The New Science of UFOs, which was a kind of intellectual exercise in the art of the possible and not impossible. And what we wanted to do is basically tell that same story in a way that would be more accessible to people and to.

• 1:59:22Speaker 01

  Tell it from the point of view of interesting people and characters who had problems in their lives and make the science part of the story so that it became clues. And so as scientists, we will tell you that there's nothing more exciting than embarking on a scientific journey of discovery, solving a mystery and peeling back the onion one layer at a time and seeing something new and unexpected beneath, which only takes you deeper and deeper and deeper. So in addition to exploring the science of UFOs, we wanted to give the readers the feeling of what it's like to go on a journey of scientific discovery. And so one thing that happens in this book, you might remember, especially

• 2:00:07Speaker 01

  at the end, is there's a bunch of twists and turns, like switchbacks up Mount Everest, right? It's like, it's kind of like a whiplash, like, whoa, that's true, that's true. Well, in science, that's what really happens, where you dig deep and you get answers that you weren't looking for, that lead you to questions you weren't going to ask. And so at the end, there's this kind of rapid fire series of reveals of deeper and deeper truths, where what you thought just a week ago is now today's illusion, and you turn one illusion into one fact until you finally get to something that's close to the truth. And that's what

• 2:00:49Speaker 01

  science is like. So we have a lot of twists and turns on purpose, and all of those are science driven. So there's a, pretty much, most of the science that was in the new science of UFOs is in here, but it's used to tell a story about people who are trying to overcome obstacles and rise above themselves.

• 2:01:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we, we wanted to put a lot of science in there, but we wanted it to be exciting, and we wanted it to be a mystery, and we wanted to, we wanted the reader to do the discovery themselves and to be, like, to be completely caught in the action, saying, oh, what's going to happen next? What's going to happen next? And this is, all this is deep into the science that we have studied for the other book.

• 2:01:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's a lot of biology in there, a lot of exobiology, there's a lot of neuroscience. Neuroscience is very important. I am a neuroscientist, and I'm really interested in species that are radically different from us. And I would commend to people to read this book called An Immense World by Ed Young, in which he describes what he calls the umwelt, a worldview of these exotic creatures like fish that have electric fields and sense electric fields, snakes, where I got my PhD on snakes, rattlesnakes and pythons that see infrared, they see in the dark. The mantis shrimp that see 12 different colors that we don't see, you know.

• 2:02:16Speaker 01

  And I've been especially interested in that phenomena of organisms whose worldview and way of thinking and neuroanatomy is so radically different from ours, they cannot be like us. And so that's exploring the negative space of the human condition. So the main, I guess villain, you want to call it in this story, not exactly a villain, but is about as opposite a human as you could get.

• 2:02:43Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:44Speaker 01

  Right? I mean, in every way, this creature is, is about as different from us as you can get. And the interactions between these completely alien us and them kinds of organisms,

• 2:03:01Speaker 01

  contrast creates conflict, which makes things interesting. When each discovers their own limitations when looking through the world through the other's eyes. And so we spent a lot of time, and there's a lot of hardcore neuroscience in the way this creature is defined and in some of the other characters is there's a lot of the kind of animal dimension. I studied in my PhD work and later, a lot of animal intelligence. And my conclusion from studying animals is that they're way smarter than we think they are. They're just not smart in ways that we're smart.

• 2:03:41Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 2:03:41Speaker 01

  Right?

• 2:03:42Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:03:42Speaker 01

  And this is what Ed Young is saying in his book. And so there are two creatures in this story. One is a genius parrot named Walter.

• 2:03:52Jesse Michels?

  That's right.

• 2:03:53Speaker 01

  Who is not a nice character.

• 2:03:55Jesse Michels?

  No.

• 2:03:56Speaker 01

  No, kind of like Iago in Aladdin. Kind of like that kind of character. And Walter is this genius parrot. And if you think about it, humans can be geniuses. Relative to other humans, why couldn't an African gray parrot be a genius relative to other parrots? And where would that take you?

• 2:04:13Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 2:04:13Speaker 01

  So that's what you have in Walter. And then there's this other creature we won't say too much about, who's the kind of the villain? Who's a fascinating study in what we are not.

• 2:04:23Jesse Michels?

  That other creature, which, yeah, we won't talk too much about is just fascinating. And I think what you said is so true that, um, questions grow at an exponent of your knowledge. So you continue on the search, you build up these kind of layers of, of knowledge. But then the questions grow exponentially more. And I think it really touches on the idea with the phenomenon that, that this book and the movie Arrival also kind of, it does a good job of this. It's weirder than you can think. And it's not only weirder than you can think, and I think there's an Arthur C. Clarke quote about this. It's weirder than you can think. It's weirder than you can even imagine.

• 2:05:01Jesse Michels?

  And you also explore a hypothesis that I'm pretty sympathetic to, which is the Slurrian hypothesis. This idea of these, what we're calling aliens, we're calling them extraterrestrials. But maybe they've been cohabiting with us on earth for a while.

• 2:05:20Speaker 01

  That's a possibility or maybe not. And, you know, really any story is about a person who sets out to do something they want, only to discover that what they need is something very different. And to confront and overcome their own limitations. And this is what the story is really about. It's about this paleontologist who starts off in deep trouble. He's been fired from his job at UCLA. He's got no money. His mother has got a severe chronic illness. He lives in the way back of beyond Trona, which is where I was born and near where I grew up.

• 2:05:55Jesse Michels?

  Oh, cool.

• 2:05:55Speaker 01

  So I'm very familiar with what it's like to, to come from nothing in that part of the world. And he finds, in pursuit of the science of what he's pursuing, because he makes a discovery. He goes into the garage because he wants to sell his dad's collection of Native American art, just to get a little money. And he discovers something there that's like, whoa. He discovers an artifact that a dealer tells him is priceless, but he can't sell it because of various reasons. And so his science brain kicks in and it leads him on this journey of external discovery. But more important, it takes him on a journey of internal discovery. And I want to emphasize that because what we want the readers to

• 2:06:37Speaker 01

  come out of this, at the end, and one reason we have so many reveals at the end, is to make people question their own perception of reality in their own lives.

• 2:06:48Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 2:06:49Speaker 01

  To have a healthy dose of yo, maybe yes, maybe no. Because in all of our lives, we see things and assume things that just aren't true.

• 2:06:58Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 2:06:59Speaker 01

  And so, in a sense, the book is about a character, but in a sense, it's about all of the readers too. Because each reader is going to bring their own needs and wants, their own obstacles. And we want to leave them with a gift. We want to leave them with that ability to look at the world very differently than when they started the book.

• 2:07:21Jesse Michels?

  Well, I think it achieves that. And for, I was just, I loved it. I couldn't take my eyes away and was just fascinated by, I mean, you're asking these kind of second and third order questions. It's not your garden variety, you know, book about these topics. Another thing you kind of touch on, another theme, without giving away too much, is

• 2:07:43Jesse Michels?

  This idea that there's like, there are these like almost gang wars going on for this forbidden archaeology. And there's like a blackmail network involved and this stuff, you know, around, you know, these, these kind of mystical objects aren't, um, they're, they're not being retrieved in these sort of above board ways, which to me, again, kind of comports with a lot of my study of the UFO stuff in the open source world is like, it is the wild, wild west. There's a lot of private mercenary action around this stuff and it is, it's not, and it's a lot of plausible deniability where you have the fingertips aren't attached to the arm, so to speak, and they can get severed at any time. And it's way weirder than you'd ever expect.

• 2:08:28Speaker 01

  It's weird and it, you know, that text gritty texture of reality is how weird it is. There's a lot of the intelligence world in this because, you know, they say, write about what you know. And I'm a neuroscientist and I was a spy. And so it's really an espionage novel too. And the intelligence tradecraft that's in there is real, right? And the way intelligence officers think of problems, and also when you get to the very top, because one of the characters is the FBI director. And what is the FBI director in this story concerned with? Protecting the FBI at all costs, right? And I will tell you, having been at that level in the government, you know what we really spend our time on is optics.

• 2:09:13Speaker 01

  Okay, this thing happened. How do we spin it to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post? How do we spin it and turn a negative into a positive with Congress? What are we going to tell the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, so they grow our budget?

• 2:09:28Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 2:09:28Speaker 01

  Right? And how do we take down a rival using this? That's all we spend our time on at the very top of the government. I guarantee you that is what happens.

• 2:09:38Jesse Michels?

  Bureaucracies.

• 2:09:38Speaker 01

  So that's what happens with the FBI director.

• 2:09:40Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:41Speaker 01

  You know, when you see that woman and how she interacts and how cynically, how cynical she is and how pragmatic and self-serving.

• 2:09:50Speaker 01

  That is real. That is a synthesis of real people that I have known. It's very real. And so it's a glimpse, just like the new science of UFO is a glimpse inside the mind of an intelligence analyst. And any other time, that was all open source data.

• 2:10:07Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:07Speaker 01

  So it's unclassified, but you're seeing exactly what happens in the super secret world of intelligence analysis. I've exposed it in that book. And in the novel, I expose the politics and the sausage mating and all the dirty dealing that happens under the hood in the intelligence world.

• 2:10:25Jesse Michels?

  It's fascinating. Yeah, go for it.

• 2:10:27Speaker 03

  And there is a lot of psychology in there because we also like psychology and we like to put our, our people in trouble. So our paleontologist is also a troubled person in inside himself. The love interest has also some flaws and she's also in her own way troubled their layer under layer under layer in the way they are, who they are. And also the creature is also has also layers inside itself. So there's a lot of psychology in there. We love psychology.

• 2:11:08Speaker 01

  Well, that's true.

• 2:11:09Speaker 03

  So it's very, it's a very complex, intricate bit with all those flavors in there. It's.

• 2:11:15Speaker 01

  Well, I should also say I was a psychotherapist for a while. And Freud said something really true. What you see on the outside is the opposite of what's on the inside. If you see a really hard, tough exterior, it's protecting a soft inner side. Where someone who's very centered and isn't very aggressive or doesn't have to talk a lot or whatever, they're very solid inside very often. They're very centered. And so we have these two characters, the main character and his love interest, and they both present kind of the opposite on the outside of what's really going on. And so through their relationship, you start to see that the layers peel back. And at the end.

• 2:12:00Speaker 01

  At the climax, if you will, both metaphorically, they kind of expose the vulnerable side of themselves to each other, which is an emotional growth for the two of them. Yeah. But I think, and what this comes out in the, we'll call them the romantic scenes.

• 2:12:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the love story is something very unique between the two of them, something like I've seldom seen anywhere described, the progression of the love story, the beats. It's very unique, but it's very tasty. There's a lot of subtle taste in there because the taste of extraterrestrial, of, of love, of psychology, of what's happening in the intelligence world, how to put, how to aim at somebody with a gun. I mean, there's so many, there's so many different details, different flavors. I think it's very, very.

• 2:12:56Speaker 01

  Well, what she's referring to is, I took this long novel writing class, which I had to produce a novel, and the teacher says, the number one thing you have to do is create a character that the reader instantly cares about and put them in trouble so they care about what happens and want to turn the page. And that's absolutely what we do. But she says, you have to put texture in there, the gritty feel of reality to make it authentic. And so things I learned in the intelligence world, I put in there that I could. For example,

• 2:13:27Speaker 01

  I had to carry a weapon, right? And so I had to qualify on the range and I had to shoot three or four times to keep my scores up a week, right? And so I'm over at CIA and this case officer, hardcore, what you'd think of as a spy, he goes, Eric, that's bullshit. You're going downrange. I mean, I was going to Iraq and I had to carry an M4 and a Beretta. And he said, don't use any of that. He said, two things. The first time you shoot for real, because you've shot on the range. You don't hear it and you hear it and you're going to be shocked at the moment. You most need to have your senses with you. So you need to shoot without your hearing so that you're not shocked the first time you hear it. He said, that's the real world. He said, the second thing is this business of a Weber stance and lining up the rear side.

• 2:14:11Speaker 01

  He said, no, here's what you do. You take your pointing finger and you lay it along the barrel. And you take your index finger and you put it in the trigger. So when you want to point at something to shoot at it, you point with your pointing finger because you've done that your whole life. You're going to be really accurate and don't worry about squeezing. Just pull off as many as you can, center of mass. And he said, that's the real world. So that's something I learned in my intelligence training that I share with the readers. That's the real world. That's what really happens. Like if you get in a gunfight, um, which is more than in Iraq, we would shoot just to keep their heads down to create muzzle flash. If you really have to shoot at something, you don't shoot at it the way you do on the range.

• 2:14:55Speaker 01

  So it's details like that that we put in there.

• 2:14:58Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:58Speaker 01

  That are, I guess what I'd call bonuses.

• 2:15:00Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, they're all these clearly nuggets, just based on your own, uh, real world experience. And, but then it's also just fascinating through a fiction lens. So, I mean, the, the other thing that resonated with me was this idea of sort of breakaway science or forbidden archaeology being housed in private corporations. I found that very interesting and possibly dovetailing with things we've seen in the real world.

• 2:15:27Speaker 01

  Well, it's funny you mention that because I'm still very connected to the national security world. And there's something happening there that's extraordinary, which is instead of the government saying, here's what we need. We're going to pay you defense companies to invent it.

• 2:15:42Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:42Speaker 01

  You're getting companies like Palantir and Anduril and, uh, Ursus Rockets, Ursus Major Rockets, where they're saying, we're going to get venture capital money. We're going to invent cool stuff way faster than you could. And we're going to say, here it is. You want it?

• 2:15:55Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:15:56Speaker 01

  And so the military R and D that's going on is happening outside the military in Silicon Valley.

• 2:16:03Jesse Michels?

  Right, right, right.

• 2:16:04Speaker 01

  And, um, you're seeing this happen with, you know, Anthropic and the Defense Department and so forth. And so that is exactly what's happening right now.

• 2:16:14Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, no, it's fascinating. I think. Those companies you mentioned, like Anduril, for example, is a reaction to Lockheed and Northrop, where they have their cost plus models. And so they will, you know, charge extra for doing, you know, less sometimes. And so Anduril's like, we're going to actually take the, the risk burden and the financial burden. We're going to innovate and build something you don't even know you need. And, you know, uh, trying to make it work, which in some ways, I think if you're a taxpayer, you should be kind of grateful for. And then, yeah, maybe there are some other, you know, issues we have to, we have to think about when it comes to it, but.

• 2:16:52Speaker 01

  So truth in advertising, I have a relationship with Lockheed.

• 2:16:55Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:16:56Speaker 01

  I must disclose.

• 2:16:56Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:57Speaker 01

  Which makes me, you know, have to be careful about what I say, but there's two sides to every story.

• 2:17:03Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:04Speaker 01

  Um, if a defense contractor like Lockheed or Northrop or RTX is doing something, it's for one reason and one reason only. Their customer told them to do it.

• 2:17:12Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 2:17:13Speaker 01

  They don't do things just to, uh, you know, add to their profit and so forth. In fact, those businesses aren't very profitable. When you look at profit margin, they have to only make between 10 and 15% maximum on a cost plus. Their profit margins are not good at all.

• 2:17:28Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 2:17:28Speaker 01

  The return on capital can be pretty big because the government can pay for some of the capital.

• 2:17:33Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 2:17:33Speaker 01

  But generally speaking, they're not, um, high multiples. They're very low multiples.

• 2:17:38Jesse Michels?

  That's right. That's for sure. True.

• 2:17:39Speaker 01

  Right. And the reason is they're not big growth.

• 2:17:41Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:42Speaker 01

  Right. And so, uh, so they don't really rip off people consciously. That's not at all what happens is the government says, when you do, uh, procurement, you have to do it this way. And when you do cost accounting, you have to do it this way.

• 2:17:58Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 2:17:58Speaker 01

  And you have to do this, that and the other. And when you add up the slowness and the cost, it's because that's what the government is. It's slow and it's expensive.

• 2:18:06Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 2:18:07Speaker 01

  And really you could kind of look at these companies and say they're more like part of the government.

• 2:18:12Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:12Speaker 01

  And the way Mikoyan or Kalashnikov or Sukhoi.

• 2:18:16Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 2:18:16Speaker 01

  It's really part of the Russian, you know, and so they're really just replicas of the government.

• 2:18:22Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:22Speaker 01

  And so the problem is that the US is falling behind China and Russia and Iran in some cases, like in hypersonics, and they're saying, we can't have this. We can't fall behind China.

• 2:18:32Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:33Speaker 01

  Who, everything is dual use because the government is everything. So they're turning to Silicon Valley to do faster.

• 2:18:38Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:39Speaker 01

  And they're relaxing the rules for them. They don't have to follow the same rules.

• 2:18:44Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 2:18:44Speaker 01

  That the Lockheed's do. So I wouldn't be so harsh on, on the defense companies because they basically are doing what they're told to do.

• 2:18:53Jesse Michels?

  Sure. Well, I also think they have a lot of really interesting frameworks and things they've discovered that they maybe haven't successfully scaled up all the time, but because they have decades of, you know, a head start on a lot of these kind of new Silicon Valley companies. I'd love to see kind of less loss of information between some of these aerospace graybeards at those companies and some of these newer companies. I think that's, you

• 2:19:18Speaker 01

  know. You know how that's happening?

• 2:19:20Jesse Michels?

  How is that happening?

• 2:19:21Speaker 01

  Who, where do you think Anduril's hiring?

• 2:19:24Jesse Michels?

  I don't know where.

• 2:19:25Speaker 01

  I'll just say this, technology walks on two legs.

• 2:19:28Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:19:29Speaker 01

  Like if you want a rocket scientist.

• 2:19:31Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:33Speaker 01

  You know, and you can pay them, you know, double what Lockheed can pay.

• 2:19:37Jesse Michels?

  So they're just poaching.

• 2:19:38Speaker 01

  Gee, where do you think those people are coming from?

• 2:19:39Jesse Michels?

  Contractors. Yeah, sure. Yeah.

• 2:19:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's not all a bad thing.

• 2:19:43Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, no, no, no. I mean.

• 2:19:45Speaker 01

  So, you know, I think that the bottom line of all human behavior is you get the behavior you reward.

• 2:19:52Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:52Speaker 01

  And if you look at the way our defense industry behaves today is because that's what they get rewarded for. And if they don't, they get punished.

• 2:19:58Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 2:19:58Speaker 01

  And so it's completely, you know, they are so exquisitely tuned into their customer. That's all they're going to do is what their customer wants them to do.

• 2:20:08Jesse Michels?

  What on the UFO front, you have all this lore of like the Lockids and North reps engaging in crash retrievals and not having proper supervision or oversight when it comes to the government. Do you take any of that stuff seriously or?

• 2:20:23Speaker 01

  I'll just say it's beyond my experience. I know nothing about any of that. And I'm not just saying that. I really don't.

• 2:20:28Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:20:29Speaker 01

  So I can't comment. I, I've never heard anything.

• 2:20:31Jesse Michels?

  There's this funny thing where I, I interview, you know, I interviewed this guy, Rolf Mawat Larson, who he spoke about. I think you know him.

• 2:20:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:38Jesse Michels?

  And, um, you know, I interviewed you and I interviewed a bunch of people who I respect from government circles and they know nothing about the UFO stuff. And I take it face value that they know nothing about the UFO stuff. And sometimes they'll go even farther, right? Rolf did. And he said, if I did know, I would like a thousand percent, you know, publicize my knowledge on this stuff. And to me, it's like. Because a lot of the people I do interview seem to know a ton about this stuff. And I would love some wave function collapse to occur where it's like, let's get it in a room or something. I don't know what it is, but I'd love to understand ground truth on this, on this whole thing. And I'm sure games are being played. I think that the issue where I would

• 2:21:20Jesse Michels?

  challenge my audience is they assume that games are being played from the people that take your stance. And I think they should actively be thinking about possible games being played on the pro UFO side, you know, and I that's, I don't know, you know?

• 2:21:37Speaker 01

  Well, look, the way things are compartmented inside the government is entirely probable. Yeah. There were things I had no idea were going on.

• 2:21:47Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:21:47Speaker 01

  So the fact that I, in theory, could have known.

• 2:21:50Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:50Speaker 01

  Means nothing.

• 2:21:51Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:21:52Speaker 01

  For one thing, you know, I once, I was a super user, so I had to get exposed to all these compartmented programs at the Pentagon. And it's like Clockwork Orange where they clamped open my eyelids and made me look at this stuff for a whole day. And I don't remember any of it, but there was nothing about UFOs in there.

• 2:22:06Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Well, they should have recruited you because this book, it feels like you're as deep as anyone on this stuff.

• 2:22:12Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, I've made it my, well, both of us have kind of, you know, fascinated by this, but it's because we're drawn to the, that's funny.

• 2:22:23Jesse Michels?

  Uh huh.

• 2:22:24Speaker 01

  Right? And like I say, this book, The Shadow of Time, is really kind of taking people on a journey that they wouldn't ordinarily go on, like in other science fiction, because we're not really science fiction writers. We're hardcore scientists.

• 2:22:39Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:39Speaker 01

  I mean hardcore scientists. And so although there's some speculation in here about what isn't impossible.

• 2:22:46Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:48Speaker 01

  The journey is very authentic. The, the, you know, because all of us in science who've gotten really into things, we have whiplash from thinking, oh, well, that's the case. And we run toward that and go, okay, that's true. Oops. We get closer to it and go, ooh, that isn't true. Well, then this is the case. And you go back and forth. So this whiplash that happens in the last chapter. Is real. That's what happens to real scientists who are really open to what's happening.

• 2:23:13Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, I mean, the truth is always much stranger than fiction often. So

• 2:23:20Jesse Michels?

  we were mentioning actually before we were rolling that, you know, you worked at Hughes Aircraft and you were doing stuff around flight simulation and you obviously have a neuroscience background. And I brought up Donald Hoffman and you were like, oh yeah, I worked with that guy. And he's now, I don't know if you know this, he's like all the rage on podcast circuits for his idea that we don't, it's not adaptive evolutionarily for us to see base reality. And so we create these icons in our mind and he's created this whole kind of math, you know, underpinning to that. So I found that fascinating. Have you ever heard of anything around like being able to fly a craft with, with your mind? I would think that that would be

• 2:24:04Speaker 01

  Well, it's funny you mention that.

• 2:24:06Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:08Speaker 01

  Up until 2020, I was still working for Disney as a contractor and I worked in their accelerator where we funded startups and owned a piece of them and then nurtured and coached them. And one of them was a

• 2:24:25Speaker 01

  a brain sensing company that had a game. Well, it was for health, they had it for health, but what we wanted to do is have brain controlled game experiences.

• 2:24:40Speaker 01

  And so, do you remember rocking the rock that rocks?

• 2:24:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I remember, yeah.

• 2:24:43Speaker 01

  So I worked with them and in the lab, we invented a rock that you could move with your mind and steer around on the floor.

• 2:24:50Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 2:24:51Speaker 01

  We call them Rocky.

• 2:24:52Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 2:24:52Speaker 01

  And it worked.

• 2:24:54Jesse Michels?

  Wild.

• 2:24:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, that never made it to market, like, you know, one tenth of 1% of the stuff we do in R and D ever.

• 2:25:00Jesse Michels?

  What was the neuroscience behind?

• 2:25:02Speaker 01

  Well, it was basically AI or really more machine learning, looking at surface potentials, EEG type potentials, not even a vote response, but just basically.

• 2:25:14Speaker 01

  Kind of consciously controlled EEG.

• 2:25:17Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:25:18Speaker 01

  And so you put this thing on, which kind of looks like the old Superman brainiac thing. You know, with a, with a little sensor pods, two frontal, two mastoid. And then I think there were two over the parietal lobe. So I think a total of six nodes. And, um, you know, you go through the normal calibration and then I guess it's kind of like biofeedback training.

• 2:25:47Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:25:47Speaker 01

  Where you look at the rock and then you will the rock to move forward. And the, the machine learning interprets your signals. And then over time, you could have it go forward and back, left and right.

• 2:25:59Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:00Speaker 01

  And, uh, you know, it was cool. I mean, it was freaky. I'll tell you something, you know, when I see a rock move and I told it to move only with my mind.

• 2:26:08Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:09Speaker 01

  Now, here's the thing.

• 2:26:12Speaker 01

  You were picking up brainwave signals, but we're also picking up electromyogram from scalp muscles.

• 2:26:16Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 2:26:17Speaker 01

  And from maybe eye muscles and, and facial muscles. So was it brainwaves or was it muscle action?

• 2:26:26Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 2:26:27Speaker 01

  Or both? We can't say.

• 2:26:29Jesse Michels?

  That's so interesting.

• 2:26:30Speaker 01

  The, the, in a way it didn't matter because we didn't care. We just wanted to create an experience where someone could actually. And now there have been toys sold on the market, like there's the levitating ping pong ball toy. Where there's an air column with a little fan. And you control the fan velocity with your brain.

• 2:26:52Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 2:26:53Speaker 01

  And so you put on this EEG thing and you think rise, rise, and you train and you, your brain learns how to levitate the ping pong ball.

• 2:27:01Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 2:27:02Speaker 01

  You know, at one time you could buy that on the market. Those exist.

• 2:27:06Jesse Michels?

  Wild.

• 2:27:07Speaker 01

  So there you have it. Could you do this with a drone? Absolutely. You could do it with a drone. Now, if you used a magnetoencephalography.

• 2:27:15Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:15Speaker 01

  Like these squid based things. You could really do it.

• 2:27:19Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 2:27:20Speaker 01

  You could definitely control pretty much anything. There was this guy.

• 2:27:27Speaker 01

  Who I had give a talk at the Aspen Institute, who, uh, there's two, there's Donahue and this guy at, um, Duke, who, um, implant electrodes in the brain of people who, uh, are paralyzed,

• 2:27:44Speaker 01

  uh, quadriplegics, and they control a robot arm with their brain. And they train him to play video games and they train the guy to, uh, walk with an exoskeleton with a neural implant.

• 2:27:55Jesse Michels?

  So wild.

• 2:27:56Speaker 01

  This is the future. So absolutely, absolutely, uh, this can be done today.

• 2:28:02Jesse Michels?

  Wow. That's so amazing. That's incredible. Where, where do you guys, you know, net out on the UFO issue? Obviously there are themes in the shadow of time that to me might represent your kind of net assessment on what you think is going on. But I also don't want to assume that. So what do you, what do you think is going on?

• 2:28:22Speaker 01

  Well, I will say the shadow of time is first and foremost entertainment.

• 2:28:26Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:28:27Speaker 01

  Okay. We have to be very clear.

• 2:28:29Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:30Speaker 01

  It's to get an emotional journey where there's suspense, there's mystery, there's, oh no, that can't happen. And there's, there's romance and there's discovery and curiosity. So really it's, it's meant to create emotions in the readers and insight and maybe some self-discovery. It's not, it's intent is not science. So I don't think that you can say that what we say in this scenario here is what we think is the most likely. We think it's the most entertaining of the not impossible.

• 2:29:07Speaker 01

  I will speak for myself and then let you comment.

• 2:29:11Speaker 01

  My belief is that there's something real going on.

• 2:29:16Speaker 01

  And whether that's atmospheric physics, we just don't understand. Whether it's, um, some other not atmospheric, but some physics phenomena that we don't understand. Uh, there's something very real in a few of these reports.

• 2:29:32Jesse Michels?

  How would you probability weight the kind of prosaic explanations, atmospheric stuff versus the more exotic stuff?

• 2:29:40Speaker 01

  I really have no way of saying, I, I would tend to think that. It's something beyond what our science can even imagine right now is what I really think it is.

• 2:29:50Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:51Speaker 01

  It's something like this, there are more dimensions than we think, or some weird physics that hasn't yet been discovered is what I really think.

• 2:29:59Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:29:59Speaker 01

  It shows more the limitation of our understanding of physics than anything.

• 2:30:03Jesse Michels?

  I believe that too.

• 2:30:04Speaker 01

  And so I don't think it's mostly atmospheric or any of these other things. I think it's something even more fundamental. I think it's something that we're going to have to completely redefine. And for those of you in the audience who don't know this, cosmology today is undergoing this exact crisis.

• 2:30:23Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:24Speaker 01

  Where I don't think there's any other field of science that I know of that really bedrock assumptions are being questioned and crumbled. Like redshift.

• 2:30:37Speaker 01

  Well, everyone knows that redshift is the farther something away is, the faster away it's moving. So the more it gets stretched, so the redshift is greater, right? So you can see how far away something is by the amount of redshift, assuming you have a standard star with a standard emission spectrum, which is an assumption, which may not be true because the things that are farther away, maybe they had different chemistry or something at that time. Then there's somebody say, well, no, maybe light gets tired after traveling for X billion years. Maybe it loses some energy. Well, that's been quote disproven, but then some people say, well, man, maybe it hasn't been disproven. But you have the Hubble tension.

• 2:31:18Speaker 01

  You have different measurements of the expansion of the universe, which are completely incompatible, but both true. Which tells you, hmm, some basic things we understood about the universe cannot be true. Dark energy, dark matter. And so I think that we know because of things like dark energy and dark matter and Hawking radiation and things like that, we know we're very limited really in what we know. And so because we know that we don't know, I think that's where these things are. I think they are most likely some really shocking fundamental physics that we just can't get our heads around right now.

• 2:32:01Jesse Michels?

  I think that even some of the cosmological concepts that we treat as ontologically true, like dark matter and dark energy are, they're just mathematical placeholders. We've never really detected dark matter. And then if you, dark energy is just defined by the, you know, inflation of the universe. But if you like, even if you put it through like a, you know, an AI engine, you say, what is this? It goes, well, it's not one of the four fundamental forces, but it's a force that it's like, this is anti-gravity is what it tells you.

• 2:32:30Speaker 01

  We know what it's not.

• 2:32:31Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:32Speaker 01

  We don't know what it is.

• 2:32:33Jesse Michels?

  We don't know what it is, which means it's a placeholder.

• 2:32:36Speaker 01

  And it may not be true. I mean, there are some theories that say that it's just gravity isn't constant across the whole universe in time. Like maybe the laws of physics actually change over time.

• 2:32:46Jesse Michels?

  I believe that. I believe that the big G is an averaging of a bunch of stuff.

• 2:32:50Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, maybe. Who says the Planck's constant has to stay the same throughout all time?

• 2:32:54Jesse Michels?

  Totally.

• 2:32:54Speaker 01

  Do we understand why it is what it is?

• 2:32:56Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:56Speaker 01

  Why is C exactly what C is?

• 2:32:58Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:32:59Speaker 01

  You know, well, Einstein would say it's a property of spacetime.

• 2:33:02Jesse Michels?

  You can only measure C, by the way, one way. You can't measure it both ways, there and back.

• 2:33:07Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I get depending how you define it. That's true. But, but I guess the point is that you asked me what I think. I think that it's both baffling and for the same reason incredibly exciting. That I think what we're seeing with these credible, real phenomena, of which there are some, is something really bizarre and out there that is so far different than what we think is happening in the universe. That we just don't know, we're looking at it, but we don't know what we're looking at.

• 2:33:38Jesse Michels?

  So what do you think? Cause you have all this talk of disclosure now and Trump is, you know, Trump and Obama engaged in some sort of bizarre medic warfare like a couple of months ago. And Trump's now saying, we're looking into the UFO issue. What do you think comes of that? Now aliens.gov has been registered. I mean, If it is this fundamental physics thing, there are limits to what you can disclose, but presumably maybe in just an unofficial context, but there is data on the government side. And so do you think all of that gets released? Some of it gets released? Do you think it's used as a distraction?

• 2:34:13Speaker 01

  They're never going to release everything.

• 2:34:15Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:34:15Speaker 01

  I mean, I mean, for lots of reasons that I won't go into, but certainly some of it where sources and methods are involved, they're not going to release that.

• 2:34:22Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:22Speaker 01

  Um, but they won't do it because, you know, they're, I'll tell you a story.

• 2:34:26Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:26Speaker 03

  Oh, wait, before you tell the story, I want to say what I think.

• 2:34:29Jesse Michels?

  Jump in.

• 2:34:30Speaker 03

  Sorry about that.

• 2:34:31Jesse Michels?

  No, no.

• 2:34:31Speaker 01

  I always ask her to do that. So go ahead.

• 2:34:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, I cannot say silent too long. I've got to.

• 2:34:39Speaker 01

  Nor would we want you to.

• 2:34:40Jesse Michels?

  That's right.

• 2:34:42Speaker 03

  So, um, what I think is that there are so many, there is a bunch of different phenomena that don't have, that might not have anything to do with each other. They could be very separate. So we need to distinguish what are those that are due to weather or atmospheric, uh, atmosphere, um, atmospheric, uh, uh, stuff, uh, or the ones that will have no explanations. And the ones that have no explanations, I do think that you're right. There is something that we don't know about that is fundamentally different than we know, but we need to acknowledge

• 2:35:25Speaker 03

  that they exist. We need to acknowledge that this is a puzzling thing and we need to acknowledge this in government, in the whole world, which we don't. So in psychology, when we have a problem, the first thing is be aware of it. And I don't think we're aware of it enough to look for the origin of what it is. So first thing is awareness. So I would urge all our listeners to be aware of what is happening in the sky. Film whatever is happening in the sky. If they see anything abnormal or different and then report it because the

• 2:36:03Speaker 03

  more people we have that report this thing that, um, that, uh, that are part of us to increase our awareness is really important. That's it. Are you back to?

• 2:36:15Speaker 01

  Well, I'm really glad you stood up for yourself for a lot of reasons. But she makes a point that I feel horrible I didn't make. I feel very certain that we're not looking at one phenomena. I think we're looking at multiple phenomena. And I think that they're different enough in the way they've described. You know, the glowing spheres are maybe not the same thing as the Tic Tacs and so forth. The triangular ones that people have reported.

• 2:36:44Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:44Speaker 01

  With some consistency, those flying kind of fireballs that were seen over Washington DC in the 50s that seemed to have some credibility.

• 2:36:55Speaker 01

  I think at the end of the day, when they're going to find out, it isn't one phenomena. It's multiple.

• 2:37:00Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:37:00Speaker 01

  And maybe unrelated.

• 2:37:02Jesse Michels?

  I totally agree.

• 2:37:03Speaker 01

  So that, I think that's a really important point that she made.

• 2:37:07Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, I think there's something going on in our oceans that feels more ultra terrestrial or, you know, solarian hypothesis. And then there's something that feels more of like a mental interface thing where people get into these heightened states and things show up. And those two things feel like probably of a different variety. Like I'd imagine the ultra terrestrial thing is more, you know, in the same biological meat space as us, but I don't know.

• 2:37:35Speaker 01

  We don't know. And yeah, I mean, and there are some people who believe that panspermia, tell them about panspermia and that we're basically all aliens.

• 2:37:45Jesse Michels?

  Right? Yeah, yeah.

• 2:37:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, that that life could be, oh, we assume that there is life only on Earth, but it could be that panspermia is a theory that says that life can exist, it could exist anywhere in the universe. What is to say that life doesn't exist 120 light years away from us? Like we found some dimethyl sulfide, the dimethyl disulfide, 122 or 240 light years away from us on exoplanets. So it's very possible, and we're starting to discover long chain carbon structures that are on Mars, that are on different planets.

• 2:38:31Speaker 03

  So it's very possible that there is life. In a lot of different places in the universe. And it's possible that-

• 2:38:40Speaker 01

  It could have come here on asteroids.

• 2:38:42Speaker 03

  It could have come here on asteroids on-

• 2:38:44Speaker 01

  Could have come from Mars. You know, we got bombarded by a lot of stuff from Mars. And it turns out, conditions for forming life, a biogenetically, on Mars were there before on Earth. So we might all be Martians. Or we might be multiple. It could be panspermia, meaning organisms from different places all came here.

• 2:39:04Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, Mars, most conventional astronomers would say that Mars might have had a biosphere. There are kind of water caverns all over it. It might have had a magnetosphere that it was stripped of.

• 2:39:18Speaker 01

  Oh, it did have one.

• 2:39:19Jesse Michels?

  It did have one.

• 2:39:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:39:20Jesse Michels?

  You have Argon 40 and Xenon 129. So there's just one friend of mine, who's a, he's a, was at Lawrence Livermore in Sandia. And he thinks that there was a nuclear holocaust on Mars. And it's, you know, who knows? He's definitely like, you know, in a camp on his own and believing this. But I think it's really interesting because he says that these exist in excess of what you would ever expect with just normal, you know, radioactive isotope decay. And that the only explanation is that. And so-

• 2:39:51Speaker 05

  I found and digested the isotopic evidence. And when it all kind of sitting in my office, it all hit me. It looked like a thermonuclear holocaust and had happened there. And we were so afraid it would happen on Earth.

• 2:40:08Jesse Michels?

  And he's got the chops to say something like that where I feel like I have to listen, so.

• 2:40:14Speaker 03

  On Mars, there's a lot of lava tubes. We've never been inside those lava tubes. So what is there inside? It could be, that's a very protective area. There is no, or much less radiation in those lava tubes. But we've never had anybody going or any machine going inside those lava tubes, so.

• 2:40:35Speaker 01

  But the panspermia thing, meaning is it likely that we're all evolved from some extraterrestrial life form?

• 2:40:42Speaker 01

  I think it's almost certain that we're evolved from building blocks that are extraterrestrial. If they did that study of that asteroid Benu.

• 2:40:51Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:40:51Speaker 01

  In which they found all of the nucleic bases, which are the formation for RNA and DNA. So I go, hmm, okay, well, so we have an existence proof that those really important building blocks, nucleic acids are in outer space. So the law of parsimony says it probably came here from outer space or came here and we co-evolved them. See, what we're finding in anthropology, when it looks at how did humans get to be humans where they are? It's turning out that it's unbelievably complicated. There were many waves of migration out of Africa before and after Homo sapiens.

• 2:41:31Speaker 01

  There was interbreeding between Denisovians and Neanderthals and, you know, Cro-Mannian and, you know, Homo erectus. And it's like we're this mongrelized, weird mishmash hybrid of a lot of different interbreeding. And so there is no clean, simple story of how modern humans came to be modern humans. You're European in background, so you have probably 3% Neanderthal genes, as do I. Well, she's really an alien. I don't know how many.

• 2:42:02Speaker 01

  But I think that the point is that I think what we're going to find is that in the origin of life on Earth, it's going to be messy, complicated.

• 2:42:12Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:12Speaker 01

  A mishmash, a zillion different things.

• 2:42:15Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, and it seems like archaeology is only 200 years old. And the further we go, archaeology is like a product of the 19th century, finding ancient Assyrian and Babylonian cities. And the longer we go, the older things get. And the longer we go in anthropology, the more hominid species we find. And so I think we have, you know, it was like five to 10, 10 years ago. Now it's 21 to 30. This is depending on your stringency with peer review and, you know, what your definitions are. But there are a lot of ancient hominids that we just didn't even know or anticipate. I don't think we ever thought that Neanderthals are as smart as we now think they were.

• 2:42:57Jesse Michels?

  And so, you know, maybe it was somewhat of a, you know, obviously, our intelligence and prefrontal cortex was adaptive, but more of an accident than we think it is that we won. So yeah, there are all these open questions that I think we're just going to get a lot more, more data on, hopefully.

• 2:43:15Speaker 01

  So I think if, if you sum up what both of us said about where we come down on UFOs, it's, it isn't one phenomenon, it's multiple.

• 2:43:23Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:43:25Speaker 01

  Some of it might be understandable within our current science, some of it almost certainly is not.

• 2:43:31Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:43:31Speaker 01

  But bottom line, it's real.

• 2:43:34Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, well, that's.

• 2:43:35Speaker 01

  There is some tiny percent that's absolutely real and science should take it seriously. We should do a lot more hardcore research into that subject.

• 2:43:45Jesse Michels?

  It's cool to see the former CTO of the intelligence community and director of research at the NSA say that that's a big deal.

• 2:43:52Speaker 01

  Well, I think that any scientist who is worth their salt will tell you there's so much more that we don't know. She said, we know 1% of what there is to know. I wanted to say maybe 1/10 of 1/10 of 1/10 of 1%.

• 2:44:07Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:07Speaker 01

  You know, I think that some problems are too small to see, some are too big. And it's too big for the human mind to get their mind around just how incomprehensible the universe probably is. And this is the point that, I think it was Niels Bohr or Feynman or someone like that said, yeah, quantum physics is not only weirder than we know, than weirder than we can know.

• 2:44:32Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, Bohr was like, you can't understand this stuff. And he was, he would debate with Einstein because Einstein was trying to understand the ontological implications of the spooky action at a distance stuff. And Bohr was like, good luck, you know?

• 2:44:46Speaker 01

  Well, he also said, Bohr has also said, prediction is very difficult, especially of the future.

• 2:44:52Jesse Michels?

  There you go. I love that. That's hilarious. That's awesome. I want to actually, you know, wrap up here on the Listening Cure, because this is a book, really, kind of based on your long work, Dr. Chris Gilbert, that was my introduction to both of you, which is funny, because I'm obsessed with UFOs and a lot of the topics you're into. But I find it to be fascinating that intelligence might not be just concentrated in the mind, but might be kind of embodied. And, you know, we might be holding information all over. And really, the premise of this book is like, if you have an ailment, you have to listen to it and form a dialogue with it. Is that right?

• 2:45:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So if you have an ailment, if you have like a lower back pain, for example, you can have a dialogue between your brain, your mind, and your back. Sometimes your, your mind is going to tell you, oh, you need to lift those heavy bags and, and you need to walk for your 10,000 steps a day. And your back is going to say, whoa, that's too heavy for me, or that's too many steps for me. This is not, this is not right. I don't, it doesn't work for me. So you've got to take into accounts, into account every part of your body that might not

• 2:46:13Speaker 03

  follow the brain. And now we're discovering there is the gut bacteria. What kind of gut bacteria do you have? And is there a dialogue to have between your brain and your gut bacteria? There probably is. Why are you drawn to certain foods and not to others? That could be the gut bacteria. Now we're discovering that dysbiosis, which is the, again, the gut bacteria you have, could be responsible for maybe the increased amount of cancer or digestive cancer that we have in people that are 45 years old, or at least less than 50 years old. We've got an

• 2:46:56Speaker 03

  increase of colon cancer in less than 50 years old.

• 2:47:01Speaker 03

  Why is that? We're thinking maybe dysbiosis, maybe the gut bacteria is very different. So maybe the that that dialogue between um that part of our body and the brain. And it's fantastic to, for me, it's fantastic to create a dialogue between uh the like um several parts of the body, like you have a meeting, a conference meeting between a board meeting, between different seats, the stomach will have a seat, the back will have a seat, the liver will have a seat,

• 2:47:38Speaker 03

  the brain will have a seat, gut bacteria will have a seat and listen to what they, each of them will have to say. And then you will be able to understand yourself better, deeper understanding. It's also very interesting to have a dialogue between my body and Eric's body, for example. So if you have a a mate, your partner, and forget about the brain, don't have the brain talk to each other, but have their body, body talk to each other, what are they going to say? And they could say something very different than what the mind will say. There there's fascinating things that happen when you give the body a voice.

• 2:48:21Speaker 01

  Hmm. But you know, this brings up a fascinating difference between the two of us, which I regard as a strength, in that we look at the world very differently. She is a clinician. She wants to make her patients' bodies heal. So she's not into mind-body medicine in the sense of uh understanding the brain and the mind for its own sake, but she wants to uh heal the body by, you know, understanding the brain. So her goal is healing the body, right?

• 2:48:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's actually healing the body and

• 2:48:56Speaker 01

  And the mind.

• 2:48:57Speaker 03

  And the mind, because they're completely related.

• 2:49:00Speaker 01

  So but but I I think what I wanted to say is the difference is she's very practical and pragmatic. She has a very concrete end result, health. Right, where I'm more of a bench scientist than a clinician, right? And so I'm interested in the deep why. So in the book, the few parts that I wrote, because it's really her book, and I'm just throwing in a few pieces of neuroscience that if I had to rewrite that book, my part again, I'd read very different. Because I interpreted the body the way a neuroscientist would, which is the map of the body on the brain. We have the, you mentioned the Vernicke's and Broca's area for speech, but there's similar

• 2:49:42Speaker 01

  areas for motor and sensory in which you have this little human version of you called the homunculus, which is a complete map of your body on your brain, one half each for both motor and sensory, right? And so if you've ever taken a psychology book, you've seen this thing with huge lips and huge hands. And so I talked about the body in that sense. It's the neural incarnation of bodily sensation. But I believe I was very limited now, and I should have gone way beyond that. Because now we know that there's a ton of neurons in your body, in the peripheral nervous

• 2:50:23Speaker 01

  system, like in the gut nervous system, and in the heart. So when we say we feel in our gut, there could be learning and perception and emotion, literally in your gut, not metaphorically. Because think about where you feel emotions. They are physical sensations, right? Almost every emotion you have, you can map it on to a physical part of your body. And that may be because that is literally where you're consciously experiencing it, not in your brain. And so there's this thing called cellular cognition now, where it turns out that you

• 2:51:03Speaker 01

  can classically condition plants and single cell organisms, and you can take a planaria, cut it in half, after you've trained it in a maze, it regrows the front half, where the back half had no neurons, and it now knows the maze even so. It's what we call cellular cognition. And so I now believe that when she says you're talking to your back, it's literal, it's not metaphorical. That your back has a constituency, as it were, that it represents the cells in your back muscle and your back. And it has a point of view that it, as the cellular clusters there individually have, and it's talking to the brain through who knows what.

• 2:51:47Speaker 01

  And so I think that what is fascinating to me about this very practical clinical idea that she came up with is that there might be some literal scientific truth to what she's saying that goes far beyond the metaphorical. It's literal.

• 2:52:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think it's important to, and I say in the book, it's very important to listen to the body. And sometimes the body will tell you, oh, no, no, no, don't do that. Or you've got sensations, like tingling sensations, or a knot in the throat when you're about to do something. Like if you're about to marry somebody, if somebody is about to marry somebody that maybe you're not meant to marry, somebody could have a knot in the throat or trembling, or it's important to listen to what the body is feeling because the body knows usually. And sometimes the body will know if it's the wrong person to marry, for example.

• 2:52:47Speaker 03

  So before being, before taking very important steps in life, I say, listen to what your body is saying. Because if your body doesn't want to, or if it's before taking an assignment, if you have a promotion, and it's a huge promotion, there will be a completely different, like it will be a lot of work. It will be very good for you, but a lot of work. And sometimes the body will tense up and say, oh, listen to that. Because I've seen people accepting a promotion, accepting this immense stress that they will take on, and then coming afterwards with cancer, and they will die with cancer

• 2:53:30Speaker 03

  because the body knew, the body knows it's too much, too much, too much, too stressful. So listen to your body. At the end of each chapter of the of the Listening Cure, there are exercises that everybody can take and that will make them more aware of what's going on. It's a fascinating world, completely different, completely different than UFOs. But it's a fascinating world instead of the outside world of the universe. It's the inside world of our body and our brain and what were meant to, who were meant to be and who were not meant to be.

• 2:54:05Jesse Michels?

  Absolutely.

• 2:54:06Speaker 01

  Well, one comment about different from our book, Yes and No, the main kind of anti-character in the shadow of time, has cognition in its body distributed very differently than a human.

• 2:54:18Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:54:18Speaker 01

  And that turns out to be really important to the story and how is this different? So some of that did make its way. And and the biology of this particular class of organism, as far as we understand it, is so radically different than humans.

• 2:54:33Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:54:35Speaker 01

  That, and that's why we we made this character the way we made it. But some of the Listen to Your Body is in there in that we constructed this this creature from our understanding of of, you know, how consciousness can be distributed in different parts of the body.

• 2:54:51Jesse Michels?

  I think this is especially relevant for people who don't have acute injuries or acute illnesses. So like, if you get the flu, there's like a clear protocol of what you're supposed to do if you injure your knee or something, pretty, pretty clear. But there are a lot of people, especially in Western society, that feel very kind of unheard or gaslit by the medical system, who deal with chronic illnesses, things that just persist throughout their their life. And so, yeah, this technique of kind of anthropomorphizing the symptoms and speaking to it, it's very interesting. I think it's going to be very novel for a lot of people. But the idea that that could be cathartic, like.

• 2:55:33Jesse Michels?

  There's actually another book that I love. I recommend your book all the time and I recommend this other book called Healing Back Pain by a guy Paul Sarnow.

• 2:55:41Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, we know about him.

• 2:55:42Jesse Michels?

  He's awesome. And he says that the physical pain you feel is actually adaptive because it's easier for you to process physical pain than emotional pain. So it's, it's like this overhang remnant of what was adaptive because you couldn't process an emotional thing. There's other books like Body Keeps the Score about this stuff too, but it's that the body is sort of an imprint of past, you know, maybe the word trauma is overused these days, but past, you know, emotional experiences that people have had in their lifetime. And you can actually go back in, find the, you know, have a dialogue, find the root cause and kind of repropagate back up into a more healthier version of yourself, which is, that's fascinating.

• 2:56:26Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it's interesting to think about the evolution and how we came to have these bodies that we have and the mind that we have. And if you think about those first leaps between single cell and multicellular organisms, which clearly we made in evolution, you start to understand what she's saying even deeper. Look at a pond scum or a slime mold. What you find is that's a collection of individuals that start to behave in concert. Like you have certain ones that are used for digestion, certain ones that move the slime mold around towards new food or away from threats. And so you also have gene swapping among individual, single cell organisms. So that a multicellular organism might form

• 2:57:10Speaker 01

  from multiple, what used to be different species that became one. Right? So if you now fast forward that process over four billion years, you end up with us. But we've retained that original form of multicellular where really we're different organisms. And that is literally true with our biome. Right? Most of your DNA isn't yours. It's all your biome. Right? And so um, one way to think about the body from the standpoint of evolution is we're really not individuals. We're a collection of many different organisms, each with their own agenda that have cooperated for mutual benefit, but whose needs often collide.

• 2:57:55Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:55Speaker 01

  And anyone who's felt an urge to do something like eat a donut or maybe do something amorous that they shouldn't.

• 2:58:01Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:58:02Speaker 01

  Knows that life isn't pure.

• 2:58:04Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:58:05Speaker 01

  You know, one part of you wants to do it and the other part says, don't, don't do that.

• 2:58:10Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. So it's all, it's almost like this um, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. It's a, what you described almost sounded like a, you know, internal family systems where you create this dialogue, but it's with components of the body and then you, you, the output is this sort of compromise or something between them, which is, that's such a fascinating concept.

• 2:58:30Speaker 01

  Well, it, it's fractal when you think about it. When you think about the way your body is, you have specialists. Evolution has decided that a collection of specialists will outperform an equal mass of generalists. So when you look at your body, you know, your toenail does a very different function from your liver, from your brain. And within your brain, you see hyper specialization. There's different nuclei that have different shapes and so. So um, diversity of uh, function and narrowness of specialization is what biology has decided works best. And look at human evolution. We went from a society of generalists where everybody hunted and everybody gathered to now you look at a corporation where,

• 2:59:13Speaker 01

  or even medicine, like I'm an internist, but I do nephrology in adolescents with, we slice things narrower and narrower. And so with multicellular organisms, as with human civilization and businesses, we go toward bigger and bigger and bigger. With hyper and hyper and hyper specialization.

• 2:59:35Speaker 03

  That don't know anything about each other. Ask a dermatologist how to treat high blood pressure, he will not know, he or she will not know how to treat high blood pressure. So it's hyper specialized and they don't connect with each other.

• 2:59:48Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. And it's also looking for, it's sick care, in my opinion. It's waiting for the very, you know, margins of, you know, extreme, like you're in the, the, the bad 5%, let's give you surgery or something. And it's not, this, this complex is building up over time. You have some tension and then that creates, you know, yeah, dysbiosis and then that leads to cancer. It's not these like, long buildups which are occurring in everybody, you know? And so it's important to, I think, treat the root, the root cause.

• 3:00:18Speaker 03

  And there's another, another element that complicates stuff is the aging. The aging process is not the same in each organ or in each part of us. Like the brain might not see the aging as much as the, you know, the, the back or as the knee or, you know, it's every, so you have to take into account each part of our body that ages differently and have a dialogue with those.

• 3:00:46Speaker 01

  Gee, that wouldn't have anything to do with saying my trochanter bursitis is due to me being 74 years old and not realizing it.

• 3:00:54Speaker 03

  I'm not saying.

• 3:00:57Jesse Michels?

  You're in great shape for 74.

• 3:00:59Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. Thank you. I'll take that as a compliment. But yeah, no, I mean, it is fascinating to though, you know, when you look at the healthcare system and say, how come we're sick treatment oriented? Well, remember I said you get the behavior reward? Money might have something to do with that. It may be more profitable to treat sick people than to stop them from being sick in the first place.

• 3:01:22Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:22Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm just saying.

• 3:01:23Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:23Speaker 01

  I'm just a guy asking questions.

• 3:01:25Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, I think you might be on to something. Well, it's been such a pleasure and such a wide ranging conversation with you both. And I hope people buy all of the books. But um, yeah, the new science of UFOs, obviously we have the shadow of time, which is the new book here. Fascinating and really fun to read. And then of course, the listening here, which is my entry point to you guys. Really appreciate your time.

• 3:01:50Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. This has been a whole lot of fun. And to the listeners, viewers out there, we hope we haven't given you whiplash from moving around to all these different topics.

• 3:01:59Jesse Michels?

  Oh, they're used to it. It's, uh, we all have ADD in our generation.

• 3:02:04Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you again for the opportunity. This has been a lot of fun.

• 3:02:06Jesse Michels?

  Oh, yeah, no.

• 3:02:07Speaker 03

  Thank you. Thank you. Absolutely.

• 3:02:09Jesse Michels?

  It's been a total blast.

• 3:02:10Speaker 03

  It's been a lot of fun.

• 3:02:11Jesse Michels?

  All my favorite topics in one, so.

• 3:02:15Jesse Michels?

  Cool. Head to AmericanAlchemyMerch.com to grab official American Alchemy merch and support the show directly. And while you're there, the Cowboy UFO T is a fan favorite we always keep in stock, along with the Atomic Age design. Thank you all so much for following and supporting the show.

• 3:03:06Speaker 00

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